I Called Him Necktie

by Milena Michiko Flašar

  28

  So! He drew himself up. That’s the end. I talk and talk. You must think I can’t stop. Enough about me. Now it’s your turn. Tell me something.

  What?

  Whatever. The first thing that comes to you. I’ll listen.

  And then he leaned back and actually seemed to have nothing else in mind but to listen.

  Where to start? I was looking for something that would be worthy of what he had said. It’s difficult, I said. The first thing that occurs to me is that it is difficult to tell something. Every person is an accumulation of stories. But I. I hesitated. I am frightened of accumulating stories. I’d like to be one in which nothing happens. Given that you throw yourself in front of the train in the early morning. What is the use of what I’m telling today? And does it have any validity? As I said. It’s difficult. The first thing that occurs to me is: We are skating on melting ice.

  A fine sentence. He repeated it. We are skating on melting ice. Is it yours?

  No, not mine. Kumamoto’s. I swallowed. Kumamoto Akira.

  The words flooded out of me. I was a dry riverbed where hard rain falls after years of drought. The ground is quickly soaked through and then there is no stopping. The water rises and rises, way over the banks, pulls down trees and bushes, laps over the land. I felt a release with every word I spoke.

  29

  Kumamoto wrote poems. His school notebooks were full of them. Always on the quest for the perfect poem, his obsession, he sat with a pencil stuck behind his ear, completely withdrawn from the world, a poet through and through, a poem in himself.

  We were both in our final year. Both under the same pressure to pass. He found it easier than I did. Or rather, he pretended to. What’s the point of learning, he joked, when my path is mapped out. Unmistakably. The footprints that have marked it before me. My great grandfather, my grandfather, my father. All lawyers who have paved the way for me. I don’t have to learn anything. They’ve already done it for me. I just have to regurgitate and spit it out afterwards. That’s what I owe them. Look! He showed me his notebooks. Torn up. Father thinks society doesn’t need misfits. Well, he’s right. I just can’t help it. I’ve spent hours taping it back together.

  Under one strip of adhesive tape I read: Hell is cold.

  The most perfect line, he said, that he had ever created.

  Hellfire is not a warming fire.

  I am freezing beside it.

  No place is as cold as this burning desert.

  Thick pencil lines. Scored in the thin paper. In some places a bit was missing. It doesn’t matter.

  Kumamoto beat his chest three times. It’s all in there. My own requiem.

  30

  At first I did not understand him. I understood him just as little as the poems he wrote. I read them and understood the words that formed them. I understood hell and fire and ice. But the abyss they described, to understand that required a way of reading into the depths, which I shied away from because I realized I was already down there and didn’t want to admit it. Anyway. If I had understood him then, perhaps some things would have happened differently, but who knows? Who knows what good something is, and whether it counts that it’s good? As far as I remember no word that Kumamoto used was ever good.

  Yet we became friends. Good friends. I admired his single-mindedness. A light emanated from him, showing someone who knew where he was going and that there, where he was going, it would be terribly lonely. He couldn’t have cared less about what other people thought. He laughed with those who laughed at him. So with his father he said: You’re quite right. Only I can’t do anything about it. He said it with a wink.

  What he admired in me?

  I don’t know. Perhaps that I believed in him absolutely. I trusted in him and his cheerfulness. I trusted that here was someone who would always stay young, and who, when I was dead, would still be there, with snow-white hair, dreaming of the perfect poem.

  31

  Usually we met in the evening. He liked the twilight. He said the light was sad and happy at the same time. It was mourning for the day that had passed and anticipating the night to come. We walked aimlessly in the streets. Kumamoto, trailing behind me, surrounded by the smell of an unfamiliar landscape. It smelled of soil frozen hard centimeters down, of unusual plants held hidden beneath. When they shot up, what would come to the surface?

  The answer was an intersection.

