The Shut Ins

by Katherine Brabon

  I was unsettled by this, and reread the letter many times. Perhaps, in order for significant change to happen, a sudden and shocking act was required. Leaving my room to greet Mai outside the door, or writing to her, were perhaps not significant enough to change me. And I realised that I would like to change how I lived. After many days and nights considering it, during which I had trouble sleeping, I decided I would go to the dormitory. It was difficult to tell my mother. I came out of my room and stood in the kitchen. She looked taken by surprise for a moment, but seemed to understand.

  As my mother made the preparations for me to go to the dormitory, I waited for a visit from Mai Takeda. Each morning I bathed and put on clean clothes. I was nervous at the thought of seeing her, but I felt that I was ready. I waited for the sounds of her entering the apartment, of her voice and my mother’s voice responding. One day my mother stood at my door and said she had not heard from Mai Takeda in over two weeks. I had thought that pulling myself out of my room would bring me to Mai. Finally I was going to be on the side everybody else lived on. But I did not see her again. I don’t know if there’s any meaning in the way things worked out; that when I finally left my room, Mai Takeda disappeared.

  My mother drove me to the dormitory. I hadn’t been in a car in years. I hadn’t been out in the daylight for so long. It seemed more like a dream, all that light, than the dream I often recall, when I am trying to swim in the ocean and I fail.

  There were no set rules at the dormitory. We could establish guidelines as a group, as long as everyone agreed to them. They wanted us to learn autonomy, to do things on our own terms. The people in charge said we had been raised in a society that made us focus on sacrificing individual preferences for a collective goal, and this made us struggle to express individual desires. Shutting ourselves away was the only way we knew how to do this. They wished to create a space where we could learn to think and act on our own, to do this in front of others and not be ashamed of it. They said that speaking openly without being judged was a priority.

  Volunteers and local people visited the dormitory; there was a cafe where we were encouraged to meet people. Once or twice a week in the evenings there was a group dinner. We would help to prepare the food. None of us knew how to cook but the volunteers showed us the right way to chop the spring onions, to rinse the rice. It was someone’s job to set the table with bowls and chopsticks. The staff would bring their families, so we would see children and sometimes even a dog in the common room. I didn’t really talk on those evenings, but I liked to watch the people. There was a lot of smiling and I did not feel pressure. The organisers said that, when I was more comfortable, I could go on an excursion to a concert or a short hike. For now, I could take my time.

  One of the volunteers was a man named Yori. He was a recovered recluse. Yori encouraged us to talk. Perhaps because he told us about his own time as a hikikomori, I did not feel pressure from him. Yori had an earring, short spiky hair and always wore black. He said that his mother was a very strict and angry woman. Her father, Yori’s grandfather, was killed in the war and so Yori’s mother lived with her mother and a strict stepfather. Yori said that his mother could not show love to him, she could not be affectionate, she did not touch him or speak encouraging words to him. He could not recall his parents saying nice things to each other, or speaking about anything other than ordinary things about the house, Yori’s schooling and behaviour, money and plans to visit family. It was like they lived by transactions, said Yori. His mother would hit him and punish him for small mistakes. If he did not do well in school, she told him, she would kill herself from the shame.

  He said that many people in Japan have transactional relationships, many parents in particular. They can’t say the things that they feel as an individual, even if that is a good emotion, like love or desire. They only know how to do things for the collective good, for a stable society, a functional household. But according to Yori this makes a very unstable society. Everything is pushed underground. The pressure is dangerous. People need to express themselves, said Yori. Otherwise they don’t know who they are. If they push things underground, expression takes on strange and maybe dangerous forms.

  Yori shut himself away at the end of high school, like me. But he didn’t take any jobs. He stayed in his room the whole time, for over ten years. His mother gave up her yelling, her hitting. Yori felt his own anger try to come out of him. Sometimes, he hit his mother when he felt very unhappy. Sometimes he yelled at her for ruining his life. It was as though she had transferred her anger to him and became withered and quiet afterwards. When Yori was thirty-five she died of a stroke, and he found his way to the dormitory.

  ‘Hikaru,’ he said, as we stood outside in the concrete yard of the dormitory while Yori smoked a cigarette, ‘try to talk to me about yourself.’

  I said that the world seemed very dark to me, full of pressure and judgement; that this had been made clear to me by my teacher’s words, my mother’s disappointments. If I could not feel cared for by my own mother, the world out there must be even worse. I spoke about mistakes and consequences, how I became obsessed with them and always worried about them at the supermarket jobs. The work environment makes your mistakes so obvious; the rules are so clear that they are frightening. You are on a stage and everyone is ready to mock you. I told him how when I walked on the street, I worried the traffic warden would tell me off for walking in the wrong place. On the train I worried that I had the wrong ticket or had taken someone’s seat without realising.

  ‘One of the social workers here told me they see the condition of hikikomori as a kind of social suicide,’ said Yori. ‘It is a way to escape all of those fears without actually dying.’

