I read both in Japanese before this English translation. It was several years ago that I first read the original of "The Place That was Promised" (Part 2), and I have just read that of "Underground" (Part 1), which is the first time.
What I tried to do in rereading them in English was to know what had to be changed when they were introduced to other countries and if the language might change how I felt reading the text.
The impressions I got from the originals were still so vivid, though, even graphic, that the latter of my trying would be failed.
I even had a nightmare at the night I had just read how the interviewees described the incident at Kodenmacho station.
When the gas attack happened, I was a student and lived in a different area of Tokyo. Though I sometimes used the subway lines and went to the area which was attacked, the news, either live broadcasts or videos, gave me nothing much but feeling "Something quite weird happened".
In a few years, even when I went to work in the very same area using the very same lines at almost the same time of the day, I didn't remembered the attack at all.
The method Murakami used in "Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche" reminds me of a documentary film, "Capturing the Friedmans"(2003), which is "just kind of peels the onion and shows the unspoken contradictions and the difficulties" (said by the filmmaker, Andrew Jarecki), but the words captured by Murakami visualizes "what the truth is" more vividly in your mind.
In "The Place That was Promised", the writer (Murakami), who it is said that "Underground" (Part 1) gave a new understanding of his mission as an author, sometimes seemed to be being struck or at a loss.
He must have recognized himself as "Catcher in the Rye", and looking back at his works, he would have thought most of his way had been on the right track.
Through the interviews for "The Place That was Promised", though, he seemed to have just found that his works might have totally failled to catch people who he thought he could and had to catch, and that it might be much harder to reach such people than he thought.

Some reviewers (including Murakami, writing on himself) have asserted that after Murakami`s long stay abroad, this book was primarily written by Murakami for himself as the author sought to come to grips with Japanese society again. Whatever Haruki Murakami`s rationale, `Underground` is worth a read, particularly to anyone who seeks to understand topics ranging from our new `postmodern` existence, to Japanese society and modern life, or just the nuts and bolts of the future of terrorism.

A great deal emerges from these telling interviews; information that takes the form of insights which subtly impress themselves on the reader. `It made me realize all the more how frightening [mass media`s control] is` --victim Masanori Okuyama. `People raised in happy families probably wouldn`t join Aum` -- Harumi Iwakura, former Aum member. `The local police might not have any experience, but they were practically useless... they only showed up after the rescue operation was over,` --Naoyuki Ogata, victim. `People were foaming at the mouth... that half of the roadway was absolute hell. But on the other side, people were walking to work as usual` --Kiyoka Izumi, victim. Some of what came out of the interviews was information that came completely out of the blue, probably even to the author, such as the mention (in the book`s Japanese edition) that half the women interviewed suffered regularly from sexual assault while riding on Tokyo`s legendary so-packed-you-can`t-breathe trains.

And it all emerges because Murakami`s strength is his intense focus here-- `I intentionally set up my camera at one fixed spot,` he writes. Outlines of events are sparse; the narratives are front and center. His wide approach (34 interviews from victims alone) allows for sweeping perspective on a number of topical issues and permits the reader to take from the book what they may. A more in-depth look at the inner workings of Aum, the socioeconomic background of terror, or the disconnect of modern digital life are all natural follow-up reads-- the reader need only choose their path. While keeping it simple, Murakami has written and complied a work, a look at the dawn of the modern urban age of terror, that will be read for years.

This easy-to-read book is unique in Murakami's own catalog. First of all, its his most true to life `documentary-style' book, consisting as it does of interviews, recollections and observations of selected people who were affected by the deadly gas attack in the Japan Metro in the 1990s. The book is not a `novel' - instead it breaks new ground for the author, and at times makes you wonder if this is the same man who gave us fantasy novels such as "The Wind Up Bird Chronicle" and "Kafka on the Shore".

