The Shut Ins Read online

  ‘Not only is The Shut Ins a compelling story about hikikomori, those who seek absolute isolation from society, and those who orbit them in their reclusion, it is also a profound exploration of loneliness, solitude, and that peculiar, ineffable yearning for inner or unconscious worlds; the chimeric ‘other side’. Katherine Brabon is a precise and contemplative writer, her prose capable of intense, almost-heady evocation. I will read everything she writes.’ – Hannah Kent, bestselling author of Burial Rites and The Good People

  ‘I was drawn in utterly by The Shut Ins. It illuminated the world around me in a strange and beautiful light, and it continues to unsettle my thoughts in the best possible way. At once bold and subtle, The Shut Ins is a haunting and transportive reading experience.’ – Emily Bitto, winner of the Stella Prize for The Strays

  ‘Katherine Brabon’s The Shut Ins is quietly mesmerising. Brabon has created an exquisite portrait of loneliness and aloneness through the stories of four interconnected people living in modern day Japan. Her prose is original and vivid, I found myself entranced by this novel from its first sentence to its last.’ – Anna Snoekstra, author of Only Daughter

  Katherine Brabon’s debut novel The Memory Artist won the The Australian/Vogel’s Literary Award (Allen & Unwin, 2016), was shortlisted in the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards and longlisted in the Indie Book Awards. She was co-winner of the 2019 David Harold Tribe Prize from The University of Sydney for her short fiction, and a runner-up in the Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize in 2020. Katherine was an ambassador at the Melbourne Emerging Writer’s Festival in 2019 and enjoys an active role in Australia’s literary community.

  Katherine’s writing has appeared in The Age/Sydney Morning Herald, Meanjin, Kill Your Darlings, The Lifted Brow, Island magazine, Southerly and she is a regular contributor to Lindsay magazine. She has received grants from the Australia Council and Creative Victoria, and residencies at Chateau Lavigny, Art Omi and the UNESCO Cities of Literature International Residency in Ljubljana.

  First published in 2021

  Copyright © Katherine Brabon 2021

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.

  Allen & Unwin

  83 Alexander Street

  Crows Nest NSW 2065

  Australia

  Phone(61 2) 8425 0100

  [email protected]

  Webwww.allenandunwin.com

  ISBN 978 1 76087 974 7

  eISBN 978 1 76106 220 9

  Set by Midland Typesetters, Australia

  Cover design: Mika Tabata

  Cover photograph: Rieko Honma/Getty Images

  Contents

  Note no. 1

  I Mai: Winter to Spring, 2014

  Note no. 2

  II Sadako: Spring to Summer, 2014

  Note no. 3

  III Hiromi Satō: Summer, 2014

  Note no. 4

  IV Hikaru Satō: Summer, 2014

  Note no. 5: Postscript

  Notes

  Acknowledgements

  Note no. 1

  I was in Japan, alone, when the story of Mai Takeda came to me. I don’t know where she is now—others’ stories only rest with us for a short time—so this is all I know from less than one year of her life.

  When I first arrived in Tokyo, it was night-time and raining. It was the middle of July, the most humid time of the year. I wrote some things down: A fear of too much time, of feeling lost. Should not be scared of solitude. Cab driver coughing so forcefully into a white cloth, trying his hardest to be quiet. A view from the cab of a rainy street: a middle-aged woman, riding a bike while holding a white umbrella, wearing a white skirt and a pastel blue top.

  The next day: a plump young woman, red-faced, sitting on a step near Sensō-ji temple in Asakusa, crying out as though about to burst, shouting among the tourists.

  From Tokyo I took the train to Shizuoka, halfway to Nagoya. There I stayed with the parents of my friend M. M no longer lives in Japan. She told me she does not want to work there, to devote her life to a company, although she does miss her parents. She now works as a translator and spends her afternoons swimming off the rocky coast of Malta. My friend’s mother is a social worker. She showed me a newspaper article about the hibakusha, the victims of the atomic bombings. My friend’s father, a dentist, had practised English before my visit by listening to the radio. M’s mother cooked for me and, after dinner, we stood on their wide balcony and lit sparklers in the warm night. I slept in the room, up a narrow flight of wooden stairs, where my friend had slept as a girl, as a teenager.

