Underground - By Haruki Murakami & Alfred Birnbaum & Philip Gabriel Page 0,1
trial, except as concerned the court or police investigations. They had a duty to protect people’s privacy, and the same went for the hospitals. All we had to go on were newspaper listings of the hospitalized from the day of the gas attack itself. Names only; no addresses or telephone numbers.
Somehow we came up with a list of 700 names, of whom only 20 percent were identifiable. How does one go about tracing an “Ichiro Nakamura”—the Japanese equivalent of “John Smith”? Even when we did manage to contact the 140 or so positive identifications, they usually refused to be interviewed, saying “I’d rather forget the whole incident” or “I don’t want to have anything to do with Aum” or “I don’t trust the media.” I can’t tell you how often people slammed down the phone at the mere mention of publication. As a result, only about 40 percent of the 140 consented to be interviewed.
After the arrest of the principal members of the Aum cult, fewer people feared retributions, but still the rejections persisted—“My symptoms aren’t really serious, so it’s not worth making a statement.” Or, in more than one case, the survivors themselves were willing but their families were not—“Don’t get all of us involved.” Testimonies from public servants and the employees of financial institutions were likewise unforthcoming.
For practical reasons there are also relatively few female interviewees, because they proved harder to trace by name alone. Unmarried young women in Japan—and this is pure conjecture on my part—don’t appreciate strangers asking too many questions. Nevertheless, some did respond “despite family opposition.”
Thus, out of thousands of victims, we found only sixty willing respondents, and that took a huge amount of dedication.
In the process of shaping the written interviews, drafts were sent to the respective interviewees for fact-checking. I attached a note asking them to let me know if there was anything they “didn’t wish to see in print” and how the contents should be altered or abridged. Almost everyone asked for some changes or cuts, and I complied. Often the forfeited material had illuminated details about the interviewees’ lives, which I, as a writer, was sorry to lose. Occasionally I came back with a counterproposal for them to approve. Some interviews went back and forth as many as five times. Every effort was made to avoid any exploitative mass-media scenario that might leave disgruntled interviewees shaking their heads, saying, “It wasn’t supposed to be like this” or “You betrayed my trust.” Things took time.
After such delicate and laborious orchestrations, we had a total of sixty-two interviews. However, as stated previously, there were two last-minute withdrawals, both very incisive, telling testimonies. Discarding the finished texts so late in the game, I honestly felt as though I were cutting away parts of my own flesh, but “No” means “No,” especially when we had made clear from the start our intention to respect each individual voice.
Put another way, every remark in this book is a completely voluntary contribution. And by way of final confirmation—I am very pleased and grateful to say—almost everyone agreed to use his or her real name, which adds incalculably greater impact to the words: their words, their anger, their accusations, their sufferings … (this is not to slight those few who adopted pseudonyms, for whatever personal reasons).
At the beginning of every interview I would ask the interviewees about their background—where they were born, their upbringing, their family, their job (especially their job)—in order to give each a “face,” to bring them into focus. What I did not want was a collection of disembodied voices. Perhaps it’s an occupational hazard of the novelist’s profession, but I am less interested in the “big picture,” as it were, than in the concrete, irreducible humanity of each individual. So perhaps I devoted an inordinate proportion of each two-hour interview to seemingly unrelated details, but I wanted to make sure readers had a firm grasp of the “character” speaking. Much of this extra dimension did not, of course, survive into print.
The Japanese media had bombarded us with so many in-depth profiles of the Aum cult perpetrators—the “attackers”—forming such a slick, seductive narrative that the average citizen—the “victim”—was almost an afterthought. “Bystander A” was glimpsed only in passing. Very rarely was any “lesser” narrative presented in a way that commanded attention. Those few stories that got through were contextualized into formulaic glosses. Our media probably wanted to create a collective image of the “innocent Japanese sufferer,” which is much easier to do when you don’t