Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche - Haruki Murakami (2003)

Part II. THE PLACE THAT WAS PROMISED

“Nostradamus had a great influence on my generation”

Akio Namimura (b. 1960)

Mr. Namimura was born in Fukui Prefecture. He wanted to study literature and religion, which he’d been interested in before college, but he and his father, who was a stubborn man, clashed over what he should major in, and he gave up college to go to work. He got a job in an auto-parts factory in Fukui City. In high school he hated studying, and just read books on his own, always feeling alienated from his environment. Most of the books he read then were on religion or philosophy.

He has had a number of jobs, and continues to read, reflect, and write and to be interested in religions. Throughout his life he has had a clear sense that he and the world are out of sync. That’s why he sought connections with people who were living outside the mainstream. In the midst of his searching, though, he can never completely rid himself of doubts that what he discovers is not the answer he seeks. He finds it impossible to throw himself heart and soul into any one group, even when he was a member of Aum.

At present he is back in his hometown, working for a haulage company. He has always loved the sea and often goes swimming. He’s crazy about Okinawa. Hayao Miyazaki’s films make him cry.^* “That proves I have normal human feelings,” he says.

When I graduated from high school I felt like I would either renounce the world, or die—one of the two. The idea of getting a job made me sick. If I could, I wanted to live a religious life. Since living meant accumulating sin, I thought dying would be much better for the world.

These ideas went through my head as I worked selling tires for an auto-parts company. At first I was a useless salesman. I’d walk into a gas station or repair shop, say “Hello,” then freeze up, unable to say another word. It was hard on me, and for my potential customers, too. In the beginning my sales record was zero.

Later I grew more sociable and was able to rack up some sales. It was good training for life. I worked there for two years. The reason I left was I lost my driver’s license.

One of my relatives happened to be running a cram school in Tokyo, and he said I could work there. I was thinking about becoming a novelist, and when I mentioned this he said, “You can study to be a novelist while you’re correcting essays.”

Sounds good, I thought, so I moved to Tokyo at the beginning of 1981 and started work at the school. But things weren’t as promised. My relative was suddenly very cold to me: “You want to be a novelist? Stop dreaming. The world’s not some fairyland, you know.” I wasn’t even allowed to help correct compositions. “You’re incompetent,” he said, and I had to settle for odd jobs—keeping the students quiet, cleaning the rooms, stuff like that. I put up with it for a year and a half, then threw in the towel.

I’d saved a bit of money while I was working in Fukui, so I decided to live on my savings for the time being and study to be a writer. So for three years I was unemployed. I kept my expenses down to a minimum. I didn’t buy anything, just food. I’m generally a pretty frugal guy, anyway. I just read, and wrote. The area I lived in was great since there were five public libraries a short distance away. It was a lonely life, but loneliness doesn’t bother me. Most people couldn’t have stood it, I imagine.

I mostly read surrealist fiction—Kafka, Breton’s Nadja, and the like. I went to university festivals, read all the little magazines they published, and made friends I could talk about literature with. One guy I became friends with was in the philosophy department at Waseda University, and he introduced me to a lot of writers: Wittgenstein, Husserl, Shu Kishida, Shoichi Honda. I was impressed by the fiction this guy wrote, but now that I think about it, his stories were really derivative.

This guy from Waseda had a friend named Tsuda who was a follower of Soka Gakkai.^* He tried his hardest to get me to join. We debated religion back and forth, but finally he said: “Look, talking about it won’t get you anywhere. If you don’t actually experience it your life won’t change, so just take my word for it and give it a try.” So I joined his Soka Gakkai group, living with them for about a month, but I realized it wasn’t for me. They’re one of these religions that aim to help people become successful in this world. I was looking for a purer kind of doctrine. Like Aum. Aum was closer to the original teachings of Buddhism.

When my money ran out, I started working for a company transporting department-store goods. I did that for two years. It was a tough job, but I’d always been into the martial arts and liked to work out, so physical labor didn’t faze me. It was a part-time job, so the pay was low, but I worked three times harder than anyone else. I attended night classes at a place called the Japan Journalist Technical School. I thought I could write reportage.

