The Shut Ins

by Katherine Brabon

  Hiromi Satō brews tea in a clear pot. Mr Satō is not home, but I ask after him.

  ‘He’s well, thank you. Busy at the company. Some clients are in Osaka, in Yokohama, so he travels.’

  ‘And Hikaru?’

  Hiromi looks down at the teapot. ‘He has had some difficulties in securing a job, but he is working towards improvement. Thank you for asking.’

  Hiromi pours the tea. We kneel across from one another at a polished wooden table. There are rice crackers, the large fried kind, on a white porcelain plate.

  ‘I hoped you might be able to help me, Mai. The nature of Hikaru’s difficulties—it’s unusual. His interactions are limited. It’s hard for him to participate fully in life.’

  ‘Where is Hikaru, Mrs Satō?’

  ‘Down the hallway, in his room.’

  ‘Will he come out?’

  Mrs Satō shakes her head. ‘Not for some time now. I spoke to a doctor who told me that people in his condition are homeless in their homes. They live confined and inward. Hikikomori. They reject the world; they don’t live in it.’

  I look across to the wooden floorboards of the hallway. It’s as though Hikaru is not real, is not a twenty-eight-year-old man now, but has remained the seventeen-year-old boy I knew when I was a seventeen-year-old girl. I imagine a figure who hasn’t moved in a decade, like a monk who starves himself, secluded, meditating, to become mummified as he dies.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Mrs Satō says. ‘When I saw you at the station for a second time, I had a surge of hope. I thought it might help, perhaps, if you could write to him. The doctor said it can be helpful to have someone from the outside write letters to the confined person.’

  ‘I can do this,’ I say.

  She makes a great deal of thanking me. Her language is so formal, I’m embarrassed for her.

  That week, at my small desk in the open workspace I share with other part-time teachers, I write a brief note to Hikaru Satō. I say that I hope he does not mind me writing, that I saw his mother in the passageway at Nagoya Station and she invited me to tea. I see the young Hikaru in his ragged purple-and-white t-shirt, his grey tracksuit trousers. Was it a baseball team shirt? I can’t remember. I have a strange image of a child-man in my mind: Hikaru grown but still the teenager I knew. I say that I look forward to visiting his mother again. I keep the letter in my desk at work.

  When I’m at home, in the evening, I think of the letter folded and hidden in the desk drawer. I think I may feel warmth towards it, a need to protect it. I have done something by writing the letter. It is a different part of me, of my personality, that has written it. At home, at work and as I have been in my life so far, I am less of that person, more of another. The letter has been written by the part of me who is always waiting, expectant.

  I recall a story I was told by a woman at the language school where I teach. The story was about her sister. What she said has stayed with me. The woman’s sister left her husband, a reasonably successful businessman in the north, because of her own unfaithfulness. She was, the woman said, guilty of adultery. And yet she had never so much as dined, let alone spent a night, with any man other than her husband. The woman felt guilty of adultery because of her thoughts. More specifically, there was a place she liked to go, a garden somewhere in the city in which she lived. It wasn’t a very pretty place, but it overlooked the city from a high vantage point. She went here often, alone. She went there, sometimes, instead of going home to her husband straight after work on evenings in spring and summer, instead of spending weekend mornings with him. Each time she stood in this place, the woman felt both moved and singular. Because of this, her desperation to be in that garden, she eventually left her husband. I think of this story often; of the power this woman accorded her adulterous thoughts.

  Another week passes. J sleeps late again on the weekend and wakes as I am ready to leave the apartment to see Hiromi. I tell him I am going out and will return in the afternoon. He stands in the kitchen in his slippers and tracksuit, his face muddied, hair messy. He arrived home in the early hours after drinking with his colleagues. He pours a tall glass of water and drinks heavily from it. A line of water trickles from his mouth and falls on his t-shirt. He nods and I leave.

