Murakami writes of his concern with the false division between the members of the cult and the average commuter on the train. In other words, between the apparently evil and the apparently good. Rather, he worries that instances of young people being drawn to the cult shows us a distorted image of ourselves … these subconscious shadows are an ‘underground’ that we carry around with us. There is a sense of urgency in Murakami’s sentences. For people who are outside the main system of Japanese society (the young in particular), there remains no effective alternative or safety net. This is a black hole, he says, that can only threaten to draw more people into it. Each modern society has its own black holes. As creatures who think too much, we humans need ideas to believe in to feel comfortable. We can either choose a life of routine and structure built for us, or try to follow a different path, one that is unknown, that may be frightening, fulfilling, dangerous, true. Either path is confirmed by certain ideas, dictated less by physical needs than impulses emotional, philosophical, nebulous.
I wrote to M’s friend about my trip to Nagasaki. As if reporting to a diary, with the habit of listing very specific details that are somehow both mundane and deeply personal, I told him that I now travelled to Kurashiki, where I would stay in a hostel for three nights, and from there on to Tokyo. We had not yet discussed where or when exactly we would meet.
Most days I woke to a new email and each day my return to Tokyo approached. He had become a marker of my days, this man I had not met and barely knew. It is strange to say, but I felt a misstep in my chest if I woke and there was no word from him. In effect, he had become my only company in the country, the only person I knew for sure that I would meet. Every other encounter was anonymous; a fact that is exciting at first when we travel, in the thrill of arrival, but which soon enough becomes a source of isolation.
I asked M’s friend what precipitated his departure from Japan. I wanted to know the defining event. He could have said simply a work opportunity, or some other generalisation, but instead he said that it would perhaps be better to discuss certain things in person.
He did tell me that he usually felt hesitant, even nervous, before travelling back to Japan every year or so, but that the prospect of meeting me gave this present journey a new, brighter quality. He said he did not feel that he missed his parents. He had very nearly forgotten his old acquaintances, and for various reasons did not have many people he could call a friend. His visits were made purely out of filial duty. Some bonds are tied with skin; to break them you tear off parts of yourself. He said that he wasn’t capable of such self-inflictions. I felt uncomfortable. I had asked too much of him. In contrast, I had offered little of myself. Basic biographical details, easy sentiments of warmth about M, our mutual friend.
I tried to keep our conversations more general. Yet when I asked him about the things I was interested in—the sarin gas attack, the hikikomori, the idea of a person feeling homeless at home—still I felt that I had stepped too far into the personal. I guessed such questions had the capacity to seep into his own life, reopen old wounds. After I sent him my questions I walked again along the river in Kurashiki. I had walked the same path through the old town so many times that day. I didn’t know where else to go. I crossed the short bridge, conscious of seeing the same shopkeepers, the same young tanned men offering rickshaw tours around the town, hoping they did not recognise me walking the same paths again alone. Thinking of M’s friend, I was anxious in a familiarly guilty way, as often happens when I don’t know what lines or borders are constructed around a person and I don’t know what is right or wrong to say. Perhaps it was the humidity of the small town of Kurashiki, the low clouds, that caused the heavy, anxious feeling in my chest, across my forehead.
To my relief, M’s friend replied quickly. He said one thing that surprised him about his new country, that both pleased and horrified him, was that a person’s undoing, their release from society, could happen out in the open. People took other paths, rejecting the work and education and family structures of most people. You asked about the hikikomori. They choose another path, but there are not many ways for them to live differently, so they go to another place inside their very rooms. In the world I grew up in, it is hard to untie yourself from society. Writing this, I realise even I am still tied. His words were precisely those, and I wondered what fragile barrier I had risked crossing with my questions.
He wrote more. He said that he had a very formal relationship with his parents. His encounters with them were transactional in manner and feel. He had achieved a measure of success in his life overseas, and this enabled him to return without causing his parents any shame. They did not turn him away but nor did they welcome him. And yet, he said, each significant thought and action was measured by them. It’s as if I still see through their eyes, like a child sees their school day through what they will be able to tell their parents. My mother’s eyes, in particular. I’m sorry, he wrote, to speak about such personal things. I don’t want to say things that sound too strange, but sometimes I think I am talking to myself when I talk to you. I could be in a dried-up well, thinking my thoughts and hearing them come back to me in echo and darkness.
I did not say that I felt the same, although it would have been the truthful thing to write. Above all, I wondered if we would actually meet in just a few days’ time. I wondered if he felt the same hesitation as me; if he wanted instead to preserve the in-between, slightly unreal place we had created with our exchanges.
The night stayed hot, the day extinguished itself in a pink-flooded sky.
The story of Hiromi Satō runs parallel to the accounts of Mai Takeda and Sadako. A psychiatrist who specialises in the hikikomori condition says that most problems have their seed in the unhappiness of the mothers, many of whom are locked into the singular role of childrearing with little support from their husbands beyond the financial. The war-traumatised parents of these mothers created fussy, meticulous households in which the children became vigilant yet unemotional. As they grew into adults themselves, they could devote their lives to dutiful education and strict adherence to a company, and yet were not equipped to raise their own children. I don’t want to make such a judgement in favour of or against Hiromi Satō. If I have learned anything from the quiet that takes over me at times, from my own urge to retreat, it is that nobody is wholly bad nor completely good in all parts of themselves.