Just around that time, though, life in Tokyo started to exhaust me. My mind was getting messed up. I was more violent, hot tempered. I was interested in nature then, and thought getting back to nature or moving back to my hometown sounded like a good idea. Once I get into something I really get into it. At the time it was ecology. Any way you cut it, the concrete jungle had burned me out and I longed to see the ocean in my hometown.

So I moved back to my parents’ house and started working on the construction of the Monju high-speed nuclear reactor. I put up scaffolding. I considered this training too, but it was extremely dangerous work. After a while you get used to heights. I fell a number of times, and came close to dying. Let’s see—I must have been there about a year. From the Monju reactor you have a fantastic view of the ocean. That’s why I chose that job. So I could see the ocean while I worked. The ocean where the Monju was built is the most beautiful area around.

MURAKAMI: But should someone into ecology work on a nuclear reactor?

I was planning to write reportage on it. I thought that by writing about it I could cancel out my participation in building it. Wishful thinking, perhaps. You know the film The Bridge on the River Kwai? My idea was something like that. You work hard to build something, then in the end destroy it yourself. Of course I wasn’t going to plant a bomb or anything. How should I put it? Since the sea that I loved so much was going to get polluted anyway, I might as well be the one to do it. Mixed-up emotions, I know. My mind was torn in different directions.

After a year I finished work on the Monju and went to Okinawa. I used the money I’d saved from the construction job to buy a used car, and I took the ferry to Okinawa and lived in my car for a while. I took a leisurely trip from one beach to the next. That took about two months. I fell in love with the great outdoors. What’s great about Okinawa is that each place you go to has its own distinct personality. Every summer I’d come down with “Okinawa Fever” and couldn’t sit still. I’d have to go. It made it hard for me to hold down a job. Come summer I’d just take off for Okinawa without a word.

In the meantime my father passed away, just before I turned 30. We didn’t get along. No one in the family liked him. People thought of him as a good person, but at home he was a tyrant. He got violent when he drank. He used to hit me when I was a kid. Later on I was physically stronger so I’d hit him first. I’m not proud of that. I should have been a better son.

I was always drawn to religion, but my father was materialist, a rationalist. This caused problems between us. I’d come out with some religious opinion and he’d laugh at me, saying, “Enough of this God nonsense!” He’d get furious. This made me so sad: “Why does he have to say such terrible things? And why doesn’t he accept anything I do?”

I was in Okinawa when my father’s condition got worse. I rushed back to Fukui, but he passed away soon afterward. He had cirrhosis of the liver, a horrible way to die. In the end he didn’t eat a thing, just drank and wasted away. On his deathbed he said to me, “Let’s have one good talk,” but I said, “Give me a break. Just go ahead and die, why don’t you?” In a sense, I think I killed him.

After the funeral I went back to Okinawa. I was working on a construction site. But being away from Fukui and my family, I got terribly depressed. I was fine after my father died. The whole family got together and we had a pretty lively old time. But suddenly after I returned to Okinawa I took a nosedive. It felt like I was being dragged down to hell, kicking and screaming. “I’m done for,” I thought. I’ll definitely end up in hell. No way I can go back. That kind of feeling. It was a severe case of clinical depression. I was steadily going mad. On rainy days when we couldn’t work I’d just lie curled up in bed. The others would go out to play pachinko, but I’d just stay there alone, completely blank.

One day, about three in the morning, I woke up and felt so terrible I thought, “This is it, I’m a goner.” I felt like I was going to lose consciousness. I called my mother and she told me to come back home. But my mental problems persisted even in Fukui. Nothing cheered me up. I spent the first month at home doing absolutely nothing.

What rescued me from this situation was a female yuta in Okinawa.^*

Actually I’d read Lyall Watson’s book Lightning Bird: One Man’s Journey into Africa and I was quite moved by it.

MURAKAMI: That’s an interesting book, isn’t it?

The main character, Boshier, is an epileptic and a schizophrenic. But he and others like him were able to meet a teacher, go through training, and become sorcerers. In other words, they could turn negative elements into something positive. And people would look up to them. I read that and thought: “Hey! That’s me they’re talking about.” I started checking into it and found out that the same things are said about the yuta in Okinawa. In Okinawa that path to salvation still remains. So maybe I could become a yuta. I’m qualified, right? That’s what I thought. That was one way out for me.

