Rating: 
Summary: What does it mean to be alive?
Review: I was surprised to learn that Murakami pondered this question when writing Underground because he did not explicitly ask the "Big Question" in this collection of interviews. That is just as well. There is probably no general answer that fits every individual person. And Murakami, as most novelists, is less interested in the big picture than "in the concrete, irreducible humanity of each individual".What he found was that the degree of suffering inflicted by the Tokyo gas attack varied considerably from person to person. Not only because of the different degree of harm that a person suffered but also because of the different ways in which they responded to the lasting damage to the body and the spirit. I was surprised how well most of the people coped with what must have been a devastating experience for them. Their resilience was astonishing. But then again, Murakami gave a voice only to the victims who were willing to talk about their experience and face it. I was also surprised how few of the lives of the victims took a radically different course after they had almost been killed by poison gas. The lives of those who suffered severe physical harm were radically changed, of course, but only one of the interviewees voluntarily changed his life in a substantial way (he divorced his wife). It is amazing how strongly human beings prefer continuity rather than change. It is amazing, too, that so few pondered Murakami's question "What does it mean to be alive?" The most common response - and I think it is a very human response - was to try to forget the shock of the events and to go on "living" (I almost wrote "to get back in the rut"). Reading Underground has other rewards, too. There is Murakami's warm, humane voice when he describes a young woman who cannot speak and is left partially immobilized from the impact of the gas. It is vintage Murakami, a bit sentimental, a bit fuzzy, a bit mystical, but heartfelt, perceptive and written with the novelist's eye for detail: "I place four fingers in the palm of her tiny hand - practically the hand of a child in size - and her fingers slowly enfold them, as gently as the petals of a flower going to sleep. Soft, cushioning, girlish fingers, yet far stronger than I had anticipated. Soon they clamp tight over my hand in the way that a child sent on an errand grips that 'important item' she's not supposed to lose. There's a strong will at work here, clearly seeking some objective. Focused, but very likely not on me; she's after some 'other' beyond me. Yet that 'other' goes on a long journey and seems to find its way back to me. Please excuse this nebulous explanation, it is merely a fleeting impression." Underground is also a very relevant book about Japan and the effects of the long-lasting recession in Japan on the psyche of the Japanese people. Part One of Underground consists of interviews with the "victims", Part Two contains interviews with members of the Aum sect. It turns out that many sect members were highly intelligent people that "did not fit in". They were "nails that stuck out and got hammered down", as the Japanese adage goes. They yearned for simplicity and purity, spirituality and belief in a society that became complex and muddled, materialistic and did not contain any inherent meaning (well, modern, in a word). For the members of the sect, the subway system represented HELL (the "Underground": complicated and confusing - just look at the map!), and their secluded life represented a utopian HEAVEN ("The Place that was promised": simple and clear). Murakami's genius lies in showing that the Japanese people who populate these worlds are human beings, each one with strengths and weaknesses, each one a victim and a survivor at the same time, each of them trying to come to terms with the consequences of modernity in Japan. Doktor Freud, you may like him or not, answered the question in the title of this review in a memorable way: to be alive means to learn to work and love. If things go terribly wrong, you get what Murakami describes: People who "work" hurry to their offices as usual even while suffering from the physical symptoms of gas poisoning, and people who "love" deposit Sarin gas in subway trains at the behest of their revered spiritual leader. Murakami's book is, eventually, an invitation to think about what working and loving really means.
Rating: 
Summary: Gas in the Subway
Review: I'm a big fan of Haruki Murakami. I have read all of his translated novels except Sputnick Sweetheart. I put off reading this book, but decided since it was written by Murakami I figured that it was probably going to be good, and I was right. The Tokyo subway gas attacks seem to be something out of a bad terrorist movie. Plastic containers of sarin wrapped in newspaper dropped on the subway cars and then stabbed with a sharpened umbrella. Sounds crazy, but it all is true. This book does awonderful job telling of how the victims and the victims families suffered after that attack. It is also quite disturbing about how little help the victims received after the attack, waiting over an hour before ambulances arrived. Murakami also interviews former and current Aum Shinrikyo members, seeing what makes them tick, what was it like living in the Aum Shinrikyo establishments, and their feelings on the gas attacks and Shoko Asahara. Good book.
Rating:
Summary: A disturbing must-read...
Review: 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...
Rating:
Summary: The Underground in All of Us
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: The Underground in All of Us
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Very Well Translated to My Satisfaction
Review: 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."
Rating:
Summary: fascinating
Review: Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami, profoundly disturbed by the 1995 sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway by religious cult Aum Shinrikyu, set out to discover not only why it happened, but what elements of the Japanese psyche "allowed" it to happen. Murakami readily admits not being a social scientist, and the brief analytical sections make that abundantly clear. Not that he does a bad job in summation of the interviews, it is just that the interviews largely speak for themselves. In addition to roughly 60 interviews with survivors of the gas attack, there are a dozen or so interviews with former or current members of Aum Shinrikyu. The combination of testimonies by these two groups of people (victims and cult members) makes for incredibly compelling reading. Murakami's esteem as a writer is surely what even allowed this project to get off the ground. Most people would've probably ignored an average journalist or more likely, the average journalist wouldn't have been able to spend the time and financial resources necessary for a project of this magnitude. These fascinating accounts should interest any student of religion, history, psychology or Japan.
Rating:
Summary: Real Japan
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Particularly insightful in the post-9/11 world
Review: Murakami's 'Underground' is really two collections of interviews, first of the victims of the Sarin attack, then from various cult members. From the perspective of the weeks following the September 11th terrorist strikes, Murakami's book takes on deeper and frightning resonance. The stories of the victims are heart-breaking accounts of lives derailed or destroyed. The cult members accounts are also strangely moving, documenting a group of intelligent and priveledged individuals who sought to escape a commercial world for one more spiritual, and chronicals their bafflement, humiliation and isolation following the incident. At the core of this strike is another religious fanatic, a charismatic preaching the rewards of paradise to those who will follow his bizarre beliefs: a hybrid of obscure Tibetan tantric and Christian apocolyptic vision. For readers trying to make sense of the terrorist mind, this volume offers chilling insight.
Rating:
Summary: Confusing, Horrific, Enthralling, Wondrous
Review: Reading the accounts, I found myself confused. I didn't think this is what it would be like. Many interviews horrified me. Many moved me. I did something I have not done for a while... sat down in the middle of the day when I had many other things to do, and read about 100 pages in the blink of an eye. This book belongs in your hands. Its stories and underlying currents of conclusions belong in your mind. One of the nicest qualities of this book for casual readers is that each interview is not terribly long, so there is a natural breaking point every 5 or so pages. I found myself stopping every once in a while to read a few pages at home or at work (another testament to the book's capitivacting nature, since I never bring recreational reading to work, save this time) You may not finish it, you don't need to (though you will want to) - any 5 pages is enough to expand your mind and incite thought about terrorism, anti-terrorism, life, society, and even public transportation.
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