Twenty-six times as deadly as cyanide gas, a drop of sarin the size of a pinhead is sufficient to kill a person") and their families. Part two was a collection of interviews with members and ex-members of the Aum cult. By bringing these two books together, startling similarities between the victims and the perpetrators slowly emerge and the distinct elements of the Japanese psyche is revealed. Murakami begins his book with a map of the Tokyo subway system. He organizes his book, as mentioned above, into two parts: victims and cult members. He further divides it into categories by subway lines and by the passengers who rode the poisoned trains. Though these passengers are a random sampling of the Japanese population at large, a theme becomes apparent, and that is the randomness of life. Understandably, these victims express a deep sense of regret. Their sorrow, however, is not for the actual act of terrorism itself. Instead, their regret stems from the realization that their bad fate could have been easily avoided had they not been on a toxic train.

One senses that the two worlds are closer in the jammed space and monolithic culture of Japan than in the United States, yet sarin survivors were amazed that terror could happen here. Murakami shows that his fellow citizens ignored evidence that no ground is safe. With the Federal Building in Oklahoma City, Americans have our own incontrovertible evidence. Yet Underground may be a necessary reminder, as well as a fascinating and often moving cultural study, of how easily and abruptly one world can penetrate another.

Haruki Murakami is intent on changing that. Murakami, already a prolific writer in his native language, has been heavily translated into English as of late, with the appearance of two short stories in the New Yorker over the last 6 months and the publication of two novels within a year — "Norwegian Wood" last year and "Sputnik Sweetheart" later this month. He recently held a writer-in-residence post at Princeton. He is outspoken about his love for all things American, and all his novels make heavy use of American pop cultural themes.

Murakami's interviews reveal a Japan populated by lonely, alienated people, people locked into a massive industrial society yet at the same time cut loose from family and tradition by the juggernaut of modernization that swept over the country in the post-WWII era. It is a theme that appears in most of his books, and its expression in these real-life accounts should gain Murakami respect as a social critic as well as a writer.

Needless to say, "Underground" was read much differently in Japan; its resonance resembled the collection of the hundreds of personal accounts flowing from the Oklahoma City bombing. The attack was the kind of deep social wound that a book can do so much to salve, and yet is at the same time so complex, so bound up between personal disaster and social tragedy, that it is impossible for an outsider to insert himself. What comes across as drudgery to us is a form of bitter catharsis to the Japanese. "Underground" makes a good case for Murakami as the social conscience of modern, urban Japan. But it will do little if anything to improve his standing among American audiences.

Tokyo got off lightly. Although 5,000 suffered symptoms ranging from short-term discomfort to permanent vegetative disability, and although the emergency services proved ill-prepared, there were only 12 fatalities. Given sarin's toxicity, the casualties should have been far greater. But it had been suspended in a slow-releasing solution to give Asahara's henchmen time to get away.

For the sinister and barmy details of Aum, readers can go to The Cult at the End of the World, by David E Kaplan and Andrew Marshall (Hutchinson). Haruki Murakami, then internationally acclaimed novelist, pursues different angles. Returning to Japan after a sojourn in America, he realised that the Aum atrocity could not be readily brushed aside as an aberration. He sensed that there were good reasons why it had occurred in Japan. Subtitled "the Tokyo gas attack and the Japanese psyche", Underground is not so much an attempt to investigate a particular madness as to explore its context.

Murakami edges us one stage further. His final interviewees are lesser members of the sect itself. Oddballs all, they too have endured the treachery of Aum's leadership. All they wanted was something other than the narrow conformity of Japanese life. But the more conformist a society, the greater the dangers of marginalisation. Despite its veneer of democracy, Japan sometimes transpires as a sort of voluntary totalitarianism. In the living past it has experienced nuclear attack and the endgame of its venture into Manchuria, presided over by the divine Emperor Hirohito.