So I went to Okinawa and was able to see a famous yuta. I met her along with several dozen other people, but she singled me out in the crowd, telling me I was troubled by something. It was like she could see right into my soul. “You’re troubled because of your father, aren’t you?” she said. “You’re clinging to your father and have to rid yourself of that attachment. Put your father behind you and take a step in a new direction. If your mother is still alive you must take good care of her. Living an ordinary life is the most important thing.”

Hearing this, I felt like a weight had lifted: “Ah, I’m saved!” And after that I stayed with just one company. In the summers I no longer took off for Okinawa. I decided to take good care of my mother and work hard, sticking to one job.

MURAKAMI: In Adrian Bosnier’s case he had to enter that other world, but in your case you could still return to this world. You were told, in fact, to return.

That’s right. That’s what happened. Having a normal life—marriage, kids—that’s all a kind of training, I was told. In fact, it’s the most difficult sort of training.

I’d been keeping an eye on religions for some time, checking them out. I was pretty involved in Christianity, and Soka Gakkai, as I mentioned. Even now I attend a Christian church. So Aum was just a tiny part of my life. Still, even now I feel Aum was something special. That’s how much power it had.

In 1987 when Aum first appeared I wrote asking for some introductory literature. A heap of pamphlets arrived. I was amazed how professional they were, that a brand-new religion had the money to publish such slick stuff.

At the time there wasn’t an Aum branch in Fukui, but there was one in nearby Sabae, where a man named Omori allowed Aum members to use his apartment as a meeting place once a week. They invited me and I went every once in a while. They showed a video clip about Aum that had appeared on the All-Night Live TV! show, and I was impressed. Joyu spoke so eloquently^*

He explained that Aum followers were using primitive Buddhism as a base to develop kundalini through ascetic practice. He could answer any question clearly and simply. “This is really something,” I thought. “What an impressive guy, and what an amazing group.”

All the people there were Aum followers except me. I was just an observer. One practical reason kept me from going in further at the time: Aum costs money. They had a course you could take—ten tape cassettes for 300,000 yen. They were sermons by Master Asahara, so they were very effective. That’s a cheap price to pay to get power, everyone thought, and shelled out 300,000 yen. But that only made me afraid. I was poor, and stingy to boot, so maybe I was even more sensitive to this.

We all took a bus together to Nagoya. It was the first time I saw Shoko Asahara. I wasn’t a member yet, so I wasn’t allowed to ask him any questions. In Aum you have to rise up through the ranks if you want to do anything, and that cost money. Once you got to a certain level you were allowed to ask Asahara questions. A step up from that and you were given a flower garland. I saw this in Nagoya and thought it was pretty silly. Also Asahara was gradually being deified, which disturbed me.

I subscribed to the Aum journal Mahayana from the very first issue. In the beginning it was a good magazine. They took great care in presenting the experiences of actual believers, and had stories on “How I Became an Aum Member,” using people’s real names. I was impressed by their honesty. After a while, though, the magazine didn’t focus on individual members but solely on Asahara, raising him higher and higher with everyone worshipping him. For instance, when Asahara was going anywhere believers would lay their clothes on the ground for him to walk on. That’s a bit much. It’s scary—worship one person too much and freedom goes out the window. On top of that, Asahara was married and had a lot of children, which I found strange in light of the original tenets of Buddhism. He got around this by saying that he was the Final Liberated One and those kinds of things would not accumulate as karma. Of course no one really knew if he was or not.

I had no compunction about making my doubts known to people. One thing I found strange was that a lot of Aum followers died in car accidents. I asked a woman I knew well—Ms. Takahashi—about it. “Don’t you think it’s unusual that this many believers have died?” I asked her. “No, it’s all right,” she replied, “because four billion years in the future the Master will return as the Maitreya Buddha and will raise up the souls of those who died.” “What rubbish!” I thought.

Also, Aum violently attacked Taro Maki, the editor of the Sunday Mainichi magazine, which had continued to criticize Aum. When I asked them why they just said: “Whether we’re attacked or whatever happens to us, people who have a relationship with the Master are blessed. Even if we fall into hell, he will save us later.”

