"Yes!" The memory of it stirred him. "I was Japanese in a shiny new Volvo. 'Let's see your license and registration.' It happened every day." Attempting a gruff American policeman's accent, he said, "'It's just warning ticket.' 'Why warning? What did I do?' 'Did I say you did something? It's a warning.'"
I had started to laugh at his mimicking a midwestern policeman, but grimly, because I had heard similar stories from foreigners driving cross-country.
"Utah is the worst! We were stopped all the time," he said. "And in South Dakota there's a town called Welcome. I saw the sign. I said to my friend, 'Let's stop here.'" He put on a sad face, with an exaggeratedly downturned mouth. "No one welcomed us."
He had another story. Once, when he was in Washington, D.C., to give a lecture, he went to his hotel to check in. Someone else was ahead of him, so he stood a decent distance from the counter. Then a big white man ("probably a lobbyist") approached and planted himself in front of Murakami. Seeing this, another man indicated Murakami and reprimanded the man, saying, "He was here first." The big man said, "I was here first"—an outright lie.
Still, Murakami said, he had fond memories of America. American cultural artifacts—songs, foods, expressions, and place names—are grace notes in his work; his grasp of American society is a unique feature of his fiction.
"Let's go underground," he said.
We went down an escalator at Kasumigaseki, on the Hibiya line. He handed me a ticket, but when I went through the turnstile I looked back and saw that his ticket had been rejected. Trying it several more times, he held up the line. People glanced at him and walked around him. He went to a conductor, who studied his ticket and explained a detail of it, indicating the remedy with a white-gloved hand—all railway personnel in Japan, and many workers, wear white gloves.
What impressed me was that all this time, as he was obstructing the turnstile, looking confused among the scores of commuters, consulting the conductor, not a single person said, "Haruki Murakami! I love your books!" He was not only the best-known and most widely read writer in Japan, but had been writing books for almost thirty years. The author of
I remarked on this.
"Yes, no one knows my face. I have never appeared on TV here. They ask, but I always say no."
"Why?"
"So that I can do this."
He meant haunt the underground, walk around unobserved, peacefully, in a leather jacket and woolen gloves and a red scarf and blue jeans. He then explained to me how the Aum Shinrikyo terrorists entered the station in pairs, got on the trains, put on gas masks, stabbed the packets of sarin gas with the tips of their umbrellas, then quickly exited the trains. Their actions were timed so that the gas would be released simultaneously, causing the greatest possible harm.
Later, one of the gassed victims said to Murakami, "Since the war ended, Japan's economy has grown rapidly to the point where we've lost any sense of crisis, and material things are all that matter. The idea that it's wrong to harm others has gradually disappeared."
And one of the cult members had said to him, "What I liked most about the Aum books was that they clearly stated that the world is evil. I was happy when I read that. I'd always thought that the world was unfair and might as well be destroyed."
In this innocent and orderly place, among the passengers streaming through the station in an orderly fashion, no one lingering or looking at others, it was easy to see how anyone who wished to could plant a bomb or be a suicide bomber or, as in the case of the Aum outrage, bring packets of deadly gas onto the trains and stab them open with the sharpened tip of an umbrella. Though they were not obvious as malcontents in this seemingly monochrome culture, there were enough angry people to wreak havoc.
Murakami understood this. He wrote, "We will get nowhere as long as the Japanese continue to disown the Aum 'phenomenon' as something other, an alien presence viewed through binoculars on the far shore. Unpleasant though the prospect might seem, it is important that we incorporate 'them,' to some extent, within the construct called 'us,' or at least within Japanese society."
We traveled on the Hibiya line to Nakaokachimachi Station, in the Akihabara district.
"Nerd city," Murakami said.
But it looked exactly like every other place I'd been in Tokyo: tall tombstone buildings, frantically blinking signs, streets choked with traffic, sidewalks crammed with people, slanting shadows. Walking in a slot among the close buildings, I had a sense of being indoors, which is another weird feature of cities, the way they enclose you, trapping you in their unbreathable air.
