作者：华沃德•W [法国] 译者：张砾
出版日期：2001年10月15日
对村上春树，日本目前最受欢迎的小说家来说，当前的反对恐怖主义的斗争不是文明的冲突，也不是一场十字军战争。
更恰当地说，在小说家看来，恐怖分子对美国的攻击和美国及其盟国的反恐行为如同一个不相容的网络，或者如村上称之的那样，是一个回路。双方对现实世界的理解，如同物质与反物质一般，充满矛盾、不可调和且一触即发。
“开路是这个社会，”村上先生说，“闭路是宗教狂热者的世界，如伊斯兰原教旨主义者或者奥姆真理教，我认为这些宗教狂热者在某方面都是一样的。他们的世界是完美的，因为他们把它封闭起来了。”
在宗教狂热者的世界里，他说：“如果你有问题，总是有人给你一个答案。在某种程度上，所有的事都是简单而且清楚的，只要你相信，你就是幸福的。”
然而，在我们的开放世界里，“世界是不完整的，”一次采访中，他在他整洁的放满书的办公室里说（窗外就是东京流行的奥姆真理教的屋顶），
“这个世界，有很多令人分心的事和缺陷。并且我们在大部分情况下都在承受挫折和压力，而不是愉快。但至少事物是开放的。你有选择，你能决定你生活的方式。”
村上先生的反思，重新唤起了冷战期间关于开放社会和封闭社会孰优孰劣的讨论，以及长期存在的对于自由意志的哲学争论。不仅如此，村上的这个观点还有更加重要的意义，因为它们来自于一个非西方人士，并且他的国家在1995年3月20日也经历过奥姆真理教这一宗教教派恐怖的化学武器袭击。
在村上的小说，《斯普特尼克恋人》和
《拧发条鸟编年史》里，作者利用专业的二分法创作了类似的东西。他塑造的离奇的主人公，经常看起来在两个世界之间来回迁徙，一个是单调的，另一个是神秘而充满危险的。但这主要得益于他近期的一次，也是第一次，非小说的散文文学的尝试。在那次尝试中，村上说，他学到的东西已经足够使他自信地谈论恐怖主义的世界以及他们和我们这个世界的冲突碰撞。
东京地铁袭击事件，导致12人死亡，约5500人受伤。在那件事情发生之后，村上春树花了一整年来采访62名愿意与他细谈的受害者，并整理出版了《地下》（珍藏国际版，2001），一部受到斯德特科影响的作品，客观真实地记录了受害者们在袭击当天的经历以及随后几个月缓慢且典型地不完全的康复过程。
但是后来，《地下》被指责为一部片面单薄的作品。这一批评，使村上感到惊讶和刺痛。于是，他又花了一年时间来报道一部深刻钻研奥姆真理教忠实成员工作的姊妹篇，《希望之乡》。“我是一个小说家，所以人们认为我会站在奥姆真理教崇拜者的一边，因为他们是没有希望取胜的。一个小说家应该对没有希望取胜的人抱有同情心，”他说，“但我写作了《地下》，因为我只对受害者，这些普通人感兴趣。因为我相信普通人的故事比那些纯粹的人的故事更重要，更深刻。我相信我做了正确的事。一年后，我写了奥姆真理教崇拜者这一部分人的故事。最初它们是两本不同的书。但是，即使到了现在我仍能记起所有受害者的面孔和声音，却不能记起那些奥姆真理教分子的样子。”受害者的故事充满了预示命运的日常决定：一时冲动的搭乘和平时不同地铁线路的决定，或者是为了赶去参加年会而毫无戒备地遭受到化学武器的袭击。
那些无辜遭受到恐怖袭击的受害者们，其中有些人花了几个月才搞清发生在他们身上的事，比如：有一个受害者说他遇害的第二天躺在医院病床上的第一反应是：“好吧，我还不错。我就在毒气区的中心，但我当时并没有感受到死亡的钟声在颤抖。而是正在看电视，好像被毒气袭击是别人的问题一样。很久以后我才开始奇怪，我怎么能这么冷淡。我本来应该感到狂暴，感到随时都会爆炸。但直到秋天才开始一点一点地感到这样。
“如果你被训练过，你就能找到那条通路，在两个世界间来回。要找到这个封闭回路的世界的入口是很容易的，但要找到它的出口却并不容易。很多邪教头目免费提供了进入这个回路世界的入口。但他们并不提供一个出口，因为他们想要让他们的追随者们留在那个封闭世界的圈套中。这样，让他们干什么，他们就会干什么。我想这非常像发生在那些被命令驾驶飞机撞击大楼的人身上的事。
日本的经验是国内的袭击和最近的劫机之间很少有平行线，而美国的经验教训也差不多。村上先生将这个时代称之为：“新的动荡世界”。
“在日本大多数人都认为恐怖主义是美国自己的问题，”村上先生说，“美国是世界上最强大的国家，而伊斯兰人不喜欢美国，因此就有了恐怖主义问题。但那是不正确的。其实，同样的事情随时都能发生在任何时候、任何地方。东京、柏林或者巴黎，都有可能。因为这是一场开放的世界和封闭的世界之间的战争，是一场不同精神状态之间的战争。这与民族和国家无关，而仅仅关乎精神状态。”
对于美国来说，村上春树认为，这个国家的轨迹会被此类事件深刻地改变，并且是以无法预计的方式。“我出生在1949年，当我十几岁的时候，这个国家变得越来越富裕，我们都相信如果我们富裕了我们就会幸福，”他说，“但情况不是这样。这是个真正的转折点。”
“纽约的灾难宣告了美国社会的另一个阶段，”村上先生说。“这是对美国本土的第一次袭击，人们知道他们是脆弱的。事情再也不和以前一样了。实话说，我不知道，事情会变好还是变糟，但我期望最好的结果。我们必须变得成熟和习惯于新的动荡。我们必须忍耐这一动荡。对于它，没有简单或者清晰的解决办法。最重要的事情之一就是同情心和尊重，在我们的世界和他们的世界之间的战争中，这些会起到很大的作用。”
