Hikikomori and the Rental Sister Read online

  “But you don’t want to be here. You don’t want to see me.”

  “It’s complicated.” She learned the phrase from a movie and has been waiting to finally use it.

  “Who’s your boss? What’s your job?”

  “I’m a clerk at a wagashi shop.”

  “What’s wagashi?”

  “I’ll bring you some. Next time.”

  “Why don’t you want to help me?”

  “I never said that. Why don’t you want my help?”

  “Because I’m fine.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  He lets out an incipient sound that dies before it can mature into a laugh. She resists reaching out and touching his knee.

  “So then let’s forget about helping,” she says. “You’re fine, I’m fine. I’m not sure what to do, anyway. Forces have brought us together.”

  “What kind of forces?”

  “I don’t know. I feel I’m always being forced. I never get to decide. Does my English make sense to you?”

  “It’s very good.”

  “Americans expect everybody to speak English.”

  It’s an awkward exchange, a mistimed, uncomfortable dance, neither of them knowing what to make of the other, what to say, how to proceed, but there is also a murmur of attraction—or maybe only intrigue—that keeps her searching for the thread, the spark that will get the words flowing smoothly. He is afraid of her, but already she can see that his heart harbors no hate. There was a time in her life when she was constantly with different men, strangers, sizing them up, and she learned to trust her gut, a sometimes painful education, but it paid off, and now when she looks at Thomas she feels something she can’t quite put into words because it’s just an instinct, but already she can see why Silke has waited and why she wants him back.

  For a long time they say nothing. They both succumb to their preoccupations.

  “I didn’t realize there was anyone else like me,” he says.

  “Hikikomori? I think in this country you might be the only one. But there are lots in Japan. It’s not exactly the same, but close enough.”

  “What happened to your brother?”

  “That’s why I didn’t want to come. I miss him too much.”

  His eyes apologize but his lips stay mute. He flinches. “You’re wasting your time.”

  “You’re hopeless?”

  “You can’t fix me.”

  “I don’t want to fix you.”

  He tilts his head like a wondering puppy. She feels as if she’s talking to her brother, saying what she never had the chance to say. “I’m curious about you,” she says. “But I don’t want to fix you. I just want you to come back to the world.”

  “The more you know me, the less you’ll like me. You may think you know about my son, but—”

  “I didn’t know you have a son.”

  “She didn’t tell you?”

  “I told her not to tell me anything. It’s just me and you.” The wind whistles. Then it fades.

  “Tell me something about your brother.”

  The light through the window shade has turned dull and gray, flat and weak. “My brother wanted to be an astronomer. He had a telescope pointed out the window. He had maps of the stars. He read books about space dust. But have you ever been to Tokyo? It’s too bright to see many stars. Brighter than New York. He told me all about the big bang. He told me that in the big bang energy became . . . became . . .”

  “Matter?”

  “Yes. In English. Thank you. He told me energy became matter.”

  His T-shirt is clean. No stains. The sleeves and neck have not stretched from too much time away from the washing machine. She wonders how he does laundry. Her brother washed it in the sink and hung it from a line stretching across his room. His skin, too, looks clean. He showers. He keeps up with basic human grooming. She can report back to Silke. It’s enough for a seed of hope. And if he showered and dressed just for her, even better.

  “Did you really sell your underwear?”

  “Yes,” she says. She wants his trust. She wants him to believe. “But I didn’t tell you the real reason. It started out as shopping money. But then I got an idea. A stupid idea. I thought if I sold enough I could save enough to take my brother out of his room, to some other country. Somewhere dark. Where he could see the stars.”

  The room is too small. She goes to the window. She pulls back the shade. One corner of the glass is white with frost. “Thomas,” she says, careful to pronounce it correctly, “it’s snowing. Come look.” He joins her at the window. He is tall. She comes up only to his shoulders.

  The snow falls gently. The wind forms the flakes into translucent sheets, thin curtains swaying back and forth.

