The attack had two purposes, and neither was random. Aum Shinrikyo, the doomsday cult led by Shoko Asahara, was locked in a real estate dispute with the city of Matsumoto. Residents had fiercely opposed Asahara's plan to establish an office and factory in the southern part of the city, gathering 140,000 signatures on an anti-Aum petition -- equivalent to seventy percent of Matsumoto's population. Three local judges were expected to rule against the cult in the pending lawsuit. The attack was meant to kill those judges before they could deliver their verdict. It was also a field test: Aum had been manufacturing sarin at one of its facilities and needed to know if the nerve agent worked as a weapon in an open space. The original plan was to release the gas inside the courthouse itself, but cult members arrived after the building had closed. They improvised, targeting the three-story apartment building where the judges lived.

In the confusion that followed, police needed a suspect. They found Yoshiyuki Kono, a local resident whose wife, Sumiko, lay in a coma -- one of the attack's victims. Investigators discovered that Kono stored agricultural pesticides at his home. Although sarin cannot be manufactured from common pesticides, a Japanese historian claimed publicly that organophosphorus pesticides could theoretically be synthesized into nerve agents, and the media ran with the story. Kono was dubbed 'the Poison Gas Man.' Death threats arrived in the mail. Journalists camped outside his home. The legal pressure was relentless. An anonymous tip had actually pointed police toward Aum Shinrikyo almost immediately after the attack, warning that Matsumoto was 'definitely an experiment of sorts' and predicting that if sarin were released in an enclosed space like a crowded subway, the result would be 'a massive catastrophe.' The tip was ignored.

Nine months later, on March 20, 1995, Aum Shinrikyo members punctured plastic bags filled with liquid sarin on five Tokyo subway trains during the morning rush hour. Thirteen people died and thousands were hospitalized. This time, the investigation moved swiftly toward the cult. The evidence was overwhelming, and the earlier anonymous tip about Matsumoto took on terrible significance -- someone had predicted the subway attack almost word for word. The blame for the Matsumoto attack was finally, properly, shifted to Aum. Matsumoto's police chief publicly apologized to Yoshiyuki Kono on behalf of both the police department and the media. Every major Japanese newspaper that had accused or implied Kono's guilt issued formal apologies, including outlets that had never directly named him as a suspect.

Among the eight dead in Matsumoto were Yutaka Kobayashi, a twenty-three-year-old salaryman, and Mii Yasumoto, a twenty-nine-year-old medical student -- ordinary people asleep in their homes on a Monday night. Yoshiyuki Kono's wife Sumiko eventually awoke from her coma, but she never recovered speech or the ability to move. She lived fourteen more years in that condition, dying in 2008. The legal reckoning for Aum took decades. Thirteen cult members, including Shoko Asahara, were sentenced to death for their roles in both the Matsumoto and Tokyo attacks. All thirteen were executed on two dates in July 2018. Combined, the two sarin attacks killed twenty-one people and left thousands with lasting injuries. The quiet neighborhood in Kaichi Heights, where the refrigerator truck once idled on a warm June night, looks like any other residential street in any other Japanese city. Nothing marks the spot where a nerve agent drifted through open windows.