I Called Him Necktie Read Online Free PDF Page B

again?
    Who?
    Kumamoto.
    No, I shook my head: I don’t know what happened to him, and to be honest I really don’t want to find out.
    Why not?
    He has written his poem. Do you see? Now I am writing mine.
    And if he were still alive ...
    ... yet I’ve spent two years in my room. The last two years of my youth – given away! Given to him, who must be, I can’t imagine it any other way, dead to the bottom of his soul.
    May I read it? Your poem?
    It’s not finished yet.
    But there it is.
    Where?
    On the back of your hand.
    So many scars. I hid them in a flash.
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    Root vegetables, soba noodles, two korokke croquettes.
    The few crumbs that were left he scattered in front of the pigeons, which had gathered around us flapping their wings. He stamped his feet. They whirred away. Came back with ruffled neck feathers. Forgetting that he had just shooed them away. The poor things, he murmured. It must be awful. No memory. But perhaps not as awful as you imagine. I mean. If you were to forget everything. Wouldn’t you forgive everything as well? Forgive yourself and others? Would you not be free of regret and guilt? An electrical crackling, he flicked an invisible fleck from his trousers with his sleeve. No, not so, that would be too easy. To forgive, to be really free, you have to remember, day after day.
    Do you want to tell me more?
    Yes, I’d like to forgive. The sentence came out, just like that.
    I am not a typical hikikomori, I continued. Not like one of those in the books and articles that are put by my door from time to time. I don’t read manga comics, I don’t spend the day in front of the television and the night in front of the computer. I don’t build model airplanes. Video games make me feel sick. Nothing can distract me from the attempt to protect me from myself. From my name, my inheritance. I am an only son. From my body, whose needs have not ceased – to maintain it. From my hunger, from my thirst. In the two years since I withdrew, I was overcome by my body three times a day. Then I crept to the door, opened it a crack, picked up the tray my mother had put there for me. If no one was at home I crept out to the bathroom. I washed myself. Strange, this need to wash myself. I brushed my teeth and combed my hair. It had grown long. A glance in the mirror: It is still me. I suppressed the cry sitting in my throat. I wantedto protect myself from it too. From my voice, from my language. The language, in which I now maintain that I don’t know whether a typical hikikomori really exists. Just as there are all sorts of rooms, there are all sorts of hikikomoris, who, for all sorts of reasons, have retreated into themselves in all sorts of ways and means. While one, whom I’ve read about, spends his vanishing youth practicing the same tune over and over again on a three-string guitar, the next, I’ve read about him too, assembles his shell collection. At night, when it is dark, he runs down to the sea, his hood over his head, and returns home only as the light dawns.
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    I’m lucky to have been left in peace up till now. For there are some who have been enticed out. They’re promised reintegration. Recovery too. Work. Success. With this faint promise on their lips they are led back step by step into society, that great commonality. They are accustomed to pleasing it. They are harmonized. But I am lucky. They haven’t reckoned with me. They haven’t sent a social worker to sit by my door and go on at me for hours and hours. The books and newspaper articles, Father’s aftershave, Mother’s fingerprint on a little ball of rice, this slight life is just enough, just tolerable. It is granted to me. That is my good fortune. To be part of a family, that is granted to me, to enclose me. Out of shame, mind you. Nobody should find out that I am a hikikomori. The neighbors have been told I’m on an exchange program in America, and now that I am going out again, they’ve been told that I came back, need time to get used