Someone close to me recently remarked on how children can be completely in the present; they do not look forwards or back. I recall at the age of ten first feeling the swooping anxiety of looking forwards: something to be done at school the next week hung over every present moment. I still know the place of the memory: walking up a flight of steps outside, near the library, beneath a huge pine tree in the schoolyard. It is a rupturing, this breaking through of the future and its consequences into our consciousness; it is not something we are born with. The hikikomori have a finely tuned sense of the constructions of society, family, industry. Their retreat should perhaps be considered a warning. How do we cope with this division between the cave and the sun? When do we learn to want to be alone, to hope that solitude will soothe our suffering?
In Hiroshima, the hostel accommodation was a short walk from the main building, which housed the reception, and a small bar with a wooden bench and stools, as well as a few tables. The reception and bar walls were dotted with notes from past visitors, postcards and a map of the world. These details seemed to me to be a kind of uniform or code in nearly every hostel I visited, and I wondered if I was missing something said by their presence. To reach my shared room I exited the main building and turned left into a side street. At night the street was mostly deserted, the only sign of life the cool glow of a vending machine, this large rectangular offering was never without light.
In the small hostel room, with wooden walls and two bunk beds close to each other, dark blue sheets screening the lower bunks, I finally slept well. Perhaps it was the smaller room, or the fact that I had a lower bunk. I was uncomfortable in top bunks. It felt unnatural to sleep so high in the air, and my sleep was often visited by the old memory of being a child, sleeping in a caravan bunk bed on a holiday to somewhere I’ve forgotten. I remember that I rolled over in my sleep and fell into the nothingness before landing on the floor. I would usually laugh about this, when I told the story, as we often try to laugh when we look back on our childhoods. But on those solitude-stricken hostel nights in high bunks, those beds in the air, I could only think of the fall into the void, sleep-swaddled, night-clotted, and the ache at the end of it.
My exchanges with M’s friend, increasingly experienced by me as if in a waking dream, both eased my loneliness and created a new kind of longing. It was as though he and I existed in an unconscious shared space, our dreams bumping into one another in strange places. I could not imagine meeting him. In fact sometimes, particularly in the middle of the day, when the sun was very bright and I had been in crowded places, I felt that I never wanted to meet him. I knew him only in this tightly defined realm of our exchanges. Really, I knew nothing of him. He was effectively a character of my mind. Meeting him—and it is like this when we meet anyone of whom we have constructed a pre-real, preconceived impression—would shatter my creation. I did not want that to happen. I enjoyed the mental company of his presence. This kind of company, which was more my own version of him than the real person, was something I had always favoured. I started to worry that I could only live in such liminal spaces, outside of real relationships.
Could I learn something from what seemed to be a different sight that came with solitude? I thought for a long time about the words of M’s friend: I have lived a long new life. This conception of his life as divided into old and new, then and now, was tied to physical place: his life in Japan and then his life outside of it. From the train on my way through Kyushu, towards Nagasaki, I wrote to him: But isn’t achiragawa about places that are not physical? What I was perhaps asking him was: Do I have to leave my current conditions in order to get to that other place? I was perhaps trying to test, with some nervous method of detection, whether I could cause a great shift in my life just with thoughts. I was troubled by my own act of equating changing places with a great mental transformation. To want to leave is nothing new, I told myself. It is the human folly, that we move places for purely emotional reasons. We are not animals migrating for the seasons, not a herd chasing untrodden ground so there is food at our feet. I had seen this in myself and in people around me: the hope that our very thoughts would change by leaving. We think we are leaving unhappiness and buying a ticket to its opposite. Could we not attempt to measure the depths of our own inner mental caves purely by staying in the one place?
M’s friend said that, for a long time while he lived in Japan, he had tried to inhabit a different kind of life. I went inwards, he wrote. But it was the wrong kind of solitude. I was living a lonely life, but I still existed in the society I had tried to run from. A more drastic break was needed. I imagine you in Japan. I wonder what it is you are running from. Or perhaps you are running not from but towards something.
The twelfth-century poet Kamo no Chōmei turned his back on society in his mid-forties. After he was passed over for promotion in the family’s Shinto shrine, he took Buddhist vows and became a hermit. Chōmei lived in a small hut that he built himself in Hino, in the mountains near Kyoto. In his book Hōjōki, Chōmei describes how, after a long time in seclusion, the mountain deer come up close to him, reminding him how distant he is from the rest of the world. But he doesn’t find peace or any kind of enlightenment when he is alone. The book ends with Chōmei concluding that his heart is corrupt, that he cannot truly leave the city but cannot live there either. Solitude makes something fester inside him.
During the summer I spent in Japan, there was flooding across the large island of Kyushu, where Saga and Nagasaki are located. Every year the rains overwhelm this place. There are typhoons. The landmass of Japan sits on four tectonic plates, as volatile as the year’s fleeting blossom. Even the oldest man-made structures hold their breath in trepidation. Some of the train lines were closed. Two young women who shared my hostel room in Hiroshima couldn’t travel to Beppu, in Kyushu, as they had planned. Perhaps because of the lowering humid days, the threat of a torrential unleashing from the skies, as the trip progressed I grew more agitated. I was grappling with some questions about the stories I was attempting to tell. A book starts unknowable. I wrote: I need to understand what is happening to it.
