Confessions (11 page)

That’s got to be it. The whole thing was made up by that pathetic woman. Which means that Watanabe is a victim, too.

It’s all Moriguchi’s fault.

Today is the last day of the school year.

I could tell Naoki’s been depressed since that visit from Moriguchi, but he has been going to school every day, so I’ve been trying not to worry.

When he got home today he went right to his room. He didn’t come down for dinner, and he went straight to bed without saying good night. I suppose he’s been exhausted from the tension and it all came out at once.

He’s got some time to rest now during vacation, but it makes me sad to think that Moriguchi will still be there when he goes back for the new school year in April.

From the first day of the break I noticed that Naoki has been acting a little odd—almost as if he’d suddenly become a neat freak—or developed obsessive-compulsive disorder.

The first sign was when he asked me to serve dinner on individual plates rather than in one big bowl for all of us. And that from a boy who had always been happy to eat leftovers off my plate or anyone else’s. Then it seemed like there was a new announcement every day: He wanted his laundry done in a separate load, he didn’t want anyone getting in the bath after he’d used it.

I’ve seen things like this on TV and I decided it was just a phase, something to do with puberty, so I’ve done as he asks. I’m not sure that’s the best course, but it’s clear for now that he really doesn’t want me touching anything he wears or uses.

He’s never had to do housework of any kind, but now suddenly he’s washing all his own dishes and doing all his laundry. Only his own, of course.… As I’m writing this I realize it must sound as though he’s suddenly become a model child, but when I actually see him doing all this cleaning, I can’t help feeling terribly worried. He spends a whole hour scrubbing just a few plates and cups. Then he puts the whites and the colors into the washing machine together, adds way too much bleach, and runs the wash cycle over and over again. He acts as though all the germs out there in our environment had suddenly become visible to him.

Yet if that were the extent of it, I suppose I could just accept it as an extreme form of OCD and try to figure out what to do about it. But Naoki’s trouble is worse. At the same time he’s cleaning everything around him, he’s doing just the opposite to himself.

He’s getting filthy. He refuses to do anything to clean his body. I keep telling him he’s got to take care of himself, but he’s stopped combing his hair or brushing his teeth. He used to love taking a bath, but now he won’t go anywhere near it. He was walking down the hall today and I jokingly gave him a tiny little shove in the direction of the bathroom door, but he turned around and screamed, “Don’t touch me!” in a tone of voice I’ve never heard from him before.  It was really the first time he’s ever raised his voice to me at all. I tried telling myself that he’s going through a rebellious phase, but it made me terribly sad all the same.

But a few minutes later he came to find me like nothing had happened and started talking about things he remembered from years ago. It was so strange—I don’t know how much longer I can take this.

One of the neighbors came over today with some bean cakes they’d brought back from a trip to Kyoto. Naoki has never been fond of bean sweets, but I decided to take some up to his room anyway to see if he might be interested.

I wasn’t surprised when he refused, but then he showed up in the kitchen a little while later and said he’d changed his mind and wanted to try them. I made a pot of tea and we sat down. I have to admit I was nervous.

He took a little nibble and then shoved the whole cake in his mouth and swallowed it in one bite. Then, for some reason, he started to cry.

“I never knew they were so delicious!” he said. “I never knew!”

It was when I saw him crying that I realized all his cleaning and his self-neglect have nothing to do with puberty or a rebellious phase or OCD or anything else. It’s all because of what happened with the Moriguchi girl.

“Eat as many as you want,” I told him.

He took another cake out of the box and unwrapped it, and this time he ate it slowly, one bite at a time—and I’m pretty sure he was thinking about that little girl the whole time he was chewing the cake, mourning a child who would never enjoy a delicious treat like that again. He is truly a sweet boy.

I suspect it’s not just when he’s eating bean cakes, either. I think he thinks about her all the time, no matter what he’s doing. All that compulsive washing must be his way of trying to wipe away that terrible memory; and at the same time he neglects himself and lives in filth because he feels guilty about being comfortable when she’s unable to feel anything at all.

He’s still punishing himself for what happened.

At last I feel as though I understand why he’s been acting so strangely these past few days—and I’m sorry that I didn’t realize sooner what he’s been going through. He’s been asking for my help all along, and I was too blind to see.

This makes me realize all the more that the real villain here is that awful Moriguchi, with her false accusations and evil mind games. If she has to find a way to escape her own guilt, couldn’t she at least pick on someone as warped as she is? It’s too awful for words, trying to pass on her sins to a sweet boy like Naoki. It’s obvious she quit her job because she couldn’t escape her own feelings. She would have had to face the same class of children at the start of next year, so the only solution was to leave. I have half a mind to write the principal and ask him to find an enthusiastic young man to take her place.

Naoki needs to stop worrying. What he needs now is to forget the whole thing. And the best way to forget the painful things in life is to write them down in a diary like this.

Come to think of it, it was my favorite teacher in middle school who taught me that. Why was I so lucky, having such a wonderful teacher, while Naoki ends up with a loser like Moriguchi? That’s what she is all right: a loser.

He was just a little unlucky. But his luck’s about to turn. I’m sure of it.

I went to the stationery store today and bought a diary with a lock and key. The lock makes it feel as though you’re really closing away all the stuff you spill out on the page.

I took it up to him a few minutes ago and told him I knew he had all kinds of troubles bottled up inside.

“But you don’t have to keep it all in there,” I told him. “And you don’t even have to tell me. Just write it down in here.”

He is an adolescent boy, so I was worried he might think a diary was too girly, but he took it without saying anything. Then he started to cry again.

“Thanks, Mom. I’m not much good at writing, but I’ll give it a try.”