"Underground" is an easy book to read, but its also maddeningly difficult to finish in one sitting. It took me about two weeks to actually make it through the entire thing. Its quite long, and there is no clear narrative structure. I found the beginning of the book very odd. The actual restructured train incident has been pieced together by Murakami from newspaper reports, and he relies completely on eye witness reports to describe the shock and horror of the actual crime scene. He also does away with niceties, and is uncompromising in his criticism of Japanese society, the government, and Japanese mass media itself. In fact, through much of the book it did seem at one point that Murakami himself was sort of anti-Japanese (a fact that reaffirmed itself to me when I discovered he actually was sick of his fame in Japan and fled overseas instead to live in peace). But at other times, Murakami gives us a portrait of families who dealt with the disaster with great nobility and tenderness, and he empathizes whole-heartedly with all the victims of the incident.

Murakami is more successful at entering the minds of the terrorists and giving us various plausible explanations as to why they did it. The most telling reason (pretty much "my boss told me to do it") is shocking at how it managed to sway so many young and even successful young men (and women) into joining the cult and falling for its' very twisted message. Murakami dispenses with casual observations here and attempts to create the portrait of a killer. In the end, his chilling depiction of the Cult is reason enough to buy this book, because its evident that this sort of psychopathic mentality exists in some form in every country. Japan is no exception.

For all the horror here, there are also passages of great beauty and grace. One particular story of a woman who is a `living vegetable' because of the gas attack is endearing because Murakami sets the story up so well - we feel we know this person, and by the time tragedy strikes her, we are totally sold on reading a whole book only about her. Then you remind yourself that this is not fiction. Every word in this book is true, and Murakami's attempts at tracking down and scheduling interviews with some very unwilling participants (who still suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder) are to be commended. Though thousands were affected on that day, the author seemed to have trouble pinning down even a tiny percentage of people who wanted to approach him and talk about it.

That such an honest and superb account of that fateful day exists, is gift enough for me. Though I was aware of the incident when it occurred, I was possibly too young or engrossed in my studies to really pay it much attention. As I grew older and gravitated toward Japanese music and literature, I discovered Murakami. I only read this because I wanted to finish everything that Murakami had ever written, but as I went along I found myself lost in the story and the brilliant work contained therein. Surely, this is a topical book and not for everyone - in fact, I would prescribe it more for research scholars and students of history - but if you adore the works of Haruki Murakami, you will surely want to pick this up. Its revived in me an interest in world affairs and geopolitical events, and if one single book can do that, well, then more power to that book.

Five Stars. Highly Recommended.

In 1995, a Buddhist sect staged poison gas attacks on the Tokyo subway system, leading to 12 deaths and hundreds of injured, some of them with lasting damage to their health.
The book is a combination of interviews with victims and with "the other side" plus comments by HM in introductions or in questions asked. HM says explicitly in the preface to the 2nd part that he wants to avoid the wishy-washyness which would arise from pretending neutrality, but somehow he does fall into exactly that trap. Of course it is interesting and worth while to explore the mind-set of the murderers, after all they were a substantial social force and similar groups exist all over the world, with all kinds of abstruse nonsense being believed by an amazing number of people. (Not the least being the mainstream Evangelists in the US.)
The 1st part of the book with the victim interviews has a strange quality of "Rashomon-ness", as has been observed by others. Nothing wrong with that, worth printing and worth reading, but hardly a breakthtrough of analytical value. It shows us Japanese in their daily routines and in the process of handling upsets to routines. It shows an amazing unpreparedness, but we should not really be amazed by that any more, see Tsunami, Katrina etc.
There is a "middle part" of the book, where HM describes his own relation to the events. This part is strange and unexpectedly unoriginal. What is he telling us? I can't see much else apart from the statement that he has alienated himself from Japan. Too much living abroad seems to damage Japanese in their Japaneseness. But he does not really verbalize or explore that aspect very deeply.
The 2nd part has interviews with Aum followers, and this part is an exercise in value relativity. HM does interject critical questions, but for me, the objectivity is carried too far.
Give me a healthy dosis of polemics any day over these exercises in tolerance. There is a shortage of critical analysis. Maybe his self-deprecating statement that he is just a simple novelist is really the plain truth. That does not devalue his fiction, but should teach him to stay with his forte.

This book could have been good, but it's too long and too repetitive, the subject matter is very interesting, but the story gets retold a thousand times and it's just not very entertaining or insightful for that matter.

