Underground / Haruki Murakami ; translated from the Japanese by Alfred Birnbaum and Philip Gabriel.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Murakami, Haruki, 1949-

Contributor:

Birnbaum, Alfred.

Gabriel, Philip, 1953-

Gotham Book Mart Collection (University of Pennsylvania)

Standardized Title:

Andāguraundo. English

Language:

English

Japanese

Subjects (All):

Oumu Shinrikyō (Religious organization).

Terrorism--Japan.

Terrorism.

Japan.

Penn Provenance:

Gotham Book Mart (former owner) (Gotham Book Mart Collection copy)

Physical Description:

x, 366 pages, map ; 21 cm

Edition:

First Vintage international edition.

Other Title:

Subtitle on cover: Tokyo gas attack and the Japanese psyche

Place of Publication:

New York : Vintage International, 2001.

Summary:

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.

Contents:

Map of the Tokyo Subway xi

Part 1 Underground

Tokyo Metropolitan Subway: Chiyoda Line 9

Nobody was dealing with things calmly / Kiyoka Izumi 12

I've been here since I first joined / Masaru Yuasa 19

At that point Takahashi was still alive / Minoru Miyata 26

I'm not a sarin victim, I'm a survivor / Toshiaki Toyoda 30

It's not even whether or not to take the subway, just to go out walking scares me now / Tomoko Takatsuki 40

The day after the gas attack, I asked my wife for a divorce / Mitsuteru Izutsu 45

Luckily I was dozing off / Aya Kazaguchi 50

Everyone loves a scandal / Hideki Sono 54

Tokyo Metropolitan Subway: Marunouchi Line (Destination: Ogikubo) 59

I felt like I was watching a program on TV / Mitsuo Arima 63

Looking back, it all started because the bus was two minutes early / Kenji Ohashi 66

That day and that day only I took the first door / Soichi Inagawa 74

If I hadn't been there, somebody else would have picked up the packets / Sumio Nishimura 78

I was in pain, yet I still bought my milk as usual / Koichi Sakata 84

The night before the gas attack, the family was saying over dinner, "My, how lucky we are" / Tatsuo Akashi 87

"li-yu-nii-an [Disneyland]" / Shizuko Akashi 96

Tokyo Metropolitan Subway: Marunouchi Line (Destination: Ikebukuro) 104

"What can that be?" I thought / Shintaro Komada 107

I knew it was sarin / Ikuko Nakayama 112

Tokyo Metropolitan Subway: Hibiya Line (Departing: Naka-meguro) 118

"What if you never see your grandchild's face?" / Hiroshige Sugazaki 121

I had some knowledge of sarin / Kozo Ishino 127

I kept shouting, "Please, please, please!" in Japanese / Michael Kennedy 132

That kind of fright is something you never forget / Yoko Iizuka 138

Tokyo Metropolitan Subway: Hibiya Line (Departing: Kita-senju; Destination: Naka-meguro) 143

I'd borrowed the down payment, and my wife was expecting

it looked pretty bad / Noburu Terajima 146

In a situation like that the emergency services aren't much help at all / Masanori Okuyama 150

Ride the trains every day and you know what's regular air / Michiaki 154

Tokyo Metropolitan Subway: Hibiya Line

Some crazy's probably sprinkled pesticides or something / Takanori Ichiba 159

We'll never make it. If we wait for the ambulance we're done for / Naoyuki Ogata 164

It'd be pathetic to die like this / Michiru Kono 170

The day of the gas attack was my sixty-fifth birthday / Kei'ichi Ishikura 177

Tokyo Metropolitan Subway: Kodemmacho Station

I saw his face and thought: "I've seen this character somewhere" / Ken'ichi Yamazaki 183

He was such a kind person. He seemed to get even kinder before he died / Yoshiko Wada 191

He was an undemanding child / Kichiro, Sanae Wada 202

Sarin! Sarin! / Koichiro Makita 209

The very first thing that came to mind was poison gas

cyanide or sarin / Dr. Toru Saito 215

There is no prompt and efficient system in Japan for dealing with a major catastrophe / Dr. Nobuo Yanagisawa 220

Blind Nightmare: Where Are We Japanese Going? 224

Part 2 The Place that was Promised

I'm still in Aum / Hiroyuki Kano 251

Nostradamus had a great influence on my generation / Akio Namimura 265

Each individual has his own image of the Master / Mitsuharu Inaba 277

This was like an experiment using human beings / Hajime Masutani 292

In my previous life I was a man / Miyuki Kanda 304

"If I stay here," I thought, "I'm going to die" / Shin'ichi Hosoi 317

Asahara tried to force me to have sex with him / Harumi Iwakura 333

No matter how grotesque a figure Asahara appears, I can't just dismiss him / Hidetoshi Takahashi 346.

ISBN:

0375725806

OCLC:

45620755