  I take the letter to Hiromi Satō. It is March and spring blossoms are starting to appear across the city in different colours, as bruises do on skin. I feel light as I take in their colour. The space I pass through between the apartment I share with my husband and the subway station allows for an internal transition. I feel it in me. I put one hand out to cover my guilt, and with the other I take something. It may be wrong, yet I do it.

  Hiromi greets me at the door of the Satōs’ apartment, we have tea, we find words to say. I pass her the letter. She takes it in both hands with so many thankyous.

  J and I visit my parents. My mother has prepared a large lunch, with crispy eel and soup with clams bought at a fish market that morning, betraying efforts that would not usually have been made. It’s still the early days of our marriage, and my mother acts as though she must impress upon J evidence of my family’s standards. She apologises, as she does every time, for the lack of space to entertain in the small, two-bedroom apartment.

  My father, who does not suffer much lunch-table discussion, asks J rudimentary questions about his work. I ask my mother whether she has many photos from the time I was in elementary and junior high school.

  Her eyebrows crease as though she doesn’t understand, but she leaves the table and returns with two old photo albums.

  ‘What do you want these for?’ My mother doesn’t like nostalgia.

  ‘Nothing,’ I say. ‘I saw the mother of an old school friend the other day. I was thinking of school.’

  ‘What friend?’

  ‘Hikaru,’ I say.

  ‘Hikaru Satō? It was his mother you saw?’ She remembers him, the shame of his failure to finish school, his disappearance from the world.

  I nod.

  ‘That friend was a guy?’ J turns, with a sharp movement, into our conversation. He says, light and jeering, ‘An old boyfriend, hey?’

  ‘He was a friend.’

  The photo albums sit in front of me, unopened. I regret this. As my parents look between J and me, I feel chastised. I’m supposed to be a wife.

  ‘Strange boy,’ my father barks. ‘Not made for the salaryman life.’

  My mother and I clear the table.

  It’s only later, when J and my father smoke on the balcony, that I open the albums. I prise the plastic pages apart and see myself as a ten-, eleven-year-old girl: childhood-thin, two neat plaits and school uniform, or dresses with frilled hems. Birthday parties, New Year gatherings, Nagoya Port Festival. Hikaru is not there. I flick through the pages, but he doesn’t appear, not in this album or the other one, where I am older, thirteen and fourteen, in my junior high uniform. How has he escaped? It’s as if he ran from these images as a child, knowing they would preserve him in places he did not want to be.

  ‘What did Mrs Satō say?’ my mother asks. She is scrubbing a frying pan in the sink and does not look at me. She is curious, perhaps wondering what it’s now like for the woman to whom the worst happened: the shame of raising a boy who failed to become a man.

  I take a cloth to dry the pan. ‘She told me that Hikaru is making some efforts towards improvement. She also said that Mr Satō’s business is going well. He travels a lot.’

  My mother nods. She dries her hands then makes tea, opening a packet of sweet rice cakes. She cannot compete with this, the success of Mr Satō’s business compared to my father’s struggles.

  J and I return to our apartment in the early evening. I’m not hungry after my mother’s big lunch but I cook something anyway, out of habit. J pours a can of beer into two glasses.

  ‘We’ve been married six months now—maybe it’s time for a child.’

  I feel both cold and warmth in me. A little of me is sad for him, I wear thin guilt, but I am strengthened by the feeling
that I can keep one secret inside me, the letters to Hikaru, so I can keep another. He doesn’t need to know I don’t have the urge he expects, the one every woman is expected to have. I hear my mother—Who will keep the country going in the future?—I imagine Japan occupied by the elderly, by grey stone figures who walk with gravel joints, a country that has slowed down. The only people alive are the ones who were born seventy years ago; it is a country without babies.

  J orgasms predictably, rolls over and breathes heavily. I rarely orgasm. Often it all passes so quickly I’m not even sure my body is aroused. I roll onto my side and rest a hand between my legs.