  “Isn’t it beautiful?” she says. Thomas watches the snow but says nothing. Megumi, too, says nothing for a time, the two of them together at the window, watching. “Snow is gentle, but so powerful,” she whispers. “Slows everyone down . . . makes everything quiet.”

  Snow sticks to the branches of the tree to eerie effect, as though the tree is white and the branches mere shadow. Unseen birds chirp.

  “What could those birds be singing about in the snow?” she says. Thomas turns toward her, on the verge, lips parted. But he says nothing.

  “I know it’s hard to let me in,” she says, looking out the window at the white world. “I’m an invasion of privacy. My own brother hardly ever let me in. You’re brave to let me in. And I can see that there’s something heavy inside you.”

  That heavy thing, whatever it is, has gravity. It’s drawing her in, closer. She feels the pull. She has been alone for so long, surrounded by people who are empty inside. It’s what she thought she wanted, to float, untethered, to forget. But heavy things—even buried deep—tend to find each other. Silence attracts silence.

  She touches his back. Three fingertips. He does not flinch. Now all five. She holds the pressure. They watch the snow fall. The wind picks up and the sheets of snow disintegrate into random white swirls. “Want to go outside,” she asks, “play in the snow? Nobody’s there. It’d be just us.”

  “It’s time for you to leave.”

  “But the snow,” she says. “Why don’t you come out with me for just a few minutes?”

  “I wish I could.”

  He closes the door behind her and locks the dead bolt with such deliberate slowness that it sounds as though he’s trying to be quiet and gentle, as though he feels some sort of complicated emotion about locking her out, or about her hearing him lock her out. Megumi waits, not sure exactly what she’s expecting, but whatever it is it doesn’t come.

  She peeks into Silke’s room on her way out. Bed still unmade, underwear and a bra on the floor, and a pair of twisted jeans. Curtains open.

  Outside she makes a snowball and hurls it at his window. It’s pretty high and she misses, hitting the bricks just below. This time she packs the snow tighter and throws it harder. The snowball explodes and the window rattles and all that remains is a little white dot of snow stuck to the glass. She packs another one. She waits, and as soon as she sees the slightest movement in the window shade—there it is—she lets it fly and it arcs through the air and just as Thomas’s full head appears in the window the snowball smacks against the glass. He recoils, disappears, and then there is only the window shade and two white dots. She makes another and waits, melting snow seeping into her mittens, staring up at the window, smiling.

  “You know that guy?”

  She whirls around and faces a man with a bright orange metal snowshovel. “Who are you?” he says.

  “I’m sorry,” she says, deploying her thickest Japanese accent. She turns to walk away.

  “No, wait,” he says. “That guy up there—how do you know him?” He cannot hide his confusion. He looks back up at the window, then at her again, the Japanese girl throwing snowballs. He’s about Thomas’s age, maybe a little older, all bundled up and ready to shovel the snow.

  “I’m sorry,” she repeats, and t
urns and hurries away. When she gets to the bus stop, the snowball is just a little ball of ice. She throws it at a stop sign.

  Eleven

  I scream myself awake, and if my scream has also awakened Silke, she does not come down the hall to ask about my nightmare. She stays in her bed, busy with nightmares of her own.

  In my head, the lingering echoes of a singing cardinal. The morning my son died the cardinal sang for only a minute or two, but in my nightmare she sings forever, on and on, never tiring, never a pause, an endless repeat of whoops and chirps, a rhythm and melody with no resolution, and I have no power to move forward or back; I am forced to sit and watch and listen until my mind can take no more, until an invisible biological process squirts chemicals through my blood, waking me up alone in my bed, nobody to comfort me when I scream.

  The night is at its blackest. The wind wails against the window, trying to slither in. Even the wind needs refuge and relief from the cold.

  I feel my way to the window and raise the shade. Snow, stained orange from the sodium lamps, covers the street. The plows have not yet come. Everything looks soft and peaceful. But the wind still blows.

