Hikikomori and the Rental Sister: A Novel (7 page)

But I am the one who opened the door. I retracted the locks and turned the knob. I am the host. She, the guest. I stare at the gaping hole. I manage to produce a syllable: “Door.”

“You want it closed?”

My eyes go wide. She closes the door.

“Nice to meet you, Thomas,” she says. “Thank you for letting me in.”

The shadow moves closer and the image sharpens, a girl, the long black hair I remember from the window, and now a white face and small red mouth. I cannot yet see her eyes. I look away.

I lick and lick inside my mouth, massaging my palate with my tongue, but there is no saliva, no lubrication, dry on dry and all this friction, I’m afraid I’ll catch fire. “Sorry,” I say.

“Sorry for what?” the red mouth says.

“Brother.”

“Thank you.”

There is something between her and me, something in the air, particles of some sort, but the certainty with which I know the particles exist between us floating back and forth is exactly the uncertainty I have about their meaning. My odor wafting into her nostrils, she is taking me inside her.

I glance at her eyes but then look away. I do not wish to begin the interrogation. Black hair, white skin, red mouth, this is the pretty little pest my wife sent to my door. What does she expect we’ll do?

Yet the interrogation has already begun: my odor, my wild hair and bristly beard, the acute angles of my limbs as I sit cross-legged on my bed, they are answers to her questions. She is taking in the sights and smells, collecting data. I am a specimen, a trapped bug. She turns and scrutinizes my room and my stacks of boxes and my clothes, judgments cementing. She thinks she already knows me.

Her head swivels. She takes another step toward me.

“Get out!” I yell, and finally my saliva is back and so I try again: “Get out!”

After she leaves I fasten the locks and rush to the window, an animal movement, an ape keeping watch, I pull aside the shade and there she is, long black hair, but this time she turns around and looks up at my window and I see her eyes and she sees my eyes, two pairs of mirrors reflecting light back and forth. She smiles at me. I snap my head back and hide behind the shade.

Every cell of every muscle is hollow, empty, and I’m surprised I don’t just float away and pop like a bubble. How refreshing exhaustion is, to be completely aware of my emptiness, to feel that the slightest breeze would scatter me into oblivion. But of course there is no breeze. I will not scatter or pop; I will simply lie here exhausted from her visit.

How easily shame comes. It must have slipped through the open door, loose inside my room, and now it devours me, sharp teeth and stickywet tongue.

Ten

“Wait three days before seeing him again,” Hamamoto says. “Now you must find the proper balance. Don’t be too soft . . . don’t be too hard.”

But she cannot wait three days. The next morning, as soon as she is sure Silke will have left for work, she rides the M20 to the M10. Winter sadness creeps into her. The sidewalk snow piles have turned to little rocks of black ice. A thin white film covers the concrete and buildings, imparting a frozen, ashy quality, drying out like old bones. The city is a giant cemetery, buildings towering over her like gravestones, cracking apart in the cold.

She knocks on his door. The dead bolt retracts. She waits a few moments. Then she opens the door herself.

His room has a thick smell. He’s again sitting cross-legged on the bed, looking at a magazine.

“Hi, Thomas,” she says.

“You say my name wrong.”

“I do?” she says, moving closer to him, slowly. “Will you teach me?” He does not look at her. “Can I sit here?” she asks, motioning to the bed. He moves over to create more room, and she sits facing him on the bed. “Tell me how to say it.”

Suddenly he gets up and moves to the middle of the room. He sits on the floor. After a moment she does likewise. They sit opposite each other. Thomas wears an old black T-shirt. Dark blue jeans. Bare feet with very short toenails. His face is covered with dark hair, and the hair on his head is full and longish and random, clumps jutting this way and that. He looks how she imagines a painter looks, though maybe real painters don’t look like what people think painters look like.

His eyes search the wood floor and finally land on Megumi’s socks, colored fuchsia and blue with a little pocket for each toe. He looks at them for a long time.

“Cute, right?” she says as she wriggles her toes, ten little fuchsia balls at the end of her feet. His lips show the slightest crack of a smile, but then she blinks and it is gone. “Tell me how to say your name.” She wants to reach out to touch him gently on the shoulder, a simple gesture of comfort and care and sincerity, as if to say it’s okay, she’s here, she’s here to tear apart this world he’s built, she’s here to destroy it and send him back out there with his wife, back among the ills and also the beauty, but he’ll be okay, because she’ll be right there next to him, every step, all the way, until the end, until he’s forgotten all about this little world, until he never wants to see it again. He won’t be alone.

