The Shut Ins

by Katherine Brabon

  My mother wrote that she had seen Mai in the underground passageway of Nagoya Station. She had invited her to have tea. Mai would come to our apartment, after all those years.

  I looked for Mai on the internet and found her Facebook page. I could see her picture. There were pink cherry blossoms in the photo. She looked very similar to how she looked in high school, but her hair was longer back then, almost touching her elbows. I looked for a while at her face and the cherry blossoms. Those flowers would have fallen to the ground and disintegrated a long time ago. I felt strange and empty when I looked at her photo. I am full of things with no names, like the symptoms of an illness nobody knows.

  Mai always did the right thing at school. She was quiet but raised her hand to answer the teacher’s questions. She followed instructions and never complained or made trouble for anyone. During elementary school, I would see her playing with other girls in the schoolyard. But she looked different to them; she was separated by something, detached from the others who whispered and laughed together and shared private jokes. She stood slightly apart, as though she preferred to watch.

  We didn’t talk to each other until junior high. It was the first week of the new school year. The weather was still cool in the mornings. I wore my shorts and shirt as I walked to school. I always preferred to look up at the powerlines rather than down at my feet. The road was winding and went up a hill, so cars would beep their horns at me when they flew around the corner. That day, Mai was walking in the same direction. We saw each other and walked side by side.

  The most important thing to me at this time was the deserted construction site on my walk to school. At first I only looked at it. I was comforted by the way it was pointless and imperfect. Then I went inside and walked around. The site had walls without ceilings and steps that led nowhere. There were unused materials in crates and sheets of thick plastic lying around as though waiting for something. The concrete floors had traces of dirt from work boots, but it looked like nobody had been there in a long time.

  My mother and father didn’t know about the construction site—they didn’t know I went there—but one morning, I told Mai about it. We had walked to school together a few times, though since she lived in another suburb we could only walk part of the way together. Once we even stayed behind after school to sit on the basketball courts. As soon as I told her about the construction site, how I liked going there and that it seemed sort of comforting, I regretted it. I felt I had exposed the most secret part of myself. I expected her to laugh at me, to tell the others at school about my odd hiding place. But she didn’t tell anyone. She went there with me. She stood next to me as we stopped and looked at it, and a few times she came inside. She walked through the unfinished rooms and looked at it all. She was quiet. I can see now the image of us there together, in our school uniforms. I see it from a distance as if I’m not that boy anymore, I’m just watching him. She seemed to understand something about the place. After that, we went there a few more times and we often walked to school together. I liked that I could share the place with Mai Takeda.

  The first time Mai Takeda visited my mother, I heard everything. It was the afternoon and I had been sleeping, but I woke up when the apartment door clicked open. I had become very sensitive to the sounds outside my door. My body learned the sounds of my mother and my father. I stood next to the bookcase at the end of my bed. I ran one finger along the comic book spines while I listened. I heard my mother greet the person at the door. I heard the person say, Hello, thank you for inviting me here. It was a woman’s voice, but I knew it was Mai. Her tone sounded the same as when we were in school. They went to the kitchen, my mother made tea, they went to sit in the living room. I heard every movement. I could not hear what they were talking about. She stayed half an hour. Then they stood up, went to the door, Mai put on her shoes and left. She thanked my mother, and my mother’s voice had softened.

  I did not expect Mai Takeda to come back to our house. I thought she had only accepted my mother’s first invitation to avoid being rude. People do lots of things they don’t want to do, for the sake of manners and the expectations of others. But she came back and had tea again with my mother. She stayed a little longer than half an hour, and then they stood up, went to the door, and Mai put her shoes on and left. My mother’s voice sounded warm, polite and soft. Usually her voice is low but slightly brittle, the texture of a material that might break.

  One night during the weeks Mai Takeda started visiting, I left my room. I went outside. Her sudden reappearance into my life made me think of the abandoned construction site. I wanted to know if it was the same. Outside it was winter and very cold. It had been a long time since I went out at night and the cold air shocked my body. My whole self felt exposed. Usually, I barely noticed the seasons pass. Only their sounds outside were different; winter was sharper and quieter, summer busier and more talkative. Soon, sleet fell from the sky and melted instantly on the pavement. My breath was white. I walked quickly; it was after 1 a.m., a time when the suburbs are empty of people. To walk there only took ten minutes. I remembered the slight curve in the street, following an incline, the levelling out of the road and then the construction site. The sleet was getting thick when I arrived. The building was finished. On the ground level were two shops. One was a hairdresser and the other some kind of grocery store. Both were closed and dark. Above were residential apartments. A couple of lights were on. Regular people lived their lives there. The place had become just like anywhere else. I was so angry at myself for going there.

  Mai Takeda and I went to the same high school. High school was different to junior high. It was even more difficult. I was bullied less but that was just a sign of my invisibility. Each of my classes had different students, and somehow nobody spoke to me. Mai sat with me sometimes if we shared a class, or we walked around the school yard during breaks, but she also had other friends and they laughed at her for walking with me. Perhaps it was obvious to everyone that I was terrified of them. This gives people power and they use it even if they don’t really care about using it.