  I turn away from the snow and he is standing in the middle of my room, looking up at me. He is mostly shadow, but his little form is unmistakable. A father knows. His cheek, his nose, his eyes, they collect and reflect the scant light. “Why are you so scared?” he says.

  “You snuck up on me. I didn’t know you were there.”

  “Dad, what happened to me?”

  “You don’t remember?”

  “I try, but I can’t.”

  “I don’t know either.”

  “Dad, why didn’t you save me?”

  “I didn’t see it in time,” I say, and I can’t tell whether he believes me. This is our stalemate.

  “Who is that girl?” he asks.

  “What girl?”

  “The one with the strange eyes.”

  “You saw her?”

  “Are you going to marry her instead of Mommy?”

  “That’s not how it works.”

  “Because Mommy’s still here.”

  “You talk to Mommy, too?”

  “She won’t talk to me. I did something wrong.”

  “You didn’t do anything wrong. I did.”

  I blink and he is gone. It’s always like that. I blink or avert my eyes in shame just for an instant and he’s gone, from shadow to less than shadow, and some romantic place inside me wants to say that he’s not actually gone, that he’s still in my room, somewhere, that he’s always here in my room with me. But I know it’s not true. He is gone. His absence is like someone punctured my chest and vacuumed out all my organs. I find my way back under the covers, pillow still wet with nightmare sweat, I concentrate on the sound of my breathing, I hope to god the nightmare won’t pick up where it left off, and I fall asleep.

  “I’m proud of you—” Silke says one evening from the hallway, interrupting my magazine article about the proper way to make a schnitzel, specifically (for the sake of illustration) Wiener schnitzel, but the same techniques can be and should be and must be applied to the entire schnitzel family.

  “—for letting her inside your room and letting her help.” The first key is that the schnitzel must be pounded thin, thinner than you think, a point which I thought was obvious but apparently out there in the world there are a lot of thick schnitzels, some almost as thick as a proper Japanese tonkatsu. In a sidebar the article points out that in America a lot of tonkatsu are way too thin (but thicker than a proper schnitzel), thereby creating an entire species of breaded fried meat that is the same thickness, both of which are incorrect. I wonder if my little pest eats tonkatsu. I’ve never had it.

  “I know it must be difficult, but . . .”

  The second key is that the frying fat should be a mixture of oil and butter, and the oil should have a high enough flashpoint that it won’t catch fire. The exact proportions are of course not scientifically certifiable, based instead on the experience of the cook, who must pay close attention to the cooking of thousands of schnitzels in order to stockpile a great mass of information that he synthesizes into something called intuition.

  “What do you two talk about? Do you like her?”

  “I’m sure she tells you everything,” I say. The third key—the most important—is the level of heat involved, which must be high enough to blister the breading, but not so high it burns, and of course the ability to accomplish this is helped greatly by the proper adherence to point number two, the proper proportion and types of butter and oil.

  “She doesn’t tell me anything,” she says.

  The blisters, or bubbles, create air pockets between the breading and the meat, and these air pockets give the schnitzel its lightness. The breading should not stick to the meat, except here and there and barely, just enough for it to hold together. The article says that if your experience of a schnitzel is a leaden, oily, soggy mess of thick meat, then your cook either failed to create the air pockets or, more likely, never learned how to really cook a schnitzel in the first place.

  “All she said was that you let her inside. And that you are very handsome and that you were very nice to her.” Her voice overflows with pride.

  Handsome? “I told her to stop coming,” I say.

  “Well then it’s a good thing she’s not going to listen to you.”

  “I told her it’s no use.”

  “But it is, and you know it.”

  “I told her about him.”

  She is trying to create a home where none exists, and suddenly I feel immense empathy toward her and her life out there. To her, my presence here at the end of the hallway must be an all-consuming emptiness. For me there is only the present, but for her time continues without mercy, and sometimes I am everywhere and sometimes I am nowhere. With these feelings the world is seeping in drop by drop.