III
Hiromi Satō
Summer, 2014
Hiromi Satō arrives in Nagasaki in the raging heat. Although this is the town of her birth, she cannot accustom herself to this air that is like fire. Standing at a tram stop heading for the old Chinatown, she wipes her brow. A tram approaches, one of the loud old ones that were here during her childhood. The tram line follows the curve of the sea. At the Port of Nagasaki there are now cafes, restaurants selling pizza and seafood, where once there was only industry.
Hiromi’s mother still lives in the house where Hiromi was raised. The house is fifty years old and spacious, with traditional-style wooden walls and a tiled roof, old tatami on the floors that needs replacing. Hiromi has neglected her mother; she has been preoccupied with her son, Hikaru. She must get the tatami replaced.
Her mother greets her outside the front door. Her grey hair is long and tied back in a bun. Hiromi wears her hair, still black, in a similar style.
‘You came all that way.’ Her mother’s voice has become gravelly with age.
‘It’s hot, okaa-san,’ says Hiromi. ‘You shouldn’t stand outside.’
Hiromi puts her bags down in the kitchen and her mother spoons tea into a pot.
‘How is the boy?’ her mother asks.
Hiromi opens her mouth to speak, to repeat the customary responses, the shield of lies that protect against shame, but is caught on the threshold of something else emerging from her, a confession and collapse, the wave and destruction of a city. She swallows and says that Hikaru, her son, is living with other young people, and he will start a job trai
ning program soon. Her mother nods. The air in the kitchen is very warm, but the heat is softer and drier than outside. Her failed son, she loves him.
For less than a month Hikaru has been staying in the dormitory of the organisation that helped to persuade him to leave his room. It is a ‘halfway’ house, they say, which means it is halfway between the world inside his room and the world where most people live. It is not easy for him there. In fact, sometimes on the phone he calls it a nightmare and Hiromi wonders what she has done. Six other young people live in the halfway house, and a number of volunteers come and go throughout the day. Hikaru must help with the cleaning and preparation of the meals, and do his best to participate in social activities.
For three years her son did not leave his room, except for fleeting occasions in the middle of the night. Every morning, Hiromi brought breakfast to the door of Hikaru’s room. It was usually the same meal: soup and rice with fish or vegetables. She put the food on a tray and put the tray on the floor outside his room, knocked and walked away. She heard him open the door, take the tray, then close the door. This repeated interaction brought her both warmth and shame. Now he must help to make his own breakfast. Hiromi cannot picture her son doing this, but he must.
At first, her son tried to work, but at each job something caused him to fail. He would retreat into his room for months at a time. Hiromi admits to herself that this caused her great anger at the time. She wished he was what could be called a regular child, a good son in the eyes of society. Sometimes, Hiromi heard her son leave the apartment. Soon he began to do this at least once a week, more often in summer. He always departed after two o’clock in the morning, never before. On humid nights she imagined him in Shirakawa Park, eerie and floodlit and green, a quiet aquarium lit up only for him.
Hiromi never entered her son’s room, even when he left it during the night. Once a month she would call, Hikaru, give me your dirty clothes. Her son would put his clothes outside the door, by then soiled and pungent, and she left them outside his door when they were clean. She would knock and say, Your clothes, Hikaru. She adapted to this new situation, when her son went inside his room as though forever.
Hiromi slipped messages written on small pieces of notepaper underneath his door. These messages gave him news about the birthdays or sicknesses of relatives, or informed him if she and his father would be away for the weekend or return late from the family shrine.
The messages were also how Hiromi informed her son that the young woman, Mai Takeda, was missing. Mai came for tea in their apartment and would often bring a letter for Hikaru. After a time, it seemed only right that Hiromi should pay the young woman for these visits. Hiromi knew this happened for other young hikikomori men: the parents quietly paid a rental sister to write letters, pay visits, coax the confined out of their rooms. Their arrangement appeared to work well; Mai had been visiting for a long time. But then she stopped. Mai Takeda hasn’t visited or called for a month now.
Mai Takeda was Hikaru’s only friend at school. She was a small, quiet girl who wore her hair in two thin plaits, and she had conventional parents. In high school her son and Mai shared a strange friendship. Mai had other friends, while Hikaru was mostly alone. But for some reason, Mai Takeda never left Hiromi’s son completely by himself. She would come to their apartment to walk to school with him. Something seemed to connect them. Hiromi wondered whether the young girl preferred to be outside her parents’ home, walking the afternoon streets with Hikaru, staying after school to quietly watch Hiromi prepare the evening meal, to follow Hikaru as he showed her his comics, his Nintendo games. She had a special skill of watching, but every time would refuse, shake her head in silence, when asked if she wanted to join in. She would linger in their home, it seemed, and then make her way back to the apartment of her parents.
