Underground (8 page)

Afterward people who’d been injured were scared to go on the subway, or so I hear from reports, but that really wasn’t the case with me. Maybe it’s because the sarin wasn’t on my train. Two days later when I took the subway to work in the morning I didn’t feel especially wary. There were others with me in the car, and—how can I put it?—it lacked reality for me. Someone right in front of me on the platform had died, but it still wasn’t real.

I get a lot of headaches. I suppose it’s on account of the sarin, but then I always did get headaches, so who knows? Only the frequency of my headaches has increased … That and when my eyes get tired, I begin to feel nauseated. That’s the most unsettling thing of all. There’s just no end to it once you start thinking, then you have to tell yourself, “No, that has nothing to do with it.” On TV this doctor said, “Once the symptoms go away, there’s no fear of aftereffects,” but who really knows yet? I just hope nothing shows up later.

Of course it irritates me. I don’t see why the criminals should be pardoned. I’d just like to know what they thought they were doing. I’d demand a full explanation and an apology. I’d absolutely insist on it.

I might easily have died there, I do think about that. I’m still nervous going out alone. It’s not even whether or not to take the subway, just to go out walking scares me now. So now whenever I go out, I try to go with my husband. Is this a psychological aftereffect? … But I do often wonder, maybe I will die. I was always the nervous type and thinking like this doesn’t help, it gives me knots in my stomach.

My husband is really worried about me, maybe more concerned than I am. He says I was discharged from the hospital so quickly, perhaps I should have stayed longer. Whenever anything happens, he blames it on the sarin. I’m glad he’s here for me. I wish we had more time to spend together, just the two of us. During our morning commute when we split up at the station, I think, “Oh, I don’t want to go off alone.” Since that day, we’ve never had a fight. We used to before, over anything. Lately I wonder, supposing we parted at the station after having a fight and something happened—what would I do?

I live in Shin-maruko now, but back then I lived right in Yokohama at Sakuragicho. My office is in Kokkai-gijidomae, right in the heart of Tokyo, so I take the Toyoko Line, which connects to the subway. Work starts at
9:15
, but I generally try to get there good and early by
8:00
. At that hour the trains aren’t so crowded and there’s no one at the office, so I can get some work done in peace. I wake at
6:00
: my eyes just snap open automatically. I’m a morning person, so I’m not much of a night owl. Unless there’s something going on, I’m asleep by ten in the evening. Although there aren’t many nights when there’s “nothing going on.” There’s overtime and business dinners, and I go out drinking with the guys from work too.

That day I was running a little later than usual. I took the Toyoko Line just before
7:00
, reached Naka-meguro around
7:15
, took the Hibiya Line to Kasumigaseki, and changed to the Chiyoda Line. I encountered the sarin gas in the one-station interval between Kasumigaseki and Kokkai-gijidomae.

I always take the front car when I change trains at Kasumigaseki. That puts me right by the exit closest to my office. The bell was ringing when I reached the Chiyoda Line platform, so I raced to get on, but the train just sat there. I saw two station attendants wiping the floor in front of me. Liquid had leaked from a box, spilling out like water … The train remained stationary while the attendants did their business mopping up the liquid. This delay meant I caught the train.

No, it wasn’t with mops, they were wiping the floor with wads of newspaper. The train had to get going again as soon as possible, so they can’t have had time to fetch mops. An attendant carried the leaking box out of the car and finally the train pulled away. I only found out later, but it turns out the station attendant who carried out the box died. The other one died the day after.

We were delayed about five minutes at the station. All that time, the station attendants were right in front of me cleaning up. The car wasn’t especially crowded, but there was nowhere to sit, so I just stood and watched them clean up. Thinking back on it I suppose there was a smell, but at the time I didn’t notice. It didn’t seem at all unusual. All the passengers were coughing, though, as if someone had left something behind that had evaporated. Yet even so, not one of them got up to change seats. After the train departed, I saw the floor was still dirty and moved a few feet away.

I didn’t notice anything else out of the ordinary until I got off the train at Kokkai-gijidomae. A lot of people coughing, but that was all. I didn’t pay much attention, I just went to the office. The TV is always on at work so we can keep up with the exchange rates. I was half watching the news when something strange happened. There seemed to be some big furor going on. The screen showed mainly Tsukiji Station and thereabouts.

The day before, I’d just gotten back from a ten-day business trip to South America. The next day was the Spring Equinox holiday, so there was no pressing reason for me to come in, but I’d been away for a while, so I thought I’d just see what work had piled up. But the office was dark. What’s happened? I wondered. Was the place always this dark? When I saw the TV report I didn’t think for a moment it was the very same train I’d taken, but slowly I started to feel ill: contracted pupils were a symptom, apparently. Everyone said I ought to go to a hospital.

