NOTA |
(★)(It was a clear spring day, Monday, March 20, 1995, when five members of the religious cult Aum Shinrikyo conducted chemical warfare on the Tokyo subway system using sarin, a poison gas twenty-six times as deadly as cyanide. The unthinkable had happened, a major urban transit system had become the target of a terrorist attack./ In an attempt to discover why, Haruki Murakami, internationally acclaimed author of ´The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle´ and arguably Japan´s most important contemporary novelist, talked to the people who lived through the catastrophe --from a Subway Authority employee with survivor guilt, to a fashion salesman with more venom for the media than for the perpetrators, to a young cult member who vehemently condemns the attack though he has not quit Aum./ Through these and many other voices, Murakami exposes intriguing aspects of the Japanese psyche. And as he discerns the fundamental issues leading to the attack, we achieve a clear vision of an event that could occur anytime, anywhere. Hauntingly compelling and inescapably important, ´Underground´ is a powerful work of journalistic literature from one of the world´s most perceptive writers.) |