Not everyone fighting for the return of exiled President Jean-Bertrand Aristide has ended up on a boat, in exile or in a roadside pool of blood. Nearly three years after the coup that ended the country’s brief experiment with democracy, tens of thousands of Aristide supporters are struggling in quiet whispers and behind closed doors to keep alive the hope he represents. Former prime minister Robert Malval maintains what amounts to a shadow government from behind the high stone walls of his hillside villa. The fellow priests who joined Aristide’s cause remain a powerful symbolic presence. And many grass-roots activists have followed the old Haitian tradition of maronnage – Creole for hiding.
The game is dangerous. Christian, a onetime TV and radio dealer who asks to be anonymous, has been underground since last July, when a neighbor snitched about his pro-Aristide leanings. Two officers fired shots through his door, then ransacked his house and burned his political pamphlets. But he continues secretly passing them around. “It is the last fight,” he says. “This is the end of the match.” Showing a raised scar on his scalp, Tissaint, another organizer who didn’t want his last name used, describes how the military burst into his home two years ago and shot him in the head. Tissaint is keeping a list of neighborhood people killed: 16 so far. “After 6 o’clock,” he says, “you can’t be out on the street.” Malval, Paul and the other top leaders have a bit more room to maneuver. Killing them would surely increase the likelihood of U.S. intervention. Even so, Malval rarely leaves his villa except to visit diplomats in a bulletproof car flown in from the United States last fall.
Time is working against the flickering resistance: morale is waning, money for activists is drying up. A U.S. promise to turn back refugees has slowed the flow of boat people. The regime is proposing new presidential elections this fall. And Washington has had trouble getting U.N. backing for an invasion. The underground may have little to show for the cause that has already cost it so much.
title: “Notes From The Underground” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-01” author: “Judith Bried”
You want to argue that he’s already done that, with “Underground” (Vintage), his oral history of the gas attack that salutes the decency and unselfishness of so many ordinary people on that day. But no argument seems appropriate here, so you trail along while he delivers his flowers to the station office, and then searches fruitlessly for a plaque commemorating the dead. Like so much about the gas attack, it is tucked out of view. “People are very reluctant to talk about the gas attack,” he says. “They want to be quiet, because that’s a tradition of Japanese society. People are not supposed to make waves. That’s the rule of the system.” But it’s a rule Murakami despises–“I hate the Japanese system”–and he’s been breaking it at every chance for years, first as a college protester in the ’60s, then as the bohemian manager of a jazz bar in the ’70s and then as a novelist who turned his back on Japanese literary tradition and flaunted his Western influences.
“Underground,” his first nonfiction book, marks a radical departure for Murakami. His fans will surely think it strange, with its focus on social issues and Japanese character. He has, after all, made his reputation as an internationally popular writer of what even he calls “weird stories” with titles cribbed from Western pop (“Norwegian Wood,” “Dance, Dance, Dance”). His protagonists are smart but alienated young men and women who always seem to wind up on quests of some kind, searching for an old friend or a lover or battling subterranean monsters, or simply chasing a lost cat. There is nothing particularly Japanese, or even Asian, about any of this, nor about the tastes of Murakami’s characters. They dine on pasta, dote on American Westerns and read Jack Kerouac. In “Sputnik Sweetheart” (Knopf), a new Murakami novel published concurrently with “Underground,” the hero’s a schoolteacher in love with a woman who’s in love with another woman. The women take a trip, and one of them vanishes. The teacher comes to help, but everything comes to grief. And yet, as heart-wrenching as this story is–everyone’s love is unrequited–somehow, mysteriously, it remains an almost cheerful book. Perhaps it’s because Murakami’s narrators are never odd people. Odd things happen to them. But they are easygoing, regular Joes, and their stories are completely addictive.
These coolly surreal novels have made Murakami a success at home (“Norwegian Wood” has sold 4 million copies just in Japan, where it’s sort of that country’s “Love Story,” only a lot better written) and abroad. “A Wild Sheep Chase” and “Dance, Dance, Dance” have each sold more than 1 million copies worldwide. But while he is Japan’s most famous novelist–and its best candidate for a Nobel Prize–he’s also its most polarizing. Even his fans usually lead off a Murakami conversation by telling you which of his books they don’t like. But that’s what happens when you write some books that are love stories, others that are shaggy-dog sci-fi detective stories, and in all of them your foot keeps tapping the anxiety pedal. The critic Saburo Kawamoto nails it perfectly when he calls Murakami’s stories “bright nihilism.”
In person, the author, 52, is as enigmatic as his books. At his home, shoes come off, following Japanese custom, but the furniture is Western and the art on the wall is pop. Everything is comfortable but exquisite, right down to the rosy Zelkova wood floors in his office, with boards as broad as two feet across. The man himself is cordial but almost never confessional. He just doesn’t do small talk. If you comment on the vast record collection that eats up a long wall in his office, he refuses to pick up on the conversational cue. “I hate CDs” is a long sentence.
Murakami had been living in Europe and the United States for most of a decade when the gas attack happened in 1995. He had already begun thinking about his country and its history. The marvelously ambitious 1994 novel “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle” explored the Japanese atrocities in Manchuria in the ’30s. But the subway disaster–and his curiosity about how such a thing could happen in Japan–was the tipping point in his decision to return and confront his own cultural identity. “I don’t know what is ‘Japanese’,” he says, chuckling. “That’s a very big subject. But I interviewed 63 people–63 stories–and it’s strange to say, but I got warped by those narratives. They shaped my soul as a writer.”
“Underground” is a painful book to read. The scariest thing is that the victims had no idea what was happening. They were just getting sicker by the minute. Keeping to the routine was the only touchstone they had. One man even stopped and bought milk before going to the hospital because it was his day to buy milk. The victim that most touched Murakami’s heart was a young woman who could barely talk. Shizuko Akashi suffered temporary brain damage and is still hospitalized, her memory gone, her speech impaired. “Sometimes I think it’s ridiculous to work 10 or 12 hours a day,” Murakami says, “commuting two hours each way. You are like ants, like slaves. But when you look at her and her family–I admire them, truly, from the bottom of my heart. They are supporting this society.”
Murakami says one reason he wrote “Underground” was to hear the “voice of the people, to hear what common people had to say.” Now those voices have sent his fiction in an utterly fresh direction. His latest short stories, published in The New Yorker, all relate in some way to the 1995 earthquake that devastated Kobe, Murakami’s boyhood home. Some of these stories are as fantastical as any he’s written (“Super-Frog Saves Tokyo” lives up to its title), some are realistic, but all of them deal with the perilousness and the potential for heroism in the most ordinary life.
So if Murakami is heading for deeper, more meaningful waters, does this mean the fun’s over? Not likely. When he’s asked point blank if he sees himself as a sort of literary conscience of Japan, Murakami blurts out, “No!” and then laughs at his own vehemence. “I am a novelist,” he goes on after a moment’s reflection. “Shintaro Ishihara, a very famous writer, has become the governor of Tokyo, because he thought it was more effective to become a politician than to keep writing. But I’m a writer, so I’ll keep writing. Fiction is my battlefield.”
