In some moments, I feel that Hikaru is not even there, behind the closed doorway, as if he does not exist; that Hiromi Satō and I have created him through our meetings over tea and rice cakes that we no longer eat, through our act of quietly clinging to each other amid our lives. He is on the other side now, and because we do not know that side, we cannot bring him back.
On three or four occasions, I stand at Hikaru’s door. I knock gently and say, Hello, Hikaru, it’s Mai Takeda. I am visiting again today. Once I say, It would be nice to see you, if you feel like coming out one day. Only when I hold my breath do I think I can hear something: a slipper on tatami, a sniff or breath, a creak of wood. I stand as though at a shrine, straining for the sacred sounds of the dead. After moments that stretch the silence, I walk back to the living room, where Hiromi looks up from the table as though waiting for a doctor to deliver news. Hikaru has gone further than either of us have ever been able to; where he is, we do not have language, we do not have sight. I feel stupid about the words I said, standing at his door. Surely they would not have crossed over to him, through his wooden barrier.
A couple of months after my failed trip to Gifu Prefecture, Hiromi Satō and I kneel at her table for tea and rice cakes. She says that, if I would like, I can go to his door again today.
‘I don’t know if he hears me, Mrs Satō.’
‘Of course he would hear you. The wood is not thick.’
‘Does he sleep through the day?’
‘I see him in there all the time, in my mind, but I never see the real image of my son in his room.’
She stands up and walks towards the front door, where her purse sits on a shelf. She opens it and removes something.
‘Here,’ she says. ‘This is the last photo I have of Hikaru. He was sixteen. We went to Chita for a day. There have been no photos of him taken since then.’
I look at the photo. Hikaru stands next to Hiromi on a beach in Chita. Blocks of white buildings stand behind them, and beyond them are trees, hills. I nod; I do not know how to react. I think I hear a confusion of pride and mourning in Hiromi’s voice, as though all at once she is presenting the ultrasound image of an unborn first son, a photo of his graduation, the picture displayed at his funeral. Her loss is strange and I feel complicit in it now. Hikaru will not leave his room although I have written so many letters. He wields his absence over us. When we stand and I walk to the door to leave, the photo is still in my hands. Hiromi won’t take it back; she says she has a copy of it.
At work I find it difficult to make myself do the tasks required and to say the words I am supposed to say. I make a few mistakes. I forget that I am to replace another teacher one day. On another, I leave my books in the classroom after a lesson and cannot find them for my next class.
I don’t feel any great shame at my mistakes. When I first started my job I was often afraid, careful not to do the wrong thing, to avoid embarrassment or other consequences. Now, when I commit mistakes, I don’t seem to feel anything. My colleagues, apart from their expressions of repressed satisfaction when they tell me about my mistakes, don’t treat me any differently. We greet each other pleasantly in the mornings, sit together or nod in acknowledgement in the staff lunchroom, discuss schedules and lesson plans and other things that need to be done. They cannot see the secret change I feel. It’s as though I am freed of them and they don’t know it. I’m glad about this. They do not know about Hikaru, or Gifu Prefecture where I was born. They do not know of the letters I write to Hikaru or the abandoned construction site we stopped at before school. This is a new feeling and it is possibly the most powerful one I have ever had.
On my day off, I spend the whole day outside. The spring air feels hopeful. It’s only when the day comes close to passing that I begin to feel cold, and a light sadness overcomes me. I return to the apartment an hour before J is due to return home from work. I sit on the floor at the table in the small kitchen area of our apartment, reading a news website on my laptop. The blinds are half closed, like eyes that struggle to wake up. There has been a mild earthquake in Kyushu, near where J’s sister lives. I pick up my phone from the table and call her; she says they are okay, nothing has happened to them. We talk about the Tohoku earthquake, three years ago now, and how some people have sent drones into the towns near Fukushima, to take photos. The towns have died but they keep living, grass grows back, birds fly over, cherry blossoms fill the streets with no people to stare at them. A yellow traffic light beats a signal for nobody. Books and teacups stay in rooms, on tables, clothes hang waiting in wardrobes. All of the ingredients for a life are there, all the things we are told we need, but now there are no people to use them.
