Underground

346 Pages·2001·1.68 MB·English

by  Haruki Murakami

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