The Shut Ins

by Katherine Brabon

  I admit that as a vague impression of this man, M’s friend, formed in my mind, I tried to situate him in the stories presented here. It was around this time, on the verge of my return to Tokyo to finally meet M’s friend, that I received the account of Hikaru Satō. The time period presented here overlaps with the account of Hiromi Satō in important ways. The parallel lines are as if two leaves in a river.

  The account of Hikaru Satō is the last one I have. With each fragment that I have included here, I feel less sure I am presenting something true. At the time of writing, it is still not clear to me whether I should leave this story behind. And yet it seems important to convey the limited knowledge I have. It was in going to this other place, alone in Japan, that I found this new word, achiragawa, to move within, to think around. The story shed light on the other side.

  I arrived at Kurashiki Station early in the morning. The humid day felt nearly dark. I bought a hot coffee and a train ticket to Tokyo. Once on the train, I thought that perhaps it would be better not to meet him, this friend of M’s. He had been a constant companion, but perhaps the final meeting would destroy the place we had created, the nebulous non-place where words seemed to carry so much truth. His last two emails had been functional. Now that we were to meet, I was afraid the sense of disclosure and intimacy was no longer there. Already I missed the place where we met, through our exchanges, where we became more of ourselves, or so it seemed.

  At that point I think I understood achiragawa, the other side. A new concept can be a great comfort, a mental unlocking. In Japan I went inwards, perhaps too far, too close to the other side. I could perhaps have continued to travel alone and never settle into a society again. I have uneasily put down all of these accounts, incomplete as they are. In kintsugi, the art of repairing broken pottery, the fragments of clay are rejoined using liquid gold or lacquer dusted with powdered gold. The rejoined fragments glow with bright scars.

  IV

  Hikaru Satō

  Summer, 2014

  I don’t have many memories of the sea, but I had a dream about it and I remember the dream often. I’m not sure if this means I have valid memories of the sea. In this dream I am in a swimming competition. I think it must be somewhere in Chita, where there are long beaches. I went there with my mother when I was younger. In the dream, the other contestants and I are standing with the ocean in front of us. But the weather has turned. The wind jumps around the people. The sky is a shell; I can only see the pearly grey of the inside. The dream is ridiculous. I have never been in this kind of situation. But dreams are not allowed to be real. The wind has upset the sea and when we run from the sand to the water we must battle to take our first strokes. The natural leaders quickly advance and then I hear the first cries. Young men and women, realising the conditions, give up early. Their cries are like those of a child for a parent. I try to move forwards but my progress is slow. A boy younger than me asks if we can swim together. I try to nod and talk but cold water runs into my mouth. Soon I can’t see the boy.

  The waves don’t break. That is the most terrible thing. They just roll, enormous, and plunge beneath the surface. They are strong; the dark water pushes me back and I feel vomit rise in my throat. A wave approaches and I am lifted on the swell. The wave never breaks, it just carries me high-high-high—and then lets me drop me back down, indifferent. I’m making almost no progress now and trying not to call out, but I hear someone cry, Help! Help! and I realise that it is my voice. I have given in.

  I remember the dream vividly, but I only had it once. I don’t know if the beaches in Chita ever have waves like that. I woke before knowing if anyone responded to me.

  I heard Mai Takeda enter the apartment and have tea with my mother. Mai knew me when I was out in the world and this made it seem both easy and hard to think of seeing her again. I stood at my door that day, when I heard her. But I had cowardly feelings and didn’t open the door.

  I have read about people like me online, in articles and blog posts. It was sort of like reading about myself. The website version of who I am is a young man who plays video games eighteen hours a day. He may be violent. The online construction of me does not want company, does not desire connection with other people and whatever good feelings come from that. I think people must be scared of people like me. Those descriptions, especially the ones posted online, do not resemble me. I don’t think they do.

  My bedroom has a Western-style single bed on one side, a bookcase at its feet. On the other side of the room are a desk and chair. At the far wall, a window looks onto a narrow street with houses. I stare at the powerlines, sometimes for a long time, and follow them with my eyes as far as I can. I have quite a few books and magazines. On the desk is a computer. I used to have a TV but it stopped working. It took me a long time to tell my mother this had happened. Those weeks were as silent as winter, when you first step outside and see that it has snowed. Finally I told my mother that the TV no longer worked. Somehow she arranged for me to get a computer. It’s a laptop that came in a black bag and there were headphones with it. My parents stopped mentioning my birthday when I started staying inside my room, but this felt like a present. On the laptop I can watch movies, play games and read.

  I don’t mean that I sit on my computer all day. Sometimes I sit at my desk and feel the quiet, empty feeling that comes from not talking to anyone or seeing people. I think. Time seems to jam and then race ahead. I stare at my hands and then three hours have passed, almost without me in them. There are a lot of noises to hear in an empty house. There are small sounds from appliances and louder noises from the street. I like it when something happens in the street. Once, a car broke down near the front of our building. I liked watching the person get out of their car and try to work out what was wrong, and then I watched as other people came to help. There were three or four people standing around, mostly men, looking at the car, bending their heads, gesturing with their hands. Someone got out their phone, spoke into it briefly, nodding seriously. They must have called a mechanic because then a mechanic arrived. He solved the problem and then the owner thanked him and the people who came to help. I watched all of this for over half an hour. When they all left, it was very quiet.

