Customer Reviews

Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche

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"Underground" is a strange animal. Murakami is known for his fiction, which is the stuff of seemingly straightforward stories interlaced with strange jaunts into the supernatural, the superreal and the just plain odd. From the historical and subterranean epic of "Wind Up Bird Chronicles" to the science fiction netherworld of "Hard Boiled Wonderland" to the intertwined, haunted love stories of "Wild Sheep Chase" and "Dance Dance Dance" to the seemingly straightforward "Norwegian Wood" and "South of the Border", Murakami has staked out a territory all his own, and erected an aura of genius that no one can penetrate. So, from out of the blue, he turns from fiction and gives us this document of the Tokyo subway sarin gas attack and does it in such a way that it all but confirms his place as one of the most valuable writers working today.

"Underground" documents the coordinated efforts of members of the Aum cult to release Sarin gas on several subway trains in the midst of rush hour. Murakami takes what seems to be a roundabout approach and turns it into the very heart of the matter. Instead of clinically documenting each cult member's actions and the statistics of how many wounded and how many dead in a linear, start-to-finish timeline, Murakami tracks down those who were affected, from the relatives of the dead to those with minor side-effects, and interviews them not only about the attack and the effects it had, but how people reacted, how it changed their views on life and government and religion, and mostly, about the people themselves; where they work, what they do for fun, what kind of people they are. Murakami turns a true-crime document into a snapshot of Japanese life.

Make no mistake though, this is a discomforting and, at turns, horrifying portrait of a seemingly pointless terrorist act. By not just focusing on the relatives of the dead or those left crippled or comatose, he shows us the downstream effect of this one act, of people who still can't avoid their blinding headaches, who cannot sleep without raging nightmares, who still cannot re-adjust to their normal lives because of the intrusion of these few moments. From train conductors to businessmen to students to himself, Murakami explores how all facets of Japanese life reacted to this crime and how it came to shatter people's idyllic visions of a calm and placid society free from the pointless violence that plagues the rest of the world.

In the second half of the book, Murakami interviews former cult members and people who are still members and tries to understand what drew them into the cult in the first place. Exploring the roots of their disillusionment and the kernel of interest that drew them into Aum, Murakami explores their progression into the Aum cult as well as Aum's progression in Japanese society; how it grew from a few members to hundreds, how it expanded its operations and how it quickly imploded after the attack. Murakami does the seemingly impossible feat and allows us to see these members as people, first and foremost, and not just as a part of a faceless mob.

"Underground" is distinctive in how effortlessly it reads, how seamlessly it blends from one story to the next, and how casually it draws lines of connection from one story to the next. Faceless bystanders and samaritans in one account can show up pages later to give their own point of view. Stories are corroborated and contradicted and the picture that emerges in the end is one with as much confusion and untold stories as the incident itself spawned.

Murakami tells of how he was at home during the attack, how he found out through a TV broadcast, and how he came to write the book. What we're left with is a story of cultures, of ideologies, of opinions and observations. It's a rare book because the victims are allowed to tell their stories, even when they protest that their stories are not as important as others', because Murakami does not intrude with theories or arguments or condescending empathy, because people are treated as people, and not just as casualties or cult members. In the end, Murakami's book works so well because, to him, everyone's story matters, and every piece of information is another facet that constructs a life, a society, a crime and (cliched though it may be) the human condition.

I don't think I've read a better book to come out this year....I don't think you will either.

The Tokyo subway sarin gas attack of 1995 is an event that continues to baffle and anger the Japanese. However, as Murakami points out in his book, it is also something the Japanese would prefer to condemn and move on from rather than analyze and try to understand. Murakami's approach is to interview survivors of the attack, relatives of those that have died, and members of the Aum Shinrikyo cult that, while not involved with the gas attack, were members of Aum at the time the attack occurred.

The first two-thirds of the book are dedicated to the survivors and relative interviews. While touching, shocking and surprising, after the first dozen or two, they begin to take on a numbing quality. So many of the stories share so many themes ("I had to get to work...", "I'm not so much angry as confused", etc.) that, in retrospect, they run together. In fact, the two things about the attack that stand out most in my mind are that (a) while some of the survivors and family members are incredibly angry over the situation, most are not so much angry as confused and hurt, and (b) while almost everyone agrees that the situation was handled incredibly poorly by the emergency services and lives were lost as a result, no one wants to sue. They merely wish to get on with their lives.

Where the book really shines, though, is in the Aum interviews. Murakami profiles members of the cult who came from different backgrounds, had different aims in joining Aum and saw different sides of it as members. In this section, we begin to see the breakdown of the "salaryman phenomenon" in Japan at a personal level. People who joined were mostly intelligent, if highly misguided, and wanted more from their lives than office work could give them. Between the two groups, Murakami begins to show a Japan wtih serious social issues straining below the surface of an otherwise quiet and conformist society.

