Hikikomori and the Rental Sister: A Novel (5 page)

Megumi, he used to say, most people think the day begins when you wake up in the morning and ends when you go to bed at night. Going to bed is the last thing they do. But I make it the first thing I do. A good night’s sleep ensures a good day, so I begin my day by going to bed. Tomorrow begins tonight! But he has forgotten his own advice.

She wants to keep soaking, to float all day in hot water, but she has to go visit Thomas Tessler again, who so far is just a pile of silence behind a locked door. When she leaves her building, a cat is sitting on the top step. It stands up and stretches and rubs against the iron railing. “Were you waiting for me again?” she says in Japanese. “Don’t you have any warm place to stay?” The cat looks up at her, circling at her feet. “I’m sorry, sweetie, you can’t stay with me and I don’t have any food with me this time.” The cat rubs against her leg. “Okay, wait here.”

She goes upstairs, returns with a small plastic container of the dried salmon left over from breakfast, and sets it on the step. From a half block away she turns around to check but the cat is looking the opposite way, licking its paw.

The sun hasn’t shone in a long time. After three years here, she isn’t sure what New York is, in the larger sense. She’s sure there is a larger sense, because in Tokyo she always had in mind both where she was at the moment and how that place related to the entire city. But in New York, she has no sense of context, no idea of what lies beyond where she is at that moment. Her New York is nothing more than what is right in front of her face. Streets, addresses, bus routes, walk or don’t walk.

His locked door is waiting. She wishes she knew how to pray. The time seems right for a prayer.

Seven

The little pest is back at my door. I reach into my pocket and finger her letter. I’m not sure how many days it’s been since she opened it for me, since her last visit, but in that time I’ve read the letter 158 times after I began keeping track and at least fifty before that.

“Thomas, it’s me again, Megumi.” She knocks three times, gently. “Are you in there? I understand if you don’t want to talk, that’s okay, but at least let me know if you’re in there. So that I’m not out here talking to myself.”

She knocks again. I am careful not to make a sound. Someone is in here but whether that person is still me is hard to say.

“Okay, how about this,” she says. “I’ll stay for ten minutes, just in case you are in there, but if I don’t hear from you by then I’ll leave. Ten minutes is my maximum limit for talking to myself.”

Her voice is an accent she’s trying to hide, which makes it more noticeable. I try to imagine what she might look like, but I come up blank. People are so foreign; I can barely even remember what my own wife looks like now. I only see her in the dark, sleeping under that blanket as I pass by.

“Whatever we talk about, I’m not going to tell anyone. Not even your wife. I’m not a doctor or anything, and I’m not going to shrink your head, but even if all we talk about is your favorite breakfast cereal, it’ll stay locked up inside me, okay?”

Seven minutes until she leaves. She says she took a bath this morning. Says she wanted to soak all day, but she had to come see me. Tells me to say something. Otherwise it’s a wasted trip. “And I don’t mean bath the way Americans mean it,” she says. “I mean it the Japanese way. In Japan, first you wash, then you soak. There’s a washing area, sort of like a shower, where you scrub and clean and get all soapy, and next to that is a soaking tub. You make sure to scrub everywhere, even between your toes and behind your ears. Then you rinse off and soak in the tub.”

Against my will, I have an erection. Her voice. I am now mere animal. Six more minutes.

“But, do you know what’s even better than a tub on a cold day like today? The onsen. Do you know ‘onsen’? It’s an outside Japanese bath. A hot spring. My parents used to take me all the time, and when I got older I went with my friends. There you are, in a huge pool of steamy mineral water, outside in the beautiful mountains, fresh air, birds and trees all around you as you soak. It’s immaculately luxurious and relaxing. You’ve never been so clean and refreshed in your life.”

Five minutes. The wind blows stronger, hissing, spitting at the window.