  It was strange to be in a place that was so much a part of M’s life without her being there. I remembered our conversations in Melbourne, where we had lived together near the university. She had recently ended a relationship, I had recently begun one. We sat on the grass that lined the alleyway at the back of the large brick terraces. M’s long dark hair touched her elbows. It was at this time that M first used the word achiragawa. It means to be over there or, more specifically, to be on the other side. I will try to explain it. There is a world we live in, on this side, and another world, achiragawa, that is a place of dreams, death and possibility. The other side may be our unconscious minds, our inner lives, the home of our deepest, unspoken beliefs. For some it may be spiritual, the location of their gods; it explains how the dead are no longer present in body but also, they are somewhere. The difficulty in grasping this idea is that achiragawa is not really a place. You can’t find it on a map. That is the difficulty.

  Those times when you wake and feel stuck in the images you saw fleetingly in your dreams, feel weighed down by unnameable significance, you are a step closer to the other side. The other side makes itself felt on days when you feel frozen in the world of others, but inside, in the world that is just yours, you are alive with possibility. Outside, you feel mute for fear of saying false things, aware of the devastating barrier between the inner and outer self. When it is a great effort to conform to the norms of a human day, to speak and live in the structures we have created, you are feeling the pull of achiragawa. It is physically absent; it is wonderful and perilous for the mind.

  I went to Japan because of this word. I went to Japan because of my own pull towards this place that is not really a place, to this idea of achiragawa.

  During the final months that I lived with M, as winter began to spread across the days, the cold seeping into the bricks of our peeling, cracking terrace house, we felt drawn to the summers of other places. She with her old relationship, me with the new; in both situations we wonder who we are. We discussed the need, or mechanism, of keeping some things inside, of resisting speech. We talked about how this can be both good and bad. We seemed to be trying to understand our respective positions inside and outside of certain structures: relationships, countries, friendships. We spoke about silence and freedom, unsure of ourselves. Until now M had, she said, seen herself only through the mirror of other people. She used the word amae, a sweet dependence on another person. She had previously found it impossible to see her own person, separate from the people around her and the life expected of her.

  In a few short weeks she would leave for Europe, and what she called her own kind of achiragawa. I would leave soon too, for Japan. I wrote d
own the new words she had taught me. Sometimes it is useful to leave your language, which is really your structure, your worldview, and find the cold pool of clarity in the unfamiliar.

  In Japan I was unsettled. I am still trying to articulate why. The sudden confidence of being in a new place, which usually stays with me almost a week, lasted barely two days. Travelling alone you are reduced in words, anxieties are prone to increase, and if you are not careful you will soon find it an ordeal even to do something as simple as walk into a cafe and order something to drink.

  After I left M’s parents, I mostly stayed in hostels. In the mornings, the large shared rooms were close and hot, dense with the pressure of a dozen humid nights breathed out by a dozen sleeping women. I woke early each day and stepped down the ladder rungs (I was often allocated a top bunk), put on the slippers provided and went to wash the night-stuck sweat from my face, arms and neck. The humidity shocked my body in such a way that I was permanently dazed. I felt a strange disconnection from my body, one perhaps born of extremes.

  The decision to go to Japan alone in the height of summer was entirely my own. I sensed that if I did not go, there would be consequences for my own life. I cannot explain what these unborn, imaginary contingencies would be; only that they propelled me. Questions remained and they stalked me: is there no other side, is there no other way to live a life? Can you test these daily despairs within the structures of your own life, or is some greater uprooting needed, as my friend M felt, in order to truly get to achiragawa, and how might I know if I am there?