Her mother sleeps early and Hiromi is left in the house gripped by the heat of the day. She pours tea in the kitchen and takes down several cups from a shelf, wiping them clean of the dust that has settled over many of the unused items in the kitchen. She hears small noises from the street; the tick of a bike, the scrape of a step, the hum of summer.
Hiromi has a new phone that her husband bought for her. She isn’t very comfortable using it, but she knows enough to type in Mai Takeda’s name on the internet. The device feels otherworldly, glowing in the old kitchen of her parents’ home. She can see that Mai has a Facebook page, and although Hiromi does not have one herself—she does not wish to be contacted by people from the distant past who have not bothered to know her life again until now—she can see Mai’s name and picture and the city she lives in. In the photo she is standing beside a row of cherry blossoms, probably somewhere in Nagoya. She smiles but doesn’t show her teeth. She wears a black down coat and a dark red scarf. The photo reveals nothing. Mai looks very similar to how she looked in high school, although then her hair grew to her elbows while now it is shoulder-length.
She came back into their lives and then suddenly left it. Hiromi sensed that Mai carried great uncertainty behind her quiet face. She cannot fathom where the young woman has gone.
Hiromi did what she was raised to do, but something went wrong. She took control of her son’s education, his health, his sleep, his clothing, his food. Her husband worked. That was how things were done. She sent her son to cram school, where the children were at their desks at seven in the morning and released to their futons late in the evening. She found a good elementary school, and while she could not get him into the best high school in Nagoya, it was the second best, and it was where Mai Takeda would go and that was good, she thought.
The pressure and expectation have always felt monumental, almost religious, like the eyes and hands of gods haunt her, and her failures amount to disrespect of them. And so the fear has always been monumental too, because the consequences would come from a place beyond her, over there on the other side, where the presence that she has long felt is watching and pressuring her resides. She has met these pressures; she must pay her duties to that presence every day.
Sometimes her son says that he would like to come back home. The dormitory is difficult for him. Hiromi says he must try, he must try to persist there for some time. But her heart wishes for him to return. She cannot be any kind of mother to him when he lives in a halfway house. She feels his need to return like it is her own need, pulling him back to his room, to her, like the moon drags a tide.
Hiromi Satō thinks of her parents, her father dead now, her mother withered and sleeping, and what they would make of the son she has raised. Coward son, she loves him. The Japanese mother raises a little emperor until he is four, and then brings a crushing weight down on his shoulders, forcing him into the mould that was waiting for him before birth. Hiromi Satō knows that she has transferred this weight onto the shoulders of her son. But the act has not relieved her; like a virus the burden multiplies, splits and transfers to the children.
The rooms are cooler in the mornings and Hiromi rises early. Her mother still sleeps. Hiromi sweeps the floor and the front step of the house. She reads an old newspaper and drinks tea. Her phone rings silently. It is one of the volunteers from the place where Hikaru is living. She says they will take a group on a pilgrimage soon, walking along ancient roads to the mountains and rivers, through forests of bamboo and oak. They will sleep in traditional inns. Every resident is welcome to join. Hiromi thanks the woman.
The volunteer’s voice is hesitant as she says, ‘Hikaru is struggling. We are not sure he’s ready to take such a trip. We like to make it available to all residents, but in our opinion it is not advisable in his current situation.’
‘Does he say he wants to go?’
‘He has not expressed a preference. He speaks very little.’
Hiromi thinks she detects in the volunteer’s voice a thinly veiled frustration, and she feels embarrassed that, even in this situation, her son is not performing well. Somehow it has all gone wrong.
Some of the residents at the dormitory are
enrolled in a job-training program. They attend classes in customer service skills, public speaking and computer software. People who used to stay in the dormitory—they are called recovered hikikomori—sometimes volunteer to speak to the residents or join in activities. And on other days, staff from the organisation bring in their children and the residents play with them on the floor or read them stories from picture books. Hiromi cannot imagine her son doing any of this. He has not joined the job-training program. He has not progressed enough for that yet. She does not know what he does with each day.
‘Can I speak with my son?’ she asks.
Hikaru comes to the phone. His voice is slow and heavy when he says hello. He asks her if Mai Takeda has called.
‘No. But perhaps she is taking some time away from the city. Her husband may not like to share details of their personal life. It’s not our business.’
‘Someone should find her.’
‘It’s not certain that she is missing.’
‘She stopped coming.’
‘I am sure that her husband is handling it. It’s not a good idea to get involved in other people’s concerns.’
Hikaru is quiet.
‘Do you need any money?’ she asks.
‘No, I don’t need any money.’
‘I will call again.’
Her mother wakes and Hiromi hears the shuffle of slippers as she slowly comes to the kitchen. The age of her mother’s body quietly shocks Hiromi, particularly first thing in the morning, when a person is at their most vulnerable. Like a prehistoric bird, her mother’s hands are claw-like. Her back is bent, skin loose and wrinkled, her stomach hanging low on her otherwise thin frame—an ancient reminder of a pregnant body.
The Shut Ins Page 10