Why would a young man or woman wish to blow up the world, or at least part of it? And what explains the ease with which some people can be cajoled into blowing themselves up into the bargain? Recent instances have been described variously as acts of desperation, the result of years of poverty and humiliation. Perhaps. But one of the most horrifying cases of random mass murder took place seven years ago in one of the world's most affluent societies, Japan. And the young zealots who tried to kill thousands of civilians by spreading poison gas in the Tokyo underground were the highly educated, well-off children of an "economic miracle".
Much has been written since about the Aum Shinrikyo, or Supreme Truth, a cult led by a chubby, half-blind guru named Shoko Asahara, which combines bits of Buddhism, some messianic Christianity, a few Shintoist attitudes, and a lot of invented mumbo-jumbo. But the reasons why it attracted some of the best and brightest in Japan are still elusive. The novelist Haruki Murakami, after talking to victims, as well as some of the perpetrators of the subway gassing, concludes that there is something specifically rotten about Japanese society, something he describes in his book, Underground, as "the lack of a broad world vision". Japanese life, in his view, has been narrowed to purely material, technocratic aims. What the religious killers wanted was a meaningful armageddon.
A remarkable thing about his interviews is the almost painful seriousness of the believers. There is no room for humour in their earnest quest for purity and meaning. One of them, a man of scientific bent, tried to prove Buddhist "truth" mathematically. Another was convinced that the world was evil and needed to be destroyed before it could be reborn. Reading these statements, I was reminded of something Henry Miller once wrote about the suicidal death of the writer Yukio Mishima. If only, he said, Mishima had had a sense of humour, he would surely have lived.
I can see what he means, and even more so after watching a brilliant new Japanese film, based on a cult much like Aum Shinrikyo. Distance, now playing at the ICA cinema in London, is directed by Hirokazu Kore-Eda, and offers a fictional exploration of the question of why serious, educated, prosperous people become prey to apocalyptic fantasies. The form is an extraordinary blend of quasi-documentary techniques - interviews, handheld camera, etc - and a dramatic confrontation between the world of the living and the world of the dead, whose spirit, if not the form, comes straight from the No theatre.
The world of the dead is a lake set in a forest, where members of the religious cult committed mass suicide after failing to poison Tokyo's water supply. The living are one survivor of the cult and a few relations of the dead who come to the lake to leave flowers in remembrance. Like us, the living try to make sense of what possessed their estranged kin. The drama arises from their attempts to enter into the world of the dead and their failure to do so; that is the "distance" of the title.
We see flashbacks of the dead as they renounce the world to join the religious group. With the same deadly earnestness of Murakami's real interlocutors, they talk about "freeing" themselves from the "polluted" world, where all values are "false". A medical student tells his brother that he wants to practise a more "fundamental" medicine; he wants to heal the "human soul". The most chilling flashback shows a woman telling her husband that she will leave him for the group. The group, she says, has restored meaning to her life. In the group there is absolute trust. The group has given her a completely new "system of values" that are "absolute". What is so disturbing about this scene is her beatific smile, born of absolute conviction. This is indeed a person who is ready to die.
But the die is not entirely loaded against the world of the dead, for the living world does look tawdry and artificial. The Japanese urban landscape, often in reality, but always in the film, is stripped of any sense of a history or spiritual life. It barely looks human. People live in high-rise apartments overlooking artificial turf. The sounds of the city are mechanical: disembodied voices pour out of loudspeakers, advertising jingles deafen most human conversation, which, in any case, takes place mostly through mobile phones or other electronic devices.
The bleakness of urban Japan is partly the result of the massive bombing in 1945. But this is also a society where the past, including the spiritual past, is tainted by dictatorship and war. The same has been true of Germany, another country where efficiency and materialism replaced a history of abused idealism, and where, possibly as a result, young seekers have had a propensity to purify the corrupt world through acts of terror.
It might be tempting to see this film as something so typical of Japan that we can only watch it with the detached fascination of people from a totally different world. Tempting, but wrong. For Japan might offer a rather extreme vision of modern anomie, but our own world is not so different. As politics become increasingly bureaucratic, as organised traditional religion fades away, as history is turned into a theme park and social life is usurped by television and the internet, we too become vulnerable to sudden eruptions of irrationality. In a society where masses of people cry louder over the death of a celebrity than for their own kin, strange cults are never far away. Here, too, we have searchers for absolutes. If they can no longer find them in churches, there is no telling where they will explode.