If the situation turns into, “I don’t care, even if you die”, then this group’s system has failed. Let’s make sure that it doesn’t become that way!
President of the N.H.K., Misaki Nakahara
Name: _____ Member #: _____
“Look, sign it quickly.”
I took the ballpoint pen from her. I was troubled by it for a while. In the end, nothing at all had been resolved. It wasn’t as though anything had changed.
“Let’s look forward in life”? Are you an idiot?! We have dreams, so we’re okay? We don’t have any kind of dreams!
I wondered if I would have to go on living every day, whispering to myself, I can’t take it anymore.
Is that okay? What do you think?
I worried back and forth about this for a little bit; in the end, though, I just signed the contract.
Meanwhile, Misaki, shutting the contract back in her bag, grabbed my shoulders and pulled me close. Our eyes met at point-blank range.
And then, in a loud voice, she declared, “Welcome to the N.H.K.!”
Her overly enthusiastic expression struck a humorous chord. Fending off a fit of stifled laughter, I thought to myself, I don’t know how long this can continue, but I’ll try as hard as I can.
I made this small decision.
N.H.K. Member #1, Satou Tatsuhiro, had been born.
First Afterword
In the beginning of the twenty-first century, the hikikomori phenomenon suddenly broke out wildly across Japan.
As a sharp-eyed man, I thought I’d jump on the tide of the times and earn a ton of money. I’ll write a story about hikikomori and become famous! I’ll become a best-selling author with my hikikomori story! I’ll go to Hawaii using the royalties! I’ll go to Waikiki!
My dreams stretched out endlessly. However, once I actually started trying to write the story, I soon regretted it. It was painful.
What happens when a real hikikomori writes a hikikomori story? Inevitably, you start having to use your own experiences in your creation. You start having to write about yourself.
Of course, stories are fiction, and no matter how much one of the characters I used looks like me, he is himself, and I am myself. Even if we speak the same way and live in the same apartment, we are still unconnected. We inhabit separate worlds.
Regardless, it was still painful. It was embarrassing. I felt as though I were taking my own shame and revealing it to the whole world.
In the end, I got caught up in paranoid fantasies.
What if everyone is secretly laughing at me while I write this kind of story? I really thought this.
In truth, I still can’t read this story objectively.
Each time I reread it, I start to have light hallucinations. I break into a cold sweat.
Each time I approach one of a few specific places in the plot, I start wanting to throw the computer out the window.
At other particular points, I start wanting to run away from home to live deep in secrecy in the mountains of India.
That was probably because the themes addressed in this story are not things of the past for me but currently active problems.
I can’t look at it from afar, thinking, “How young I was then.”
This is all a real problem.
For the time being, I went ahead and wrote the whole thing. I decided to write everything I could. And what came out of it was this story.
Reading back over it, my face turning red… well, how is it, really?
When I read it on days when I’m in a good mood, I think, Amazing! I’m a genius!
And on days when I’m depressed, I think, I suck to have written something like this! Die right now!
Even so, I think that what is probably true about it is simply: I wrote everything I could possibly write.
Well then, hello, everyone. My name is Tatsuhiko Takimoto. This is my Afterword, for my second book.
I owe a lot to many people this time around, too. Everyone who had something to do with this book and everyone who is reading it, thank you so very much.
I still will do my best after this. I will get pumped up and try hard.
Tatsuhiko Takimoto
December, 2001
Second Afterword
Several years have passed since I wrote, “I still will do my best after this.” I have not done my best. Proof of that is in the fact that I haven’t written a single new story. I’ve been reduced to a NEET[41], living as a parasite on the royalties from this book.
This may be the result of trauma or something like that. Because of it, I developed a strange disease in my brain. Because of this disease, which causes everything to remind me of the trauma, it makes my brain cry out. It makes my brain cry out each time I try to write a story. My brain always is crying out—and because of that, I have become unable to write stories at all. Because of the terrible fear that I faced when I wrote this book, I no longer want to write stories and have become completely unable to write any. Oh, what a terrible tragedy! For a young and talented (at least, he thinks so) writer to have become incapacitated because he wrote this book!
You must read this now. A rare, dark mystique is hidden in this book, which holds the cursed origins I have explained above. It seems that a comedy manga writer long ago went crazy and often would disappear, but there was likely a ghastly force contained within the work that destroyed him, mentally. Because there must be some similar force within this book, it is a book that I confidently can recommend to anyone. It can even help with home and office communication. This book is optimal as a graft onto discussions like, “Hey, do you know the N.H.K.?” and then, someone will say, “The Nihon Hikikomori Kyokai, right? It’s really funny. But it made me cry a little, too.”
It’s embarrassing to mention something that’s selling so well, but no one knows minor works. One could say that a book around this level is indeed the masterpiece that truly could help everyone’s communication. There are jokes about all sorts of current events included, and it’s extremely useful for helping young people think about the present times. It could even be said that if you read this book, you’ll be able to understand the feelings of young people who live in our society today. Older people will be surprised, thinking, “Oh, really? Young people nowadays are like this?!” And those of the same age as the characters in the book will sympathize, thinking, “I understand! I understand! This sort of thing happens all the time!” and can enjoy reading it. At least, I think this book has as much value as its price. I promise that it would take first place in a ranking of “books that you won’t lose anything by reading.”
I feel not even the slightest pang of guilt over giving you the above sales pitch. That’s the honest-to-God truth, although these are days when I can’t hold onto any sort of conviction that God actually exists.
Let’s get back on track. It’s already spring. It’s already warmed up. Birds come to the tree outside my window. In light of that natural cycle, a deep belief that one day, all my daily troubles will be solved boils up inside my chest.
Identity … Love … Existence … Space … God … The time must come, someday, when we will be granted a final answer regarding these great mysteries. With that warm feeling buried in my heart, I keep living. Hoping that this feeling of gratitude will reach all of you who are reading this work, I now close my laptop.
Tatsuhiko Takimoto
April, 2005