Murakami's analysis of the Tokyo Sarin Attack is exactly the kind needed to understand all terrorism occuring in the world today. A great antidote to main-stream media's simplistic "us vs. them" morality tale description of terrorism. For concerned citizens of the post-9/11 world, I strongly recommend this book, together with Erich Fromm's "Fear of Freedom".

What is different about Haruki Murakami's Underground? For one, it is non-fiction. The novelist has put aside his imaginative pen and focused closely on the actual events that unfolded ten years ago when terrorists from the Aum Shinrikyo cult carried poisonous packets of sarin on board the Tokyo subway during the morning rush hour. Readers familiar with Murakami's work will find none of the speculative creation he is so well known for. But they will still find his gift for delving into the lives of ordinary people faced with the unimaginable.

The first part of the book, about two thirds of the total, is almost entirely made up of statements by the victims, those who were affected. For each one, Murakami introduces the person in a few paragraphs and then goes over entirely into their own words. Interspersed are accounts of the perpetrators, their backgrounds (briefly) and their actions that day. Only in one case does Murakami himself enter these narratives, and that is with a woman left severely brain damaged and probably hospitalized for life. In that instance he had to interact with family and tells us of his time with them. In all cases he shows the utmost respect towards the people who have agreed to recount for us a most terrible day.

For the second part of the book Murakami interviews members of Aum, most of whom were formally uninvolved and unaware of their masters' murderous intent. Here the passages are longer, and Murakami himself shows up more in the writing. He asks questions of them and their life in Aum, as well as before and after their experiences there. Though hardly a hardball interviewer, he is willing to sometimes challenge them. What was life like in Aum? Why join it? These are the sorts of questions he asked. The answers are not entirely unpredictable, though they would probably make more sense to a reader familiar with Japanese spiritual customs. Some of the answers could be incredible (one woman wondered why customers would want to avoid a bakery run by Aum cultists even after the gassing. Like anyone would eat something they made.) In most cases they show great ambivalence towards their experience in Aum.

Overall, this is likely to be among the best accounts of the human side of the Tokyo gas attack. It shows not only how the people reacted that day, but also how they've come to terms with it in the aftermath. Amazingly there is frequently little anger. The events as they unfolded produced more concern at the time, and then relief among the victims that they'd survived. Some have no long-term problems. Some do. In this aspect we see the value of the subtitle, The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche.

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.

A valuable glimpse of the Japanese psyche and the effects of impure Sarin dispersed by terrorists. The difference in signs and symptoms, as the impure Sarin was inhaled @ varying concentrations, brought new insights to nerve agent chemical exposure and it's effects.

A story that is most distressing is handled with the utmost care, respect and attention that comes as no surprise to any fan of Murakami's work.
The sarin gas attack and the damage it caused to so many is spoken of by the victims themselves. The past and some present members of the sect responsible also give their experiences and opinions. I haven't read anything quite like it. Certainly the way Murakami treats it is unlike anything else I can think of. He handles the task oh so delicately, and the power of the stories combine to give an amazing look at the whole catastrophe and disaster from several vantage points.

The man is a master with fiction and is just as flawless when dealing with real life events.

An informative, emotional and unforgettable read!

Murakami is famous for his post-modern fiction exploring the zitergeist of modern Japan. In this book, he reapplys his human insight into the tragedy that broke the belief in Japan's safe society - the Japanese sarin gas attack. One guesses that Murakami goes through a transformation in writing the book, from one who writes aparts from the typical Japanese, to one who feels them as his own people.

The book covers the tragedy from many points of views - the victims surviving the crisis, the train station workers both coping with the problem and exacerbating it, the police attempting to solve the problem, and even the members of the cult. It is interesting that in the second edition of the book, we are treated to a post-mortem of the members of the cult who somehow still believe. In many ways, they are the most interesting characters, similar to doomsday adherants whose belief strengthens even after the event never materializes.

The book ultimately is a tough one to classify. Is it cultural? Psychological? Historical? With certainty, it is a very powerful book that testifies to Murakami's latent power as a writer across multiple genres.

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."

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."