Sadako’s story came to me after I recorded the account of Mai Takeda. I do not know her last name. Sadako’s story overlaps with Mai’s, in the limited way that our stories coincide with another’s, and covers the following month, which is important in the chain of events. Sadako was connected to Mai in ways that will become apparent. She never met Hikaru Satō. Sadako’s story is important for many reasons, starting with the hotel and ending with the cave.
II
Sadako
Spring to Summer, 2014
Sadako left the subway station at Asakusa and crossed the wide main road, making her way through the tourist stalls to the laneway. The public baths were at the end of the laneway, which was very short and only had buildings on one side. Apart from the baths, there was no reason to go there. Sadako liked this bathing house: it was cheap and quiet. She went there on her days off, walking under the blue cloth sign above the entrance into the ugly grey building, putting her shoes on the shelf and buying a ticket at the vending machine.
She nodded to the middle-aged woman who sat behind the desk and gave out the towels with a curt nod. After putting her clothes and bag in a locker in the changing room, Sadako sat on a low wooden seat in front of a mirror in the bathing area and washed herself. Warm water dampened her hair, flattening the strands and then streaming over her body. She scrubbed her scalp, arms, stomach, legs until the skin was red. Then she went to the water.
Above the large main bath, a mural on the wall depicted a scene of Mount Fuji in snow. Sadako looked down at her body in the water. Her figure had changed since she arrived in Tokyo. Her legs were thinner but her stomach was more fleshy. She felt bloated all the time from the alcohol she had to consume at work. Her breasts had shrunk as though something had been sucked out of her. And whenever she looked in the mirror, she saw that her skin was tight and puffy, her body always hot and starved of wate
r. Make-up couldn’t hide her poor skin, which had an ugly shine and a few spots.
After bathing, Sadako spent the rest of the day in her rented room, in an apartment she shared with two other women she didn’t really know. She made coffee and ate instant noodles while watching videos on her laptop, mostly about hostesses who had made it, who were popular and wealthy and who didn’t have to work in hostess bars anymore, their clothing brands earning them hundreds of millions of yen. They had birthday parties thrown for them involving tiaras, champagne and private clubs, and their faces were plastered over the entrances of the bars and clubs that afforded them this life.
Sadako did not particularly like her job, but she liked the security of the money it made her. She knew there would be at least a few ¥10,000 notes in her wallet at the end of a night. She couldn’t rely on rich parents or a husband.
Before work that evening, Sadako went to the hairdressers. The familiar toxic air of the salon made her head ache. She never felt well. Her body had a low tolerance for alcohol and she thought it would give in eventually. The salon was owned by Kumiko, who wore heavy perfume and had orange streaks in her hair. Kumiko was a little older than the hostesses who came to her salon, and, despite the noise of the hairdryers and the smell of hairspray, for Sadako there was something comfortable about the place. The girls could talk and complain about their jobs, laugh together or stare beyond the mirror in an exhausted daze. They didn’t have to wear their usual masks while they were in Kumiko’s salon. The girls would have their hair washed, dried and styled before going off to work in whatever club or bar employed them. It was almost like being cared for.
Sadako worked at a bar in Kabukicho. She had moved to Tokyo only a few months earlier but had already found a decent-enough job. She hoped to move her way up to working in Ginza, where she had heard the pay was better and the surroundings were nicer, more glamorous. She had also worked in clubs and bars in Yokohama. Even when she was nineteen, when other girls were studying and dating on campus at the university, Sadako was paid to dine in Yokohama’s lavish restaurants, to pour expensive cocktails and order otoro, the very best tuna belly, and other things she could never afford for businessmen with wives at home.
It seemed like the best option, or the only option. After her parents divorced, they were even poorer apart than together, so when she graduated high school, Sadako left home. Her first job was as a waitress, but the pay was lousy. An old co-worker came to the restaurant one night and told her to try out for a hostess job. She could earn a lot more money, live in a nicer room.
The bar in Kabukicho usually got busy around 10 p.m., when men started to leave their offices. That night, Sadako and another hostess sat with two men aged in their forties. As one of them put his hand high up on Sadako’s thigh, she slowly placed her palm on his hand and slid both of their hands off her leg. Another hostess had taught her this subtle move years ago in Yokohama—the men thought it was an intimate gesture and weren’t often offended. The bosses were always adamant that you must not offend the customer, no matter what kind of creep he was.
Sadako’s next customer was a man who said he worked in public relations for a hotel group. He was perhaps fifty, maybe older, a little reserved, with wrinkles around his eyes. She poured him his drink, made small talk, refreshed his drink. He leaned closer to her and asked if Sadako and two or three other hostesses were available to attend a party at one of the hotels in the group. Sadako said she would have to ask her boss. The manager of the hostess club gave permission, provided he was given a cut of the earnings, so it was agreed that three of them would go to the hotel that weekend.
