Writing Guilt: Haruki Murakami and the Archives of National Mourning‪.‬

I. In 1995, two 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: "Both [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.