On “Underground” by Haruki Murakami *****

I first read this book at the airport in Madrid, Spain. I believe it was 2001, but it could have been 2005. Either way, at the time, I found the book engaging and heart wrenching, especially the account of the woman who became mostly a vegetable after the 1995 Aum Shinriko sarin gas attack in the Japanese subway, which is the focus of this book. On this second read a quarter century later, I didn't find myself tearing up (in fact, maybe because I remember the account of the woman, I was more affected this time by the account of a pregnant woman who lost her husband), but I was nevertheless pulled in by the interlocking accounts.

Essentially, the book is a set of interviews Murakami conducted with some of the attack's victims. In the account of the pregnant woman, it was incredible the coincidence that on thar particular day, her husband and she go up early to eat a heavier breakfast together before work. It was like a good-bye, but how would they have even known? Murakami organizes the accounts around stations, so one reads several different people's observations from each station, and often the one observed in one account is one telling the account in another. Also fascinating was the way that the people generally speaking didn't know what was going on, which I suppose is almost always the case in real time in these sort of events. I remember 9/11, which would have happened, actually not long before I read this title, the kind of chaos and confusion of the moment, and I also remember a friend of mine who lived in New York at the time explaining how that day was even more chaotic for her. After all, the Twin Towers were where most broadcasting towers were, which meant no TV or communication was available. Were we are war? What's happening?

But the accounts of the victims are just the first part of this book. The second part, tacked on apparently after its initial Japanese publication, concerns those who actually are or were part of the Aum Shinriko cult. This was interesting insofar as the accounts expose the way in which one's reaction to being in a cult really is complex. Most people got quite a bit out of the association, in terms of mental stability, but at the same time, it's clear that a good chunk of the teaching and behavior was abusive. Some were locked up for days or had to make a furtive escape from one of the group's communes. Further, of course, was the degree of loyalty the group inspired such that members would go through with such a plot as to release poison gas on a subway.

One other thing that surprised me was that these events occurred in 1995, so around the time of the Oklahome City federal building bombing. I'd thought these event occurred in the late 1980s, around 1987-89. Strange how our memory can transplant events like so. When I heard of this on TV (which I do remember), that means I was in grad school, not high school or my first year of college, as I'd thought.

On "Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman" by Haruki Murakami *****

I wasn't that impressed by Murakami's previous collection, After the Quake, and while I remember enjoying The Elephant Vanishes, I don't recall finding any particular story especially amazing. There, it was more a matter of the collection's overall weirdness and wackiness, something unique Murakami's vision, which was largely new to me at the time (though I'd read a couple of his novels previously). This latest story collection seems more like the work of a master, though some of the stories, in the Japanese, date back to before The Elephant Vanishes. Why Murakami would have left out a story as magnificent as "New York Mining Disaster" I'm not sure. That story, my favorite in the collection and surely one of the best stories I've ever read, tells the tale of a young man who for one difficult year loses a lot of his friends to death. But it's really about death itself and about the way we commune with the dead, and the way in which death makes little sense to those of us who are still alive. Other highlights of the collection include four of the last five stories, the last five apparently being Murakami's most recent output. Murakami claims these are weird tales, though he admits that just about any of his stories would fit that claim; I found them (at least four of them) to be, in fact, refreshingly restrained--weird, but more subtly so. One is about chance happenings; another, "Hanalei Bay," is a story of grief that becomes a rather traditional story of another type--but, for me, rather unexpectedly; one is a story of love with the "weird" story embedded in its center. I won't say that every story in the collection spoke to me--some just seem strange with not much more too them--but on the whole, this is a fantastic new set of stories, one I'm glad to have added to my personal library.