  I said to Yori that I felt like I had gone to the other side when I was in my room. Like I had died but was still alive.

  ‘Did you feel abandoned?’

  I said I didn’t know.

  Yori said that there were many different ways a person could be abandoned.

  I said that I thought it would have been better to live in another time. The whole of Japan used to be shut off from the rest of the world. I said I would have liked to live then. Everywhere has been found now. There’s nowhere to go where we haven’t made a map or a road or a rule.

  ‘Yes,’ said Yori. ‘That may be true.’

  At the dormitory, I learned some things that were simple and nice. With Yori and another person who had just recently left their room, I planted lettuce and we ate a salad made with food picked from the garden. I felt pleasure at this simple thing. The encounters with people were surprising in their lack of terror. Nothing went wrong, I didn’t fail.

  When I stayed in the dormitory, I thought a lot about my room at home. It was a way to think of something comforting, perhaps how people with more diverse experiences think of pleasant memories with people or places to make themselves feel better. It was strange to sleep in the same room as others. I heard their breathing, their movements, their stomachs making noises in the night.

  I hoped that eventually I would think less about my room. But as time went on I felt that I was frozen. I didn’t get better. The organisers said that I needed to take my time. Yori said it was necessary for me to take time. But the more often they said this, the more I was aware that I had not changed. I had not started conversations with anyone or talked at the evening dinners or gone on any excursions. Other people started the job training program but I could not even talk with others except for Yori. The social workers and volunteers didn’t seem angry at me, but I did not trust this. I was sure they were adding negative notes to my file, that they were talking about me in their staff meetings, about how I was the slow one, the one who was failing. Yori said that this was not true, that I must try to keep my grip on this side. But once this dark seed was embedded in my mind, it grew roots and stems and a great black flowering over my thoughts.

  When summer came, my mother went away to see my grandmother in Nagasaki. Every day at the dormitory
seemed to get worse. I slept less every night. I was terrified to walk from my shared bedroom to the kitchen or the bathroom in case I saw someone and was forced to talk. I stopped going to the group dinners. I was sure that, just like at school, just like at my jobs in the supermarkets, people knew I was struggling, knew I was weak and only just managing to get through each day, stepping from one precious stone to another across a fast-moving river.

  Most of the others at the dormitory were doing much better than me. Some people finished the job training program, and one man went for a job trial at a bakery. Although not everyone did well. A younger man cut his wrists one night and was rushed away.

  One day I woke from a bad sleep and knew I was suffocating. I begged to go home, I cried like a child. My face was hot and wet. Yori stopped me throwing myself at the front door of the dormitory. It was difficult to control how I felt, to stop it coming out in physical ways. I needed to be alone again. The organisers at the dormitory said I had to wait until my mother was home and could care for me. But my mother was in Nagasaki, my grandmother was sick. I had to stay in the dormitory for another week. I slept all day on the top bunk of the bed and did not talk to anyone. I could only eat when I crept out of the room at night. I started to feel angry that my mother had not come back. I felt that she was taking longer than was necessary, that she was trying to send me a message by delaying her return. I felt cut off from her, as though we had been violently torn apart.

  Now I am in my room again and it is certain that Mai Takeda is missing. This week my mother put a note under my door to tell me that nobody had heard from her in over a month. My mother also said it was sad that my grandmother no longer knows me. She said my grandmother wasn’t well, that she would have to go back to Nagasaki soon.

  Since she picked me up from the dormitory and I returned home, my mother’s voice is always tense and grey. She is rigid in every movement. If she knocks on the door of my room it is firm, almost a beating. Once the room even seemed to rattle from the force of the door. Her movements in the house—her steps and when she picks things up and puts them down—are louder. I rarely hear my father in the house; I have almost forgotten him. It is just my mother and me, bound together as though we are stuck out at sea.

  When I was younger, my mother warned me about everything. Every necessary action guarded against something bad happening. If I didn’t do this, then that would happen. The consequences were usually things I could not picture, like shame or trouble or disgrace. What would that shame or trouble or disgrace actually look like? They were not solid things, which made them more terrifying. At the shrine, you respect and fear the gods because you can’t see them. I don’t know if my mother knew exactly what the consequences looked like either. I think they only grow physical form in the actions and words of people around you: the looks, the comments, the judgement, the silences.

  I have no source of hope as an individual. All that is required of me is to maintain the order of things as they are. This makes me feel hopeless, like Japan is a tunnel with no way out. In my room, it is timeless and safe.

  We still don’t know where Mai Takeda has gone. She delivered her last letter just before I went into the dormitory. Mai wrote that her husband expected things from her, that her parents and his parents were asking her lots of demanding questions about her future. I feel trapped in a current, she wrote, and I can’t help but think that a child born now would only suffer. I feel that something born by force and tradition is made with bad beginnings. I did not really understand the meaning of her words.

