Haruki Murakami and the Tokyo Gas Attack

By Murray Sayle

Most countries would need a lot to upstage1. upstage: 使……相形见绌，抢镜头。a natural disaster that took 5,000 lives, but not Japan. The Great Kobe Earthquake of January 17, 1995, is already halfforgotten; the Sarin nerve gas attack on the Tokyo subway system,two months later, that killed twelve and put hundreds in hospital,has rarely been out of the Japanese media or consciousness since.2. 1995年1月17日的神户大地震几乎已被人遗忘；而两个月之后发生在东京地铁的沙林神经毒气攻击事件，致使12人死亡和成百上千人受伤入院，至今仍未淡出日本媒体和公众的记忆。

The subway attack was, so far, unique. It not only alarmed the five million or so daily users of the Tokyo subway and the inhabitants of other big cities around the world; worse, it roused memories of a brutal war, fire raids, and atomic bombs, the barbarous past a now peaceful and still prosperous Japan thought was gone forever.3. 这次事件不单单使五百多万名每天乘坐东京地铁的日本人和全世界其他大城市的居民感到惊慌；更糟糕的是，它勾起日本人关于残酷的战争、燃烧弹空袭和原子弹的回忆——和平繁荣的日本曾以为这段野蛮的历史已永远成为过去。inhabitant: 居民，住民；fire raid: 燃烧弹空袭；barbarous: 野蛮的，残暴的。Yet surprisingly little has been written about the Tokyo subway horror. Japan has many able journalists, but none has seen fit to tackle in any depth their most sensational story since Hiroshima.4. 日本不乏有能耐的新闻记者，但自广岛事件后，好像没人能够写出深入轰动的报道来。sensational: 轰动的，耸人听闻的；Hiroshima: 广岛市，这里指二战末期美国在日本广岛和长崎投下两颗原子弹这一事件。Instead, a fashionable and commercially successful Japanese novelist, Haruki Murakami, has written two books on the subject, both big sellers in Japan, now translated into English and bound together as Underground5. Underground: 《地下》， 发表于1997年，是关于日本沙林毒气事件的纪实作品。: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche, translated from the Japanese.

1995年3月20日上班早高峰，有人在人流如梭的五列东京地铁上扔下不明包裹后逃跑。随后人们开始呕吐晕倒，惶恐不安，整个东京交通系统陷入混乱。日本人对地震等天灾已经习以为常，但这次毒气攻击的人祸事件至今却仍然牵动着他们脆弱的神经。日本著名作家村上春树在采访了幸存者、甚至始作俑者奥姆真理教前成员之后，写出《地下》一书，从亲历者的角度为人们描述那场发生在东京黑暗隧道里的浩劫。

Murakami seems out of his depth in trying to understand what the guru of the AumShinrikyo was all about, and why so many bright young people have followed him, some, quite possibly, as far as the gallows.6. 村上春树竭力想要理解这个他力所不及的问题：奥姆真理教的领袖究竟有着什么魔力，为什么能让那么多聪明的年轻人死心塌地地追随他，有些甚至追随他至绞刑架前。out of one’s depth: 超出了某人知识/理解力的范围；guru: 领袖，专家；AumShinrikyo: 奥姆真理教，一个日本代表性的邪教团体；gallows: 绞刑架。But his effort is interesting just the same and gives us many clues to his own question: What exactly is going on in Japan?

Who Is Murakami?

Haruki Murakami was born in Kyoto in 1949, the only child of two lecturers in Japanese literature. As a form of rebellion7. rebellion: 叛逆，反叛。,he says, he refused to read the Japanese classics. Instead, when his parents moved to the port city of Kobe, he discovered usedbook shops stacked with American paperbacks8. paperback: 平装书。. He mostly read hard-boiled detective stories by Raymond Chandler and Mickey Spillane, later moving on to Scott Fitzgerald and Truman Capote.9. 他读得最多的是雷蒙德·钱德勒和米奇·斯皮兰的硬汉派侦探小说，之后转读司各特·菲茨杰拉德和杜鲁门·卡波特。hardboiled detective story: 硬汉派侦探小说，侦探小说的一种流派，主要以描写艰苦的环境和打斗的场面来赢得读者的喜爱。“They provided a small window in the wall of my room through which I could look out onto a foreign landscape, a fantasy10. fantasy: 幻想的，空想的。world,” he recalls.