Admittedly, this sort of classification may be a little premature for Japan, but it does indicate the Japan faces the same problems today that many others (like the US) face. I recommend this book not just for those interested in the gas attack and the people were that committed it, but also for the political scientists and the social anthropologists wanting a look at the problems and difficulties facing Japan as a country. While, as Murakami himself says, he is primarily a novelist and this is his first real attempt at nonfiction, I hope he revisits this format in the future when looking at other modern problems in Japan.

I'm a fan of Murakami's fiction so I decided to try out Underground for something different. I came away rather shaken and convinced that the man is a definite genius.

The book centres around the Tokyo subway gas attack that was perpetrated by members of the AUM "cult". They created a special "Science" division with some rather prominent people that, under the cult leader's directions, produced Sarin for the attack. Sarin, originally used by the Germans in WWII, was placed into plastic sacks that were then wrapped in paper. AUM specialists were trained to puncture these packages with specially-sharpened umbrellas on the subway line during morning rush hour. They then escaped at predetermined locations leaving the sacks (rapidly leaking their contents across subway car floors) in the subway.

A scary amount of effort by some rather intelligent people; a very interesting commentary on the complex interweaving of a moral-less science with a horribly-twisted psyche. The death toll was a lot less than it could have been considering the circumstances...

Murakami's genius lies in the fact that the reader is presented with the rather "simple" stories taken from interviews. Only a few interviews does Murakami actually intervene; everywhere else you have only the first person.

The emptiness of modern Japanese life that Murakami potrays so brilliantly in his other books hits home with disturbing force in these oral histories. People walk, much like robots, passed dying people in order to make it to work on time. People who are obviously suffering from the gas (partial blindness, breathing difficulties, etc.) "must get to work" and carry on as if the day was like any other. Scary. I'm not sure who I would pity or who I would feel angry at based on this book since the ordinary citizens seem to be at least as warped as the AUM cultists.

An excellent book that fully exposes the rotten core of modern society. Read it and pass it around...

Japanese being my first language, this is the only Murakami's book I have read in English. I have read several of his books in Japanese, the original language Murakami's books were written in. The only reason why I read this in English was because a friend of mine gave it to me on my birthday. I usually find translated books not as good as the ones in the original language, but this book impressed me to the extent that I even forgot it was a translation while reading it.

Having read the book, I wondered how many writers, in the whole world, are capable of writing people's life stories like Murakami did in this book. He wrote those reports of people's experiences concisely as though they are beautiful music pieces. Murakami is not a typical Japanese person. He is different in that he is capable of viewing Japanese people and culture as an outsider. Yet he is not an outsider. He is as Japanese as other Japanese. "Underground," however, is beyond the scope of being Japanese or non Japanese. It is in the scope of humanity. I believe only Murakami could possibly write a book like this one. Also, this book differes from other books of Murakami's in that "Underground" is a unique form of a documentary whereas others are considered novels or journals.

One of the most talented writers alive in this era put his version of humanity in a book that could not have been written by anyone else in any other time. That's "Underground."

If you are looking for the end-all account of the sarin gas attack, you're not going to find it here. Reading this book is akin to hearing highly subjective, deeply personal interviews about the attack. You might find it repetitive (every victim story seems to start with, "My eyes got dim...I couldn't breathe..."), but for me, it never got old, maybe because each reaction belonged to a living person. I never tired of their stories, and Murakami's introduction to each interviewee was a nice deft touch.

The second section is slightly different -- interviews from the perpetrators (the Aum cult), and this time, Murakami often interjects with questions, trying his best to sort out his own feelings as he wrestles with the tragedy. At times it seems as if he's attacking these people, so it's not exactly an unbiased interview. Still, I found this section illuminating. It's amazing how alike all thse Aum people were, and how they were not entirely unlike some people I know, some people I consider my friends.

If you enjoy this book, check out Studs Terkel's "Work," which is where Murakami got his idea for the interview style. And if you like "Work," check out "Gig," an updated version of Terkel's book.

I was looking down my "to buy" list of books, mostly composed of just Murakami, Mishima, DeLillo and stuff like that, when I came across Underground. I went to the store to check it out and saw that this was no ordinary Murakami book. It was non-fiction. I skimmed through-it and read the interview of Eiji Wada's wife. It was so sad. I immediately bought the book and finished it a week later on a backpacking trip.

