Hikikomori and the Rental Sister: A Novel (14 page)

Each member of the family was so different from the others. Mom and Dad on one side, she and her brother on the other. But even Mom and Dad were different from each other. A family of one Japanese, one Korean, and two mutts. It’s strange to be different from your parents, who are different from each other.

After she cleaned and rinsed him, she led him into the bath. While he soaked, she showered. Sometimes she took the bowl and poured hot water through his hair. He reached his hand out of the water, and she held it. He never said a word. Just before the water turned cool, she guided him out of the tub and dried him with a towel. She brushed his teeth. He did the rinsing and spitting; she did the brushing. He was waking up a bit. He watched her as she bandaged his cuts. She dressed him in his yukata. She put hers on, too.

She took him to his room and put him into bed. She asked him if he wanted her to stay with him. He took her face in his hands and smiled and shook his head.

That’s how it started. The next morning he said through the door he was in too much pain and couldn’t go to school. He said he wasn’t going back until he was all healed.

She didn’t think anything was wrong at first. But then one day when she went to rebandage his wounds he wouldn’t let her in. She left the fresh bandages and medicines on the floor outside his door.

For a couple of weeks he’d come out only for dinner, but he’d just play with his food, eat a few bites and go back to his room. He wouldn’t say anything and he wouldn’t look at them. The silences were heavy and tense. After a while, maybe a month, they started talking at dinner as though it was just the three of them, as if it was a family of three, plus a pet who ate at the table. Eventually he stopped even coming out. Her mother put a tray at the door for him, like a dog.

Megumi sometimes went to his door, but all he’d say was, “I’m not healed yet. I’ll come out when I’m healed.” Months and months of the same. Then her mother stopped putting food at the door. He was on his own.

Thomas’s light is still on. There is no silhouette, just the steady glow. Silke’s window is dark.

She can’t be alone; she needs more than memories. Alone is harsh. Alone is loud. Thomas is warm and still.

The stairway up to his fifth-floor apartment has the slightly burnt smell of lingering cooking. She puts her ear to the door. She turns the key. She turns the knob.

The living room is dark. She suddenly can’t remember the placement of the furniture. She holds still. Her eyes adjust. Shadows begin to form, outlines, delineating objects from empty space. From her purse she takes a scrap of paper and writes a quick note, as best she can in the dark, by feel. She takes off her shoes and holds them. Her bare feet stick to the wood floor. The piano sits silent.

Silke’s door is open. The hallway seems endless. She does not peek inside as she passes. She slides the note under his door and knocks, barely.

The strip of light beneath his door vanishes. He opens the door. He pulls her in by the hand. The locks snap tight. He keeps her hand. He kisses her. His lips are warm. She is floating. The whole world is black.

“Are you okay?” he says into her ear. His voice tickles.

“I just wanted to see you,” she says.

The light comes on. The world reappears, solid. Stacks of boxes. Bed, desk, dresser, microwave, refrigerator. Magazines. Two lamps. Television.

He kisses the tiny button of a bruise. “Can we get out of here?” she says. The room is too small. “Just for an hour. Will you come walk with me?”

“She’s a light sleeper.”

“We can make it.”

He goes to the window and pulls back the shade. Looks the street up and down. “I could use some groceries,” he says.

The ritual begins. The door open just a crack. The listening, the crouching. He leads her by the hand past his wife’s room.

Outside, there is no breeze. They walk in silence. He’s not used to walking with another person and sometimes he bumps into her. They walk according to separate rhythms.

A car speeds toward them, its engine sound increasing in pitch as it closes the gap. As it passes it looks completely mechanical, an autonomous robot creature rolling down the road. The pitch of the engine grows lower as it leaves them behind. “Do you hear that?” she says. “It’s called the Doppler effect. My brother taught me about it. He said that to determine if two bodies are moving farther apart or closer together, all you have to do is listen.”

This is the deepest part of night, when the day has finally wound completely down, when everything is for a few moments perfectly still before winding back up again. For these few moments the world seems in perfect balance. A lonely sparrow chirps, awake too early.

“In America they say that birds sing,” she says. “But in Korea they say that birds cry. Do you know why? It’s because of the Japanese . . . how can I say it? Because of all the Japanese soldiers in Korea during the world war.”

“Occupation.”

“The story is that Korean birds used to sing, but when the Japanese soldiers came they started to cry. Even now when Koreans hear birds they say ‘Saega ooleo.’ The birds are crying.”

“Why did you leave Japan? What happened?”

They pass closed shops and dark windows. The sky shows no sign of turning brighter. But she knows the sun will eventually rise and she will have to leave Thomas and go back to work selling wagashi. She wishes the sun would stay sunken.

“I had this idea that . . . that if I could make enough money, I could take my brother out of his room and move away to America or Australia. Some place where being half Korean didn’t matter. I thought I could save him. I thought we could start fresh. It was my last year of high school and my parents wanted me to go to college, but how could I go when I knew my brother was in his room like that? So I started meeting clients. Men.”

The money she earned from selling her panties wasn’t enough to take her brother away from Japan. So she bought some plain white silky fabric, cut out little rectangles, folded the rectangles in half, and sewed them into her panties. Labels. On the back of the labels she wrote her cell phone number discreetly. The Agency would never know.

Most guys never called. She’d write her phone number, drop her panties into the pretty box at the Agency, take her envelope with the ¥10,000 and never hear from the pervert who purchased them. She had expected every guy to see her number and call right away. If they wanted her panties, they must—once given the option—also want her, right? She was diving into the thick sludge of men’s perversions, and she was getting stuck.

Then one day during biology class her cell phone vibrated inside her backpack. After class she pulled it out and found someone had texted I HAVE YOUR PANTIES.

