Underground

is a book by Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami about the 1995 Aum Shinrikyo sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway. Described as a work of "journalistic literature", it collects a series of separate interviews Murakami conducted with 60 victims of the attacks and 8 members of Aum, descriptions of how the attacks were carried out, and his essay "Blind Nightmare: Where are we Japanese going?" Underground was originally published in Japan (in Japanese) without the interviews of Aum members – they were published in the magazine Bungei Shunju before being collected in a separate volume, The Place That Was Promised. The English translation combines both books into a single volume, but has been abridged to achieve this. The translation of Underground was performed by Alfred Birnbaum, with that of The Place That Was Promised being done by Philip Gabriel. In his introduction to the book Murakami describes his motivations for writing it: Jay Rubin holds that Murakami also had highly personal... full article at wikipedia