J’s sister asks me if there is any news, if I am well. She does not seem to want to end the call. I tell her I am fine. I ask after her children. She says that the younger one caused some difficulties this week.
‘He failed a test. Every day, he asks to stay home from school. I want to protect him but I also feel angry at him. He cannot cope and I don’t know if it’s my fault or if he is weak.’ ‘I think that many people may seem to be coping but in fact they are not.’
J’s sister only sighs.
We hang up and I sit in front of the computer. I think of Hikaru. Perhaps he would like to live in one of those nuclear towns, a place broken down and freed of structures. It is the structures on this side that Hikaru runs from. I imagine Hikaru in one of those towns, walking through it with a small smile on his face. He wears the clothes—the purple-and-white t-shirt, the grey tracksuit trousers—that he wore on the weekends when we were teenagers.
We are obsessed with structures, maintaining order, and we hold our breath for our whole lives.
I search online for places that might help Hikaru to leave his room. There are several support groups in Nagoya. One of them proposes a collaborative approach to treatment by including parents, the person who will not leave their room, and the community. There is a dormitory where people who have been unable to leave their rooms can stay, along with a team of social workers and volunteers. People have the opportunity to engage in practical tasks and courses. I type the details into my phone so that I can offer them to Hiromi Satō.
J arrives home. I close the laptop and begin cooking dinner. I slice white fish and soak it in sauce. I prepare a salad and rice. J is quiet, scrolling through his phone and sipping a beer.
Later, in bed, he shifts his whole body over to the side of the futon where I lie, pressing the length of his body against me. His hands grope my breasts, my stomach. He breathes over my neck and into my ear, says it is time I gave him a child. I feel that I am wrong, a wrong person and woman, not the right kind of person to be a wife. What kind of wife does not desire her husband, does not wish to have his children? I shift my hips and part my legs so that he can enter me from behind. J comes quickly and then says he has to go to Tokyo the next day, for work. What would it mean, to be free of dependencies, the structures we have created? Would it be a crisis, like crawling over hot stones that burn and hurt, until we emerge, staggering again to our feet; a transformation into one’s own being, a separate individual? I do not know if I would recognise myself.
When J is in Tokyo, I visit Hiromi. She notices my flushed face and asks after my health. I admit that I have felt feverish, a little unwell, for some time.
‘I’m sorry that Hikaru didn’t respond,’ I say.
Hiromi shakes her head. ‘It has been a long time.’
I tell her about the dormitory I found online, the social workers and the support available. I tell her that I will explain all this to Hikaru in a letter. Hiromi thanks me, her language so formal I almost recoil from it. She says that she cannot talk to her son about such things. She cannot imagine what words she might use.
‘In many ways you do feel like a sister to my son, like a daughter to me. I am so grateful to you, Mai.’
‘It is helpful to me as well,’ I say to Hiromi. ‘Before this, my life did not have the same sense of p
urpose. I am the one who is grateful.’
‘I wish you every happiness, Mai Takeda. I hope you feel it now.’
For a brief moment, I wonder if I can tell Hiromi Satō that I am worried for reasons I cannot quite name, that fears and harsh thoughts about my life seem to follow me. I wonder if I can tell her about my attempt to go to Takayama, in Gifu Prefecture, and how I failed in this. But I don’t; the words don’t cross over from my thoughts to outside. We finish our tea as I tell her inconsequential things about my life, about J and my job.
Now that I have started this correspondence with Hikaru, with him over there, on the other side, I don’t know how to stop. If he doesn’t come back to this side, I don’t know how these encounters will reach a natural end. It’s not a secret I can keep inside me, alive, for my whole life, my whole marriage. Surely it has to emerge one day. A warped birth, a reckoning.
