In the work of mourning it is not grief that works: grief keeps watch. Blanchot, Writing of the Disaster Every work of art is an uncommitted crime. Adorno, Minima Moralia Who can swear that our unconscious is not expecting this? Derrida, No Apocalypse, Not Now I. In 1995, traumatic events occurred in Japan. On 17 January, an earthquake struck Kobe, killing five thousand people. On 20 March, the Aum Shinrikyo cult released sarin gas into the Tokyo subway system killing twelve and injuring four thousand, some permanently. These events powerfully traumatized Japanese society, exposing as it did hidden--one might say, subterranean--uncertainties and anxieties. As Haruki Muramaki puts it in Underground: [events] were nightmarish eruptions beneath our feet--from underground--that threw all the latent contradictions and weak points of our society into frighteningly high relief. Japanese society proved all too defenseless against these sudden onslaughts. We were unable to see them coming and failed to prepare (237). These events, two of the greatest tragedies in Japanese postwar history (237), present serious challenges to Murakami, both as novelist and citizen of Japan. On the one hand, the events demand memorialization, demand, that is, a mourning response; yet on the other, these historical events, so cataclysmic, so beyond imagining, resist representation, resist language itself. It is here, in the crucible of history's impossible claims, that an aporetic guilt arises for Murakami and perhaps for Japan: the guilt of failing to imagine the possibility of trauma (We were unable to see them coming) and the traumatic guilt of being unable to imagine the means to represent the traumatic event in order properly to mourn. And for Murakami the problem of representation is a problem of guilt, a guilty problem: he is faced with the difficulty of attempting to represent trauma and the problem of representing guilt. Both of Murakami's narrative responses to these traumas (after the quake and Underground) represent Murakami's (guilty) attempt to speak of guilt, to speak through guilt (and thus to mourn), and to speak of the fundamental impossibility of representing guilt within language itself a priori incapable of accommodating trauma. (1) Blanchot's words from Writing of the Disaster are thus crucial in what follows: The disaster, unexperienced. It is what escapes the very possibility of experience--it is the limit of writing [limite de l'ecriture] (7). disaster defies representation, and in some profound way this defiance--the disaster's resistance to representation--becomes the disaster. What Murakami's texts implicitly argue is that authentic trauma--and the guilt arising from that trauma--is not the initial event but the failure to represent that event: the disaster is both the limitation of writing and that which, as border or boundary, encloses writing's impossibility. What then can be said about guilt, for guilt, within this limit-space where writing becomes its own effacement, its own impossibility, its own disastrous immolation? after the quake and Underground stand as testimony, as witness, to Murakami's attempt to find the appropriate narrative means to express the disaster. after the quake is a series of six short stories (I will analyze here); Undergound, in its English version, is a series of interviews with victims of the sarin attack (Part One) and with members, past and current, of the Aum Shinrikyo cult (Part Two). In Underground, Murakami makes clear that the workings of memory displace historical events, transforming trauma into another narrative: Simply put, our memories of experience are rendered into something like a narrative form. To a greater or lesser extent, this is a natural function of memory--a process that novelists consciously utilize as a profession. truth of is told will differ, however slightly, from whatever actually happened. …
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Jan 1, 2019
James R Lewis 
Open Access