Murakami crafted the questions (especially the ones to the Aum members) so well. At times it can be monotonous, and to undedicated readers, can lose a persons interest pretty easily. Yet it is interesting to see the viewpoint of the victims and the cult members. The beginning is sad and then there is the middle essay which is like a median from dark to darker. Then the almost scary part is at the last part talking to people in Aum and people who are out of it yet still partially believe in the beliefs. It can be entertaining to wonder what the people did after 1999 came and went. Aum Shinrikyo believed that the world would end, or "reset", as someone referred to it, in that year. One person I distinctly remeber is a man (I forgot his name though) who hated life and wanted to kill himself. He said that since the world would end in two years (it was 1997 at the time) he would just wait for it. I think that he commited suicide when the "end" didn't come. I also think that now Aleph (as Aum is known now) is even snaller because of prophecies that didn't come true (i.e Ishikaga Island, Shoko Asahara being the enlightened one and levitating away, and the "end" of the world).

This book is probably one of the best non-fiction (if not the best) book I have ever read. Anyone who has even the slightest curiousity in the attacks should read this. Even people who don't even find Japan interesting would like it because this book is from peoples viewpoints and not about a country.

Haruki Murakami's UNDERGROUND offers a window into the soul of Japan, and the view is deeply disturbing. Better than any sociological treatise or mere reportage, Murakami describes the 1995 sarin gas attack in Tokyo's subway system almost exclusively through the voices of its victims, their families, others who were pulled into the emergency, and finally, members of the Aum Shinrikyo cult that perpetrated the attack (but not those directly involved).

UNDERGROUND paints a picture that is at times tragically sad. The story told by Yoshiko Wada, the then-pregnant wife of Eiji Wada (one of those who died), is one of the most moving pieces of writing I can remember. Sad as well are the stories of subway workers who died trying to save others, and the descriptions of people lying on the sidewalks, comatose or experiencing violent spasms while their fellow salarymen pass hurriedly by on their way to work, refusing to notice.

At other times, the picture borders on grotesque. There are verbal images of subway cars full of coughing Japanese commuters, some falling to the floor, with no one becoming suspicious that something terribly wrong was happening. Some victims head for work nearly blind from their contracted pupils (an effect of the sarin), yet they proceed as if it's just a head cold. Other images portraying commuters blithely exiting a subway station at near-normal pace while loudspeakers blare "Gas attack!" are almost unbelievable. More so are the images of Japanese salarymen crawling on the sidewalks, on their hands and knees, to get to work, so single-mindedly driven by habit and inculcated sense of duty they resemble the robot assassins in TERMINATOR, relentlessly intent on completing their mission even as they are dying.

Murakami takes an intriguing approach to telling this story, refusing to give us background information on the Aum cult or its leader, Shoko Asahara. This decision seems frustrating at first, but the effect is powerful. Murakami's interest is the victims' stories, not Aum Shinrikyo's. Doubtless many of those injured by the sarin attack knew little or nothing of Aum at the time, just as many in the World Trade Center on 9/11 had probably never heard of Osama bin-Laden. We feel nearly as disoriented and confused reading their stories as they felt experiencing the events - who, what, why? By forcing us to focus on the victims and their collective reactions, Murakami makes us feel the same sense of inexplicable irrationality they must have felt. We experience the effect while barely understanding the cause.

In the last quarter of the book, Murakami switches from invisible recorder of peoples' stories to active interviewer of some past and current Aum cult members. As those individuals speak, the background becomes clearer and the stories of the victims gain perspective, fitting into a large picture of Japanese society. The statements of these Aum followers reflect the typical cultist's emotional detachment and sense of not being "normal," but after the bizarre descriptions provided by the supposedly normal victims, I could not help wondering who in this society was really the more sane. The Aum interviewees universally reject the terrorism of the Tokyo subway attacks, yet they see those events as nothing more than a perversion of higher principles and practices to which they nearly all subscribe. They view their Aum days as peaceful, fulfilling, and beneficial, feelings they (and everyone else in the book) seem unable to find anywhere else in Japanese society.

At times, Murakami's interviews seem overly repetitive, but even the repetition is revealing. We see into a society whose suppression of individuality is so overwhelming, people who don't know each other use almost identical phrases to describe their experience. They share common reactions to the events and even common disinterest in their victimizers. They speak of two hour one-way commutes on hot trains packed wall-to-wall with people, work days that routinely run from 5:00 a.m. to midnight, and work ethics that submerge any sense of self (and any common sense as well) as if these were the natural living conditions of 20th Century mankind. The one person who may have saved the most lives that day, Dr. Nobuo Yanagisawa, did so by acting the least Japanese of anyone in this book. Intentionally or not, Haruki Murakami has shown us a "normal" Japan nearly as horrifying as the sarin gas itself.

There are many things to say about Haruki Murakami's fascinating "Underground." First, concerning the book itself in its US release paperback form:

- Cover designers John Gall and Jamie Keenan deserve some type of award for what they've done here...subway lines doubling as passageways to the lungs...an eye-catching, spot-on, mesmerizing cover.

