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