村上春树2011年反核演讲

Murakami was a teenager in the 1960’s. By the time he was 25,in 1974, he was running a Tokyo jazz and coffee bar called Peter Rabbit and like a good host was listening to his customers, mostly a shade younger than himself.11. 1974年，他时年25岁，在东京经营着一家名叫“彼得兔子”的爵士咖啡吧。跟其他友善的老板一样，他喜欢听客人说话，大部分客人稍微比他年轻一点。a shade: 细微差别地，一丁点儿地。The last cause in which young Japanese have showed even a flicker of interest, “Crush the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty,” ran out of steam with the treaty’s renewal in 1970.12. 最后一件能让日本年轻人表现出一丝兴趣的事——撕毁《美日安全保障条约》，随着1970年条约的自动延期，日本人也对此失去热情。a flicker of: 一丁点儿的，一丝的；run out of steam:筋疲力尽，失去动力。With unemployment close to zero and hunger not even a memory, Japan’s good times had started to roll, and Chandler’s world—jazz, coffee, hamburgers, wise-cracking13. wise-cracking: 满嘴俏皮话的，妙语连珠的。babes, and fast cars—seemed, thirty years late, to have come to earth in New Japan.

Murakami wrote nothing until he was 29, when his novel,Hear the Wind Sing14. Hear the Wind Sing: 《且听风吟》， 村上春树第一部作品，发表于1979年，获得日本群像新人奖。, won a minor literary prize. Two years later he closed Peter Rabbit and has written full-time, with enviable, not to say15. not to say: 虽说不上。astonishing financial success ever since.His 1987 novel Norwegian Wood (titled for the Beatles song that runs through the nameless narrator’s head) sold four million copies in Japan, and several of his other string of hits have topped a million.16. 1987年，他的小说《挪威的森林》（这位当时还默默无闻的小说家，用他喜爱的披头士的歌曲《挪威的森林》为小说取名）在日本卖出400万册，其他几本畅销系列丛书销量也超过100万。Sales on this scale suggest sociological rather than literary forces at work. Murakami is one of the handful of writers who have made it big at a time of a pronounced generational changeover, usually after wars.17. 村上春树是在明显的代际交替时期，特别是战争后，能够获得成功的为数不多的作家之一。pronounced: 明显的，显然的。His model, Scott Fitzgerald, hit a similar jackpot18. hit the jackpot: 获得头奖，获得惊人成功。with the now unreadable This Side of Paradise (1920) about the lives of students at Princeton.Noel Coward did much the same with his plays I’ll Leave It To You (1920) and The Vortex (1924).

The selling point of these commercial coups has been the same. Young people believe that their generation is special,utterly unlike any that went before, and they flock to buy a writer who speaks their own language.Their parents buy the books in an attempt to understand their offspring19. offspring: 子孙后代。. Murakami’s characters are all young. They have few names,or none—in one story everyone including the cat is called Noboru Watanabe (i.e., John Smith).They have neither parents nor children and, if they work at all, it is in new un-Japanese trades like advertising and PR.20. 他们没有父母，也没有孩子，即便有工作的话，也是从事一些非日本传统的行业，如广告和公关。PR: Public Relations，公共关系。They have no religion,family, or social concerns. Far from working for Honda, they drive a Mercedes Benz. Murakami’s books have no coherent story lines, because young people never seem interested in how a situation will end, or a life will work out. Reality blurs, thoughts derail, scenes intercut,just like on TV (or in Chandler).21. 现实模糊混乱，思绪如天马行空，画面不断交切，就像电视画面或钱德勒的作品。Murakami has followed foreign fashion with the now dated spice-up for bland writing,“magical realism.”22. 村上春树追随国外流行的文学手法，在平淡朴实的叙事中加入“调味料”——魔幻现实主义。spice-up: 增添的趣味；bland: 温和的，平淡的；magical realism: 魔幻现实主义，其特点为在反映现实的叙述中，客观地融入荒诞或神话的元素。Like the child in most of us, he has a thing about23. have a thing about: 对……特别感兴趣，特别向往。smoke-filled tunnels where, in one story, aliens called INKlings breed under Tokyo, no one above ground knowing they are there.