  Gradually, in high school, I felt something else leave me. When I was a child it had been the small, light bubble inside me that disappeared. Now it was as though all the energy had been sucked out of me. If I didn’t protect myself, I would soon die. That didn’t necessarily mean a regular death, of the body, but something in me would die. I was sure of this. So I sought the refuge of my room. At first I told my mother that I was sick, that I couldn’t go to school. She would say, But what is wrong with you? and I never really had an answer. Eventually I simply did not answer her when she called me from the other side of the door. She might occasionally try to come in through the door, my mother, but this started to make me angry and I put the bookcase in front to block her way. Sometimes I would plan to go to school but then be unable to. I might even get dressed in my uniform and start walking there before giving up. More often I would go to the abandoned construction site, even though it wasn’t on the way to my school anymore. Nobody else was ever there, though sometimes Mai would guess that I was there and come to sit next to me. She had stopped wearing her hair in plaits by then; it ran straight down her shoulders, and she wore gloss on her lips that made them slightly pink. She would say, Hikaru, it’s time to go to school. But she understood that I could not go, and she would say goodbye and leave so that she would not be late.

  Mai Takeda only stayed with me at the construction site once. It was a cold day. I remember feeling cold. But I had brought a warm jacket with me so that I could stay there for the whole day. Mai wore her regular uniform with just a thin blue blazer. Perhaps it was the last year of high school. We were sitting with our backs to a concrete wall, the open grey sky over our heads. I don’t remember what we talked about that morning. We talked about a lot of things in that abandoned construction site: what the buildings might be one day, if they would ever be finished; about the teachers at school and the different personalities of Mai’s friends; s
ometimes Mai tried to convince me to come to school, and sometimes I tried to explain to her why I couldn’t go, that I felt that there was a wall between me and other people, we were in different places, everyone would soon be far ahead of me and then I wouldn’t even be able to hear them on the other side of the wall.

  I expected Mai to stand up to leave for school at the usual time, but on that cold day she didn’t say anything, and she didn’t stand up. She pulled her blazer tighter around her body and looked down at her legs. She shivered and her breath came out stuttered.

  ‘Are you cold?’ I asked. ‘You can have my jacket.’

  She shook her head. ‘I’m fine.’ She stared straight ahead, her body very still.

  ‘You look like you are really thinking,’ I said to her.

  ‘Hikaru, do you ever wonder what will happen?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean, what will happen when the school or your parents find out what you’ve been doing. Do you wonder what the worst punishment would be, what they could really, actually do to you? I mean, it’s not like they can take you to jail. It’s a different kind of wrong thing, skipping school. The same with being different, not doing the same things as everybody else—it’s not really a crime, but it’s still seen as wrong.’

  It took me a while to get the right answer in my head.

  ‘I think shame is the worst thing that happens to me. But I feel that all the time, whether the school or my parents find out or not, so I’m not sure if that’s really a punishment. I do it to myself, the shame.’

  Mai didn’t say anything. We didn’t mention the reality in front of us: that she wasn’t going to school either. I gave her my jacket and we walked around the construction site, shared a chocolate bar, sat down in a large patch of sun when the clouds broke. She went to school at lunchtime. Instead of telling the teacher she was sick, instead of making some excuse, she said she had gone to visit me at the construction site. The teacher told her parents. I don’t know what kind of trouble she got in. I know her parents were strict. I went to school the next week, I was still going sometimes, and I asked why she hadn’t come back to the construction site in the mornings. She seemed bothered by my question.

  ‘It’s a bad place, Hikaru.’ She had tears in her eyes and looked tired. ‘I did the wrong thing. I’m not like you. The rest of us can’t just run away like you can. My parents were so upset.’

  Her voice wasn’t angry but perhaps her eyes were. She shook her head. But then, a few weeks later, she did come back to the construction site. Maybe she had pushed whatever happened, whatever consequences she faced with her parents after not going to school, right back to some far place in her mind, where she didn’t have to remember it.

  The first letter from Mai Takeda was short and polite. My mother put the letter under the door without saying anything. Mai apologised for intruding; she hoped I did not mind that she was writing to me. She explained that she had seen my mother completely by chance in the subway of Nagoya Station. The letter was a shock to me. This kind of communication was so unfamiliar, I was almost frightened by it. I worried that it signalled an intrusion, that they would soon try to come into my room and force me out of it. My greatest fear is that somebody will pull me from my room and drag me out there, to the other side, and force me to live in a room in a house I don’t know. But to my relief, a few days passed and nobody came into my room.

  After the first letter came another. This letter was longer, it was friendly. To read it almost felt like a conversation. Mai mentioned things from our childhood, from high school. She mentioned the abandoned construction site. She remembered that we stopped there on our way to school. She remembered that I liked it. It was strange but wonderful to have this shared memory with another person. I don’t usually feel connected to other people. The construction site was a place in between the world outside and the world inside my room. It was outside yet safe. I was sure that Mai understood this. I thought back to the morning that Mai came to visit me and then didn’t go to school. Yes, I wanted to say, yes, I do remember it. How does it seem in your memories?