First I went to a nearby eye doctor and had my pupils examined. No amount of light applied or taken away stimulated any movement of the iris. Already some policemen had come in for tests and had been referred to nearby Akasaka Hospital. There were a few other sarin victims and they’d set up a production line to test blood pressure and the like. Akasaka Hospital still didn’t have any antidote, but I was put on a drip for an hour and a half, then I was told, “Would those who feel all right now please go home and come back tomorrow.” They didn’t do a blood test or anything. Come to think of it now, Akasaka Hospital didn’t run any proper tests on me at all.

By this time they’d pretty much established it was sarin poisoning. I knew that’s what I had too. They were talking about it on TV and it had been the same train, the same car … They hardly looked at me at Akasaka Hospital, so I thought maybe I’d just go home and die
(laughs)
. But I’d been standing in the train, then moved to the back of the car, so I was still on the safe side. Those who were sitting in the same car and didn’t move away were hospitalized for a long time. I heard this from the detective who came around later to gather information.

The pupil contraction didn’t improve for a while. I went to the eye doctor at Akasaka Hospital for about ten days. But they didn’t really give me any treatment.

The fact is, the very day of the gas attack I worked straight through at the office until
5:30
. I didn’t feel well enough to eat lunch, of course; had no appetite. I came out in a cold sweat, had chills, and everyone said I looked pale. If I’d actually collapsed I’d have packed it in and gone home, but since I wasn’t falling over or anything … Everyone was saying it’s probably hay fever. I’d just returned from South America, so it could be some kind of allergic reaction, they said. But my eyes wouldn’t focus, my head ached. Thank goodness my job is mainly dealing over the phone and I could leave the reading to one of the girls.

The next day was a holiday, so I just lay down and rested. Everything still seemed dark, and I had no get-up-and-go. Couldn’t sleep much at night. I was groaning, apparently. I’d dream and wake up halfway. I was scared that if I went to sleep I might never wake up again.

I live alone now, but at the time I had a family. A wife and kids. Sorry to drag out the sordid details
(laughs)
. But, well, at the time I was with my family, though I might just as well have been alone …

Well, I’d hung up the clothes I was wearing that day in the wardrobe, and the kids started complaining that their eyes tingled. I have two kids and it was the youngest whose eyes hurt. I didn’t know what was going on, but I decided it couldn’t hurt just to throw out the suit, so I trashed it and everything else, even threw out my shoes.

In the end, people died and others suffered terrible aftereffects, so of course you have to feel angry toward the criminals; but me, I probably feel a little different from everyone else who came to harm traveling in that car. Anger, yeah, but my symptoms were relatively minor, so mine is a more objective anger. It isn’t personal.

Maybe it sounds strange, but it’s not like I don’t understand all this religious fanatic stuff. I’ve always had a feel for that side of things. I don’t want to reject it straight out. I’ve always enjoyed the constellations and myths from the time I was small, which is why I wanted to be a sailor in the first place. But when you start organizing and forming groups, I don’t go in for all that. I have no interest in religious groups, but I don’t believe taking that sort of thing seriously is necessarily all bad. I can understand that much.

But it’s strange, you know, while I was in South America I was
invited out to karaoke by someone from the Japanese Embassy in Colombia, then almost went back the next day to the same place, but I said, “No, let’s try somewhere new.” And that very day, the place got bombed. I remember thinking when I got back home, “At least Japan’s a safe place,” and the next day I go to work and the gas attack happens
(laughs)
. What a joke. But seriously, when I’m in South America or Southeast Asia, death is never far away. Accidents are commonplace to them, not like in Japan.

To be honest, the day after the gas attack, I asked my wife for a divorce. We weren’t on the best of terms at the time, and I’d done my fair share of thinking while I was in South America. I had meant to come out and say my piece when I got home, then I walked straight into the gas attack. Still, even after all I’d been through, she would barely speak to me.

After being gassed I phoned home from the office to tell my wife what had happened and my symptoms and everything, but I got almost no reaction from her. Perhaps she couldn’t really grasp the situation, exactly what had occurred. But even so, well, I knew then that we’d come to a turning point. Or else, the state I was in had gotten me all worked up, maybe that’s what it was. Maybe that’s why I came straight out with it and said I wanted a divorce. Perhaps if this sarin thing hadn’t happened, I wouldn’t have been talking about divorce so soon. I probably wouldn’t have said anything. It was a shock to the system and at the same time a kind of trigger.

My family had been in such a mess for so long, by then I didn’t consider myself very important. Not that the possibility of dying wasn’t real, but, had I died, I probably could have accepted it in my own way as just a kind of accident.