"Non preoccuparti, Yamazaki. Devi sapere che, in quanto a hikikomori, io sono un professionista. Finche' starai con me la tua situazione non potra' peggiorare piu' di cosi'!" (p. 54)

"Be', e va bene, lasciamo perdere. Allora mettiamola cosi': tu quali capacita' hai?"
"In che senso capacita'?"
"Sai disegnare, comporre musica, oppure usare qualche formidabile programma informatico? Qualcosa?"
"Io... non so fare niente. A volerne proprio trovare una, so stare per un anno intero senza vedere nessuno..." (p. 69)

"Non e' una bugia. Io sono il piu' forte hikikomori del mondo. Posso vivere benissimo da solo. E non sta affatto male. Percio', smettila anche di appoggiarti agli altri. Perche' in fin dei conti ognuno di noi e' solo. E stare da soli e' la cosa migliore. Cioe', lo sai anche tu, no? Alla fine restiamo sempre e comunque da soli. E' una cosa naturale. Ed e' stando cosi'che non ci puo' succedere niente di male. Per questo mi chiudo in casa. Si', nel mio monolocale da sei tatami..." (p. 210)

Con tutte le forze che ho mi daro' la spinta con le braccia, faro' un passo lungo con il piede destro... e poi mi tuffero'. Per la prima volta nella mia vita riusciro' a fuggire. Evadero' dalla stanza da sei tatami e dopo essermi sollevato sempre piu' in alto, scappero' via verso il cielo infinito. Un salto, un volo. (p. 243)

Una nippo-young-adult versione di Il mondo di Sofia di Jostein Gaarder. ( )

Animesinde sıkıldığım bazı bölümler olmasına rağmen beni en çok etkileyen eserlerin başında gelmektedir. Haliyle kitabını Türkçe bulunca okumadan edemedim. Kitapta animesinde sıkıldığım bölümler olmadığı için kitabı çok beğendim. ( )

Not terribly good, but it's an interesting read for folks who have seen other adaptations of this story and just want to see another (the original) version of it. ( )

"We're people, so it's painful."

The subjects of this book weren’t really joyful, still I wouldn’t say the atmosphere was gloomy, so it wasn’t one of those books you shouldn’t be reading if you’re depressed because it could make you even more depressed. In fact, it could even give you some insight on your situation (or rather, on life in general).

"Who in the world are we, anyway? If I could answer that question, maybe our destination would change."

I don’t think the characters really come to terms with that question, they seem more interested in how to survive it, which is what makes them look more real than ever: their feelings are raw and sharp, when they’re suffering, they’re stuck and there’s nowhere else to go.

At first, the ending left me somewhat unsatisfied, and I realized it would have been interesting to read Misaki’s POV, but I know now that this wasn’t the point of the book. The point was: how on earth, among all the suffering and the despair, can you make the word “hope” not look so empty? Well, you can dwell in drug-induced epiphanies, you can obsess over the creation of an erotic RPG, or you can find relief in another person. But what if that other person is hurting more than you? Well, I guess that when you’re lost, even their despair would look like a good enough anchor. So if you don’t know where you’re going, at least now you know where to start.
( )

Interesting view of extreme neuroticism/isolation/hikikomori lifestyle. ( )

Tatsuhiko Takimoto's novel Welcome to the N.H.K. was first published in Japan in 2002. The English translation by Lindsey Akashi was based off of the 2005 Japanese edition of the novel and was released by Tokyopop in 2007. I don't remember exactly how I first learned about Welcome to the N.H.K. but somehow I gained the impression that it was one of the best books to come out of Tokyopop's short lived Pop Fiction line. Perhaps surprisingly, I was aware of the novel Welcome to the N.H.K. before I was aware of either the twenty-four episode anime adaptation or the eight volume manga series (also published by Tokyopop) which was based on the novel. Both the manga and the anime are much easier to come by--the Welcome to the N.H.K. novel is unfortunately long out of print and hard to find. And when you do come across a copy it tends to be rather expensive. I count myself lucky to actually own the book.

Satou Tatsuhiro is a twenty-year-old hikikomori--a young recluse who has shut himself away from the world. His family doesn't know it yet, but he has dropped out of college and is living off of the allowance they send to him. Satou rarely leaves his small, cluttered apartment except for food, but even going to buy groceries is an ordeal for him. Normally he sleeps for sixteen hours, waking up long enough to eat, drink, and maybe throw together a concoction of over-the-counter drugs in an attempt to make himself feel better before falling back to sleep again. And so it is more by chance than anything else that he happens to meet a girl named Misaki, who is just a little odd herself. She is determined to make Satou her "project" and cure him of his hikikomori ways. Satou's not entirely sure what to make of that or what to do about her. However, the two fall into a strange sort of friendship whether they mean to or not.