  As I made my way from the main island, Honshu, to Nagasaki, on the island of Kyushu, I wrote to M and told her I was not sure why I had come all this way; that I did not know how to find things I couldn’t name. She replied: There is someone I would like you to meet while you are over there. She said that, like her, this friend no longer lived in Japan. In many ways our stories are part of a larger one, about achiragawa and the need for the other side.

  M gave me the name of this friend, a man she had never mentioned before. She said he was due to visit Japan soon, from where he lived abroad. She suggested I meet him when I returned to Tokyo; he would be able to tell me more about achiragawa.

  I began to compile these accounts when I returned from Japan. In many ways, the story begins and ends with Mai Takeda. Takeda is her family name, not her married one. Her account is the first given here. I have tried to present a range of perspectives. This does not necessarily mean I’ve portrayed things truthfully, but it is a good way to complicate the truth. I want to avoid the feeling of confidence, a false confidence, in a linear story. After rereading these accounts, I still don’t know who really reached achiragawa. Some of the people here wanted to escape this side and go to the other. Some helped to create the binding structures on this side, which for the most part we live within unquestioningly. If anything, the story may help us to live with the loneliness and restlessness that visit like shifting cloud shadows—that is, the natural condition of this side.

  I

  Mai

  Winter to Spring, 2014

  I was born in Gifu Prefecture in 1986. We moved to the city—my mother, my father and me—when I was so young that my memories start there. If you look at me, I’m a daughter of skyscrapers, not mountains. I wear simple shirts, a city person’s clothes, and I don’t know anything about nature. When I was a girl we lived in a built-up suburb fifteen minutes by subway from Nagoya Station, a bead on a string of the Shinkansen line between Tokyo and Kyoto.

  Now, I live in the apartment J and I rent in Nagoya. J is my husband. Three months, not even a marriage yet. The complex was built over fifty years ago, for a thousand bodies but for no individual soul. Fifty square metres is the average size of a couple’s apartment in the average building. We have two rooms, the bedroom and an eat-in kitchen, separated by a sliding door. The floor is made to look like wood but it is fake. The kitchen cabinets are an old creamy white. I once saw a TV news report about an incident in Xi’an, China, in which a woman was stuck in the elevator to her apartment building. Most people used another elevator, at the front of the building, so she wasn’t found until someone reported the broken elevator after a month, and a repairman was sent to fix it. By then she had starved to death. She lived on the fifteenth floor of the apartment building and mostly kept to herself. Nobody had noticed she was missing.

  I think of this story as I stand in my dressing-gown and slippers in the hallway of the apartment building, surrounded by residents from nearby apartments. J stands next to me. J’s stomach softens in his dressing-gown; his stocky frame reveals what his body wants to be; what it may look like when he’s old. My mother says I’m thin but not in a way that is good. I cut my hair to my shoulders after we married, as though it would make me seem older, more like a wife. We listen to the ambulance radios down below. We have been told to stay where we are; an evacuation is not necessary. It’s nearly six in the morning on a Friday in February. During the night, a girl in our apartment building committed suicide. We were woken by the sirens.

  The night before had been completely ordinary. I returned from work around seven in the evening. J arrived at eight thirty. We ate the meal I prepared, and then J watched TV while I scrolled through my phone. I was preoccupied because I had run into the mother of an old school friend on my way home from work. She was leaving one of the department stores below Nagoya Station while I was passing along the walkway. Mrs Satō is her name. She’s the mother of Hikaru, who I have not seen since high school. Mrs Satō and I exchanged pleasantries; I told her I had recently married, and I asked after Hikaru. She nodded and said, Thank you, Mai, as though my question had offered her something, and said that she would pass on my regards to her son. Her face, which had aged only a little since I last saw her, was inscrutable. Only the purplish-grey rings under her eyes suggested she might have been feeling tired. She wore her hair in the same way as when Hikaru and I were young, tied back in a low bun.

