SHRINK

A psychologist came once. He spent hours asking me questions about what I believed in. About why I wouldn’t leave my room. Why I had treated mother and father so badly. He asked me about my favourite colour. Which subject I liked most at school. Hundreds of questions. He perched on a low stool outside my door. He wore black patent leather shoes. His sock cotton was starting to fray. The socks were black; the material magnetic. Attracted the microscopic dust fleeing mother’s pogroms. He wanted to know if I loved her. Had I been bullied at school? Did I want to kill father? I used the internet a lot, didn’t I?

Later, he talked to my parents. I heard him; I had heard his questions. He spat out symptoms into spaces between them. I was typical of a growing group. Another Japanese youth reacting against society. Protesting in some youthfully selfish way. No concern for all they had given me. I was shunning the physical world. I had been corrupted by foreign ideas. Individualism was my disease. I lacked respect for Japanese values. Those ideals our nation was based on. Built on. And now, I thought, subsiding on.



No empathy. No respect. No remorse. His syllables crept down the bare-faced hallway. They nestled in my ears. I welcomed them home. Narcissist, lunatic, ungrateful son. Maybe, no, yes. They failed in their duties. Parents should protect and nurture. They failed me. He built hostile armies with his words. Legions uniting to threaten and destroy me. They try to storm my imaginary castle. My unfurled standard taunts them on the breeze. He painted landscapes I had never seen. Panoramic views of hazy scenes I did not know. They fitted his books and his ignorance. My mind and body stayed immune. The words built like layers; deck of cards. I moved lower and lower. The dealer’s hand approaches, waits at the bottom. I sink lower and lower. Then his words could not reach me anymore.

He spoke a universe in six hours. I was his distant star, twinkling in blackness. All alone and the better for it. He marshalled galaxies of words to confuse. I could say the same in five. And still he asks the question. Why do I want to be alone?

The hardest part is staying focused. I know what I need to do, but the path taking me from anywhere to there shifts like the pavement beneath a drunken office worker at closing time. The voices calling me away clutch at my sleeves from time to time, different voices using different words but all replaying the same message.

Father appeals to the pragmatism and sense of duty that has served his generation so well, cold and practical tones desperate to hide the frustration that produces them.

“You are throwing away every opportunity I have given you, Masayuki. You are a strong student; even your English skills by themself are enough to guarantee you a fine job. I have talked to Takaguchi-san at the company and he says there is an entry-level position you could get in our international sales section once you graduate from university.”
I could even wear your old suits, unless they are too small for me.

“Do you know how many times I have had to laugh at his jokes just to get that offer? How many hours I have had to stay there after everyone else has gone home just to stay ahead and in his favour?”

Did he have a choice? I don’t know if it is important. All the unspoken threats that kept him back for so many evenings and made him rise early. Did anyone ever actually tell him that if he didn’t volunteer for overtime someone else would be sitting at his desk when he come back the next day? I want to think that he just believed it because the others did, because none of them ever had the courage to find out for sure. Just like one of those stories that starts as a throwaway whisper before school, is a strong rumour by recess and a widely known and indisputable fact by lunch. Yasu likes Ai. Yasu and Ai are sleeping together. They went to a love hotel. He wasn’t careful. She might be pregnant. She is pregnant. The baby is due in summer vacation. She will fly to Okinawa to have it. All of this from someone who saw them walking to the station together. Maybe he bought a can of coffee from her. Ai’s having an island baby. Father will lose his job if he doesn’t stay back four hours every night.



Six o’clock and the boss switches the lights off and orders them to go home, all serious and official. Government ordinance compliance perfectly adhered to. Six-oh-five and they stand in a group outside the building, smoking frantically and laughing nervously. The government are stupid. As if they would want to work nine hour days. They are smarter than the politicians. They love their company. Six ten and they are back at their desks. If anyone asks, work finished ten minutes ago.

“I do all this for you, and you do not even have the respect for me to come out and tell me to my face why you are doing this. I can’t even understand it. You can’t stay in there forever. What are you going to achieve in there? You won’t get into university, you can’t get a job, you won’t get married. How long can you lie there in that stench?”

Every piece of logic he throws at me has merit, is true in his mind and in the minds of those he knows, but he hasn’t known me for a long time. I don’t experience his dreams in my sleep, those monotone serials which all end in the same way. The dutiful but subservient wife, the cramped apartment in the suburbs, the unpaid overtime and the receding hairline. All carefully wrapped and rewrapped in the fabric of Japanese society, each layer kept separate from the others, all insulated from the extremes of temperature and fashion and sealed off from the outside air until they, like the dreamer, suffocate.

I fight his common sense with self-confidence and the only argument left to a true thinker: the certainty that only those things that feature in my dreams are what I want, no matter how much others recommend the alternatives. So my dreams are not yet clear; perhaps this is a weakness in the argument I present, but only when I can cut myself off completely will I have the space and the peace to discover my destiny. For now you will have to be satisfied with knowing that I know that what they want for me is not right.

I read about others like me on the internet: the outsiders, the withdrawn. Our country has been thoughtful enough to coin a name for our ‘condition’: hikikomori. Spit out the word like the plastic corner of an onigiri wrapper you have bitten open. Spit it out so that it gets as far away from your mouth as possible before anyone can connect you too it. One day they will realise that a choice is not a ‘condition’. Their word implies something medical or some kind of deficiency, maybe a mental defect of some description that makes us unable to ignore the elephant in the room like everyone else seems to. So many elephants in so many rooms throughout the city and the nation that I often wonder whether they have become extinct in Africa.

He reads my mind. Final words beneath a twitching nose. Just a bit bigger than mine.
“You don’t want my life? Don’t want a job? Too much hard work, too much overtime? Four hours extra a day doesn’t appeal? Remember this: I always come home eventually.”