Underground by Haruki Murakami

I’ve had this book on my shelf for at least five years.  I bought it after I’d read several of Murakami’s novels and had fallen for his writing style, and from from time to time I would pick it up and read the first 5 pages or so only to set it down in favor of a novel.  Then at the beginning of this year I committed myself to reading all of Murakami’s works in 2011, and at last the time came to read ‘Underground’.  I must admit I was not looking forward to it.  I also must admit I’ve been very pleasantly surprised by what I found.

The premise of the book is Murakami’s attempt to understand the effects of the sarin gas attacks on the Tokyo subway system on March 20, 1995 and what the victims were doing at the time of the attack.  He broke up the book by the separate lines of subway that were attacked, dealing with the various victims  for that line, then moving on to the next line.  One would assume that the repetition of similar accounts would become monotonous, but I found that because of Murakami’s approach each account brought something new to the table because of the subjectivity of each experience, something Murakami addresses at times in the book.

The second half of the book, the part that dealt specifically with the members of the cult responsible for the attacks, though not actually any of the responsible parties, I found not so much to my liking, though I’m sure there is much there that many readers would indeed find interesting.

The book itself turns out to be an intriguing sociological study of post economical bubble Japanese culture during the late 1990’s, and has much to say about modern American society and the question of rampant consumerism.