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CONTENTS Map of the Tokyo Subway PART ONE UNDERGROUND Preface T M S : OKYO ETROPOLITAN UBWAY C L HIYODA INE Kiyoka Izumi: Nobody was dealing with things calmly Masaru Yuasa: I’ve been here since I first joined Minoru Miyata: At that point Takahashi was still alive Toshiaki Toyoda: I’m not a sarin victim, I’m a survivor Tomoko Takatsuki: It’s not even whether or not to take the subway, just to go out walking scares me now Mitsuteru Izutsu: The day after the gas attack, I asked my wife for a divorce Aya Kazaguchi: Luckily I was dozing off Hideki Sono: Everyone loves a scandal T M S : OKYO ETROPOLITAN UBWAY M L (Destination: Ogikubo) ARUNOUCHI INE Mitsuo Arima: I felt like I was watching a program on TV Kenji Ohashi: Looking back, it all started because the bus was two minutes early Soichi Inagawa: That day and that day only I took the first door Sumio Nishimura: If I hadn’t been there, somebody else would have picked up the packets Koichi Sakata: I was in pain, yet I still bought my milk as usual Tatsuo Akashi: The night before the gas attack, the family was saying over dinner, “My, how lucky we are” Shizuko Akashi: “Ii-yu-nii-an [Disneyland]” T M S : OKYO ETROPOLITAN UBWAY M L (Destination: Ikebukuro) ARUNOUCHI INE Shintaro Komada: “What can that be?” I thought Ikuko Nakayama: I knew it was sarin T M S : OKYO ETROPOLITAN UBWAY H L (Departing: Naka-meguro) IBIYA INE Hiroshige Sugazaki: “What if you never see your grandchild’s face?” Kozo Ishino: I had some knowledge of sarin Michael Kennedy: I kept shouting, “Please, please, please!” in Japanese Yoko Iizuka: That kind of fright is something you never forget T M S : OKYO ETROPOLITAN UBWAY H L (Departing: Kita-senju; Destination: Naka-meguro) IBIYA INE Noburu Terajima: I’d borrowed the down payment, and my wife was expecting—it looked pretty bad Masanori Okuyama: In a situation like that the emergency services aren’t much help at all Michiaki Tamada: Ride the trains every day and you know what’s regular air T M S : Hibiya Line OKYO ETROPOLITAN UBWAY Takanori Ichiba: Some crazy’s probably sprinkled pesticides or something Naoyuki Ogata: We’ll never make it. If we wait for the ambulance we’re done for Michiru Kono: It’d be pathetic to die like this Kei’ichi Ishikura: The day of the gas attack was my sixty-fifth birthday T M S : K OKYO ETROPOLITAN UBWAY ODEMMACHO STATION Ken’ichi Yamazaki: I saw his face and thought: “I’ve seen this character somewhere” Yoshiko Wada, widow of Eiji Wada: He was such a kind person. He seemed to get even kinder before he died Kichiro and Sanae Wada, parents of Eiji Wada: He was an undemanding child Koichiro Makita: Sarin! Sarin! Dr. Toru Saito: The very first thing that came to mind was poison gas— cyanide or sarin Dr. Nobuo Yanagisawa: There is no prompt and efficient system in Japan for dealing with a major catastrophe B N : W A W J G ? LIND IGHTMARE HERE RE E APANESE OING PART TWO THE PLACE THAT WAS PROMISED Preface Hiroyuki Kano: I’m still in hum Akio Namimura: Nostradamus had a great influence on my generation Mitsuharu Inaba: Each individual has his own image of the Master Hajime Masutani: This was like an experiment using human beings Miyuki Kanda: In my previous life I was a man Shin’ichi Hosoi: “If I stay here,” I thought, “I’m going to die” Harumi Iwakura: Asahara tried to force me to have sex with him Hidetoshi Takahashi: No matter how grotesque a figure Asahara appears, I can’t just dismiss him About the Author Other Books By This Author Also By Haruki Murakami Map of the Tokyo subway showing the lines targeted in the gas attack, Monday March 20, 1995 PART ONE UNDERGROUND Preface* Leafing through a magazine one afternoon, I found myself looking at the readers’ letters page. I really don’t remember why; I just probably had time on my hands. I rarely ever pick up Ladies’ Home Journal or the like, much less read the letters page. However, one of the letters caught my attention. It was from a woman whose husband had lost his job because of the Tokyo gas attack. A subway commuter, he had been unfortunate enough to be on his way to work in one of the cars in which the sarin gas was released.† He passed out and was taken to hospital. But even after several days’ recuperation, the aftereffects lingered on, and he couldn’t get himself back into the working routine. At first, he was tolerated, but as time went on his boss and colleagues began to make snide remarks. Unable to bear the icy atmosphere any longer, feeling almost forced out, he resigned. The magazine has since disappeared, so I can’t quote the letter exactly, but that was more or less what it said. As far as I can recall, there was nothing particularly plaintive about it, nor was it an angry rant. If anything, it was barely audible, a grumble under the breath. “How on earth did this happen to us … ?” she wonders, still unable to accept what had out of the blue befallen her family. The letter shocked me. Here were people who still carried serious psychological scars. I felt sorry, truly sorry, although I knew that for the couple involved my sympathy was irrelevant. And yet, what else could I do? Like most people, I’m sure, I simply turned the page with a sigh. But sometime later I found myself thinking about the letter. That “How on earth … ?” stuck in my head like a big question mark. As if it weren’t enough to be the victim of purely random violence, the man had suffered “secondary victimization” (everyday corporate violence of the most pervasive kind). Why could nobody do anything about it? That’s when I began to piece together a very different picture. Whatever the reason, his colleagues had singled out this young salaryman—“Hey, there’s the guy from that weird attack”—it couldn’t have made any sense to him. He was probably quite unaware of their “them-and-us” attitude. Appearances were deceptive. He would have considered himself a dyed-in-the-wool Japanese like everyone else. I grew curious to learn more about the woman who wrote in about her husband. Personally, I wanted to probe deeper into how Japanese society could perpetrate such a double violence. Soon after that I decided to interview the survivors of the attack. The interviews were conducted over nearly a year between the beginning of January and the end of December 1996. Most sessions took one or two hours, but some lasted for as long as four hours. I recorded everything. The tapes were then transcribed, which naturally generated a huge volume of text, much of which digressed this way and that, lost the thread completely, then pulled back into focus. Just like everyday speech. This was edited, reordered, or rephrased where necessary to make it more readable, and generally worked up into a manageable book-length manuscript. Occasionally, when the transcript seemed to lack something, I had to go back and listen to the original tape. Only once did anyone refuse to be recorded. Although I had mentioned over the phone that I’d be recording the interview, when I pulled a tape recorder out of my bag the interviewee claimed not to have been told. I spent the next two hours jotting down names and figures in longhand, then another few hours writing up the interview the moment I got home. (I was actually rather impressed that my own all-too-human powers of recall could reproduce an entire conversation from a handful of notes—no doubt daily fare to professional interviewers, but new to me.) Still, in the end I wasn’t granted permission to include this interview in the book, so all my labors came to nothing. Two assistants, Setsuo Oshikawa and Hidemi Takahashi, helped me track down the interviewees. We used one of two methods: scanning all
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