  Kumamoto stopped. Above him an advertisement for shampoo pulsed in neon letters. Men and women ran in wide arcs around us. We were an island in the middle of surging waves. An embrace, and suddenly Kumamoto held me tight. With both hands he gripped my arms. I’ve got it, he cried, there is no perfect poem! Its perfection arises precisely from its imperfection. Do you see? I did not want to see. He, into my ear: I have an image in my head. I see it clearly before me. Its colors are glaring and harsh in their brightness. But as soon as I rush to capture it, it explodes, and what I write down are separate bits that don’t form a whole. Do you see it now? It’s as if I tried to glue together a broken vase, piece by piece. But the shards are so fragmentary that I don’t know which goes with which or how I fit them together, there’s always one fragment left over. But this fragment! It makes the poem. It alone gives meaning. His voice was feverish: My requiem should be a vase with water shooting through the glue in its cracks.

  He let go of me. I swayed. I felt the imprint of his fingers on my arms.

  You’re sick, I whispered.

  He replied: You are too.

  It was a warning. I heard it and ignored it.

  32

  Days later, in physics class, Kumamoto passed me a note. It said: Tonight at eight. At the intersection. I want to put it right. I still have the note. I know exactly where in my room, which drawer it’s in. Under an ancient fossil with an insect trapped inside. Now and then I take it out and read, word for word, like a prayer: Tonight at eight. At the intersection. I want to put it right.

  His illness.

  I believe that was definitely his intention. He wanted and wanted and wanted. To put it right. He knew he could not honor what he owed his father, and he knew that his good spirits would not prevail forever. You can’t go on maintaining forever: I can’t do anything about it. At a certain age, which he didn’t want to reach, you must see that you can always do something about it. This was his illness: Too young he recognized that nothing is perfect, and he was too young to draw the right conclusions from it. Since this was my illness too, perhaps he wanted to warn me.

  When I left the house that evening the air was damp and clammy. Like a wet cloth wrapped around your body. I was tense, ran, the asphalt soft under my feet. Already from a distance I spotted him. He had turned his face towards me. A searing look, at me. Raised his hand, called out. His mouth opened and closed again. I didn’t understand him. Eclipsed by the noise in the street, his call died away as he, without turning around, plunged like a swimmer into the traffic, headlong before my eyes. The outstretched hand. Squealing brakes. The hand still raised for seconds in the heavy air. Then it flopped down. Someone shouted: An accident! Panting, I reached the spot. Sharp elbows in my side. I burrowed through the rows of passersby. Kumamoto, covered in blood. His hand, white and thin. The howling of sirens. I stepped back. Blind. Blinded. Was pushed away, far away. Hey, you! You alright? I sank down onto the pavement. Beside me was a torn garbage bag. Rotting meat. I lost consciousness. When I came to again, they had already taken him away. Above me an advertisement for face masks. You alright? I stood up and walked.

  33

  I walked home, legs trembling. Each person I met had his eyes. Kumamoto everywhere. Thick bodies, bones inside, organs, nothing permanent. His death – Was he actually dead? – had given me x-ray vision. I remember the woman walking in front of me. She was beautiful. Delicately built. I looked at her back and watched, breathing in and out, her spine swinging to and fro as she walked. This spine, I understood all of a sudden, it is moving towards death. I remember the m
an who ran up to her, took her by the arm, kissed her hand. He too, ashes and dust. My parents. I remember. Mother, a skeleton, was sitting in front of the television. Father, a skeleton, was drinking frothy beer. Ah, there you are at last. Bare skulls eyed me from staring hollows. What’s to become of you, I heard. Running around late at night. Have you forgotten? Your future! Father bit into a piece of raw sausage. Tearing teeth. I rushed across the hall. My shadow after me, into my room. The door fell quietly shut.

  34

  Here, take a sip. You must drink something.

  The tie, red and gray stripes, summoned me back to the park.

  Take it slowly, he said, that’s better.

  I was glad he didn’t say anything more than that.