“例如，假设某人在我面前倒下，我会很愿意自己能帮助到他。”一个姐姐因为沙林毒气而变成植物人的人说，“在毒气袭击的前一个晚上，家人们在饭间谈论：‘天啊，我们是多么幸运，一家人可以在一起享受这样的好时光。”可这样的美好时光，都在第二天被那些白痴给毁了。那些罪犯偷走了我们仅有的一点欢乐。”
尽管这些故事引人注目，但任何想要寻求理解是什么驱使这些人做出如此不道德的破坏行为的人都会发现奥姆真理教成员们都以为自己甚至是光明磊落的，同样，那些在9月11日撞击世贸中心和五角大楼的劫机者们，也带这样的幻觉，没有留下任何遗嘱就消失了。
最先震撼读者的是这些做坏事的人的平凡。奥姆真理教的成员几乎从所有意义上讲都是普通民众，从找寻某些没什么前途的问题的答案的辍学学生，到受过高等教育但厌倦了你死我活的竞争压力的专业人士。在一段包围着如同对自杀袭击（常常与宗教狂热者联系在一起）的净化力量的信仰一样的对世界的厌烦和反感的文字中，赫罗•卡诺，一个参加袭击时30岁的计算机专家，叙述了他逐渐被奥姆真理教诱惑的过程：
“当我六年级时我开始思考这个世界存在着的另一个真实”，卡诺先生——一个没有参与沙林毒气袭击的奥姆真理教成员说，“我盯着手里的一把剪刀，突然产生了一个想法，某些成年人辛苦工作创造了它们，但有一天它们（剪刀的两边）还是会分开。人也是一样，最后他们都会死去。所有的东西都走向毁灭，没有回头。换言之，毁灭本身是宇宙运行的原理。”
当他加入了奥姆真理教以后，类似于佛教的一个通向救赎的捷径的许诺就出现了。“存在再一次有了意义。奥姆真理教内的生活其实比世俗生活艰苦很多。”卡诺先生说，“但它越艰苦，就越让人感到满意。我内心的挣扎结束了，对此我是感激的。”
阿克雅•纳利姆拉，奥姆真理教的另一个成员，告诉村上春树：“当我大学毕业后，我感到，我要么会隐居，要么会死掉，必然是两个中的一个。”他最终加入了奥姆真理教。为了参加团体的训练课程，他付出了他的一切。训练项目中的一项是听教会建立者——肖克•阿萨拉大师的录音布道。肖克•阿萨拉大师被称为是“灵魂的终极解放者”。$3,000的学费让他烦扰，但别人告诉他，“要取得力量，这点钱根本不算什么。”
当纳利姆拉对团体所进行的恐怖袭击感到质疑时，一个成员向他解释说：“无论我们是不是受到恐怖袭击的牵连，还是其他什么不好的事发生在我们身上，只要我们和大师建立起联系，我们就会受到保佑。即使我们坠入地狱，大师也会很快把我们救出来。”村上春树说，听到了这种任何行为都能被解释的封闭逻辑，让他奇怪地带回到了他自己的小说中，使他有了小说的创作灵感。
对于1995年发生在日本的所有事件的主导性质，从科波地震到沙林毒气袭击，村上春树说起时，都带着很深的遗憾，因为暴力事件的真正本质，都在被媒体覆盖的海洋中消耗了。就像他看到的那样，在这些问题面前，是小说家担当起走到社会前面来的角色。找到了巨大严重的公共暴力和微妙隐秘的生活面的联系，找到了日本公民的日常生活体验和他热切构想出来的人物的深层恐惧与梦想之间的联系。
“我所写，是关于英雄，如何在这个混沌的世界里寻找正确道路的故事，”村上春树说，“这是我的主题。同时，我想在地底下一定还存在着另一个世界。你可以通过你的内在，抵达那个深层的世界。我书中的大部分主角都生活在这样的两个世界中——这边的现实世界和那边的地下世界。”
附原文：
Seeing a Clash of Social Networks
—— A Japanese Writer Analyzes Terrorists and Their
Victims
By: HOWARD W. [FRENCH]
Published:: October 15, 2001
For Haruki Murakami, Japan's most popular living fiction
writer, the current struggle against terrorism is no
clash of civilizations, much less a crusade. Rather, as
the novelist sees it, the war that opposes the United
States and its allies against reputed terrorist groups
like al Qaeda is a collision between incompatible
networks, or what he calls circuits, whose apprehension
of reality is every bit as irreconcilable as matter and
antimatter. And whose collisions are bound to be just as
explosive.“The open circuit is this society,'' Mr.