The nausea is worse the next day. I don’t yet have my period although I feel hot, and my thighs have swollen, like they do before I menstruate.
J arrives home from the trip to Tokyo. He stayed the night there in a capsule hotel. It’s after midday, but I think he is still drunk. He plants a rough kiss on my forehead. His breath is hot, acidic and sweet. He has put on weight lately, around his middle. He stands in the kitchen, eyes unfocused.
‘How was your meeting?’
‘The meetings were fine.’
J steadies himself against the counter and blinks. His lips are pinched and his cheeks are red.
‘Is everything all right?’
J nods and grimaces. ‘Yes, of course. I probably had too much sake. Can you make some tea?’
He sits at the table. In his suit, with his dishevelled shirt and ruddy face, he looks out of place in our small, humble apartment. J looks over at me as I prepare the tea, watchful but inscrutable. I often feel his disapproval, as though his gaze is an extension of my mother’s, my father’s. Our eyes meet and an odd, almost loving expression passes across his face. I have the strange impression that the look was not meant for me. I busy myself with the tea and bring it over to the table.
J looks at me with a sudden, sharp expression.
‘You seem different. Are you sure you’re not pregnant?’
My body, already warm, feels hotter, like boiling water might start dripping from my hair. I shake my head. No, I am not pregnant. There is nothing inside of me.
‘You’re acting strangely. It’s like you’re keeping a secret.’ He leaves the room to take a shower. I try to sip tea. I swim in nausea, breathe in hot clouds. Nothing will change, I tell myself. Nothing will change because you have no words and you have no place to go. You cannot cross to any other side.
J comes out of the bathroom after a long time. His hair is damp and his red cheeks now shine. He says that it is sunny outside, that we should go to the park.
Note no. 2
In Saga, I slept on a futon on a temple floor. Koji, who took over at the temple from his father, picked me up from the station and complimented my sparse belongings. He said that most people bring too many things with them. I didn’t say that in the heat, with my tired body, even that small bag felt as heavy as a life. We shared cold tea in his kitchen and he told me that guests weren’t allowed to use the gas stove, it wasn’t safe. I was hungry that night, and didn’t sleep well. I heard the young priest talking with his wife as they prepared dinner together. I woke to the sound of bells and the early calls of the sutra.
Saga, now a small regional city, has old roots. Some things I wrote when I was there: I walked through the old town, which is really just a street now, the rest is 1960s, fading, ageing. Lots of older ladies in gloves and hats with umbrellas, long sleeves and long pants. I also wrote: I feel I have a better sense of Japan than I did before, in an unnameable way. Travelling alone has been good for that.
My friend M had said she wanted me to meet someone while I was in Japan. The night I arrived in Saga, I received my first email from M’s friend, a man who was once a close friend of hers, although they had lost contact in recent years. M felt it was important that I meet him. She arranged for us to see each other in a fortnight, when I arrived back in Tokyo. His family still lived in Japan, in the city of Nagoya, but this man had lived overseas for some time. He was returning for a short visit.
I had written to him from the train on my way to Saga. I introduced myself, I spoke of M, but I did not yet say anything about the things I had spoken of with M, about achiragawa and our affinity with the other side. I read his reply in a small alcove beside the spare temple bedroom in Saga. He was interested in me, in my travels alone in Japan. I wiped my brow, behind my neck. Koji told me the temple bathrooms were only available to guests at certain times; I would have to wait until later that night to use the shower. I wrote a reply to M’s friend.