  At work the following week, I write another letter to Hikaru. I say that the encounter with his mother made me remember the abandoned construction site that we used to stop at on our way to school. This place at my desk, where usually I sit between classes, preparing for the next lesson or eating a rushed lunch, has changed. All of my usual actions now seem altered to me. I walk to a cafe selling steamed buns. I order cold tea because the warm cafe air is suffocating. I greet my colleagues, teach classes, attend the required meetings. All of these things are changed now. The presence of something unknown to others, the letters to Hikaru, this secret person who would be a source of shame, has shifted something in my life. A small fire has formed, it is bright yet it burns with guilt. My life, in comparison to what Hikaru has done, his rejection, is very different. The path was presented to me, and I took the path. Hikaru strayed so far from the path, perhaps he will never find it again.

  After the next visit, and my second letter to Hikaru, Hiromi Satō hands me an envelope; her two thumbs imprint small creases with her grip. She says nothing except, Thank you, Mai. I take the envelope and thank her in return.

  On the subway home I think about when we started junior high, and Hikaru and I sat next to each other. Perhaps because of this, we gravitated towards one another in the schoolyard. It is painful to remember that nobody else was drawn to Hikaru, unless to inflict pain on him. His quietness was punctuated by bursts of talkativeness, but only to me, about things that excited him, like the abandoned construction site, or far-off places like Hokkaido, where you could see the red-crowned crane dance in the snow, or America, where everything was so unlike Japan and everyone drives a car at sixteen. He could talk only about things he was interested in, and only at certain times, otherwise he was silent. The chatter of children coursed past him like a fast river. Hikaru floated in his own current that never intersected with another for long, that never let anyone else be pulled along with him.

  I open the envelope and see a crisp, clean ¥10,000 bill, so new it is as though it was printed just before Hiromi Satō put it into the envelope, as if it contains only our fingerprints.

  As I leave the language school one evening and walk towards the subway, I receive a phone call from J.

  ‘Where the hell are you?’ His voice is an angry, repressed whisper.

  ‘I’m just leaving work. What’s wrong?’

  ‘The dinner! My colleagues and I have been at the restaurant for half an hour. My manager too. You were supposed to meet us here. I don’t even have a clean shirt!’

  ‘I’m sorry, I forgot.’

  I had stayed back at work after the last class. There were some administrative tasks to finish off. Then I had tidied my desk and, when I was done, I sat down on my chair and stayed there for a long time, looking ahead of me but not really looking at anything. I felt a wave of fatigue come over me as I lifted my gaze and saw the endless desks of my colleagues surrounding me. My limbs felt soft and heavy, and I could not think of anywhere I wanted them to carry me.

  I take a different subway so that I can go straight to the restaurant without going home first. I won’t be able to bring J a clean shirt. These arrangements were made a few days ago, but somehow I didn’t think of the dinner at all today.

  It is an upscale Korean restaurant. They are all waiting for me to arrive. J comes to the entrance and walks me to the table. He tells me to say that I was very busy at work. Everybody has their partners, husbands or wives with them. They all look over and nod, greet me. A few of them watch me as I take my seat, as though curious about why I was so late. J keeps nodding and smiling, appearing apologetic and good-natured.

  ‘I’m very sorry,’ I say. ‘I was quite busy at work today, and could not leave on time.’

  I sit down between J and the wife of one of his colleagues. The waiter offers me white wine, and pours a large glass.

  I watch the other couples interact. The manager moves his gaze between people, making conversation. Each pairing or group seems to have one dominant person, someone a little louder and more confident than the others. I hear J tell the colleague next to him that we recently went to Takayama, to the hot springs, although he does not mention that he was sick. As is common in such encounters, only a positive story is presented to the group.

  The conversations continue as the food is served. The fatigue I felt when sitting at my desk an hour earlier has deepened. I wonder how everyone can maintain this performance, how they can care enough to keep talking, talking for so long. I am overcome by a sense of pointlessness. I wonder if they are straining to find things to say to each other. I am sure there is something wrong with me, some difference, if I cannot talk to people like others do, if I do not get enjoyment from it. I feel that this is someone else’s life that I am watching, while I wait for mine to come upon me, for it to start.

