Hikikomori and the Rental Sister: A Novel (4 page)

Before I withdrew, when I lived out there, I sometimes wondered what I would do if my wife didn’t come home. I wondered what would happen if—wrong place, wrong time—she got hit by a car or a stray bullet, if one day I came home from work to find only gaping silence and the reminders she left behind, her perfume, her jewelry, her ticket stub collection from so many of our dates. And her dirty laundry in the hamper, I would feel so foolish, but I couldn’t just throw away her dirty clothes like read newspapers. During those wondering times I hoped that if there was a heaven or some great next life, that it wasn’t the kind that could look down on Earth, so she wouldn’t have to see me wandering the empty apartment like an abandoned pup. So she’d be spared my tears, my meals taken alone. So she wouldn’t suffer through my sleepless nights and empty days.

And then there were the early mornings when I’d wake up before her but stay in bed and listen to her somniloquies and brush the hair from her face and I’d wonder what would happen if the stray bullet or speeding car hit her but did not kill her, but instead left her paralyzed, trapped in her body, if all she could do was blink. I wondered which of us would feel more helpless. And I wondered which of us would find it more unbearable.

“Darling,” she says, “I saw someone today.” The sun has set, my room black but for the streetlamps pressing against my window shade, scattered light diffused like mist. “I saw someone who I think can help us.”

“Don’t you mean me?” Me. The one with the problem.

“I mean us. We’re still together, aren’t we? Anyway, this woman, she . . . Thomas, this is it, my last idea for you. Your last chance. I can’t stay out here forever, alone. This isn’t the real you, but after this I give up. So give her a chance. Here, read this.” She slides an envelope under the door.

The burning starts again, the chewing, all over my skin. The searing pain of inexpressible remorse. How long before it eats me entire?

I did not come inside one day, shut the door, and decide never to come out. I needed a day to grieve. Then a week. A month. Tired, I took a nap. When I woke it was dark. The walls were high. There was no way out.

On my dresser is a pile of framed photographs, face down. I don’t need people looking at me. But sometimes I turn over a few of the photographs. That naked smiling baby in the bath, cigarette-butt penis and giant balls, and that baby on the floor, struggling to keep his head up, it’s me. I wish I could’ve stayed that way forever. It seems I’m caught in some giant flow, moving in one direction, but I think I’ve stopped it. Within these walls, I have stopped it.

The little boy standing on a shiny, wet stone pointing at the river: that’s me, too. Look at my smile, at the water rushing past. I am pointing at the river but I’m looking into the camera, a peculiar expression on my face, happy but tinged with sadness, as though I grasped even then that the photograph would outlive the subject.

Four in the morning and she is out there cleaning the apartment, floor to ceiling. A bucket of water: filled, emptied, filled, emptied as the night goes on. She splashes and scrubs, she slides furniture across the floor. The vacuum cleaner sucks on the rug. Bottles spraying. Paper towels ripping. The violent snap of plastic garbage bags opening. Every month or so, maybe every three weeks, the same thing. She doesn’t sleep.

I crouch over the envelope. My name is written in careful letters, a woman’s writing but not Silke’s. The letterforms are soft and fluid, as though the ink is barely sticking to the paper, as though my mere breath might scatter her gentle strokes. I do not open it; I leave it on the floor, my name staring up at me.

Five

The next day. Or week. Hard to tell. There is a pest at my door, a dispatch from my wife, a new thorn for my side. She says she’s from Japan. Asks if I read her letter. Says she wants to be my sister. Says she just wants to talk, says I should open the door and let her in. Says she has a gift for me. Wants to hear my voice, to know I’m alive. Says I’d enjoy her company. Says we’d have a good time together.

But I don’t need a sister. My parents said that, before me, there was a girl who would have been my sister, had she survived, but I wonder if, had she survived, they would’ve conceived me. They might’ve been too content and too happy to make another. And even if so, the same sperm would not have fertilized the same egg to yield the same me. No, I am here because my sister isn’t. My parents created, lost, and created again. Whence sprang that urge to create, to add to the existence of things, to set another ball rolling? They had to try again, to again taste the godlike power.

