The Shut Ins by Katherine Brabon
“What would it mean, to be free of dependencies, the structures we have created? Would it be a crisis, like crawling over hot stones that burn and hurt, until we emerge, staggering again to our feet; a transformation into one’s own being, a separate individual? I do not know if I would recognise myself.”
The Shut Ins (2021) is Katherine Brabon’s second novel, following her Vogel prize-winning The Memory Artist in 2016. This book explores the phenomenon of hikikimori in Japanese society through the interconnected and layered stories of four people living in contemporary Japan. With a particular focus on suffocating gender roles and female experience, Brabon explores themes of connection and disconnection, loneliness and solitude, confinement and freedom – and the way home can be both a refuge and a prison.
Japan is a country of rigid social structures, where all actions are for the good of the collective – the company, the family, society. Success, for women, is measured in their ability to be a good wife and a good mother. The women in the novel – Mai Takeda, Sadako, a young hostess at a bar in Tokyo, and Hiromi Satō – are forced into caring roles for the men in their lives. The book begins with Mai, a young woman who is constantly pressured by her husband J and her parents to give up her part-time job and have a child. She feels trapped and unable to fulfil this role that is expected of her: “I feel that I am wrong, a wrong person and woman, not the right kind of person to be a wife.” Her husband is a typical salaryman: working late hours and devoted to his company. As he is only referred to by the initial J, his views stand in for mainstream Japanese society:
“There are systems in place for a reason. If we give in to individual deficiencies, you weaken those systems and damage things for everyone.”
Mai then has a chance encounter with Hiromi Satō, the mother of her old school friend Hikaru. Hiromi reveals that Hikaru has become a hikikomori: a recluse, having refused to leave his bedroom or participate in society for the past three years. Mai remembers Hikaru in childhood, how he “always floated in his own current that never intersected with another for long.” Instead of going to school, Hikaru hid himself away in an abandoned construction site, a place that occupied a liminal status outside of ordinary society. Now, Mai finds herself drawn back to the Satō house, visiting regularly and writing letters to Hikaru. It reawakens a feeling inside of her: a sense of the possibility of an alternative life, a life on ‘the other side.’
What Mai and Hikaru are seeking is achiragawa – and it is the search for this elusive concept that drives the book. Achiragawa is ‘the other side,’ a liminal and (as Hannah Kent eloquently puts it) chimeric space. It is our unconscious mind, our deepest beliefs, our inner selves – a “place of dreams, death and possibility.” The concept is introduced in a note at the beginning of the novel and is expanded upon in further notes throughout the book. This authorial narrative voice shares characteristics with Brabon – she is a traveller, a westerner visiting Japan in a search of her own achiragawa, and it is through her that the character’s stories are presented to us. Brabon is concerned with truth and storytelling, dramatising what she has referred to as the “different, deeper truth” of literature. “I was grappling with some questions about the stories I was attempting to tell,” she says in the novel. “A book starts unknowable.”
Brabon does not sensationalise the hikikomori. What she does exceptionally well is to reveal the everyday details and routines of Hikaru’s life, as well as the impact of his isolation on his family, particularly his mother. “Her failed son, she loves him,” is Hiromi’s constant refrain, and she feels “shame’s red cloud around her constantly.” She too withdraws from the community, and becomes a shut in. She and her son are bound together: “it was as if she were holding his hand while he dangled off a cliff.” It is empathetic, it is heartbreaking. For those like the hikikomori who don’t fit into mainstream society, there is no other safety net or support.
The landscape of Japan, a country on four volatile tectonic plates, becomes a metaphor for the way character’s true selves and feelings are repressed and forced ‘underground.’ The pressure builds and builds, and resurfaces with devastating consequences. The novel itself becomes a pressure-cooker as the heat of the Japanese summer weighs oppressively on the characters. The 2014 explosion of Mount Ontake is narrated in a later section and the way the ash blocks out the sun reminds Hiromi’s mother of the ash cloud when the bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. All the characters, and the country, have been shaped by trauma and the harrowing events of the 20th century. In the novel, the past is always present: people and places bear the psychic and physical scars of war.
Brabon also looks further back, drawing references to recluses who sought solitude, or their own forms of achiragawa, in Japanese literature, folklore and history. The sun goddess Amaterasu hid in a cave but was forced out as it was her responsibility to bring light to the world (and the meaning of Hikaru’s name is ‘to shine’.) The twelfth-century poet Kamo no Chōmei turned his back on society and felt solitude fester in him. Matsuo Bashō, another famous poet travelled far, writing poetry and seeking solitude in an attempt to find “the narrow road to the deep north”: a path inwards.
Brabon’s language is understated and clear, ringing with pure, crisp details: cherry blossoms are “faint and dark pink, like skin burned by scalding water.” It has been described as “mesmeric,” perhaps due to her tendency for repetition, which often has a hypnotic quality. While occasionally some dialogue or narration can read like exposition, the characters are compelling and full of emotional depth.
The novel also reminded me of Yu Miri’s Tokyo Ueno Station (2019) with its clear, floating sentences and a main character who turns away from society and to live on its margins. He speaks from another kind of achiragawa – from beyond the grave – and his ghostly narrative encompasses history, memory, passers-by and the city to paint a portrait of contemporary Japan and the people it has forgotten.
Ultimately, to refuse society by isolating oneself is not a solution. Yet to resist death, to resist structures and to live a life on ‘the other side’ is a kind of freedom. This freedom may be, as Mai says, “a wild dream.” But the novel, in the end, offers us this hope.
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Many thanks to Allen & Unwin for an advance review copy.
To read an exclusive extract from the novel, click here.
Emily Riches is a writer and editor from Mullumbimby, currently living on Gadigal land (Sydney). She founded Aniko Press to bring passionate writers and curious readers together, discover new voices and create a space for creative community. You can say hi at emily@anikopress.com.