First published 1998
On March 20, 1995, members of the Aum Shinrikyo cult released sarin gas on Tokyo subway lines during the morning rush hour, killing thirteen people and injuring thousands more. Haruki Murakami spent years gathering the testimonies of those who were there. The book moves in two parts. The first collects interviews with survivors, ordinary commuters and station workers who describe what they saw, felt, and lost. The second turns toward the cult itself, with accounts from former Aum members who explain how they came to follow Shoko Asahara and what they believed they were doing. Murakami works as a journalist here, not a novelist, letting voices accumulate rather than imposing a single narrative. What the book offers is granular and human: the texture of a mass casualty event as lived by the people inside it, and a serious attempt to understand how a modern, educated society produced both the attackers and the conditions that made them possible.
Genres: 20th-century, non-fiction, journalism, true-crime, current-affairs
Vibes: documentary-style, haunting, intimate, introspective, thought-provoking
Tropes: investigative-narrative, multiple-perspectives, survivor-testimony
Setting: Tokyo, Japan
Period: 1995, 20th century
309 pages · Paperback · Vintage Books
Content warnings: death, violence