  J’s manager orders two bottles of soju and everyone is encouraged to drink.

  The woman to my left is perhaps ten years older than me. She has an open, confident manner, gold earrings and dark hair cut to her chin.

  She says, ‘You’ll be wanting to finish up work soon, I assume?’

  ‘Perhaps.’ I smile, nod. I feel that anything real about me is buried so deep, it almost makes me feel sick.

  ‘My husband tells me that J is progressing very well in the company.’ The woman sips her wine. ‘Now all you need are a few children, and what a nice life you’ll have.’

  I keep smiling and ask after her own children, whom I remember nothing about.

  After a while I excuse myself and go to the bathroom. I step into a cubicle. A watery blood trail, left by some other woman, is a small river in the toilet. I flush it away, think briefly of how often I see this silent trace of other women, something a man would rarely see. Perhaps I’ll get my period soon; maybe that is why I am so emotional.

  We get home around midnight. I feel unsteady on my feet. The wine, the soju. My head wavers; I rarely drink more than half a beer or a glass of wine with dinner. J undresses and lies down straight away. I go to the bathroom. I undress, run the hot water in the shower tub, and stare down at my body as the room fills with steam. I consider the short, fine hairs over my thighs, the triangle of pubic hair always covered by underwear; I look at my face in the small square mirror, at the hair now cut to my shoulders. To be a new wife is a good thing, my mother says. I am almost thirty, I risk having no other options. But I wonder what just one other life might look like, if such an existence is impossible. I step into the tub and hose down my body. The hot water runs down my back. I feel waves of nervousness, strange excitements I can’t place. The sense of anticipation is even stronger now. Every evening marks another day I have got through.

  I wake up and know that something is not right. My face is hot, and my chest, stomach and arms are covered in sweat. In my whole body, I feel an unnatural heat. Across from me, J sleeps, one thick arm over his forehead, loud breaths. It’s the alcohol, spreading a wildfire through me. With J’s every breath the nausea increases. I run and vomit into the toilet.

  J comes to stand over me.

  ‘What is it? You’re sick?’

  I keep my head low.

  ‘Are you pregnant?’ he asks. I can’t hear any tone in his voice.

  ‘No!’ I spit into the toilet.

  I crawl back into bed, even though it’s a Saturday morning, when I would no
rmally have somewhere to be or errands to get done. J brings a cold cloth for my forehead, a glass of water. The next hours, I have dark, strange, liquified thoughts. I remember something I had forgotten. Hikaru and I, when we were young, probably thirteen, left Nagoya together one weekend. Although we took the subway alone at that age, and the local bus, we had never left Nagoya without our parents. We took a train to Yokkaichi. It was not far, less than one hour from our homes, but it was a different city—a place where our parents had never taken us. Not somewhere we had to be, but somewhere we had chosen simply by looking at a map at Nagoya Station.

  We took a Kintetsu line train to Yokkaichi Station. We got off the train and walked past convenience stores and takeaway food places. It was just the two of us, beneath the long fluorescent lighting that makes every station seem like a city of the same world. From the outside, the station was tall and white, with large bluish windows on one side, a few trees at the front. Around us were concrete and roads and signs for shopping malls. The sky was blue. We looked at each other and smiled. We walked away from the station, which felt like ridding ourselves of our last safety. We came upon LaLa Square shopping mall. We went inside, passed restaurants with food displays, a cinema, a cosmetics shop, a candy shop where we filled our hands with plastic-wrapped sweets in many colours. We went into a gaming parlour and tried to win a toy but lost every time. People young and old sat in front of gaming machines in rooms that seemed to be made only of light and noise. The mall was just like Nagoya’s shopping malls, but it was also very different. Everything was significant because nobody had brought us here and nobody would tell us when to leave.

  I could see that Hikaru was happy. I guess you could say he looked like he was exactly where he was meant to be, under the precise conditions he needed.