Welcome to the NHK!

by Tatsuhiko Takimoto

  “What's wrong? Satou, you're so quiet. Oh, I guess my music was too loud, right? I'll be careful next time.”

  On top of the desk, there were piles of square boxes that appeared to be some kind of computer games. They were decorated with loads of intimidating labels—stuff like “torture”, “wet”, “abuse”, “lewd”, “tie”, “academy”, “confinement”, “rape”, “savage”, “pure love”, “training”, “adventure”—things one didn't typically see. And of course, above the piles, was the nude drawing of the elementary school student. A sticker on it advised, “Not for those under 18 years of age.”

  Once again, I hurriedly looked away, this time toward the mountain of manga next to the wall.

  Yamazaki continued his monologue. “Anyway, I'm very happy, Satou. I never thought I'd get to see you again, and I really respect you. Did you know that? You did, didn't you?”

  Picking up one of the manga, I flipped through it. Naturally, I found the nude form of a girl, who could be nothing but elementary school aged, along with a yellow mark for “Adult Comics.”

  “Have you heard of the school I'm attending? I'm sure you've probably seen it in a TV commercial….”

  I returned the book to the pile. Wiping the sweat from my brow, I asked, “What school are you going to?”

  At my question, Yamazaki puffed out his chest and started to reply.

  Without intending to, I rolled my eyes toward heaven.

  ***

  It was several years earlier. We had been dreaming. It was the effect of the dim life in a dirty school building, beautiful young girls, and boys laughing despite the gloom. I, and everyone else, had been dreaming. In the midst of that surreal time, we all had been dreaming of a wonderful future.

  Those were the days when we were always in the club offices after school, spending the slow time with the upperclassmen. We nervously smoked cigarettes behind a shabby, old prefab hut that looked as though an earthquake would flatten it instantaneously. We didn't have part-time jobs, we didn't throw ourselves into our clubs, we had bad grades, and we had no motivation at all. Even though I was a high school student headed absolutely nowhere, I was always smiling.

  On one day, something happened: In our club office, where trash and assorted scraps littered the floor, the cute upperclassman and I had been spacing out. “Satou, what're you going to do in the future?” she asked.

  “First, I'll attend some college … I don't really know what I'll do, but I should be able to find something I like while I'm there.”

  “Hm…”

  She looked away. Suddenly, she murmured, “Remember your recent plan to rescue that kid being bullied? It was so stupid, but you looked kind of cool. You'll be fine, Satou. You'll definitely be fine.”

  I was embarrassed.

  Time passed. She graduated. Later, in the same club office, Yamazaki and I sat there. I glared at my math book. Yamazaki said, “Satou, you'll graduate this year.”

  “That's right, so you'll be the president from now on. Work hard.”

  “It'll be lonely. Everyone's getting older.”

  “Don't say that kind of stuff while you're young. Want a smoke?” Taking a cigarette out of my pocket, I offered it to Yamazaki, who took it.

  Cautiously, he lit it. He launched into a magnificent fit of coughing. Eyes watering, he said, “I hope it goes well.”

  “What goes well?”

  “All kinds of things. I hope that I can continue this kind of happy daily life. You should work hard, too, Satou, and so will I. I'll leave with high spirits, and everything will be okay, somehow.”

  Yamazaki was filled with both hope and anxiety. In that shabby club office, filled with the light of the setting sun, we laughed as though we were dreaming.

  Then, I went on to college—but I dropped out. Frightened of my futureless life, scared by my foolish anxieties, unable to see ahead and aiming nowhere, I continued ceaselessly living my ridiculously idiotic life. I was beset on all sides by invisible worries. ,

  So, I shut myself in and slept. I slept until sleep exhausted me. Spring passed, summer ended, fall came, and then winter arrived. Then, it turned into another gentle spring.

  My forward progress to the future had stopped, and I was at my wit's end. The cool night breeze felt good, and I continued to sleep.