  “So I was thinking,” she says, “that I could cook dinner for you. If you want. Don’t make a big deal of it—it’s just dinner. Just dinner, then you can go back inside.” Not tonight, she says, she doesn’t mean she’s going to cook tonight. She doesn’t have any groceries tonight anyway. So she’ll cook dinner tomorrow. Is it a date? she asks. But I do not respond. What do you want, she asks, she’ll cook anything. Just say the word, make a request, anything at all. If it’s complicated, she says, she’ll call in sick from work and stay home all day cooking. So, what’ll it be?

  What’ll it be, as if she’s working the counter at a diner, pen behind her ear. “Thomas!” she shouts with a flash of fire. But then she extinguishes it and calmly continues, “Will you have dinner with me tomorrow?” There is fight in her voice, beneath the calm, a fight against me, of course, but also a fight within herself, a fight to hold back the hope, or to hold back something else.

  “I’ll think about it,” I say.

  HE WOKE UP EARLY one summer morning, and sneaked into our room and poked my shoulder and whispered close to my ear so as not to wake his mother. “Dad,” he said, “how much longer? When can we go?”

  “Not until later, in the afternoon,” I said, rolling over, my face so close to his I could smell his milky skin. To that little creature I must have smelled ancient, unearthed, clumps of dirt sticking to my skin. “Let me sleep just a little longer,” I said.

  “Do you think I’ll catch a ball?”

  His first baseball game, his only. A cool night, barely a breeze. His first baseball hat, too big for his little head, his first bag of salted peanuts. Dad, are you sure it’s okay to just throw the shells on the ground?

  A perfect night. The green field and bright lights, the cheering, he sat with his jaw constantly dropped. The hugest thing I ever saw. He kept swiveling around in his seat, taking it all in. The people seated around us showered us with smiles. I cracked open the peanuts for him. He picked them out of the shell.

  I wonder what it’s like at the onsen. I wonder if it’s as peaceful and pure as she says, I wonder if there I could
wash my guilt away, wash my fear away.

  My son is buried not far from here. I have never been to see him, but I wonder: if he visits me here, then has he left his grave? Did I not bury him deep enough? Has he pushed himself up through the soil?

  Twelve

  Megumi goes to a bar, alone. She buys a glass of vodka and sips it. Ice cubes melt against her lips. She looks closely at each man in the bar.

  Some are too young. Most are too old. Most are too fat. None have beards the way Thomas has, so she imagines what he might look like under the beard. She tries to find a match. He doesn’t have to be perfect. He has to be close enough. The hair is important. It has to be longish and dark and a bit ragged. The build is important. He has to be tall. But not too skinny. The eyes are important. They have to be nearly black. If he has a far-off stare, even better. Clothes aren’t important. He won’t need them.

  It takes a while. She buys another drink. She deflects the attention she gets from men who don’t match. She keeps searching the crowd.

  She tells herself that this will help her keep her cool next time. The problem is comfort. She feels comfortable with him. She tells him things she shouldn’t. Comfort leads to closeness. Closeness leads to desire. Desire grows uncontrollable. The heavy thing.

  Just when she’s about to give up, she spots him. Any hesitation might dissolve her will. She approaches him. His hair is right, and his beard, too. Next to him at the bar she pretends to be frustrated at the bartender’s inattention. She leans forward to make sure he can see down her shirt, to see she isn’t wearing a bra. Men are as predictable as the sun.

  He orders a vodka for her. “It’s on me,” he says. He tells her his name but she promptly and permanently forgets it. He’s nervous. Maybe his first Asian. He drones on about how the drink he’s drinking is the same drink he had on his recent trip to some island’s all-inclusive resort, where he got sunburn and drank so much that an entire day is still unaccounted for. So impressive! He carefully neglects to mention who accompanied him on this trip. The way he tells the story it appears he went all by himself, that he sat alone on the beach and drank himself into oblivion. So then, probably a girlfriend, perhaps a wife.