Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche - Haruki Murakami

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aum_cult - In 1995, members of the Japanese religious cult Aum Shinrikyo released sarin gas in the Tokyo underground subway. As a result, 12 people were killed and hundreds if not thousands were injured - many with long-lasting effects. Murakami, a novelist (my favorites of his include Kafka on the Shore and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles) set out to interview the victims of the attack. He wanted to better understand how something so horrible could happen, what effect such an attack had on the Japanese people, and perhaps, how to prevent such a thing from happening again. Murakami's interviews were transcribed, edited by the interviewees and published in a Japanese magazine. He received some criticism for not placing enough blame on Aum, and instead focusing on Tokyo's inadequate crisis response. As a result, he went on to interview members of Aum to learn more about the organization and their beliefs. This book contains selected interview of vicitims, along with the Aum interviews. A number of the members of Aum who participated in the planning of the gas attacks have since been sentenced to death, others are serving life sentences. The interviews are presented one after another in the book - and they can get a bit repetitious. Murakami inserts short analytical bits in-between, but I would have liked to read more about the situation from a psychologist's perspective rather than Murakami's assumptions and lay-man's conclusions (though he does provide a useful perspective). Despite this, I found this to be an incredibly interesting book - a fascinating glimpse into Tokyo's conformist society and this strange cult (which continues to operate under the name Aleph).