  What can you say, I continued. What can you say when you’ve run out of words? After the door shut behind me, I felt a speechless emptiness. I lay down, speechless, ran in my thoughts towards the intersection again. Kumamoto’s mouth. What had he shouted? Again and again I tried to read it from his lips, again and again I tried and failed. Was it a word? A word like freedom? Or life? Or happiness? Was it a no? Or a yes? A simple greeting? Perhaps: Farewell? Was it my name? Or: Father? Perhaps: Mother? Or something of no importance and it was pointless to want to know.

  I spent the rest of the night in a trance. I didn’t sleep, yet I slept the sleep of a sleepwalker. As soon as I closed my eyes I saw the hand, in the dark chamber of my memory, Kumamoto’s hand, how it emerged, quite alone, rose from the black asphalt. It had pointed at me. At me of all the bystanders. And what upset me most about it was the sudden flush of shame, for this: I don’t know him. He doesn’t belong to me. I am happy to be pushed away. From him, who lies there, suffering. The shame had passed as quickly as it had come but it was no use pretending after the event that it was a natural reaction. It was there, I had felt it, it was always there, and with it the anger, so: Why had Kumamoto done something in public when it concerned only himself and himself alone? Why had he forced this cowardly shame on me? Never again, I swore, would I be dependent on someone else. Never again tangled in someone else’s fate. I wanted to enter a timeless room, where no one would ever startle me. Life would continue outside. I wanted to block it out, to hide away from it, not accept that it was happening to me. A fragment had penetrated my consciousness and made sense of Kumamoto’s requiem.

  35

  The next morning I stayed in bed. Nothing unusual. I’d often skipped school in the past. It had happened before that I’d stayed at home for three, four days, and because I made clever excuses, I’d been left in peace. The main thing was to bring home good grades. I made up for the lost hours thanks to my last reserves of zeal.

  This time, however, it was different.

  A week passed by. My parents were worried. A week later they were angry. A week later despairing. Despairing for a long time. Then angry again. Finally, worried. And so it went on, up and down, until I could no longer distinguish whether the weeks had turned into months, or the months into years. I had bolted the door to my room. Futile knocking, I did not answer. According to whether my parents were worried or angry or despairing, their knocking had a gray or white or black tone. It colored the silence, which absorbed me and resembled the silence of a dark forest. You walk along a winding path. Swaying treetops, the sun falling diagonally through the branches. In its beams shimmered spider webs, delicate designs of dreamy threads. You think: How quiet it is here. And recognize in the next moment that you are mistaken. The silence of the forest is an imbued silence. It is filled with the voices of the birds, the crackle of rotting wood. The beetles whirr. A tired leaf spins down. Like music the silence murmurs, like a song without beginning and end. This song is the origin of all other songs. In my room I realized: Silence has a body. It is alive. The dripping of the tap from the kitchen. Mother’s furry slippers. The ringing of the telephone. The fridge starts humming. Father’s slurping. Through the blocked-up keyhole I could hear what was outside breathing and was relieved not to have to mix my own breath with it. An itching on my scalp. I felt my hair growing.

  36

  Did he get in touch again?

  Who?

  Kumamoto.

  No, I shook my head: I don’t know what happened to him, and to be honest I really don’t want to find out.

  Why not?

  He has written his poem. Do you see? Now I am writing mine.

  And if he were still alive ...

  ... yet I’ve spent two years in my room. The last two years of my youth – given away! Given to him, who must be, I can’t imagine it any other way, dead to the bottom of his soul.

  May I read it? Your poem?

  It’s not finished yet.

  But there it is.

  Where?

  On the back of your hand.

  So many scars. I hid them in a flash.

  37

  Root vegetables, soba noodles, two korokke croquettes.

  The few crumbs that were left he scattered in front of the pigeons, which had gathered around us flapping their wings. He stamped his feet. They whirred away. Came back with ruffled neck feathers. Forgetting that he had just shooed them away. The poor things, he murmured. It must be awful. No memory. But perhaps not as awful as you imagine. I mean. If you were to forget everything. Wouldn’t you forgive everything as well? Forgive yourself and others? Would you not be free of regret and guilt? An electrical crackling, he flicked an invisible fleck from his trousers with his sleeve. No, not so, that would be too easy. To forgive, to be really free, you have to remember, day after day.