  And then, one day, we met again. Yamazaki and I had met again. He'd been a weak, bullied boy, but Yamazaki was still a pretty good guy. All this time, we'd been inhaling the same city air.

  Although neither of us could see anything concrete in our futures, we still were looking forward.

  Even now, I could remember it clearly—us in the club office that I missed so much, the setting sun shining through the narrow windows during our innocent conversations.

  “What's going to happen to us?”

  “Whatever happens will happen.”

  “I guess so.”

  That pleasant, gentle time after school.

  ***

  We had been young and stupid. We were worthless, helpless, and couldn't even have imagined ourselves four years in the future.

  Having run into Yamazaki again for the first time in several years, I asked, “Where are you going to school?”

  Yamazaki proudly puffed up his chest at my question and answered, “Yoyogi Animation Institute.”[16]

  Life was so strange….

  “What are you doing now?” he asked me.

  “I dropped out.”

  Yamazaki looked away, and an uncomfortable silence passed.

  Finally, in an unnaturally cheerful voice, I said, “By the way, why were you crying?”

  “I haven't been going to school lately. I didn't really blend in with the other students, I didn't have any friends, and I just started living alone. In despair, I was playing my CDs as loud as I could….”

  “You've been shut in here all the time these days?”

  “Th-that's right.”

  I stood up quickly. “Wait just a second”, I said, and I went back to my own room.

  I returned to Yamazaki's room, carrying beer cans in both hands. “Let's drink!”

  “What?”

  “It's fine. Let's just drink.” I handed a beer to Yamazaki. “It's okay. The day when you can escape from being a hikikomori definitely will come.”

  Truthfully, I was noisily professing my own desires. “It's okay, Yamazaki. I'm a professional when it comes to being a hikikomori. As long as I'm with you, your situation can't get any worse!”

  With that, we drank. We turned the anime songs back on and got drunk enough that consciousness evaporated. Our party continued late into the night. Once the anime CD ended, we started singing our own songs. Because we both were incredibly inebriated, we might have just dreamt that these were wonderful songs.

  Even if it was a dream, that's fine. I sang with vigor.

  ***

  The Hikikomori Song

  Lyrics and Music by Satou Tatsuhiro

  The freezing cold, six-mat, single room—

  Oh, this apartment:

  Even though I want to leave, my escape is still distant.

  I lie on the bed, even while awake, and sleep sixteen hours a day.

  Near the shadows of the kotatsu,

  A cockroach is hiding.

  When I eat, I have one meal a day,

  And I lose weight every day.

  Sometimes, I head to the convenience store,

  The gazes of others frighten me, though.

  A cold sweat even springs forth,

  Telling me how hard it is to escape my apartment.

  N.H.K., which seems like a fantasy—

  I here is emptiness in searching and not finding it.

  Today, when the sun sets, I go weakly forth

  To lie down in my damp bed.

  My tired and heavy brain—

  Oh, I can't go on. I can't go on!

  ***

  Because I had used the pornographic comics as a pillow when I fell asleep on the floor, I wo
ke up with a terrible headache. Yamazaki had dozed off, resting his head on his desk.

  I gently shook his shoulders. “What about school?”

  “I'm taking today off.”

  Saying this, Yamazaki closed his eyes again.

  Returning to my own room, I sprawled across my bed. I swallowed an aspirin and went back to sleep.

  Chapter 04. Road to the Creator

  Part One

  The exit was blocked. I could see no hope. There was nothing I could do. And because of some stupid daydream about the N.H.K. as the evil organization that controls the world, I had lost even the means to divert myself.

  It was a spring of unending, depressive anxiety for me—the kind of spring that made me want to imitate Vincent Gallo in Buffalo 66. Entering the bathroom, I grasped my head and moaned, “I just can’t go on living”.

  I need to die.

  Today was already different from every other day, though. Something surprising had happened earlier.

