Tatsuhiko Takimoto - Welcome to the NHK!

My right hand, which had been slashed by the box cutter, started to hurt. The bleeding wouldn’t stop.

Misaki grasped my palm. I roughly pushed away her hand, and a bit of blood splashed onto her cheeks. She didn’t even try to wipe it off. Sitting on top of me, she was crying. I tried to push her aside, but she wouldn’t break her hold on me. She pushed down my shoulders and stayed like that for a long time, trembling. Still shaking, she raised her fists, punching my chest. She hit me over and over and over.

In the end, my face got beaten up, too.

She knew no limits. My consciousness was fading.

Raising her fist again, Misaki said, “You can’t die.”

I was silent, without any answer. So, she hit me in the face once more. “Please, don’t die.”

As I didn’t want to be punched any more than this, I had no choice but to nod. So, I nodded and somehow managed to make myself smile. Next, I thought of telling her some kind of joke. But that was impossible.

Letting out a noise, I cried.

Misaki didn’t look away from me. She just kept staring and staring.

Eventually, we returned to ourselves. At this rate, we were going to freeze to death, so we decided to put the cape behind us for the time being.

Life is painful and difficult. A lot of things really will get the best of you. It’s actually rather hard.

Having made it back onto the road, I realized something terrible: How would we get back to the station?

“It took almost an hour by taxi, which means…”

“Yeah, if we walk to the station, it’ll take until morning.”

I felt a wave of despair.

Misaki pulled at me. “There’s an abandoned home nearby, but…”

“An abandoned home?”

“My house.”

After about a ten minute walk, we came to the abandoned house. The windowpanes were shattered, and a large hole had opened in the front door. We spent the whole night in a house that looked about ready to collapse. Surprisingly, though, I don’t remember it being all that cold.

We talked and talked about all sorts of things in that house, where there was a missing floorboard with every step. Misaki told me about her memories of that house. Most of them were tragic, but a few were kind of nice, too.

“My first father… I don’t even remember his face, but he named me. Because there’s a beautiful cape nearby, he called me ‘Misaki’, meaning ‘cape’. It's been a rather appropriate name, don’t you think?”

I laughed.

Eventually, I grew a little tired. After I had fallen into a few seconds of sleep, Misaki suddenly shook me lightly. “In the end, what’s the N.H.K.?”

As it would be a long discussion, I didn’t repeat my explanation. Misaki got out from under the coat she’d been using as a blanket, and she pulled her secret notebook from her bag.

“I thought of an N.H.K., too.”

“Huh?”

“It’s dark, so can you use your lighter? Oh! It’s okay, I can read the letters, even in the darkness”, she said quickly, as she started writing something in her secret notebook with a ballpoint pen.

“Um, okay, it’s finished.” She tore out the page and handed it to me.

The only light came from the moon shining in through the window. Lying face up, I forced my eyes into focus to read the contents of the paper.

The purpose of the Hitojichi Kokankai:

Members will exchange hostages with each other; you offer your lives to each other, as hostages. In other words, it means, “if you die, I die, too, dammit!” If we agree to this, then we will be unable to act, like nuclear powers, glaring at each other during a cold war. And even if we want to die, we will be unable to.

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.

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.