  And so that night, while J and I sat on the floor cushions on opposite sides of our table, turned away from each other to face the TV, I looked to see if Hikaru Satō had an online profile, but he was nowhere to be found. I had not thought of him in a long time. I gave up and went to bed, pulling the sliding door closed behind me.

  Standing in the hallway in our gowns and slippers, the residents in our section of the apartment building are all strangely united. At first, the information was limited. Someone called to report a gas leak; another person complained of a noxious smell coming through the ceiling vents of his apartment. A man said that he and his wife and children were experiencing dizziness, sore throats. Nobody knew the source of the smell or if we were in danger. Then the news travelled down from the girl’s neighbour, three floors above us. The girl had mixed laundry detergent with bath salts, poisoning herself with hydrogen sulfide. She was fourteen. Her neighbour and a few others are taken to hospital because of the fumes, but it’s only precautionary; they’re fine. The police and the apartment manager encourage everyone to return to their apartments. We all must be at work soon, after all. J and I shuffle back inside. J takes a shower while I make soup and rice. I don’t feel like eating, and wonder if I can smell fumes coming in through the ceiling vents.

  This winter, it snowed in the city. That doesn’t always happen. Nagoya Castle is coated in white like an old woodcut drawing; the red lights of cranes in nearby construction sites are modern fireflies hovering around the old castle keep. I step out of the apartment building and the wind tears at my coat. I take the subway to work.

  When I was a young girl, my existence didn’t feel particularly special to me. In the morning I dressed in my navy and white uniform, ate the usual soup-fish-rice breakfast my mother put on the table, went to school and sat at my desk, walked home and did my homework, ate the dinner my mother made—usually just my mother and I—and then watched TV or did more homework before I went to bed. My father worked for a company in Nagoya and my mother was an assistant at a dental
clinic in our suburb. I never had the sense that we were particularly happy, but we were functional, and functional seemed to be the aim of all the parents of the other children at school. I did not seek out what was other than the ordinary. I don’t think it occurred to me that this might be possible.

  I stayed in Nagoya for high school and college, and when I graduated began working for a local language school. I met J through a colleague. His attentions were welcome. I have always been quiet; have often watched the world rather than participated in it. J might not have known me in some fundamental ways, but he offered what seemed to be a chance to participate in life, in a marriage. My mother said this was good, accept him, you are approaching your late twenties, soon you will have few chances for a husband. Take this opportunity while you can. I took it. Each night after work, I open the creaking glass door, cross the threshold into our apartment building, walk up the stairs, and become one of the thousand. I guess it is true that my life still doesn’t seem exceptional to me.

  Throughout the day at work I think of the girl who committed suicide in our apartment building. I think of the encounter with Hikaru’s mother the night before. I’m unsettled by both events. I think of Hikaru Satō and wonder what he looks like now.

  Hikaru was a strange child. We were in class together at elementary school. At school we follow a path paved by everything we have grown up with and the paths of our parents and grandparents. The path is laid out for all of us, but taking it did not come naturally to Hikaru. I don’t know how to account for this. He was different. He did not respond to questions that were asked out of custom, questions to which the answer was obvious. He seemed to find it difficult to laugh with classmates, as though he could not force himself to laugh in situations when to do so would have brought him into the group, into any group, if he’d just played along. The concept of banter seemed beyond him. When we were younger, Hikaru would sometimes bear bruises from being pinched or shoved against walls. When we were older, Hikaru grew taller than everyone, and so the other students just taunted him or pretended he wasn’t there, tall and invisible in the crowd. He let his hair grow past his ears. The teachers often punished him for this and must have ordered his parents, Mr and Mrs Satō, to make sure their son was better groomed, because every now and then he came to school with a severe haircut that seemed like a kind of abuse. On the weekends, if I happened to see Hikaru, he wore the same clothes: a tattered purple-and-white t-shirt, grey tracksuit trousers and, when it was cold, a hooded zip-up jacket.