For a long time my relationship with Aum Shinrikyo was an on-off affair. One day in 1993, though, an Aum man named Kitamura came to my door. He’d called saying he wanted to talk to me, so I said okay. I’d been away from Aum for a while and wanted to catch up on the latest news. But the more he talked, the crazier he got. He talked about what would happen if World War III broke out, laser weapons, plasma weapons—like something out of science fiction. It was interesting, admittedly, but it made me think that Aum was getting into some pretty intense things.

At the time Aum was putting a lot of pressure on me to become a member. The reason I ended up joining had to do with the woman I mentioned, Ms. Takahashi. My grandmother had just passed away and I was feeling sad about it. Ms. Takahashi called me and said she had something she wanted to talk over with me. “Actually,” she said, “I’ve just joined Aum myself, and would like to discuss it with you.” So we got together. She was 27, six years younger than me. It was like destiny. I felt it at a gut level. After that, she and I really opened up to each other. And in April 1994 I joined.

My grandmother’s death must have had an influence. Also the company I was working for was starting to lay off people. To top it all, the illness I talked about before was still with me. I hoped that joining Aum might help clear it up once and for all.

I’ll admit I was interested in Ms. Takahashi. Not in a romantic sense—but somehow I couldn’t get her out of my mind. I could see she was absorbed by Aum—but was it good for her to be so totally immersed in it? I was skeptical about Aum, and thought it best to raise these doubts with her. The fastest way to do so, I concluded, was for me to join Aum as well, in order to be able to see her and have opportunities to talk to her. I know it sounds a bit altruistic.

Fortunately the entrance fee to join had gone down drastically to only 10,000 yen. Half a year’s dues came to 6,000 yen. And they gave us ten free tapes. After joining, in order to go through the initiation rite you have to watch ninety-seven Aum videos and read seventy-seven Aum books. A huge amount, but somehow I made it through them. The last thing you had to do was chant your mantra. We got a printed sheet and read it aloud over and over using a counter to click off the times. That’s why all Aum members have counters. We had to do that seven thousand times. I tried it for a while, but thought it was stupid and gave up. To my mind, it wasn’t any different from a Soka Gakkai service.

They tried very hard to get me to become a renunciate. At this point Aum was struggling to increase its numbers. I still hadn’t undergone the initiation rites, but they said it didn’t matter. Still I resisted. Ms. Takahashi became a renunciate at the end of that year. She called me at work on December 20 and said, “I’m going to do it.” That was the last time we ever spoke. She became a renunciate and went away.

When the gas attack occurred I was already distancing myself from Aum. There was a person Ms. Takahashi had proselytized and I was trying to convince that person not to join. Everyone knew I was critical of Aum’s methods. But a follower is a follower and in May 1995 the police took me in for questioning. By this time they knew who had been members. They probably had a list of names. Their methods were pretty archaic. “Can you trample on a photo of Shoko Asahara?” they demanded, like it was in the Edo period when they made the Japanese Christians renounce their faith by stepping on a drawing of Jesus. I had a direct experience of how frightening the police can be.

The police came to question me again in 1995, when an ANA [All Nippon Airways] plane was hijacked in Hokkaido. “You know something about it, right?” they insisted. They came all the time. It was like being stalked. No matter what I did, someone was always watching me. A spooky feeling. The police are supposed to protect citizens, but here they were frightening me to death. I hadn’t done anything wrong, but still I was afraid all the time that I might be arrested. They were picking up Aum believers one after another for petty offenses. They’d trump up some charges like forgery or something, and I was sure they’d do the same to me.

They phoned me all the time, asking if anyone in Aum had been in touch. I should have just put up with it, but I was stupid enough to let my curiosity about what was happening inside Aum get the best of me and I went all the way to a satyam in Osaka to see another woman renunciate I knew. I wondered how she felt in the midst of this police crackdown.

I bought a few issues of the Aum magazine Anuttara Sacca to take back with me. You couldn’t get Aum books and magazines in bookstores anymore, and I wanted to see what was in them. Just as I left the satyam two policemen stopped me for questioning, asking me what I was up to inside. I was afraid, and also didn’t want to be bothered, so I somehow brushed them off and hightailed it out of there. No wonder the police kept an even closer eye on me.

MURAKAMI: At the time did you believe that the gas attack on the subway was the work of Aum?