As he reveals in the afterword, Tatsuhiko Takimoto himself is a self-proclaimed hikikomori (or NEET, a more socially acceptable term). I wasn't aware of this fact until after reading Welcome to the N.H.K. Inevitably, Takimoto drew on his own experiences and feelings as a hikikomori while writing the novel, lending to the authenticity of the main character. Understandably, it was a difficult task for the author to write the book. Takimoto imagines readers' responses to Welcome to the N.H.K. as "It's really funny. But it made me cry a little, too." I completely agree with the sentiment. If it wasn't for the humor, the novel would be terribly depressing. Welcome to the N.H.K. is in turn funny, even hilarious, and heartbreaking. Even so, while the humor may often be self-denigrating, Takimoto is never cruel.

The translation and adaptation work of Welcome to the N.H.K. is exceptional. It reads incredibly naturally, even considering the occasional end note. I was particularly impressed because significant sections of the novel are nearly stream-of-conscious, a style of writing that can be difficult to pull off well. Welcome to the N.H.K. nails it. The entire story is told directly from Satou's perspective regardless of his current state of mind. This includes both his good and bad trips. Although Welcome to the N.H.K. can be a bit silly or goofy, it is also dealing with some very serious and mature issues and themes: drug use, sexual fantasies (including lolicon and erotic video games), religion, abuse, and suicide, just to name a few. It can be an uncomfortable experience for the reader--the story proceeds innocently enough only to repeatedly turn around to hit you hard in the gut when you're not expecting it--but Welcome to the N.H.K. is a fantastic novel. I was glad to discover that it was just as good if not better than I was led to believe.

Experiments in Manga ( )

http://lampbane.livejournal.com/535131.html

"What an odd book. Though the main character, Satou, does seem to experience some character development over the course of the novel, you barely notice since it's told from a first-person perspective. So you generally just have to figure it out on your own based on his actions. For that matter, a lot of the book is left to the reader to figure out. In most books, the protagonist will explain things and do their best to present the story, but here, Satou just doesn't care. It makes sense, since he is a hikikomori (a shut-in). As such, he wouldn't know how to relate to a normal person (the reader). The whole book has this train-of-thought structure, where not everything runs in chronological order. It's like when you tell someone a story but realize halfway through you've forgotten to explain some crucial backstory, so you have to backtrack quickly and cram that in, then resume where you left off. This novel reads like that." ( )

The story follows Tatsuhiro Satou, a 22-year-old college dropout and hikikomori, a term used to refer to a person who has dropped out of society to live in extreme isolation (in Satou's case, he barricades himself in his apartment and lies to his parents so they keep sending him an allowance to live on). Satou hates himself for becoming what he sees as one of the dregs of society, but he is unable to overcome his persecution complex and reconnect with the outside world. He is eventually adopted by a young girl named Misaki, who wants to cure him of being a hikikomori (despite Satou's desperate and ill-fated attempts to convince her that he isn't one) - but is herself so strange that even Satou has to wonder about her.

The first chapter of this book is one of the funniest things I've ever read, as Satou gets high and, with the help of his furniture cheering him on, realizes that the NHK, the Japanese Broadcast Association, must be running a conspiracy to get people addicted to their TV shows and turn them into hikikomori. While most of the book is a dark comedy, though, the "dark" part is emphasized just as much as the "comedy" part - just about everyone is lonely and dangerously depressed, even the ones who seem to have their lives together; Satou in particular frequently goes on long-winded rants about how disgusted he is by himself and his lifestyle and how he ought to die. The whole thing is textbook schadenfreude, but it's entertaining schadenfreude, with an oddly satisfying ending. It helps that the author himself is a hikikomori, so it feels more like laughing with him than at him.

This is absolutely not a book for the easily offended, by the way; there is copious recreational drug use, attempted suicide, a ridiculous amount of discussion of the virtues of erotic video games, an entire chapter focusing on a burgeoning Lolita complex, passionate arguments in favor of misogyny, and descriptions of Christianity as basically a weird cult thing (although since less than 1% of Japanese are Christian, for them it kind of is). The narration really doesn't endorse most of that, though (Satou seeing them as more symptoms of his depravity), and frankly, most of the time it's done in such a ridiculous way that it's hard to really take offense. ( )

mid ( )