  In my room I’m safe, but that doesn’t mean I enjoy spending all my time there.

  In elementary school, I mostly enjoyed the first year. My teacher, a young woman with a friendly face, was encouraging. Although she was firm about the need to make an effort, she made it obvious that she approved of attempts to do the right thing, even if mistakes did sometimes happen. She would nod, lean forwards over a student’s desk, and say, Keep on doing your best, or something like that. She never singled me out. As a student I wasn’t very good and I wasn’t very bad, either. This was fine. The first year was fine.

  Sometimes, in my first year of school, I saw other students being punished. Some intentionally misbehaved—they liked to joke or to whisper in class. Others made mistakes with their work or forgot to bring something important or wore their uniform wrong. This was worrying, as I knew that my turn would have to come eventually. Many students didn’t seem bothered by the teachers telling them off. Others grew very quiet or seemed terrified.

  I learned when I was young that it is easy to make mistakes in all areas of life. You can make mistakes with school work or in the way you dress or in how you act in public. Perhaps because there are so many potential mistakes, making them is inevitable. I don’t know who decides that certain things are mistakes, and if there is a greater purpose behind deciding something is a mistake. I became a bit obsessed with mistakes. I wanted to know the changing point, when something became a mistake. I felt that many things were turned into wrongs.

  In the second year of elementary school, things changed. I had a new teacher, a woman who seemed to be constantly disappointed in the work of her students. Why, she would ask, why could we not grasp her meaning unless she repeated herself to us in the most direct terms? This teacher wore long dresses, sometimes i
n bright colours. When things went wrong, when I made mistakes, the teacher directed her comments to my mother. His homework is not up to standard. He is slow to follow instructions in class. He does not understand concepts at the same speed as other students; she wonders if he is lazy, or a poor listener. My mother told me this was embarrassing—she needed me, as her son, to do better. And why didn’t I have more friends? Did I not like my classmates?

  The other students seemed to sense the teacher’s dislike of me; perhaps they also saw some weakness in me. They soon began to harass me. Nothing about it was very specific. Exclusion, targeted laughter, hitting in the playground. They said I was a spoilt boy, because I lived in Yagoto, which they said was a posh suburb. They guessed that I would be bad at sports because I was spoilt, so I never got to play except during classes. I don’t think I was that bad at sports, really.

  Soon, I felt something disappear from me. I was young and didn’t understand it, but once it was gone I might have described it as a light, empty bubble inside me, in my stomach, that felt comforting and meant I could do things, could act according to my first thoughts. That thing had gone. Without it, I had to be careful. Every act had the potential for bad consequences. After that thing disappeared from me, I could barely think about doing or saying something without some terrible repercussion growing legs and walking around in my head. I wondered—I still wonder—if one day I will become immobile, a statue of a man, because I feel so incapable of acting, because I live out every consequence in my head and am thus too afraid to move.

  I hope that Mai Takeda knows I wasn’t in my room for all of the ten years since I last saw her. I hope my mother told her this. I never got the chance to tell her. Nobody wants people to know only the worst things about them. I am twenty-eight years old now. I saw Mai when we were eighteen and then not again after that.

  It started slowly for me. Sometimes, I couldn’t go to school. I stopped at an old construction site on the way to school and couldn’t seem to move from there. It seemed to be a place where nothing was going forwards or backwards. I liked this about it. Once I stayed away from school for a few days, I started to feel a thickening around me, like I was slowly being closed off from the world. Soon it was harder to push through that thick, muted feeling. I knew that my behaviour was turning from an action into a mistake, but I didn’t know what else to do. I had realised I could avoid certain mistakes and consequences by staying inside. This was significant.

  At first, I didn’t stay in my room all the time, but after high school, I stopped seeing people I knew. I stopped seeing Mai Takeda. I could not stand to be near people like her, who were going off to university. It was the start of everyone getting further and further ahead of me. I would be left behind because I couldn’t move. I even started to miss the time we were at high school, because at least I was partly in that world. After it finished, everyone went beyond the place where I could only stay.

  I only went out to locations that seemed safe. I avoided places and times that I might see people from school. I never went near the subway station or the cafes where younger people congregated. I rarely went out during the day. I would ride my bicycle to a convenience store in the middle of the night, or sit in dark playgrounds. After a few months of doing nothing I tried to work. It was a job for a supermarket, unpacking their stock. My mother suggested it. She asked the manager about a job. She drove me there and told me I must stay all five hours of my shift. I could work late at night, when there was almost nobody around. It suited me. I could ride my bike there. I thought it was a job where you couldn’t make mistakes. The process was straightforward: a delivery arrived, you opened the boxes and unpacked them. But the people there had created lots of ways to make mistakes. If you unpacked the wrong box first, or didn’t unload things fast enough, or if you dropped something when it was very cold and you were tired, these actions would have consequences. Soon I spent every minute away from the job thinking about the potential mistakes and consequences. It is possible to create a whole hypothetical life of mistakes and consequences.