By then I was crying, too, but I’m feeling better, trying not to worry. I’m sure he’ll be back on his feet soon. I’m sure I can help him forget about all this unpleasantness.

I’m sure.

I usually write down bad things I’m trying to forget here in my diary, but today I feel as though I have to write about something that makes me very happy.

Mariko came by to tell me she’s pregnant! She’s only in her third month and she’s not showing yet, but you could tell by the look on her face—confident and happy and ready to be a mother.

She brought along Naoki’s favorite, cream puffs, and we were going to have a little celebration, just the three of us, but when I went up to his room to get him he refused to come down. He said he thought he was catching a cold and didn’t want to pass it on to his sister.

Mariko seemed a little disappointed, but she said that Naoki was a lot more considerate than her husband, and then she started complaining about the way he had been smoking around her even though he knew it wasn’t good for a woman in her condition.

She grumbled on and on, but I wasn’t really listening. I was realizing that I’d been misreading Naoki. I’d been so focused on his strange behavior that I’d lost sight of Naoki himself. He wasn’t just my sweet boy; he’d grown and matured to the point that he could show real consideration for his sister. It made me truly happy to realize that.

It made me even happier when he leaned out the window as she was leaving and waved to her. “Congratulations, Mariko!” he called.

“Thanks, Naoki,” Mariko called, waving back as she started down the street.

As I watched the two of them, all the doubts I’d been having about my skills as a mother vanished. The children had turned out all right.

I was raised in the most wonderful family. My father was strict, my mother the model wife, and they had my brother and me—the perfect family. All our relatives and neighbors made a point of saying how much they admired and envied the four of us. My father let my mother run the household while he worked like a dog day and night to provide for us; and thanks to his efforts we were a little better off than most of the other families around us.

My mother was strict with me, looking after my training and making sure I had the kind of upbringing—manners, etiquette, and all the little details—that would let me hold my head high no matter where I went or whom I married. My brother, on the other hand, was spoiled and coddled and praised. He was taught to be confident and to do exactly as his opinions and preferences dictated. My mother was determined to provide a home life that would let my father focus all his energies on work, so she took it upon herself to solve any problems that arose.

But I suppose it was because we were so fortunate that those tragedies came to us one after the other. While I was in middle school, my father died in an automobile accident and my mother fell ill and followed him soon after. My brother is eight years younger than I am, so he was just a boy when we were taken in by relatives—and because of the difference in our ages, I began to act as a surrogate mother to him from that point. Following my mother’s example, I was strict with myself but treated my brother with great care and indulgence. I like to think that’s why he was able to get into a top university, find work in a prestigious company, build a fine home for himself, and flourish in life.

That may explain why I feel nothing can go wrong if I follow my mother’s example.

Naoki continued to show symptoms of OCD combined with self-neglect—I can’t think of any better way to describe his condition—but after I gave him the diary, he seemed to be in a good mood a bit more often.

I have also begun to realize, now that I think back, that my two older girls had phases like this, too. Mariko was in middle school when she suddenly announced that she wanted to quit piano lessons, and Kiyomi was about the same age when she started refusing to wear the clothes I bought for her.

Naoki had the bad luck to be caught up in that nasty mess right at this sensitive moment in his development, and I think he’s still trying to figure out what to do next, what his life will become. I have to keep this in mind and try to stay calm. If I continue to praise every little thing he does and show him unconditional love—just as my mother and I did for my brother—then I’m sure I’ll get my sweet Naoki back. Or, rather, I’m sure I’ll get my Naoki back, but even more grown-up.

He just needs to rest and recuperate while he’s still on spring break.

A couple of years ago you started hearing a lot about young people who were dropping out of society, the ones called
hikikomori
—“shut-ins”—or NEETs. They say there are more and more of them every year and it’s getting to be a major social problem.

But when I hear those words, I wonder whether the real problem isn’t the names themselves, the whole idea of giving titles to children who stop going to school or looking for work. I believe we find our sense of stability, our place in life, by participating in society, by coming to belong somewhere and taking on the title of that position—mother, teacher, doctor. Not belonging anywhere, not having a title of some sort, means, in effect, that you’re not really a member of society. So it seems to me that most normal people, if they found themselves in that situation—without a position or title—would feel terrible anxiety and do everything they could to secure a place in the world as quickly as they could.

But the moment you start calling those young people by those names—
hikikomori,
NEET, or whatever—those names
become
their titles, their sense of belonging. They can feel right at home, quite comfortable and reassured, knowing that they’re full-fledged dropouts with their own recognized condition and function in society. Why, then, would they see any need to make the effort to go to school or find a job?

Once society accepts these names and positions, there’s very little we can do about it—but I still can’t understand parents who are comfortable calling their own child a
hikikomori
or a NEET. How can they hold their heads up in public? There’s only one explanation: They’re determined to blame the child’s condition on the school or on society, on anything and everything except the situation in their own home.

But they’re fooling themselves. The school or society may have something to do with the problem, but a child’s personality first and foremost is molded in the home, and you’ve got to assume the root cause is there, too, on some level.

A child becomes a
hikikomori
because of something in his home life. If that’s the case, then Naoki is
definitely not
a
hikikomori
.

The new term started exactly a week ago, but he still hasn’t been to school. The first day he said he felt a little feverish, so I let him stay home and didn’t make an issue of it. When I called the school, a young man answered and told me he was the new homeroom teacher. It was gratifying to know that the principal had finally seen things my way, and I went straight to Naoki’s room to let him know.

“A young man like that is bound to be more sympathetic,” I told him.

But he was “feverish” the next day and the day after that and had no interest in going to school. When I tried to feel his forehead, he brushed my hand away and practically snarled at me, and when I gave him the thermometer, he made up another excuse.