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.
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.