I, too, created and lost, but I will not create again.

Go away, girl. Be someone else’s sister.

But she stays at the closed door and talks. I unfocus my ears and hear only sounds, sweet sounds like a bird, all rhythm and cadence, sounds but no meaning, just up and down like notes on a page.

Fly away, bird. Be someone else’s pest.

The letter still lies there, unopened on the floor where my wife slipped it in. The pest has been chirping for quite some time now. Maybe she lives inside my head, there and nowhere else. Or maybe the voice comes not from inside my head but from the envelope. I push it back under the door, ridding myself of it. The voice goes silent.

But then as I stand up, as my knee cracks, the envelope appears from the slit once again but this time it’s torn open and empty, followed by a single sheet of paper, unfolded, displaying more of that same graceful handwriting. Oh, you clever thing.

Now I focus my ears and listen for what she says next. But no words come. I wait, but nothing. Only silence. An opened letter, so clever, but nothing else. So much chirping and now you’re mute? Tell me more. Let me listen.

Silence. Then the clicking shut of the front door. Down the hall and through the living room, somehow without me hearing. She must have floated. Before I know it I am at the window. The shade is pulled down to the sill. I pause, then go back to my bed. I don’t need to look outside to know the pest is scurrying away.

Six

As Megumi walks to the bus stop, Silke calls from her office. “What did he say?” she asks.

“Didn’t say anything, just—”

“Nothing?”

“I heard him moving around in there, but in an hour he didn’t say anything.”

The M10 bus approaches and Megumi quickens her pace. She rarely takes the subway. Compared to the Tokyo subway, it’s slow and foul and primitive, so instead she takes the bus, which is also slow and foul and primitive but at least she can look out the windows at the people on the street, people she’ll never know.

“Now what?” Silke says. “What do we do?”

“Smooth stones in a stream.”

“What?”

“Smooth stones in a stream. They don’t become smooth overnight.”

“I see . . .”

“It’s nothing to worry about. Remember, I don’t stop coming.”

“I just thought—”

“I know you did. But don’t worry. I’ll call you next time.”

That night Megumi eats dinner alone in her apartment. Naoko calls and says the girls are headed out, western bars this time. She needs no convincing.

The bar is dark and humid, bodies packed tight. She and the girls are targets. She feels their stares, their desires. On her way back from the bathroom, someone grabs Megumi’s ass. She stops and turns but in the crowd it’s impossible to tell. Coward.

“Megumi, be careful,” Miku says. “You’re spilling.” Beer from the wide glass is sliding down her cheek and neck. She wipes it off with the back of her hand.

They are drunk and sweaty when they stumble outside into the night, coats on but open, handbags hanging from their arms. Megumi sucks in the cold air, and goose bumps cover her skin. Miku slips on an icy patch and falls but then gets right back up and says, “Where to?”

“How about my place?” Naoko says. “I have some weed.”

As Megumi lights the pipe, Naoko pours three glasses of sake. “Aren’t I a great host?” she says.

“Kampai!”

Megumi settles onto the sofa. Smoke hangs in the air and crawls into her lungs and she is warm again. “To my brother!” she says, raising her glass. They all drink.

“To your brother,” Miku agrees. She takes a hit, hands over the pipe, and a somber mood passes over them.

Megumi’s skin is hot and red. She wants a glass of water, but she does not leave the sofa. She feels the entire circumference of her eyeballs, two stormy planets lodged into her skull. Who put them there? Time passes either quickly or slowly, she can’t tell the difference.

“Hey, where are the guys?” Naoko asks.

“Who?”

“There were so many hot guys at the bar, but where are they now? Why aren’t they here?”

“Looks like we forgot to bring them home,” Megumi says.

“Megumi, I thought you were supposed to bring them, you’re the hot one,” Miku says as she swallows another glass of sake and pours three more.

