BEALS: You’ve said before that the world is in chaos. How have the events in New York contributed to that sense of chaos? MURAKAMI: People now realize how dangerous the world can be. So many people watched those images of the airplane crashing into that building. That was both a reality and a metaphor for the situation we are in–a kind of soft chaos. I say soft because we have to live with it. But it can become hard at any moment, so we have to be alert.
What can the victims of the Aum attack teach the world about how to deal with terror? They have their own stories of life. They love someone, they hate someone. They have dreams and they have hopes. There were [around 6,000] people affected in [the World Trade Center]. If you imagine the numbers, it is just a figure. But when you think of the stories of those victims, then you are shocked and moved.
I would imagine that different types of disasters affect people in different ways. The horror, the fright of people when they experience an earthquake is, in one word, liquefaction. People believe the ground is solid. All of a sudden, out of the blue, the solid ground turns to liquid. With the sarin gas, it is not a matter of the physical ground, but the society we build on top of it. With the sarin attacks, we suffered from flaws in our own social structure.
How did the sarin attacks change Japan? I think people used to be optimistic before that incident. People believed that the harder we work, the richer we become. All of a sudden people realized that wasn’t happening. People became pessimistic.
Does the United States risk the same danger as a result of the recent attacks? It is a turning point for America. I lived in the U.S. in 1991 when the gulf war started. But this is a brand-new type of war. I am afraid that there will be no victors and no defeated. Americans are not used to that.
What do Americans need to do to understand this tragedy better? Generally speaking, Americans believe that they know what is wrong and who is bad. But things are not so simple anymore. In the sarin-gas case, those victims knew that Aum was doing bad things. But at the same time, they knew that the cultists were very serious, intelligent people. That disturbed [the Japanese]. They didn’t know who was a bad guy and who was good.
Do you believe the same is true with regard to the World Trade Center disaster? Yes and no. Religion was important in both. Those Islamic fundamentalists who committed those suicide attacks believed they were doing the right thing. They were serious and devoted. But the scale is not the same.