  Do you want to tell me more?

  Yes, I’d like to forgive. The sentence came out, just like that.

  I am not a typical hikikomori, I continued. Not like one of those in the books and articles that are put by my door from time to time. I don’t read manga comics, I don’t spend the day in front of the television and the night in front of the computer. I don’t build model airplanes. Video games make me feel sick. Nothing can distract me from the attempt to protect me from myself. From my name, my inheritance. I am an only son. From my body, whose needs have not ceased – to maintain it. From my hunger, from my thirst. In the two years since I withdrew, I was overcome by my body three times a day. Then I crept to the door, opened it a crack, picked up the tray my mother had put there for me. If no one was at home I crept out to the bathroom. I washed myself. Strange, this need to wash myself. I brushed my teeth and combed my hair. It had grown long. A glance in the mirror: It is still me. I suppressed the cry sitting in my throat. I wanted to protect myself from it too. From my voice, from my language. The language, in which I now maintain that I don’t know whether a typical hikikomori really exists. Just as there are all sorts of rooms, there are all sorts of hikikomoris, who, for all sorts of reasons, have retreated into themselves in all sorts of ways and means. While one, whom I’ve read about, spends his vanishing youth practicing the same tune over and over again on a three-string guitar, the next, I’ve read about him too, assembles his shell collection. At night, when it is dark, he runs down to the sea, his hood over his head, and returns home only as the light dawns.

  38

  I’m lucky to have been left in peace up till now. For there are some who have been enticed out. They’re promised reintegration. Recovery too. Work. Success. With this faint promise on their lips they are led back step by step into society, that great commonality. They are accustomed to pleasing it. They are harmonized. But I am lucky. They haven’t reckoned with me. They haven’t sent a social worker to sit by my door and go on at me for hours and hours. The books and newspaper articles, Father’s aftershave, Mother’s fingerprint on a little ball of rice, this slight life is just enough, just tolerable. It is granted to me. That is my good fortune. To be part of a family, that is granted to me, to enclose me. Out of shame, mind you. Nobody should find out that I am a hikikomori. The neighbors have been told I’m on an exchange program in America, and now that I am going out again, they’ve been told that I ca
me back, need time to get used to home. It’s my luck to be part of a family that’s ashamed of me.

  And perhaps it is this luck which characterizes a hikikomori most of all. The happiness of being freed for an indeterminate time from events and effects, from the interplay of causes and effects. Without an earthly aim before your eyes and without the need to reach one, to remain in a space where nothing happens. A ball lying still, off to the side and not colliding with any others. As you cut yourself off, you fall out of the dense web of contacts and relationships, and you are relieved at that, not to have to do that. This relief: You don’t have to make any further contribution. At last you admit you’re completely indifferent to the world.

  39

  It is not easy to have a hikikomori in the family. Especially not at the beginning. You know: There is the threshold, beyond it his room, where he is playing dead. He’s still living, you hear him sometimes, much too seldom, walking up and down. You put the food by the door and see how it disappears. You wait. Certainly he must go to the bathroom at some point, to the toilet. You wait in vain. The first time I only went out when I was sure that nobody would disturb my existence. My existence consisted of my absence. I was the floor cushion nobody sat on, the empty place at the table, the nibbled plum on the plate I put back out by the door. In that I was absent, I had violated the rule that says, you must be there, and if you are there, do something, achieve something.

  Yet it is not particularly difficult to have a hikikomori in the family. The initial despair dissipates. You’re no longer in despair at his absence, rather you are desperately trying to conceal it. A shame, that. Our only son. People have begun to talk about us. Furtive glances at the Fujimotos. They whisper, I’m buying for three when I should really only buy for two. At least he has closed the curtains. Just imagine if anyone were to see him. You know what it was like with the Miyajimas. In the end nobody had a good word to say about them any more.