Writing letters to you has felt like a journey but I am not sure where it is leading me. I hope that you can cross back over, Hikaru, and return to this side. It has felt like my task to write to you, to help you to come out. It has been a secret I have kept, nursed inside like a growing child. It sounds so strange to write but it’s like you, as a secret, other part of myself, are inside me and I need to give birth so that I can find what I seek. I do not know what I seek.
On some of the most difficult pilgrimages, the pilgrim must pass through many torii, each gate a singular hurdle, and cross perilous terrain, so that when they reach the shrine and meet with the other side, they are ready.
From your friend,
Mai Takeda
Notes
The concept of achiragawa and the other side/over there, is sometimes used in discussions of the fictional worlds of Haruki Murakami. Those discussions informed this work. A necessarily complex definition of the concept can be found in Matthew Carl Strecher’s The Forbidden Worlds of Haruki Murakami (University of Minnesota Press, 2014, p. 71): ‘achiragawa is many things at once: a metaphysical zone, freed from the constraints of time and space; a wormhole, or conduit into other physical worlds; an unconscious shared space, similar to Jung’s collective unconscious; a repository for memories, dreams, and visions; the land of the dead; the “world soul” of mysticism; heaven or hell; eternity’.
A valuable source on hikikomori is Michael Zielenziger’s Shutting Out the Sun: How Japan Created Its Own Lost Generation (Vintage, 2007). The following line was drawn from his research: ‘Some see the phenomenon as the ultimate expression of passive-aggressive behaviour. It is a rejection of society by inaction, by refusing to participate.’ The Amaterasu (sun goddess) connection was in part drawn from this book.
The definition of the hikikomori condition as ‘a coping strategy that is activated in response to the excessive pressure of social realisation, typical of modern individualistic societies’ comes from www.hikikomoriitalia.it/p/what-hikikomori-is-and-what-isnt.html.
The quote ‘probably the idea that man is eternally homeless began haunting his mind more and more frequently’ is reproduced from Makoto Ueda’s Matsuo Bashō (Twayne Publishers, New York, 1970).
Haruki Murakami’s Underground is quoted in ‘Note no. 3’: the sarin gas attack ‘shows us a distorted image of ourselves … these subconscious shadows are an “underground” that we carry around with us’; and, ‘For people who are outside the main system of Japanese society (the young in particular), there remains no effective alternative or safety net.’
The reference to ‘a monk 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’ is informed by Larissa MacFarquhar’s profile of the same monk for the New Yorker (June 2013).
The quote of Matsuo Bashō —that he left his home ‘determined to become a weather-exposed skeleton’—is from The Narrow Road to the Deep North, his collection of travel sketches blending haiku and prose.
Acknowledgements
Much of this book was written during three international residencies. I am grateful to: The Ledig-Rowohlt Foundation for the supported residency at Château de Lavigny, Switzerland, with thanks to Sophie Kandaouroff; Art Omi: Writers, with special thanks to Carol Frederick and the wonderful friends I met there; and the UNESCO Creative City Network Residency at Švicarija/Swisshouse in Ljubljana, Slovenia, with thanks to Andrei Hocevar.
I received funding from the Australia Council for the Arts and Creative Victoria to work on this novel and travel to Japan. I am very grateful for this crucial support of the Arts.
Thank you to Clare Forster, Annette Barlow, Rebecca Kaiser, Tegan Bennett Daylight and Ali Lavau for bringing this novel to publication. A special thanks to Annette for her continued enthusiasm and support for my work.
I owe so much to Mio Tatebe, Nori Yamada and Rika Kuneida, for our conversations, for each taking me into your own Japan, for answering my questions, for your friendship—thank you. Special thanks to the Tatebe and Yamada families for your warm hospitality in Japan. Thank you Samina Kakinuma Hassan for reading the manuscript and for your support.
Thank you to Katie Lang, Isabel Melles Taberner and Rheny Pulungan for our beautiful friendship and your constant support. Thanks Katie for being my first reader and sounding board for this novel.
To my parents, Nina and Martin, and my sisters, Emily and Meredith, to Leif and Will, thank you for being constant, loving and wonderful. Thanks as always to Maya and the Klauber family, to Angela Keating, and to Rob and Sam. And thanks to Jarek and Ewa Wojcik for encouragement and good wishes throughout the writing of this book.
And thank you to Marcin, for always making it clear my writing is important, for the many conversations about my work, for us.
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