From there, our conversations happened very easily. It can be easier to write in a faceless way online than to meet somebody’s eyes. As I made my way along the landmass and coast of Japan via the fast trains, M’s friend and I wrote regular emails to each other. I soon learned that M had told him of my desire to understand achiragawa. The relative anonymity of our exchanges, the fact that we hadn’t met, gave our conversations a blunt honesty which, in my slightly unsettled state, was both good for me and something I fed on each day. I began to associate our exchanges with my perceptions of a place. The fraught atmosphere of a hot and busy station, at morning peak hour in a town I didn’t know, which would usually bring about a heavy, anxious feeling in me, was eased by a message from him received in the early hours. A night in a hostel with no word from him became overlaid with a lonely feeling and a desire on my part to leave as early as possible the next morning.
He knew the questions that interested me, the concepts of this side and the other side, over here and over there. He knew the difficulties I had experienced in trying to understand achiragawa, the other side; or, rather, he recognised my need to understand my own preoccupation with it. He said he understood my admitted need for another possible life, to know what my life would be like removed from my current circumstances, my steady job, my relationship and family. He said that sometimes, when the right conditions or stressors or opportunities present themselves, some of us take up those lives. He had lived a long new life, as he called it, outside of Japan, for almost six years now.
He always sent emails between one and two o’clock in the morning, and so each came to me in a moment of hazy discovery, either half asleep, as I grasped for the bottle of cold tea near my pillow in the early hours, or on first waking, as the raw brightness of my phone mixed with his sudden presence and whatever words he had left for me in the night. Often, he would share small details from his life in the large American city where he now lived and worked. He might mention something interesting he had noticed: how most people from his office seemed to run the same route along the river but at different times of day; some in the near-darkness of morning, others during lunch hour, others again after the work day ended. He might describe an aspect of his daily routine, how he worked long hours but not as long as might be expected, and he was glad to have time to swim in a nearby indoor pool, or to do something as simple as arrive home in time to cook a meal before dark. Or he might tell me that a friend had recently got married and had a child, and that he was very happy for this friend. As I lay waking slowly and reading, I imagined this man in his long new life, and I wondered what his life was like before.
I asked him what he meant by his long new life, why he called it long when it had been, in fact, less than a decade? Sometimes, time is dense, he wrote. And when it is dense, it elongates. My time here has been very dense, with more experience than I thought possible in so few years. It makes Japan feel very far from me. He perhaps felt that he had crossed over to an other side, and that he was now writing to me from it.
I surprised myself by telling him that I was feeling lonely in Japan, that I was not sure what I was trying to find, travelling there by myself. I told him that
I wrote a journal of notes to myself, on my computer, and that my intention had been to write a book. I was frustrated at myself for sometimes wishing away the days so that I might return to the normal structures of my life. I told him that I did not want to rely on anything too much.
Briefly, he alluded to some difficulties he had faced in his old life in Japan. He referred to the rigidity of its structures, how he had longed to feel lighter in the movements of his life.
According to legend, the sun goddess, Amaterasu, hid in a cave after arguing with her brother, the god of storms. Without her, the world had no sun. Eventually, Amaterasu was coaxed out by a dance performed by other gods, and by a mirror they hung up outside the cave. Amaterasu saw herself reflected, and that earthly image pulled her back to this side. The cave was then sealed. It was her responsibility, as the goddess of the sun, to remain in this world, otherwise it would be in darkness. The first emperor of Japan embraced Amaterasu as his ancestor.
The hikikomori also retreat into a cave. Some see the phenomenon as the ultimate expression of passive-aggressive behaviour. It is a rejection of society by inaction, by a refusal to participate. Hikikomori is a person and a condition. One expert defines the condition as a coping strategy that is activated in response to the excessive pressure of social realisation, typical of modern individualistic societies. I had hoped that learning the plight of the hikikomori might offer a way to understand some of the anxieties of a life. The terror of forming thoughts into words in the presence of a group. The fear of going anywhere because of a sudden need to flee. The resistance to doing something just because it is what everyone else does. I felt closer to the hikikomori with every account that I read. I guessed that they might be one way of reaching or knowing the other side.
The Shut Ins Page 5