Murakami said, ''and the closed circuit is the world of
religious fanatics: Islamic fundamentalists or groups
like Aum Shinrikyo. I think they are all the same in a
way. Their worlds are perfect, because they are closed
off.'' In the universe of the fanatic, he said: “If you
have questions, there is always someone to provide the
answers. In a way, things are very easy and clear, and
you are happy as long as you believe.''
In our open world, however, “things are very
incomplete,'' he said in an interview in his tidy
book-filled office, which looks out over the rooftops of
Tokyo's fashionable Omotesando neighborhood. He
continued: “There are many distractions and many flaws.
And instead of being happy, in most cases we are
frustrated and stressed. But at least things are open.
You have choice and you can decide the way you live.''
Mr. Murakami's reflections recall discussions during the
cold war of the relative advantages of open and closed
societies, as well as long-running philosophical debates
over the meaning of free will. But his views take on
added interest because they come from a non-Westerner,
one, moreover, whose society experienced a terrifying
chemical weapons attack by the Aum Shinrikyo religious
sect on March 20, 1995. In novels like “Sputnik
Sweetheart'' and “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle,'' the
author has made something of a specialty of dichotomies
like these. His quirky characters often seem to flit
back and forth between two worlds, one humdrum and the
other secret, mysterious and full of menace. But it is
from a recent experiment with nonfiction -- his first --
that the author says he learned enough to talk
confidently about the universe of terrorists and their
collisions with our world.
After the attack on Tokyo's subway system, which killed
12 and injured about 5,500, he spent a full year
interviewing the 62 victims who consented to talk to him
at length, producing ''Underground'' (Vintage
International Edition, 2001), a Studs Terkel-influenced
work that hauntingly chronicles their experiences on the
day of the attack and in the months of slow and
typically incomplete recovery that followed.
Stung and surprised by subsequent criticism here that he
had delivered a one-sided story, Mr. Murakami spent
another year reporting a companion work, “The Place That
Was Promised,'' which delves deeply into the work of
Aum's devoted members. “I am a novelist, so people
expected that I would be on the Aum cult's side because
they are outsiders, and a novelist should be sympathetic
to the outsiders,'' he said. “But I wrote ‘Underground'
because I was interested in the victims, the ordinary
people, because I believe the stories of the ordinary
people are more important and deeper than those of the
pure people, so to speak. And I believe I did the right
thing.
“A year later I wrote the Aum cult people's side.
Originally they were two different books. Even now I can
remember all of the victims' faces and voices, and yet I
cannot remember those of the Aum people.'' The victims'
stories are full of everyday decisions rendered
portentous by fate: spur-of-the-moment decisions to take
a different train route than usual, or the annual
meeting that put the unsuspecting individual in the path
of a chemical weapons attack.
Others labored for months to make sense of what happened
to them, like the man who said his reaction in the
hospital bed the next day was: ''Well, I'm O.K. I'd been
right at the epicenter, but instead of shuddering at the
death toll, I felt like I was watching a program on TV,
as if it had been somebody else's problem. It was only
much later that I began to wonder how I could have been
so callous. I ought to have been furious, ready to
explode. It wasn't until the autumn that it really sank
in, little by little.
''If you are trained you can find the passage and come
and go between the two worlds. It is easy to find an
entrance into this closed circuit, but it is not easy to
find an exit. Many gurus offer an entry into the circuit
for free. But they don't offer a way out, because they
want to keep followers trapped. Those people can be
soldiers when they are ordered to be. I think that is
very much like what happened with those people who flew
the planes into those buildings.''