“Thomas, did you know there’s even an onsen here? Way up by Lake Placid, up in the mountains, a Japanese family owns it. My boss Hamamoto closes the store for a week and takes us girls there every summer. She knows the owners. It’s very serene and cool. Special. The place is so far from anything that you forget all about the outside world. It disappears. Just the wind and water and trees and deep-deep quiet.”

My erection, mind of its own, doesn’t go away. “I wonder what you look like,” she says, her voice so close to the door. “Don’t you wonder what I look like? It’s not that I care what you look like, not like your looks matter to me, you could be anything at all and I wouldn’t mind.”

I try ignoring it.

“Something about the way you were before . . . you must really be worth it. Your wife doesn’t want to let you go. Even I know that, just from listening to her talk about you. She’s made me so curious about you . . . I like going with Hamamoto and the girls in the summertime, but it’s even better in the winter. It’s so beautiful to sit naked in hot sulfur water outside in the cold air. Your wet hair actually freezes into icicles, but you’re so warm. An amazing sensation. If you’re lucky, it snows. You and I should go sometime. Your wife can come, too. If you want.”

Under the weight of my resolve, it finally shrivels away.

“Thomas, look what I made for you.” She slides a piece of folded paper under the door. “It’s a penguin. Because it’s so cold out. You know, when romantic men want to get a girl they fold origami for her. They fold a thousand little cranes. Do you like him?”

Ten minutes have come and gone. I turn the tiny penguin over and over. She has done a nice job. I push it back under the door.

She sits in silence. She does not reprimand me, she does not beg me to come out.

“I used to sell my panties,” she chirps. “My first year of high school, when my friend and I went to Shibuya for some shopping. Do you know Shibuya? Have you ever been to Tokyo? Just eye-shopping, because we had no money, but my friend said we could make some. She took me to a small building on a side street behind the convenience store. A 7-Eleven, I think.”

Her voice gives her youth away. It has not yet hardened, it still carries in its melody the hope that things can be different from the way they are now, that we have the power to change the course of events.

“. . . was like a doctor’s waiting room. But there were no chairs, there was just a pretty girl behind a reception desk.”

Silke must be paying her a lot. One hundred, two hundred a visit. Or maybe she’s not paid by the visit, but rather a long-term contract. For a long-term problem. A thousand a month? Maybe a fat bonus when I come out of my room for good.

“The receptionist picked up a Polaroid camera and leaned forward. My friend lifted up her skirt.”

She thinks she’s going to teach me something, that she holds some key to life that is so magnificent and profound that I will abandon this little tomb and dive headfirst into the outside world.

“. . . then she pulled off her panties. They got stuck on her shoe and she started falling over, so she grabbed my arm. Somehow I kept us both standing. She dropped her panties into the red box and whispered, ‘Don’t embarrass me.’ So I lifted up my skirt, and the receptionist took the picture of my legs and panties . . .”

I doubt this is what it’s like to actually have a sister. This girl is too easy, I see right through her, and it’s sad my wife thought she stood a chance against me, that this chirping thing is her last idea for me. “. . . and I took off my panties and dropped them into the box.” She thinks she’s seducing me with this story of hers. She thinks the lonely man in his room can’t resist fresh meat, that I’ll open the door for it. She thinks that’s all she has to offer. Flicking this pest away will be easy. Her story isn’t even true.

“The pretty receptionist gave us each an envelope of money. I was afraid some pervert would look up my skirt and see that I’m not wearing anything, and my friend said, ‘Some pervert’s going to do a lot worse than that when he opens the box and gets ahold of your panties.’ ”

But if it’s sad then it’s also desperate, which I can’t ignore.

“. . . took off my panties at home at the end of the day, I got nothing, but if I took them off at the Agency, I got an envelope of money.”

And yet snapping my fingers won’t bring him back or reset our lives.

“. . . old perverts get these packages delivered to their home or their office in a plain brown box.” It seems she, too, has left behind a life, and here we both are, within feet of each other but separated by this door. “. . . sits on his desk all day, in full view of all his coworkers, and only he knows what’s inside, and he’s dying to open it. Probably drives him crazy, probably has a hard thing under his desk. And I always wondered what would happen if another worker in the office gets the same package, if there’s an office and on every guy’s desk there’s this plain box and each one of them knows what’s inside but nobody says anything. Imagine it. All those salarymen, all those boxes, all those panties . . .”

