Aum Anxiety in Japanese Fiction

In this episode, we examine the history of the Aum Affair and its lasting impact on Japanese fiction.

We'll start out with the history of new religions in Japan, including Aum Shinrikyo. We'll take a look at Haruki Murakami's non-fiction book, Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche.

We'll move on to an examination of four novels that respond directly to Aum or the Aum attacks—Keiichiro Hirano's Eclipse, Kenzaburo Oe's Somersault, Banana Yoshimoto's The Lake, and Haruki Murakami's 1Q84. 

And we'll end with a discussion of three novels that I'll argue show the new religion's continuing influence—Kikuo Tsumura's There's No Such Thing as an Easy Job, Sayaka Murata's Earthlings, and Erika Kobayashi's Trinity, Trinity, Trinity.

cw: terrorist attack resulting in injury and death, religions some people think of as cults, fictional cannibalism

Transcript, notes and sources at the podcast episode website.

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