  After waking up at one in the afternoon, I found an unfamiliar slip of paper in the mail slot. Picking it up, I examined it.

  It was the resume that I had written several days earlier for the part-time job at the manga cafe. I had written it for that particular job application, a memory that I now wanted to forget completely. Why? Why was it in my mail slot? I hurried next door to Yamazaki’s apartment. Yamazaki was taking the day off from school again. Seated at his computer, he was playing some sort of game.

  I asked, “Did a religious solicitor come by today?” “Hm … they came about two hours ago. I got some of those pamphlets. I just love the word-for-word translation. Why? Didn’t they go to your apartment, too, Satou?”

  I suddenly saw the frightening truth behind Yamazaki’s testimony. Apparently, I had left my resume behind in the manga cafe. I could no longer remember if it had fallen from my pocket or if I automatically had handed it to Misaki. Because of the massive shock, my memories of that moment were muddled.

  Only one thing was certain: While making her religious rounds, Misaki had gone out of her way to bring me the resume. In other words, when I had asked, “Do you like bikes?” in a clumsy effort to conceal that I had, indeed, come to apply for a part-time job, I had failed utterly. Realizing this, nothing at all seemed to matter anymore. When humans run into an extremely embarrassing circumstance, it seems their emotions go numb.

  “Who cares?” I whispered, heading to the trashcan to throw away the paper. As I did, the back of the resume caught my eye. A message was written there in black ballpoint pen: “You have been selected for my project. Please, come to the Mita Fourth District Park tonight at nine o’clock.”

  Eh? My mouth had fallen open as I squatted in front of the trash can.

  Now, objectively considering it, I saw that this was an earth-shattering situation. I had received a mysterious letter from a girl I had met twice. Really, it was so incredibly incomprehensible that I had no idea at all what was going on. So, I obediently went along with it.

  The park was only a two-minute walk from my apartment. It was already night. The roadside trees grew at even intervals. There was the old jungle gym, the bench with flaking paint, and the towering streetlights in front of the swings, illuminating everything with a dim blue glow. I liked this park.

  On my weekly, nocturnal supply trips to the convenience store, I always made sure to stop here. Empty, the space belonged to me alone.

  I enjoyed the cool night breeze. Seated on the bench, if I looked up at the sky, I could see the faintly waving branches of the trees and, through them, the moon and the stars. It was a place to relax and release my worries.

  Tonight, the park wasn’t just my personal space, though. Someone else was there.

  I didn’t call out. In fact, my stomach felt hollow.

  What are you trying to do? What are you thinking? Who on Earth are you? These questions accompanied a growing rage, yet my mind remained clear for some reason. I was even calm, my thoughts moving in an orderly manner, with no threat of spinning out of control.

  This may have been a form of resignation. Perhaps I had finally accepted my current situation. It was wholly possible I had quietly admitted to myself that I was a hikikomori, a person with no future, someone who should just die. Yes, that had to be the explanation.

  Lately, I had been living in the past. Every night, I dreamed of long ago: the hometown I yearned for, friends, family, things I hadn’t liked, things that had made me happy, other various memories— fragments of all these things. My nightly dreams were gentle and melancholy.

  Indeed, the future had ceased to be a problem. It already had been decided, which was precisely why I needed to exist in the past—in my wonderful, comforting memories. While this was obviously an extreme form of backward escapism, I didn’t care anymore.

  Yes, that’s right. I am a hikikomori, a worthless person with a weak spirit. Is that a problem? Just leave me alone, and I’ll disappear quietly. I’m fine! It’s all over!

  “No, no, no…” I sat on the bench, head in hands.

  “’No’, what?” the girl inquired. She was rocking in one of the swings near the bench. Her almost shoulder-length hair blew lightly in the wind. Tonight, too, she was dressed like an average teenage girl—no parasol, no pamphlets, and no discernible religious atmosphere.

