It was a clear spring day Monday March 20 1995 when five members of the religious cult Aum Shinrikyo conducted chemical warfare on the Tokyo subway system using sarin a poison gas twenty-six times as deadly as cyanide. The unthinkable had happened a major urban transit system had become the target of a terrorist attack. In an attempt to discover why Haruki Murakami internationally acclaimed author of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and arguably Japan’s most important contemporary novelist talked to the people who lived through the catastrophe—from a Subway Authority employee with survivor guilt to a fashion salesman with more venom for the media than for the perpetrators to a young cult member who vehemently condemns the attack though he has not quit Aum. Through these and many other voices Murakami exposes intriguing aspects of the Japanese psyche. And as he discerns the fundamental issues leading to the attack we achieve a clear vision of an event that could occur anytime anywhere. Hauntingly compelling and inescapably important Underground is a powerful work of journalistic literature from one of the world’s most perceptive writers.