She texted back: WANNA MEET? The reply was immediate.

She texted him to go to a certain Shibuya love hotel, on the hill, at exactly four o’clock (couldn’t stay out too late on a school night, had to be home for dinner), no earlier, no later. She added that the cost was ¥60,000, an inconceivable amount of money, a ridiculous amount of money, an amount she never thought she’d get away with.

At 3:50 p.m., from across the street and around a corner, she staked out the love hotel. Nobody went in or out until exactly four o’clock, when a man walked in, nervously glancing over his shoulder to see if he had been spotted. It was a self-service hotel, so she figured five minutes would be all it would take for him to get settled in a room.

From across the street he hadn’t looked like a pervert. He looked like any other guy: tired, slouched, slightly sad. He wore a dark suit and tie, he didn’t look crazy, and he wasn’t as old as she had expected. Old, but not that old. Just a random guy she might one day find herself waiting behind in line at a store. Or at the table next to hers in a restaurant. Or the father of one of her friends from school.

After five minutes, she texted him: which room? She went inside and knocked on the door to room 15, and the man who had purchased her panties let her in.

It surprised her so few men contacted her through her labels. She had figured she’d have to sleep with hundreds of men, each once. Instead, few men called but those who did wanted to see her regularly, so over the next year and a half, while her brother was living in his room, she had a constant stable of clients. One or two would fade away just as one or two new ones contacted her. It worked out.

The money piled up. Payment for services rendered.

The sex was mostly boring, but there’s nothing wrong with being bored, and sometimes the sex was good—men and their fantasies—once in a while even great, and some men seemed to save their best sex for her, as though they had something to prove. What that something to prove might be she had no idea, but she was certain these men didn’t fuck their wives the way they fucked her.

Mostly though, the biggest obstacle to overcome was the sadness. All those men carried with them profound sadness, often buried deep deep deep, but visible to her. After sex, spent and looking up at the ceiling, the men let down their guard and the sadness came oozing out. This, the hardest part: to ignore the sadness, to not reach out, to not become involved, to not care, to do only what their arrangement required, to let them leave with their sadness, to not let her own sadness out, to stay on guard. The hotel rooms began to smell of sadness. The curtains, the sheets, the pillows, the carpeting. Drenched in sadness.

During sex the men were usually disconnected, distant, faraway minds. But what of it? Her mind, too, was far away, thinking of a new life with her brother.

But one particular afternoon she opened her eyes and looked up at a face and stiffened with fright, with self-consciousness, and she pushed him off of her and rolled to the side and buried her face in her hands. She didn’t know what else to do: he had been looking at her, he had been doing all those intimate, sweaty things not to his own private fantasy but to her, to the person called Megumi. Her mind had been far away but his mind had been right there, between them, with them.

“Did I hurt you?” he said. “Are you okay?”

Was she okay? She wasn’t sure. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Let’s keep going.”

He wasn’t like her other clients. He was unmarried, a college student, from a rich family, good looking. Smart and charming and kind. And perverted.

The next week, same thing. His mind was right there. Hers too. He paid her.

And instead of waiting for his calls, she began calling him, arranging two or three meetings a week. Sometimes four. Right there. He still paid her. Afterward they would go to a café together or a restaurant for dinner. He wasn’t afraid of being seen in public with her.

But what was she to talk about at cafés and restaurants? Her other clients? How she wanted to keep her two lives separate? At first it was easy enough to just listen. Men love to talk about themselves. But after a while she was expected to contribute; she wanted to contribute. She told about her family, about how she’s half Korean, about her hikikomori brother.

They’d meet in the hotel, and more and more often they’d use up the entire appointment simply talking, time flying, forgetting all about having sex. Even then he paid her.

At dinner one night he asked if she would ever go on a real date with him. “Are you running out of money?” she asked, laughing.

“I have plenty of money. But I just . . . I just love doing so many amazing things in the city, and I always do them alone and I like doing them alone but I’d much rather share them with someone else and the only person I can think of, the only person I’d really want to do any of those things with, is you.”

“Don’t you have any friends?” she asked.

“Of course I have friends,” he said. “But nobody special.”

Client, no longer. Over the next months, they saw each other often. They met after school and went to cafés and parks and gardens and restaurants. He took her shopping. They explored different neighborhoods and went to museums and baseball games and secret, hidden jazz clubs. A new, sophisticated world. Once, they went to the harbor and watched the ships being loaded and unloaded with giant, slow-moving cranes. Often, but not always, they went to hotels. One night at dinner, as he was sipping his soup, he asked her to stop seeing clients.

“If not for my clients I’d have never met you,” she said.

“But now that you’ve met me, why do you need to see clients?”

“For the money.”

“So if I paid you that much, you wouldn’t see them anymore?”

“Of course.”

Later that night her brother was rushed to the hospital. Three days later, in his bedroom, he slit his arms and stomach and throat.

She would’ve held him. Dead, alive, blood or no blood, she would’ve held him. He deserved to be held. He did not deserve to have his mother call the authorities and order a cleanup as though a storm had sent a tree flying through their roof. He didn’t deserve to be erased for the sake of those still living. He deserved to be held.

“When my brother died,” she tells Thomas, “I lost it. Is that the right way to say it? That’s how it happens sometimes. You just lose it. You say, That’s enough. First my brother did, then I did. I had to escape, get out of there. How could I spend even one more night in that house without losing my mind? I didn’t even pack a bag. I walked out and called my friend here in New York to tell her I was on my way. The next flight wasn’t until the morning so I slept in the airport. And now here I am. I thought maybe if I had told him about all the money I had been saving up, maybe then he would’ve changed his mind. I don’t know.”