Day-Glo and Darkness

Before Sept. 11, there was March 20, 1995. On a sunny spring morning, five members of the Aum Shinrikyo cult entered the Tokyo subway and pierced plastic packs of liquefied sarin gas with their umbrella tips, leaving 12 people dead and thousands injured. Only two months before, more than 5,000 people were killed by an earthquake that shook the western port city of Kobe. "Some strange malaise, some bitter aftertaste lingers on," writes novelist Haruki Murakami in his account of the times, Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche. "We crane our necks and look around us, as if...

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