小说《挪威的森林》

村上春树

The Underground Gas Attack

Murakami thus stood where many another novelist has been, or would have liked to have been, before him—rich, famous, bored, getting on for fifty, fast running out of material—when, on March 20, 1995, an utterly uninventable event convulsed Japan, and incidentally showed up magical realism for what it is, bookish daydreaming.24. 于是，村上春树跟其他很多小说家已经经历过或可能会经历的一样：年近五十，腰包鼓胀，名扬天下，却备感无聊，写作素材一点点耗尽。1995年3月20日，一件捏造都捏造不出来的事件震惊整个日本，并且说明了所谓的魔幻现实主义不过是书呆子的白日梦而已。convulse: 使……剧烈震惊，使……不安。Murakami had taken no interest in the earthquake and conflagration that ravaged his boyhood home, Kobe, two months earlier. We can guess why: too boringly old-style Japanese, not magical enough. AumShinrikyo’s nerve gas attack on the Tokyo subway system in the morning rush hour was another story,all the more disorienting because it confirmed what Murakami was beginning to fear: that he really knew very little about his own country.25. 奥姆真理教在清晨上班高峰对东京地铁的神经毒气攻击则是另外一回事。整个事件让人困惑不已，它证实了村上春树开始担心的问题：他对自己的国家了解甚少。disorienting:使人迷失方向的。Around 8 a.m. that morning five two-man Aum teams in business suits boarded different crowded trains,all timed to converge at Kasumigaseki, the deepest underground station and the hub of the Tokyo system, which also happens to be closest to parliament, police headquarters, and major ministries—a scientifically efficient commando raid, at least in planning, on the control centers of the Japanese government.26. 那天早上大约八点，五队两两组成的奥姆真理教徒身穿商务套装，分别挤上五列拥挤的地铁，所有的地铁都将开往霞关——东京地铁最深的地下站和换乘枢纽，同时也是距离国会、警察总部和几大部委最近的地铁站。这是一次针对日本政府控制中心的科学高效的突袭，至少策划上如是。converge: 汇聚，汇集；commando raid: 突袭攻击。

Aboard the trains the fake businessmen, more terrifying in their ordinariness than any dreamed-up aliens, dropped parcels wrapped in newspaper, prodded them with the sharpened tips of umbrellas they carried (on a rainless day) and got off at the next stop.27. 这些假商务人士挤上列车——外表与常人无异，却比人类想象的外星人更为恐怖——丢下用报纸裹着的包裹，用他们随身携带的雨伞尖（在一个晴朗的日子里）戳破，然后在下一站下车。dreamed-up: 想象中的；alien: 外星人，异类；prod: （用手指或尖物）戳，捅。Within minutes Japanese and world TV, the realistic magic of our time, was showing scenes from a waking nightmare.People came stumbling out of the subway exits, retching,28. stumble: 跌跌撞撞地走，蹒跚；retch:干呕，恶心呕吐。choking, and falling on the grass outside. Underground, some fought to get off the trains while others, fearful of being late for work, fought to get on. Above ground, emergency vehicles stalled in already clogged traffic.29. stall: 堵塞，暂缓；clogged: 堵住的，塞住的。As in Hiroshima half a century earlier, no one knew what was causing all this, only that it was something out of science’s latest shop of horrors. Gas of some kind, seemingly; but what? And why?