  However, I forbade myself to let down my guard. More than anything about her, the very strangeness of the situation spoke vividly of how truly odd she was. I had to deal with her calmly, but with total caution.

  Right then and there, I decided to think of her as an ASIMO, the bipedal robot developed by Honda. If I did that, it would keep me on an even keel. Why not? Nowadays, robot technology is really coming along. No matter how I examine it, it looks exactly like a person.

  Rocking slightly back and forth in the swing, the robot asked, “Why did you run away earlier? We’re short-staffed right now and could really use the help. We would have decided to hire you right away.”

  Wow! The voice output was perfect, too. The joints moved smoothly, legs extending flexibly from its skirt. Japan's technical skill truly is the best in the world, isn’t it?

  “Seeing as you’re a hikikomori, did you get scared of working in the outside world and reconsider halfway through your application?” She drove right to the heart of the matter—in the end, though, they were just a robot’s words. No matter what a machine might say, no one would get that angry.

  The robot continued to say even more mysterious things. “Don’t worry. I know how to escape from being a hikikomori.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” I finally reacted to her words.

  “Satou, right? Well, you’re really a hikikomori, aren’t you?”

  Instead of immediately answering her question, I pointed at the sign hanging over the park entrance. It warned, “Beware of perverts! Young girls have been continually targeted”, in caustic red paint.

  I said, “Are you sure it’s all right to meet a shady person like me at this time of night? I could be dangerous.”

  “It’s okay. My house is right over there, so I know all kinds of things. For instance, you’re always spacing out in this park on Sunday nights, right? I saw you from my window.”

  Having come this far, I was pretty anxious about all this. I couldn’t figure out what she wanted. Her real motives remained a mystery, and nothing seemed normal. Could it be some sort of roundabout religious solicitation?

  “No, it’s not. I’m just going along to help Auntie Kazuko.”

  “Huh?”

  “Because I’m always troubling her, I figured it’s the least I could do to repay her.”

  I didn’t understand what she was talking about, but she continued our awkward conversation as we both stared at the streetlamps. “Anyway, none of that matters. Satou, don’t you want to know? About how to escape from being a hikikomori?”

  “Don’t call me Satou. I'm older than you.”

  “You know my age?”

  �
��Well, you look about seventeen, maybe eighteen.”

  “You’re absolutely right!”

  Gathering momentum from the swing, she leapt off lightly. The display of energy seemed intentional. It might have been my imagination, though. After she landed, she came over to where I sat on the bench and looked straight at me. Crouching, her hands resting on her knees, she said, “You want to know how to escape, right? I’ll teach you.”

  Once again, the same unnecessarily cute smile that I’d seen before floated across her face. I was unable to think of her as a successor to the ASIMO model any longer. Looking away, I whispered, “I’m not a hikikomori.”

  “Liar. How can you say that even though you completely gave it away when Auntie tried talking to you the other day? Even though you ran away when you realized it was me at the manga cafe? Normal people don’t do stuff like that.”

  “Hey!” I sputtered.

  “You’re scared, right? Of other people?”

  As I lifted my head, our eyes met. She had big eyes, with large pupils. Gazing into those eyes, I was at a loss for words.

  In the end, without saying anything, I looked away again.

  Suddenly, I realized that somewhere along the way, the wind had started blowing harder. Over our heads, the branches of the trees were stirring. It was a chilly night.

  I decided to go back to my apartment. Standing, I turned my back on her. From behind me, she tried to stop me. “Wait!” she called, “You’ll regret this.”

  “What are you talking about? For starters, who are you, anyway?”

  “I’m a kind girl who helps worthless hikikomori.”

  “And what’s this ‘project’ that you mentioned in your letter?”

  “At the current juncture, details of the project are top secret. However, you can rest assured that I won’t do anything bad.”

  I started feeling sick, so I decided to tell a suitable lie and just get away from that place. “I’m not just any regular hikikomori, you know. It’s true that I shut myself away, but it’s for my job. I have to.”