“Thomas,” he says, demonstrating the proper pronunciation. “Thomas.”

“Toemas?”

“No,” he says. “It’s German: Toe-mahss.”

“Toemass? Like that?”

“Not aaaa like a sheep. Ah, like ‘open up and say ah.’ ”

“Toemahss.”

“Good.”

“But you aren’t German, are you? Why pronounce it that way?”

“Why do you think?”

“Why do I think?”

“No, not ‘why do you think?’ Why do you think I pronounce it that way?”

“Because you told me you pronounce it that way. You just showed me. You said I got it right.”

His jaw clenches. His fingers curl tightly. “I mean,” he says, “can you guess why I pronounce it that way?”

She is embarrassed. Sometimes the simplest English phrases trip her up. She can go on and on about complicated thoughts and subjects, but then someone will ask her what the date is and she’ll start describing how it tastes so good so many ways but her favorite is simply dried, as a snack, but you have to be careful how many you eat because, well, you know, you might need the bathroom.

She can’t guess why he pronounces his name that way. She shakes her head.

“Because my father pronounced it that way when I did something good.”

She has never met a foreigner who could pronounce her name correctly. When foreigners say her name she doesn’t feel they’re talking to the real her but some shapeless approximation.

“Want to learn my name?” she asks.

“Megumi,” he says.

“Close. But try to not make an accent. Make each syllable the same. Not: Me-gu-mi. Me-gu-mi.”

“Megumi.”

“Better!” She smiles. “Now, make each syllable shorter. Don’t hold the vowels so long. Not: Megooooomiiiiii. Make it faster. Make it more . . .” She searches for the word from childhood piano lessons. “. . . staccato. Make it more staccato. Dit-dit-dit. Fast. Megumi.”

“Megumi.”

“Yes. Yes! Now keep it stuck in your head.”

“Megumi,” he says.

“Thomas,” she says.

Finally he looks into her eyes, but only for a moment. Then he looks away. He has such large eyes, dark and deep and sad.

Silence. The space is cluttered with stacks of boxes, tall piles of magazines, crowded shelves, a desk messy with papers and magazines and a laptop computer, a garbage bag filled with empty boxes and wrappers, but it’s not a filthy room. There’s a certain order to it.

The thick smell, on closer inhalation, is a humid mix of lingering food, like chemicals heated in the microwave, and of secreted human oils and dead skin cells, the smell of a person living a still life. There is also a faint bitter smell, like burnt coffee. She notices a mug next to the television and a can of instant.

He stares at the floor, his body stiff, muscles coiled so tight he’s almost shaking or shivering. Just like her brother. She had no idea what memories her brother was chasing away, fighting off with those coiled muscles, and she always expected him to snap, go crazy, maybe even pounce on her. But then she’d take a slow step toward him and place her hand on his head and he’d begin to weep and his muscles would slacken and his entire body would melt into a puddle on the floor.

“You want me to come out,” Thomas says.

She’s supposed to say yes, that life is out there not in here, that he can’t stay in here forever, that the future isn’t so bad. “Life is out there, not . . .”

But—she’s not sure why—she cannot continue. Silence overtakes her.

“There’s no use for you here,” he says. “You can’t help me, and I don’t want to leave.”

“But if you don’t think I can help, why did you let me in your room?”

He crosses his arms over his chest. “My wife asked me to talk to you. And now I have. I’ve let you in, and now you can report back to her how hopeless it is and we can all go back to the way things were.”

She scoots a little closer. He holds his ground. The space between their knees is now just a sliver. “You’ve talked, but you haven’t said anything.”

“What would satisfy you?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never done this before.”

“This isn’t your job?”

“This is the last thing I ever wanted to do.”

He suddenly looks up at her.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “But I’ll always be honest with you. At first I didn’t want to come. Your wife forced you, my boss forced me.”

His gaze holds her eyes. It does not waver. His eyes hide his thoughts. They take in, they collect, but they do not let out. A one-way valve.

“You think I’m a waste of time,” he says. “You think I should just die.”

“Why would you say that?”

“Like your brother. You said he’s better now because he’s dead.”

The stacks of corrugated boxes tower over them. The little refrigerator hums. A garbage truck rumbles down the road.

“I don’t want you to die.”

“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 . . .”