She is quiet for a long time. We are both quiet. The apartment itself is the only thing making any noise. The baseboard radiator pops. The cooling fan inside my DVR hums softly. Inside the wall, water sloshes through a pipe, headed to or from my neighbors, who have no idea that I hear their pipes and can guess what they’re up to, that flushing and brushing and washing and showering and bathing are all distinct sloshes. My little refrigerator is normally just a faint whir, but now the thermostat clicks and the electrical circuit closes and the heat exchanger starts up with a pronounced sustained buzz. It all harmonizes into a single dull minor-key moan.

“Thomas, will you open the door for me?” Her voice has dropped. Darker. More serious, more natural. Maybe this is the real her. “I really want to meet you,” she says. I stay quiet. She says we don’t have to talk about it, that we can talk about anything, that we’d have a good time together.

She gives up. The front door shuts and the big lock snaps tight. I pull back the window shade, just a bit, but what bright sunlight! My eyes screw down to pinpricks, a stinging pain, and when it subsides, I see her, down the front steps and onto the sidewalk. The pesky little pest is a red jacket and long black hair from underneath a blue knit hat with a fuzzy ball on top. She walks away quickly.

Eight

Megumi feels Chris’s or Crosby’s or Kale’s (she has forgotten his name) warm hand on her thigh, inching upward, inside her skirt. He stops. She knows she should give some sort of sign, but her head is spinning and when she tries to stop her head the rest of her body spins like an axle. Doing nothing is also a sign: he inches farther, a fingertip or two on her panties, brushing up and down. The music thumps. The confetti lights blink and sweep the crowd, slicing through the dark.

“Where are we?” she blurts out. He yanks his hand out of her skirt.

“What do you mean?” Naoko says. “We’re right here in the—”

“I don’t mean the club, I mean everything. What is this place? Why aren’t we in Japan?”

“You want to go back to Japan?”

“I just mean . . . this place doesn’t seem real to me, like none of the things we do here are real . . . a dream place, far from home . . . so I wonder if it’s real.”

“A couple too many for Megumi,” Naoko says.

Megumi hops off the guy’s lap and makes her way through the crowd. Naoko grabs her arm just before reaching the door. “Seriously,” she says, “are you okay?”

“I’ll be fine. Just need some air. I’ll be back in a second.”

But she does not go back. She starts walking. The streets are empty, not a taxicab in sight. The M6 bus stop is five frigid blocks away. Rats crawl over a pile of garbage bags. The garbage bags rustle. Is this place real?

She sits at the bus stop alone, bouncing her legs up and down for warmth, blowing on her hands. A man stares at her bare legs. In the quiet of the night she hears the approaching bus from a long way off.

She climbs the steps, dips her card into the fare machine, and looks for a place to sit. The odor of the bus washes over her, attacks her insides, a thick swirl of chemical cleaning solvents and lingering fast food. She tries breathing shallowly, through her mouth, but her tongue can taste the air, the hamburgers and onions and potatoes and the fat they were fried in. Won’t someone open the windows?

As she steps into the aisle, the passengers—in the lifeless fluorescent light they look like stiffs in a morgue—give her strange looks, as though they hope she won’t sit next to them, and in the end, despite the empty seats, she decides to stand. She holds a vertical steel pole. It feels good to grab the bus this way, to feel its vibrations, the revving and winding of the engine, as though she’s taking its pulse. She looks around at the people who’ve been giving her strange looks and thinks, What sad people the bus brings together. Only here, only now, never again.

A teenage couple, self-absorbed, her leg draped over his, making out. From time to time he cups her breast in his hand, though she pulls it away. He must feel her gaze. He takes his lips off his girlfriend’s and turns toward Megumi. If looks, as Americans say, could kill.