Rating: 
Summary: A Masterpiece of Multiple Perspectives...
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Great work - "Underground" says a lot about Japan
Review: 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."
Rating: 
Summary: Good but lacking just a little bit
Review: This book is a bit of an odd fish. It is the combination of two books Murakami wrote on the Aum Shinrinkyo gas attack on the Tokyo subway system. The first part of is interviews with survivors of the attack. I found this part more compelling, since it focuses on ordinary Japanese citizens facing extraordinary events and the repercussions of those events. In this preface, Murakami states that he borrowed some of the structure from the works of Studs Terkel, so if you read some of his work, you'll understand the structure of this part of the book. It runs a bit long in some places but it provides large cross section of views and backgrounds of people impacted by the attack. The second part, which was written some time after the first part, is interviews with various Aum members about their experiences with Aum. Not surprisingly, given many of the higher ups are still under arrest/sentenced to jail, the interviews are with low level people within the organization. However, these viewpoints are insightful to what life was like at Aum. The purpose of the second part was to investigate WHY this happened (but on a personal level...ie, Why would people do this?), while the first part of the book focuses pretty much on only WHAT happened. My only major complaint about the book is that it presupposes the reader knows a fair bit about Aum. In Japan, this was probably a safe assumption. In the US, it is not. A few pages of summarizing the various events and Aum would have been very useful...especially for the second part of the book.
Rating: 
Summary: Never really came together for me
Review: This book makes for interesting reading, and it paints a chilling picture of the impact of terrorism on everyday lives. (There is a strong element of sensationalism in the page turning quality of these interviews. Like seeing a car crash, you can't turn away from the tragic stories, although you feel a little dirty afterwords.) But all of the first-person narratives never really coalesced to say anything to me, or to provide any particular insight. A few of the stories were very moving, but for the most part didn't stay with me when I put the book down. The second part, with its interviews with current or former members of Aum, was interesting in its presentation of why members joined and what Aum provided for them. But I didn't feel that it ever got to the heart of the matter, which is why individuals were willing to carry out this horrible job of releasing poison gas on the subway. Maybe this is impossible, and Murakami did try, but I didn't feel any closer to the answer after reading the book than I was before picking it up. I also felt that the American version could have used an introductory section with a little more general information about the attack, its outcome, and the motives of the Aum organization in carrying it out. Japanese readers are likely familiar with such details, but I had nothing more than a sketchy idea of what had happened and why. The bbok never filled this gap.
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