- The original Japanese version featured interviews with survivors and relatives of victims of the Tokyo Subway attack, together with a series of concluding essays by Murakami which essentially try to answer the question "How/why did this happen here?" In the US edition, we get that plus a series of interviews that the author conducted with ex-Aum members. These were published in serial form in a leading Japanese magazine and are collected in print here. As Murakami notes, the original book treated Aum as a "black box." He tries to add some definition here.

- The translators - Alfred Birnbaum and Philip Gabriel - have done a tremendous job here making the text come alive and give it the conversational tone that Murakami intended. That manifests itself in two ways. First, we get judiciously added footnotes from the translators. For example, a reference is made to the "Matsumoto incident," which the translators explain was an earlier sarin poisoning performed by Aum, but police investigators never successfully made the linkage. This elucidation is key. Second, the in-line transalation has great phrasing like "It was right out of the blue and caught me off guard," "he was a whiz-bang do-it-your-selfer," and "I put up with it for a year, then I threw in the towel." What a skill to be able to capture the essence of Murakami's Japanese and get it into such live, jump-off-the-page English.

What I really liked about the book itself was the spoken, captured word of the victims and how they reveal the shortcomings in the way Japan works on a daily basis. These themes will be familiar to anyone familiar with works like Alex Kerr's "Dogs and Demons" (these thoughts are all expressed by the victims themselves):

- The police and fireman don't respond on time and victims are forced to rely on Good Samaritans and - at times - the Japanese media (their vehicles are commandered) to rush them for treatment.

- The police also come under fire for not getting to the bottom of the earlier Matsumoto incident, despite some strong clues that Aum was involved.

- The Japanese government has no systematic plan in place for the long-term treatment of the injured (who number in the thousands)

- The transit authorities - on the day of the attacks - did not prevent access to the targeted railcars, well after it was obvious that people were dying in there. Indeed, many of the victims are injured in a second or third wave of entry into the cars. A jaw-dropping oversight.

- There's a complete lack of information flow between the police and hospitals. Hospital staff are forced to get their information from television reports.

Murakami sums all this up very cleanly in his essay:

"[This] nightmarish eruption...threw all our latent contradictions and weak points of our society into frighteningly high relief. Japanese society proved all too defenseless against these sudden onslaughts. We were unable to see them coming and failed to preapre. Nor did we respond effectively. Very clearly, 'our' side failed."

Like many readers, I bought this book because I was a fan of Murakami's fiction. His voice appears only in snippets (and no one smokes Hope Regulars), but I was still drawn in by these honest and personal interviews. As an ignorant American, I learned the story of the 1995 sarin attacks through the interviewees' own frightened and incomplete perspectives.

Although his own reflections seem a bit trite, Murakami has put together a book that skillfully communicates the awesome absurdity of the event. A deadly nerve gas was released on the Tokyo subway during rush hour. With no emergency services, no communication, and precious few people willing to step out of line, the trains continued spreading their toxic payloads for hours. Interviews recount many individual acts of kindness and heroism, but also a shocking lack of preparedness overall (even when people started showing up at the hospitals, no one had any idea how to treat them, and in many cases the situation just got worse).

Murakami sees the gas attacks as a microcosm demonstrating the dark side of modern Japanese culture. Every society has its demagogues and its disaffected youth, but somehow Aum went beyond that to become a paranoid, brainwashing terrorist organization. The second half of the book takes a harder look at this conundrum as it interviews present and former members of the organization. It's fascinating to learn about their reasons for choosing to become monastic "renunciates," and then to read about their reactions when, years later, their religion became a murder cult.

From a more general perspective this book is an interesting ethnography, presenting dozens of slice-of-life vignettes from ordinary people. Readers familiar with Japan only as the source of Nintendo, sushi, and hentai may find it worthwhile for this alone.

Underground, a factual book written by Japan's most popular novelist, is a vivid account of the Tokyo subway attacks.

The book tells the story from the perspective of several witnesses and victims of the attacks, similar to the historical book "Hiroshima". The book also tells the story of the gas attacks from the perspective of members of the cult Aum Shinrikyo.

To further involve the reader, Murakami also goes into depth about the Aum Shinrikyo cult and its charismatic leader, now behind bars for his involvement in this crime.

I bought an earlier release of this book in 2000, which was read on the DC metro system everyday on the way to work. Reading this book made me very afraid to ride the metro trains as it highlights how dreadfully unprepared most municipalities are for such an attack. Although we have progressed our security after 9/11, the recent attacks on the metro systems in London and Madrid highlight the potential disaster that could befall our public transportation systems.

I do not recommend this book for people who ride the subway everyday, as it will give you the serious heebie jeebies. However, for those who are diehard fans of Murakami (like me), this book is a great read. It is also a great starting point for people who want to know more about day to day Japanese life (many of the interviews are very intimate and give the book an almost voyeuristic feel), about the Sarin gas attacks, or who seek to understand a little more about Aum Shinrikyo and what would cause human beings to creat such destruction.