Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche

At rush hour on the morning of Monday, March 20, 1995 commuters on several Tokyo subway lines were gassed, the gas in question being the deadly sarin. The first section of Haruki Murakami's Underground is a collection of interviews with the survivors of the attack, and these interviews can, at first, seem monotonous. After all, each of the victims had more or less the same experience as each of the other victims. It doesn't take long, however, for the cumulative effect of their statements to build up . The full horror of the day becomes evident, and also the scope of Murakami's achievement. "They are the people who live average lives (and maybe from the the outside, more than average lives), who live in my neighborhood. And in yours," Murakami writes, and he could have been describing those subway riders, but in fact those sentences refer to members of Aum Shinrikyo, the cult that was behind the attack. Murakami interviews several of them in the second section of the book, and considering their beliefs he is moved to remark: "Reality is created out of confusion and contradiction, and if you exclude those elements, you're no longer talking about reality. You might think that—by following language and a logic that appears consistent—you're able to exclude that aspect of reality, but it will always be lying in wait for you, ready to take its revenge." Indeed.