The Book Underground By Haruki Murakami

Underground In the spring of 1995, Japan faced a catastrophe that would forever embed itself in the history of the nation. This event was the 1995 Tokyo Sarin gas attack. During this event Sarin gas was released in the Tokyo subway system resulting in twelve dead and thousands injured. This attack was conducted by five members of the Aum Shinrikyo cult (Aum). In his book Underground, Haruki Murakami interviewed the victims and ex-members of the Aum Shinrikyo cult in order to discover what occurred during the 1995 Sarin attacks. He compiled those interviews together and included ideas that explained why they occurred, this was done in the hopes that Murakami would be able to gain a better understanding of Japan as a whole.
In the book one of the ideas Murakami discusses is the idea of “personal narrative”. He describes the idea of a narrative as, “A story, not logic, nor ethics, nor philosophy. It is a dream you keep having, whether you realize it or not. …in these stories you wear two faces. You are simultaneously subject and object… It is through such multi-layering of roles in our stories that we heal the loneliness of being an isolated individual in the world.” (Murakami, 231). What he’s …show more content…
This relationship blinded the members of Aum from reality and allowed Asahara to manipulate them however he pleased. This is quite similar to an event in the movie Ghost in the Shell. In the film, several characters have their memories rewritten by a super-hacker known as the Puppet Master. This rewrite allowed the Puppet Master to manipulate these people through fabricated memories and thoughts. Similar to the Puppet Master Asahara is rewriting what the Aum members perceived. This means that they weren’t capable of seeing the whole truth and were instead blindly following what they believed to be the