“You think any of those white guys can tell us apart?” Megumi says.

Miku pours a glass of sake down Megumi’s throat. She chokes as she swallows. They laugh. She lifts her feet and lies down on the sofa.

In the middle of the night she wakes to a putrid stink. She coughs as though the stink is coming from inside her, as though coughing will expel it. Naoko is sleeping on the floor, naked. Miku is curled up in a ball, still fully dressed, next to a pile of vomit.

She sits up and stretches and steps over the girls on her way out. The narrow downtown streets are empty. She presses her arms to her chest against the cold. Her head pounds with every heartbeat.

At home she spreads out her futon on the floor, covers herself with a blanket, and falls asleep. Later, she reaches in the dark for her ringing cell phone. “Moshi moshi,” she answers. The blended voices in the background have the unmistakable Japanese melody, and she pictures him sitting alone at a dark Shinjuku bar, in some twisted, neon-hued back alley, tie loosened after work, drinking himself into oblivion.

“It’s my heart, Megumi. It beats so fast, like it might burst right out of my chest.”

“Dad, what are you saying? Are you having another heart attack?” She sits upright.

“No, it’s just that—”

“Do you need to go to the hospital?”

“Why won’t you come back to Japan?”

She hangs up on him and pulls the blanket over her head. For a while there is silence, peace, then the phone rings again. She does not answer. Another silence, then more ringing. When it is over, she falls back asleep.

A chime wakes her, a text message from her father: I’M LONELY. She stares up at the ceiling and wonders how old the cracks in the plaster are, and how many before her have stared up at them. The cracks remind her of the spider webs in Yoyogi Park that she used to see during long Sunday walks with her father. She would hold his big hand as they walked, and he looked at the trees and birds and turtles, but she looked at the webs—wide enough to span the trees—and the spiders that had spun them, spiders as big as her head, just sitting in their webs, waiting, seeing everything but doing nothing.

She calls her father. “Get out of the bar, okay? Go home and get into bed.”

“It’s been long enough, you’ve proved your point . . . you can come back now. People forget.”

“Have you eaten?” She hears him take a hard swallow of booze, then a grunt.

“We don’t have to stay in Tokyo,” he says. “We could move somewhere else, both of us together, a fresh start. I’m sick of the fucking office. Reporting for duty, Sir! Maybe I could start my own shop or something. Work with my hands, do something real. And you could work out front at the counter. You and me.”

“Go home. And pick up a bento along the way.” Heavy breathing into the phone, she can almost smell the alcohol. “Tell me you’ll go home and eat something, okay? Dad?”

“If you were here I wouldn’t be out here like this tonight. Does that make sense, do you know what I mean? Well anyway the inside of my mouth is all sticky. I’ll call you later,” he says and hangs up.

The day’s first dull light presses stronger and stronger against her eyelids. Trying to ignore her racing thoughts only makes it worse. She finally gives up trying to fall back asleep.

She folds up her futon and places it on the shelf in the closet, then fixes herself a simple breakfast of rice, salmon, and orange wedges. The window next to her small table is always left open a crack, letting a bit of winter’s bite into the apartment. Today is like yesterday, gray and steely, a uniform ceiling of clouds pressing down on the rooftops. She looks out at her apple tree, the only apple tree on Reade Street, leaves fallen, now showing off its true shape, graceful branches cutting through the air like frozen ink strokes.

She puts the dishes in the sink for later. After her shower she soaks in steaming hot water. Above the tub is a small window that she always keeps open, and through it she can see the windows of nearby buildings and she wonders if someone is spying on her as she bathes. Let them spy. The tub is the reason she took the apartment three years ago. A porcelain, claw-foot tub, deep, just like in Japan. Ofuru. The kind she can sit inside with hot water up to her neck, the kind she can fall asleep, slip down, and drown in.

Her father is probably not leaving. Probably still at the bar. Just one more glass. Kampai!