  Sometimes I think back to the weeks I spent in the dormitory, and how I liked to go outside to the vegetable garden. I liked the purpose of those small visits, the smell of the earth and the satisfying feelings that came with planting, watering, picking the produce. Maybe all meaning is contained in that vegetable garden, buried deep in its damp soil.

  My mother says that she needs to go again to Nagasaki. She says she must care for her mother, that it is the right thing to do. I know my mother does not want to care for me. There is a deeper tone of tension in her voice now. When she talks, her voice sounds tight, sometimes shrill. I worry that she has decided to abandon me. Perhaps she will not come back from Nagasaki. She leaves next week. I am scared that I’ll be inside forever and that once my mother dies, or deserts me, I will die too. All my means of nourishment will be cut off; I depend on her completely. Sometimes I wish I was an infant again, or that I could lie in a hospital forever and be cared for by my mother.

  I don’t know what will happen. I wish there was a place I could go that doesn’t scare me. I wish I was not obsessed by mistakes and their consequences. I wish that Mai Takeda would come back and that I knew how to live another life.

  I hope that one day I will wake up, the spring air will be fresh, I will get dressed and walk down a quiet street without fear. I will have somewhere to go and I will enjoy the cherry blossom wind on my face.

  Note no. 5: Postscript

  In Tokyo, the weather was sunny but, to my relief, less humid than Hiroshima and Nagasaki. On the day when I was to meet M’s friend, I woke early in the close, stuffy hostel room. I would not be able to name the precise moment I came to my decision, but as I washed the night sweat from my face in the shared bathroom, as I had coffee and fruit in the bar, I settled into the realisation that I would not go to meet M’s friend. Certain things would be lost and preserved by this decision. As it is with any taken path, we wonder about where we did not go.

  Before the appointed time, I took the subway to the suburb where he said we should meet. I looked up the address on my phone. I walked along the street. The address he had given me was a cafe. It had tall windows facing the street, with seats along the window. The cafe was quiet; I could only see one customer inside: a man with neatly cut hair and a pressed white shirt. He seemed to be in his late thirties or early forties. I imagined that Hikaru Satō would be about the same age. From the other side of the narrow street, I stood and looked at the cafe. The man stared back at me through the window. The looks we share with strangers sometimes feel full of meaning. As I walked away, I glanced back. The man watched me for a moment and then turned away.

  I returned from Japan and began to compile these accounts. Over two years I described what I knew of the story. I took many wrong paths. I felt something reaching across to me from the other side—a place of dreams, death and possibility—to this side. The writing of these accounts is the act of reaching back, an attempt to meet the other side. It is the simple act of saying, Does the life I feel inside me feel anything like yours?

  Only one of Mai Takeda’s letters to Hikaru Satō reached me. I include it after this postscript. I have said that I still do not know who reached over there, achiragawa. I think it looks different for each person. In brief moments I imagine that I am there. I am sometimes in the cave, looking out on a world that troubles me; other times I live in the sun.

  I think that the other side is with us always, settled over our minds like a coating of desert sand, a sheet of silk. The great difficulty is coping with our inner worlds attempting to exist outside, exposed on this side. Maybe we can be consoled if we recognise that we wear the other side, that sheet of silk, always. Loneliness might be the deeply known truth that our inner worlds will always be fledgling, vulnerable, on this side, where we conduct our days, where our bodies meet. Can it soothe our suffering? To know that it is not a matter of mastering this division, between the cave and the sun, but to know that what we are doing, repeating, enduring, is living on both sides—we are coping.

  Dear Hikaru,

  I hope you do not mind me writing another letter to you. I have written a lot of letters now and each time I decide to stop writing, something in me resists this fiercely, as though there is a violent part of me that will uncover itself if I stop. I guess that means I can’t keep going without writing these letters to you. So even if you don’t want to answer them, that’s okay.

  Today I read online about a mo
nk who helps people who do not want to leave their rooms and people who want to die. His name is Nemeto and he lives in a temple above a town called Seki. The town is in Gifu Prefecture. I was born in Gifu Prefecture. He started a website called For People Who Do Not Want to Die, and he has many followers who cling to his wisdom to help them live.

  I don’t know why it means so much to me to have discovered this. More and more, I feel that the world is giving me hints and symbols but I cannot understand what they mean. It’s like the life I have been living for my whole existence has not given me the tools to interpret important things. I have a wild dream that I could go to Gifu Prefecture by myself. A wild dream that I could stay there.

  Hikaru, the day I saw your mother in the subway of Nagoya Station, the day that started this new opening—for that is how I see these past few months, as a flower slowly opening—that day I went home as though everything was normal. A girl in our apartment building killed herself that night. I am trying to understand the connections between things, but nothing is clear.

  Perhaps I am trying to decide if I am one of those People Who Do Not Want to Die. In some ways, I do want to die so that this version of myself does not exist. But I would want another version of me in her place. Sometimes I think that if I go to Gifu Prefecture alone I will find the version of myself who didn’t get to live because we moved to the city. I feel almost obsessed with who she might be. Also, I feel excited by her.