  I would like to tell Mai that I have been to the construction site, that it is now finished and just a regular building. The place that we knew together no longer exists. This knowledge would be something else that we could share. But she has gone now. My mother told me this. Mai Takeda has gone and I don’t know where she is.

  Mai Takeda’s letters continued to arrive. She wrote one almost every week. My mother slipped them under my door. They were sealed. Receiving and reading those letters made me feel different. I had energy in me, almost as if I had been outside and had real encounters with a person. After I had received four letters, my mother knocked at my door. You need to respond to her, my mother said. She won’t keep writing to you forever. Yet although I wanted this communication to continue, writing a letter to Mai did not seem like an option. It is too difficult to articulate the things that lie in all the silent spaces in me.

  The prospect of meeting her again, meeting Mai Takeda, terrified me. Mai came to my parents’ apartment to deliver the letters. I could hear everything that happened on the other side of the door. Now, the sounds of Mai entering and leaving were familiar. Her voice was always gentle and even, my mother’s more animated. I heard the scuff of her shoes as she took them off, the sound of her feet in house slippers. A few times, she came to my door. She said, Hello Hikaru, it’s Mai Takeda, and I felt my heart in my chest. I am visiting again today, she said. I stood near the door. I must have been standing so close to her. And I couldn’t say a word.

  After the fourth letter, I thought I might be able to see her. I considered it. But my body was heavy, as if full of sand, and my mouth dry. I couldn’t make the movements. I couldn’t step out to the other side of the door. For the first time, I could smell my body and see the dirty clothes on me. I could feel my long, oily hair on my shoulders. I could see myself as if from a distance, through somebody else’s eyes. I disgusted myself. I could not allow Mai to see this. I stood as close as I could to the door as their conversation drained away and Mai left the apartment again.

  Mai’s fifth letter sounded different from the first four. Perhaps she was running out of things to say, of shared memories. We didn’t have that many different experiences together. She started to mention things that she was thinking that day, or that week. She described her current life. I didn’t know this life of hers. She said that she had a husband and that she worked part time at a language school. She liked the job, she liked having a place to go every day, but she might be expected to quit now that she was married.

  When Mai Takeda wrote about her work and her husband I felt uncomfortable. These were things that signified life out there, a place where I couldn’t live. I worried that she would judge me for not having romantic relationships or being able to keep working at a job.

  Other times in her letters, Mai seemed to say things almost by accident, like that she had thought about quitting her job, or how when she went to the hot springs in Takayama, in Gifu Prefecture, she was struck by both the randomness and inevitability of her current life in Nagoya. Each of us could be living an entirely different life, she wrote. It is not a surprising thing, it is a simple fact. And yet I have been thinking of it more and more lately. When she said those things, I thought about Mai in high school and when we were young schoolkids. I thought about how she always seemed to be just at the edge of a group, how she understood the abandoned construction site, as though she were like me.

  I liked it when Mai wrote those things. Her words felt real; she was not wearing a mask. It seems to me that many people wear a mask when they think and talk and write. I also hoped that she found writing to me useful, even helpful. I am filled with such anger towards myself, because I did not respond to Mai. I feel I deserve a great punishment for my failure.

  At that time I could not bring myself to leave my room during the day, not even to see Mai Takeda. But after first venturing o
ut of my room to see the construction site, I did start to go out at night again. It was spring by then. The nights were cold but full of fresh new air. Cherry blossoms floated in darkness; I could see them as I rode my bike.

  It had been a long time since I’d left the house. I went to a convenience store, one that was far from the home of my parents. I was careful to avoid seeing anyone I might have once known. Even in the middle of the night, you never know who might be out. The streets were quiet, the streetlights on, and a few vending machines glowed like small isolated rooms. At the convenience store I often bought a comic book and a can of Coke. I had to take money from the kitchen to buy these things, because I don’t have any money of my own.

  I liked to leave the house. I liked the feeling of the air on my face and hands. I always felt very tired after leaving my room, after moving my body, riding the bike in the night air, and I always slept well when I came home in the early hours of the morning. Sometimes I did not even hear my parents moving around in the morning as my father got ready for work. I stayed sleeping until the small, intermittent sounds of my mother were all that I could hear on waking.

  My mother did not say anything about me leaving the apartment, but I think she knew. At times I thought that we might be bound by something, my mother and I, as if some memory or thin, thread-like presence joined us and that, because of this, she knew things I didn’t tell her.

  One afternoon in spring my mother put another letter under my door. It’s from Mai, she said, and her voice sounded full of something, almost as if she was excited. In her letter, Mai Takeda described a community dormitory for people who did not leave their rooms. It is a supportive environment, she wrote, with social workers and volunteers, a kitchen where they share meals and the opportunity to join a job training program. She said that maybe I would consider going to stay there. I would be supported there, she said. I would not be judged.