The experiences of Japan, where few parallels are being
made between the attack from within and the recent
airliner hijackings, and of the United States are full
of lessons for each other in an era that Mr. Murakami
said might be called the ''new world chaos.'' ''In Japan
most people think that terrorism is the United States'
own problem,'' Mr. Murakami said. ''The U.S. is the
strongest country in the world and Islamic people don't
like America, therefore there is a terrorism problem.
''But that isn't right. The same thing can happen at any
moment, in Tokyo, Berlin or Paris, because this is war
between closed and open circuits, different states of
minds. This is not about nations or countries, and not
about religion, but about states of mind.''
For the United States, he said, the message was that
countries' trajectories can be profoundly altered by
events like these, often in ways impossible to predict.
''I was born in 1949, and when I was a teenager this
country was getting richer and richer, and we all
believed we could be happy if we were rich,'' he said.
''But that wasn't the case, and this was a real turning
point.''
''The New York tragedy announces a different phase for
American society,'' Mr. Murakami said. ''This is the
first attack on the American mainland, and people know
they are vulnerable. Things are not the same anymore.
''I don't know, honestly, if things will get better or
worse, but I wish for the best. We have to be mature and
get used to the new chaos. We have to be patient with
that chaos. There is no simple or clear solution for it.
One of the most important things is sympathy and
respect. In the war between our network and their
network these can go a long way.''
''For example if someone had fallen down right in front
of me, I like to think I'd have helped.'' It is also
full of pathos. One man, whose sister was reduced to a
vegetative state by the sarin gas, said: ''The night
before the gas attack, the family was saying over
dinner: 'My, how lucky we are. All together having a
good time,' a modest share of happiness. Destroyed the
very next day by those idiots. Those criminals stole
what little joy we had.''
Compelling as these stories are, anyone seeking to
understand what could drive people to acts of such
wanton destruction will find the accounts of the Aum
members even more illuminating, all the more so since
the hijackers of the airplanes that smashed into the
World Trade Center and Pentagon on Sept. 11 disappeared
without leaving behind any real testament.
What first strikes a reader is the banality of the
evildoers. Aum's members are ordinary people in almost
every sense of the word, from dropouts with few
prospects in search of some answers in life to highly
educated professionals grown tired of the rat race.
In a chilling passage that rings with a kind of
weariness and disgust with the world as well as faith in
the cleansing powers of suicidal missions that one
associates with religious fanatics elsewhere, Hiroyuki
Kano, a computer expert who was 30 at the time of the
attack, recounts his gradual seduction by Aum.
''There was one other reality I came to ponder when I
was in the sixth grade,'' said Mr. Kano, an Aum member
who was not involved in the sarin attack. ''I was
staring at a pair of scissors in my hand, and the
thought suddenly struck me that some adult had worked
very hard to create them but that someday they would
fall apart. Same with people. In the end they die.
Everything's heading straight for destruction and
there's no turning back. To put it another way,
destruction itself is the principle by which the
universe operates.''
Once he joined Aum Shinrikyo, a cultish offshoot of
Buddhism that promised a ''fast path'' to salvation, he
said, existence once again began to have meaning. ''Life
in Aum was much tougher than secular life,'' Mr. Kano
said. ''But the tougher it was, the more satisfying it
felt; my inner struggles were over, for which I was
grateful.''
Akio Namimura, another member, told Mr. Murakami, ''When
I graduated from high school I felt like I would either
renounce the world or die, one of the two.'' He
eventually joined Aum, paying whatever he could to take
part in the group's training sessions. One course
consisted of taped sermons by the group's founder,
Master Shoko Asahara, a man who, devotees were told, was
the ''Final Liberated One.'' The $3,000 fee bothered
him, but others told him, ''That's a cheap price to pay
to get power.''
When Mr. Namimura raised questions about the group's
attacks, a member explained: ''Whether we are attacked
or whatever happens to us, people who have a
relationship with the master are blessed. Even if we
fall into hell, he will save us later.'' Mr. Murakami
said that hearing this kind of hermetic logic, in which
any act or situation can be explained away, brought him
strangely back to his own fiction.
For all of the pivotal qualities of the events of 1995
in Japan, from the Kobe earthquake to the sarin gas
attack, Mr. Murakami speaks with deep regret about the
way they were rendered banal, or as he put it,
''consumed in a sea of media coverage.'' This is where,
as he sees it, the novelist's role in society comes to
the fore, connecting huge public traumas to subtler
changes in life, from the workaday experience of
Japanese citizens down to the fears and dreams of his
intensely imagined characters.
''What I write are stories in which the hero is looking
for the right way in this world of chaos,'' he said.
''That is my theme. At the same time I think there is
another world that is underground. You can access this
inner world in your mind. Most protagonists in my books
live in both worlds -- this realistic world and the
underground world.
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