I did. I was positive they did it, but still I couldn’t suppress my curiosity about Aum. I was interested in the essence of this religious group that had been attacked by society, whose books no bookstore would stock, yet which still actively published its journals—this strange kind of life force that sprang back every time no matter how much you tried to crush it. What was going on in Aum? What did the followers really think? That’s what I wanted to know. A journalist’s viewpoint, I suppose. Nothing like what was ever shown on television.

MURAKAMI: How do you feel about the gas attack itself?

It’s completely wrong and cannot be condoned. No doubt about that. But you have to distinguish Shoko Asahara from the ordinary rank-and-file believers. They aren’t all criminals, and some of them have truly pure hearts. I know many people like that and I feel sorry for them. They don’t fit into the system because they’re not comfortable with it, or because they’ve been excluded from it. That’s the kind of people who join Aum. And I like them. It’s easy for me to be friends with them. I feel much closer to them than to people who are well adjusted. The real culprit is Asahara himself. He was tremendously powerful.

What’s funny is that being with the police so much I started to make friends with them. At first I was scared, but gradually we got to be friendly. They’d ask me if any mail had come from Aum and I’d show them everything. Once I cooperated, the police became much more open and kinder to me. “Well now,” I thought, “even the police can be pure and honest sometimes. They’re all working as hard as they can. So if they make a reasonable request of me, I’ll cooperate.”

New Year rolled around and I got a card from Ms. Takahashi’s mother. She wrote, “We were completely wrong.” She’d been a devout Aum follower herself, at first. She’d gone through the initiation. I wanted to see Ms. Takahashi, no matter what. There was so much I wanted to talk to her about. I mentioned this to the police and showed them the card.

That’s probably what gave them the idea that they could use me as a spy. They called me in and sounded me out about the idea. Whether they actually used the word “spy” or not I can’t recall, but that was the gist of it. In other words, would I go into the Aum organization to gather information and report back to them? Naturally the idea of being a spy wasn’t appealing. I just wanted to find a way to be with Aum followers. I was already friends with the police, I thought, so what the hell. I’ll give it a try.

I’m the type who just goes with the flow. A loner, basically, with no friends. The type who’s stuck at the bottom of the company ladder and is always getting yelled at. Nobody would ever take me seriously. So when the police said to me in all sincerity, “Do your best and try to get some information for us,” I was very happy. Even if it’s the police, I just felt happy being able to communicate with someone. At my company, I never made any friends. My Aum friends were all gone, and Ms. Takahashi had become a renunciate and disappeared. So, “If it’s for a short time, okay,” I thought. And that’s what I told them. I shouldn’t have.

MURAKAMI: Was being a police spy a valuable experience?

All I wanted was to get in touch with Ms. Takahashi, to bring her back. Not as a spy or anything, I just wanted to be in contact with Aum members. But if I tried that on my own, without cooperating with the police, I would have been pegged as an Aum person, and I was afraid of that. They would have treated me as a criminal. Having the police back me up would make the whole thing go more smoothly. Also I thought I might be able to persuade a few members to quit Aum. But that was dishonest. Don’t you think?

MURAKAMI: Dishonest or not, it’s a convoluted story.

It is indeed. I felt sorry for Ms. Takahashi, and felt I had to do something. That’s all I was thinking about. If things continued as they were, she’d be treated like a criminal. I had to try to persuade her, but I had no idea where she was. If I cooperated with the police, I might get some information. But I never did find out her whereabouts. I asked all the time, but the police couldn’t track her down. All they knew was that she was still a renunciate. Maybe they did know but just didn’t tell me.

At any rate, since the Fukui and Kanazawa branches were shut down, the plan to have me infiltrate Aum fell through.

MURAKAMI: So it ended up well for you, didn’t it? By the way, are you interested in Nostradamus’s prophecies?

Very much so. Nostradamus had a great influence on my generation. I’m planning my life’s schedule around his prophecies. I have a desire to kill myself. I want to die. I don’t mind dying very soon. But since the end is coming in two years, I think I might be patient for a bit longer. I want to see with my own eyes what will happen at the end. I’m interested in doomsday religions. In addition to Aum, I have contacts among Jehovah’s Witnesses. What they talk about is nonsense, though.

MURAKAMI: When you say “the end,” is that when the present system will be wiped out?

I prefer to think of it as being reset. It’s the desire to push the reset button on life. I imagine it as a catharsis, very peaceful.