The hotel, in Ueno, overlooked Shinobazu Pond. It was not a glamorous hotel; the building was a boxy structure with a red facade and a bright LED sign over the entrance. Sadako and the two other women were met in the lobby by a hotel employee in a suit. He was thin and had the pasty look of someone who did not go outside often. He led them to a conference room, broad and bland with low ceilings, that was set up for a meal. There was a bar at one end of the room. They were told that the hotel staff would serve the food; the three hostesses were only required to refresh drinks, mingle, be friendly. The men had been in meetings for much of the morning and afternoon: the presence of Sadako and the other women would ease the formal business atmosphere of the day.
A short while later, the businessmen arrived. Sadako recognised one of them—a man named J. He had thick dark hair and a stocky body, and though he was from Nagoya he had become a regular client at the hostess bar in Kabukicho. J nodded to her but didn’t show any other sign of recognition. Everyone drank champagne and the waiters arrived with appetisers like yakitori, grilled vegetables and lotus root crisps. Someone suggested they take in the view of Shinobazu Pond from one of the top floors of the hotel. They all went up in the elevators, looked out the windows. The mood was light but still slightly repressed. The pond had a steely grey surface, disappearing into the dusk. In summer, someone said, it would be covered in green lotus leaves. Soon it would be night and then they wouldn’t see a thing. After the men took photos with their phones and everyone had seen enough of the view, they went back down, filling two elevators, and dinner was served. Along the table were several grills and plates of raw meat and vegetables. The room filled with the smell of burning beef and smoke trails. Beer was served. Sadako saw the client from Kabukicho, J, laughing with one of the other hostesses.
As the meal ended and everyone stood up and went for more drinks, a short man with an eager face came up to Sadako. His cheeks were red and he held a tall glass of beer.
‘Do you know about these hotels?’ he asked.
‘What about them?’
‘They’re part of a big chain. There are nearly four hundred of them. The owner, he’s a rightwing guy, a nationalist. He writes his own books about history, or gets someone to do it for him, and then he puts the books in all the hotels. Four hundred of them. That’s a lot of people reading his books.’
‘What does he say in the books?’
‘Oh, you know, it’s a regular rightwing fantasy. He says that history doesn’t portray Japan fairly, that we didn’t do anything wrong in the war, in China or Korea or America. He says the Americans are against us, making up stories about things at Nanking, about women being sex slaves. He says it’s all a plot.’
Sadako didn’t know much about history. All she knew was that her grandfather hated the Americans and had stayed angry for decades before he died.
‘And all these businessmen, they read his books?’
The man shrugged. ‘Maybe, maybe not. The big boss would like it if they did.’
Another man approached them, and the conversation went back to small talk. Sadako maintained the smile she knew was on her face. She thought of her father—now living in a town she had never seen, somewhere outside Tokyo—in the days when he was a salaryman. Was he like these men when he was young: a loyal company employee, who touched the shoulders of hostesses and drank champagne, before the company spat him out, along with hundreds of others, when Sadako was a girl?
She looked over at J, who was still talking to one of the other women. He seemed like the average employee, devoted to his company; the type who worked long hours unquestioningly.
He turned around, saw Sadako watching him, and broke off a conversation with a colleague. He walked over to her and smiled.
‘Hi,’ he said. ‘Nice to see you again.’
‘And you too,’ said Sadako automatically. ‘Can I get you another drink?’
‘Let’s go to the bar together.’
Sadako knew that J had a wife in Nagoya. They had been married six months. There were no children yet, and he came to Tokyo for work three or four times a month. During their few meetings over the past few months, Sadako learned about J’s wife only through the comparisons he drew between the woman and Sadako. You’re much taller than she is, your hair is longer and thinner. She wouldn’t say something like that; you’re different from her. Sometime
s the comparisons were critical of his wife and complimented Sadako but, like so many of the men who came to see her regularly, his marriage seemed functional, and clearly he appreciated its stability. Sadako couldn’t imagine this man in a moment of spontaneity, being surprised by emotion. She wondered if he was happy in his marriage, or if that was even the point. Sadako had the occasional affair with a client, hardly what you could call a relationship. The older hostesses had warned her when she started: If you go out with a client, you lose a paying customer. Her meetings with J were so far limited to drinks at the bar in Kabukicho, sometimes with his colleagues, when he visited Tokyo from Nagoya. There was something strange about knowing only the husbands, fiancés, boyfriends, and only ever having a onesided, vague impression of the women in their lives.
Sadako passed a gin and tonic to J.
‘You know,’ he said, ‘we should get out of here and go get a drink.’
Sadako smiled. ‘I have to stay here—I’m working. What would happen if I just disappeared?’
‘That’s a shame,’ said J, but he was smiling too. ‘It would be good to get away from all this for a while. But I have to go back to Nagoya tonight.’
The Shut Ins Page 6