Reviews and Comments

Incredibly emotional interviews that retell one of the most horrific terrorist attacks that miraculously barely killed anyone. What's particularly fascinating about this is that it not only explores the victims' stories (sometimes through the lens of their family members), but also those of the members of the cult responsible for the attack. It dissects the minds of the people who decided to dedicate their lives to this spiritual community, while constantly drawing parallels to the Japanese society at large.

Murakami is a great interviewer, and you can truly feel his determination to uncover the story behind this tragedy. And he undoubtedly succeeded in that: not only is this intimate way of experiencing the events very touching, but the book is basically considered the best English-speaking primary source on this topic.

Unfortunately, the ending of the book got spoiled in the foreword of the version I was reading; otherwise this could have been quite an exciting story about their relationship set in an ever-changing France.

A quite interesting mystery full of self-discovery at its core, with quite an unusual narrative that tells this story from multiple angles at once, this book seemed quite promising from the start. However, the overly casual dialogues that oscillate between intentionally inarticulate and pseudo-intellectual quickly got on my nerves, and the subsequent attempts to make light of pedophilia as well as incest were only the last straw. I'm fairly confident that this is the worst book that I've read in the past decade or so.