UNDERGROUND

In 1978 Haruki Murakami was 29 and running a jazz bar in downtown Tokyo. One April day the impulse to write a novel came to him suddenly while watching a baseball game. That first novel Hear the Wind Sing won a new writers award and was published the following year. More followed including A Wild Sheep Chase and HardBoiled Wonderland and the End of the World but it was Norwegian Wood published in 1987 which turned Murakami from a writer into a phenomenon. His books became bestsellers were translated into many languages including English and the door was thrown wide open to Murakamis unique and addictive fictional universe.Murakami writes with admirable discipline producing ten pages a day after which he runs ten kilometres (he began longdistance running in 1982 and has participated in numerous marathons and races) works on translations and then reads listens to records and cooks. His passions colour his nonfiction output from What I Talk About When I Talk About Running to Absolutely On Music and they also seep into his novels and short stories providing quotidian moments in his otherwise freewheeling flights of imaginative inquiry. In works such as The WindUp Bird Chronicle 1Q84 and Men Without Women his distinctive blend of the mysterious and the everyday of melancholy and humour continues to enchant readers ensuring Murakamis place as one of the worlds most acclaimed and wellloved writers.In spite of the perpetrators intentions the Tokyo gas attack left only twelve people dead but thousands were injured and many suffered serious aftereffects. Murakami interviews the victims to try and establish precisely what happened on the subway that day. He also interviews members and exmembers of the doomsdays cult responsible in the hope that they might be able to explain the reason for the attack and how it was that their guru instilled such devotion in his followers.Murakami shares with Alfred Hitchcock a fascination for ordinary people being suddenly plucked by extraordinary circumstances from their daily livesNot just an impressive essay in witness literature but also a unique sounding of the quotidian Japanese mindA scrupulous and unhistrionic look into the heart of the horrorThe testimonies he assembles are striking. From the very beginning Underground is impossibly moving and unexpectedly engrossingThere is no artifice or pretension in Underground. There is no need for cleverness. What Murakami describes happens to ordinary people in a frighteningly ordinary way. And it is all the more bizarre for that