  After I quit the job at the supermarket, I stayed in my room for four months. My parents were not happy about this. I was almost twenty; why couldn’t I be strong and cope like everybody else? But it was in those first months in my room that I realised, just like in my school days when I stayed in the construction site, that I could avoid mistakes and consequences if I just stayed on this side of the door. This knowledge opened up inside me, a secret, a spring flower that unfurls in the middle of the night.

  In my room I felt like I had crossed a barrier, moved on somewhere, away from the people who lived out there. In Nagoya, in Yokohama, in Tokyo, in Toyota where they made a city of car-making, everyone moves constantly; they are hurrying, waiting, they are wanting things. They judge others because they think it is a shield from being judged themselves. They criticise and yell, or they are silent, full of looking. People are heavy with time, clothes, manners, structures. In my room, I had escaped to the other side. It was lighter. I did not have to wear a mask. I was just myself.

  My mother started to act as if it was normal. She brought food to my door when I stopped coming out for meals at the table. I would only go to the bathroom when I thought my parents weren’t home. I tried to bathe every day so that I would be clean, but it was not always possible if my parents were around. My hair grew long. Sometimes I made a mistake and went out of my room when my mother was home, but she would usually just stop what she was doing and stare at me or ask if I needed food. I would shake my head or not answer. I didn’t want to stop talking to her. I think she ran out of things to say to me. Nothing was happening except that I was in my room. Sometimes I’m sure I am locked in a frozen, timeless shell. I don’t look at my face in the mirror. Maybe my face has not changed in all these years.

  I was still ashamed of my failure to go to university or to get a job. I was ashamed to be in my room. And also, I was comforted by it. My mother continued to bring food to my door. She stayed in the house and did her usual tasks, she had murmured conversations with my father late in the evening or she put the TV on. My father came home less and less. Now he is just a cold wind that passes through the house late at night and departs in the morning.

  A pattern began to emerge, although like most patterns we can’t isolate individual parts until we step back and see it and call it a pattern. Only now can I see things from above. I would work for a few months in jobs that did not require me to talk too much or go on the subway or see anyone that I knew. I could bear the beginning, the first days of these jobs, although I never enjoyed them. I could bear it until I learned the specific mistakes and consequences of that job. Then the idea of those mistakes would overwhelm me and I couldn’t get up, couldn’t make myself leave the apartment and go to the workplace. I would then quit the job. I would stay in my room for months. I would think about the people I had met at that job, and burn with shame. It was essential to avoid those people at all costs. I wondered what they thought of me. My father would be angry; my mother would question why I had left the job or, more often, she would be silent. I repeated this. If I did leave my room I only went to places where it was unlikely I would see someone—a library in a suburb I didn’t know, a convenience store, a train station on the other side of town. It became a pattern of five years. And in all that time I did not see Mai Takeda.

  After five years in that pattern of working and retreating, I didn’t go out again. I was twenty five. I had seen it from above and knew that patterns are forced to repeat themselves. I had been inside my room for a few months. I don’t remember the moment that time inside my room became different. I realised that my fear of seeing people I knew, of seeing an old boss, of going to places associated with my previous failures, had grown to be a fear towards anybody who worked, anybody who was part of the systems everybody lived by. If I went to the library, to the park, I sensed a mark on me, some cloud or darkness that others could see amongst the colour of their lives. I stood o
ut. I’d failed to function in that world. I felt that they would all judge me and know my failures. Still today the thought of a person in a suit on the subway makes my stomach cold.

  What happened is that the other side, over there, a place we speak of that is far from our usual lives, became the side I was always on. It became this side for me. The world where everybody else lived, where people took the subway to work each day, had colleagues and friends, went to restaurants and cinemas and had conversations on their iPhones with their headphones in, they all became the other side. The sides reversed, and I couldn’t live on everybody else’s side. I didn’t try to find another job. I didn’t have any meals with my mother. I could only ride my bike to a convenience store in the middle of the night. Otherwise I could not leave my room. It had happened gradually. If you stand on the beach for a long time, you don’t notice how quickly the tide comes in.

  It had been three years since I had spoken to anyone except my mother when she wrote a note and put it under my door, telling me that Mai Takeda was coming to visit. I rarely left my room, only occasionally riding to a convenience store in the night, in the hours when people who live normal, regular lives are not out on quiet residential streets. My mother was home more; she is home much more often now than when I first went inside my room. I hear her in the house. Perhaps she doesn’t have many places to go anymore. It must be a bad thing to have a son who is not properly in the world. Since she is home more often, it is harder to find chances to leave my room and use the bathroom for showers. I don’t drink much water or tea during the day. Often I only need to relieve myself at the very last minute—at night, when I know she is sleeping. I have got used to showering less. Nobody comes close to me anymore so it doesn’t matter if my body smells bad.