Read Online Underground by Haruki Murakami - Free Book Online Page B

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 wasinvited 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.
“Luckily I was dozing off”

Aya Kazaguchi (23)
    Ms. Kazaguchi was born in Machiya, Arakawa Ward, northeast Tokyo, and has never lived anywhere else. She likes it in