I don't think my text posted properly with those photos, so here it is again:

Bataille kept these photographs of a Chinese prisoner being tortured to death on his desk, so he could look at them every day.   He uses an intriguingly catastrophic turn of phrase when discussing the erotic appeal of the images:

"The young and seductive Chinese I spoke of, at the mercy of the torturer's skill, I loved him of a love free of sadistic instinct.  He communicated to me his pain, or rather his excess of pain, and it was precisely this which I sought, not to enjoy, but to ruin in me what resisted ruination."

The ruination of the self is perhaps the lure of catastrophe, that which draws Herzog and the viewer inside the exclusion zone.  The erotic charge, for Bataille, lies in the momentary dissolution of the self, "the fusion of the object and the subject [...] to escape from isolation, from the compression of the individual."

This isolation haunts Murakami: the indifference the characters display towards their absent relatives, separated from them by a mundane catastrophe that never appears in the text, is mirrored in images of entrapment.  Satsuki dreams she is a "rabbit in a hutch", Miyake imagines himself suffocating to death in a refrigerator, while Sala has nightmares about the Earthquake Man putting her in a tiny box.  Fleeting moments of ek-stasis offer the only consolation: Junko's "wad of feeling" when she contemplates a bonfire recalls Blanchot's "primal scene", while Yoshiya escapes his search for meaning in dance, feeling "the whole forest was inside of him."  Bataille could have been describing Murakami's world when he writes: "We are discontinuous beings, individuals dying isolated in an unintelligible adventure, but we feel nostalgia for a lost continuity."

Like Herzog awaiting the eruption, however, we find ourselves in a catch 22 situation.  The self cannot be abolished by the self; if such a thing were possible, the self would no longer be there to witness it.  The best we can hope for is to reduce the self to momentary "ruination": collapsed but still present.  Blanchot's paradoxical phrase is the "pas au-dela", the step/not beyond.  Throughout Blanchot, we get the feeling this is the true disaster, our inability to think what is beyond comprehension, "that in thought itself which dissuades us from thinking of it."