I’ve told myself before that I have to be honest when I do these book reviews, otherwise it misses the point of writing anything even slightly opinon-based about the work. I guess transparency comes first, even if its at the expense of some Murakami fans.

Underground didn’t really resonate with me. Sure, reading this book while commuting to school on the MRT over the past month was definitely an interesting experience, but perhaps the small printing size or the disjointed interviews put me off the book’s premise early. Certainly, Underground is a fantastic piece of journalistic literature and Murakami deserves recognition for the thoughtful piecing together of varying, fallable accounts of Japan’s largest human-enacted tragedy in the last few decades. Nonetheless, I left the work feeling like it was better suited as material for a case study, and inappropriate to be published as a ‘Murakami work’ per se. No doubt some part of this stems from my own conceptions of what should and should not be part of the Murakami literary canon.

That said, I found the second half of Underground much easier and more digestible than the first half, no doubt because that section focused on interviewing ex and present devotees of Aum. My fascination with their ways of seeing the world definitely says more about me than about Murakami’s abilities as a writer.

I don’t regret reading Underground. It has probably changed how I see the world, if to a smaller degree than Murakami’s other works.

Godspeed.