'No Victors, No Defeated'.(Haruki Murakami)(Brief Article)(Interview)

Following the 1995 sarin-gas attack by the Aum Shinrikyo cult in the Tokyo subway, the noted novelist Haruki Murakami moved back to Japan from America and wrote an oral history of the event. "Underground" is a peerless examination of the way human beings react to widespread terror. Since then Murakami has written a collection of stories about the Kobe earthquake, called "after the quake." In the wake of the World Trade Center disaster, Murakami spoke with NEWSWEEK's Gregory Beals in Tokyo. Excerpts:

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 ...