Fire crews in gas masks descended into the subway; then soldiers of the Ground Self Defense Force in capes and goggles to swab out the trains, the first time Japanese servicemen had been in harm’s way in Tokyo since the 1945 fire raids.30. 戴着防毒面具的消防员进入地铁；陆上自卫队士兵戴着盔帽和护目镜在清洗地铁。这是自1945年日本受袭以来日本军人第一次在东京执行危险任务。Ground Self Defense Force: 日本陆上自卫队；goggle: 护目镜；swab:（用拖把、抹布等）擦洗，擦拭；harm’s way: 危险的处境。In a day of things never seen before, Japanese and then others learned how pathetically vulnerable our great cities, that seem so safe, are to high-tech assailants who know their chemistry.31. pathetically: 可悲地，可怜地；assailant:攻击者，袭击者。

By his own account none of this made much of an impact on Murakami, immersed in his then invariable daily routine of writing, jogging ten kilometers, writing, swimming, writing,and going to bed early. Only later, he recounts, he saw a letter in a magazine from a woman whose husband, injured in the subway attack, had not fully regained his energy, had been coldshouldered by his boss and colleagues because he wasn’t quite like them anymore, and felt obliged to resign.32. 他说，后来他在杂志上看到一位女性的来信，她的丈夫在这次地铁毒气攻击事件中受伤，未能完全恢复，从此再也不能像正常人，因而受到其上司和同事的歧视，最后不得不辞职。recount:描述，讲述；cold-shoulder: 冷漠，轻视。“How could Japanese society perpetrate such a double violence?” he asks,and soon after he decided to interview the survivors of the attack, with interesting results.

Unlike many celebrities who try journalism (one notorious example, Alexander Solzhenytsin, banished guests from his Russian TV talk show because they kept interrupting him), Murakami is a good listener who keeps his questions short and general. Nights behind the bar at Peter Rabbit probably helped.

Murakami takes us into a city of Japanese with jobs,kids, and debts, utterly unlike the empty characters of his fiction. He talks to clerks, shop assistants, computer engineers, printers, “office ladies”—people with nothing in common except the need to get to work. He discovers spontaneous heroism and devotion to duty, very Japanese,among everyday, taken-for-granted people—the assistant stationmaster at Kasumigaseki who died dragging the parcels of Sarin out of a carriage with his bare hands, a ticket collector fatally gassed helping victim after victim to safety.33. 从司空见惯的普通人中，他发现了自发的英雄主义、勤勉努力的日本人，包括因赤手将沙林包拖出车厢而致死的霞关站助理站长，以及协助将一个又一个受害人挪至安全地方而导致自己中毒身亡的收票员。spontaneous:自发的，无意识的；fatally: 致命地。Murakami found no Aum sympathizers among the victims,who had barely heard of the cult and made wild guesses at what the motive of the attack might be: “people are too assertive in Tokyo these days,” “children are not taught to respect human life,” and similar explanations just as wide of the mark.34. sympathizer: 同情者，支持者；cult: 邪教，宗教团伙；assertive: 武断的，独断的。

After the first dozen or so, the victims’ accounts do get monotonous: strange smell, panic, confusion, vision slowly fading to black as the gas affects the optic nerves—an eerie reprise of Murakami’s sci-fi fantasies about dark tunnels under Tokyo but telling us nothing about Aum or its guru.35. 采访了十几个人之后，受害者的讲述变得单调起来：闻到一股怪异的味道，人们惊慌失措。毒气伤害人们的视觉神经，受害者的视力开始慢慢衰弱直至完全失明——村上春树描绘的发生在东京黑暗隧道里的科幻小说场景一再重复，但却未涉及奥姆真理教或其教主。monotonous: 单调的，无聊的；optic nerve: 视觉神经；eerie: 可怕的，怪异的；reprise: 重演，再次发生；scifi: science fiction，科幻小说。The editors of Bungei Shunju36. Bungei Shunju:《文艺春秋》，日本著名杂志。, where this account was first published, seem to have thought much the same, and therefore invited Murakami to do a second set of interviews with members and ex-members of the Aum sect. These ran in the magazine in 1998 and make up the second half of the book later.