Free Underground by Haruki Murakami Page B

understand how young people might be attracted to something more spiritual like religion. Not that I am myself.”
He has experienced some fairly severe aftereffects from the gas attack, but harbors no personal anger or spite toward the Aum perpetrators. He doesn’t know why
.
    “I work in clothing, but I have virtually no interest in clothes myself,”
he says
. “I’ll see something, say ‘I’ll take that one,’ and buy it. I don’t labor over it.”
If so, though, how come he’s such a sharp dresser?

    My wife and I live alone. We married at 24, so that makes thirteen years. We live in Chiba. I leave the house around 7:30 and catch the 8:15 Chiyoda Line from Matsudo. Needless to say, I can never get a seat on the Chiyoda Line. I’m standing for forty-five minutes throughout. I can sometimes get a seat at Otemachi. I’m still half asleep, so if I can get a seat, I’ll sit. Getting a seat means a good fifteen minutes’ rest.
    On March 20, I left the house thirty minutes early. I had a bit of business I wanted to take care of before work. It was the show season and I had a lot of little things to do for that. Added to which we’re in sales, and it was almost time to start cranking out the figures—how many units of what item sold for the whole month. We’ve got our quotas—this much we have to sell—based on budget projections. I had to get the figures in to Head Office during the course of that week, then put in an appearance at a meeting the following week.
    Actually, March 20 was the day my wife left the company where she’d worked for six years. It was an editing job at an advertising magazine, really demanding work that was wearing her down so she wanted to leave. Now she freelances as a copywriter. And also that day was her birthday, too. Which is why I remember the events of March 20 so clearly.
    I always take the first car at the front of the train. That puts me nearest the exit, which brings me out by the Hanae Mori boutique building at Omote-sando. That day I happened to get a seat all the way from Shin-ochanomizu. I’d gotten up early and was pretty beat, so I was thinking, “Ah, what a break!” As soon as I sat down I was fast asleep. I woke up at Kasumigaseki Station, four stops later. I felt like I was going to cough and that’s what woke me. And there was this weird smell. A lot of people were moving to the next car down. They were opening and closing the doors between the cars.
    When I opened my eyes, I saw a station attendant in a green uniform coming in and out. The floor was wet, too. The wet patch was maybe five meters away from me. The criminals had pricked their bags of sarin and got off at Shin-ochanomizu. But anyway I’d been fast asleep and hadn’t seen a thing. The police questioned me over and over about it, but what I didn’t see I didn’t see. Theythought that sounded suspicious. I was traveling to Aoyama and the Aum headquarters are in Aoyama.
    The train continued on to the next stop, Kokkai-gijidomae, where we all had to get off. No explanation was given over the PA, just, “This train is going out of service—all passengers please disembark.” But between Kasumigaseki and Kokkai-gijidomae I was really in pain. I was coughing, I couldn’t breathe. When we reached Kokkai-gijidomae there were people near me who couldn’t even move. One woman in her fifties had to be lifted off by the station attendants. There were maybe ten people in the car and some of them held handkerchiefs over their mouths, coughing.
    “Hey, what’s going on here?” I thought, but I had to get to work. I had a whole list of things to do. Stepping out onto the platform, who knows how many people were squatting there? The station attendants had rounded up all those who were feeling sick, there must have been fifty in all. Two or three were completely immobilized, one or two lay stretched out on the platform.
    Oddly enough, though, the atmosphere wasn’t tense at all. Even though I was feeling