Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche

About

In March 1995, members of the Aum Shinrikyo cult released sarin nerve gas on five Tokyo subway lines, killing thirteen people and injuring thousands. Haruki Murakami spent a year interviewing survivors — ordinary commuters whose mornings were shattered by an act of terrorism they still struggle to comprehend. The book is divided into two parts: the voices of those who were attacked, and the voices of cult members who carried out or supported the attack. Murakami lets both sides speak at length, with minimal commentary, creating a portrait of a society forced to confront the darkness it preferred to believe didn't exist within it. An oral history that asks the hardest question: not why did they do it, but how did a country as orderly as Japan produce people capable of this?