Contents
I. An Unpleasant Book
The Hikikomori Notes (Hikikomori no shuki) is an unpleasant book. Murder, violence, suicide, discriminatory remarks, anti-moral and anti-ethical ideas, misanthropy, a sense of victimhood, an extremely critical and skeptical cast of mind. There is no shortage of material for making readers dislike it.
That alone, of course, would be nothing unusual. Today’s entertainment is awash with serial killers, madmen, and graphic cruelty. We can enjoy horror films in which people are slaughtered, and we can consume deranged criminals as charismatic characters. Madness and cruelty, once sufficiently processed, become pleasures. As is well known, this is nothing new: the waxworks of nineteenth-century London already had a “Chamber of Horrors” displaying executed criminals, and visitors paid to go in. I, too, have read a great many unpleasant novels. Even by comparison with them, however, the discomfort The Hikikomori Notes gives me is of a peculiar kind.
One small complication here is that the writer of these notes also calls himself “I,” which is easily confused with my own “I.” From here on, therefore, I will write the narrator of the notes in brackets, as 〈I〉.
〈I〉 speaks of himself as a murderer, as someone who has received a psychiatric diagnosis, and as someone who has been a recluse for many years. As readers, our first impulse is to push him into some easy drawer: “the crazed killer,” “the social misfit,” “the paranoid with a persecution complex.” Yet this book refuses to fit so neatly into any drawer.
Regarding the contradictions in his own records, for instance, 〈I〉 anticipates the reader thinking, “So he is just a typical deranged, crazed killer after all!” Immediately afterward, he counters that a killer who explains a single motive in an orderly, logical way would actually be the unnatural one, like an “actor,” and he challenges readers to try writing down the true motive behind some major action in their own lives. Starting from the point where his contradictions are exposed, the discussion has somehow shifted to a different question: does the human mind really have consistent motives at all? At the very opening of the text, too, he treats the human mind as “an extremely complex mechanism” and is suspicious of the so-called easily understood motive for murder as a story constructed after the fact.
This move recurs again and again throughout the book. Just when you think you are observing the work, the work turns around and examines your common sense and your normality. Try to sort out the truth, and you are told that the act of sorting is itself a kind of confabulation. Try to criticize 〈I〉’s ideas, and the very justice and morality you used in that criticism are put in question.
I would like, provisionally, to call this deformity of the mind the psycho-grotesque. It is neither a medical term nor an established literary genre, but a coinage of my own. The word “grotesque” derives from the Domus Aurea of Nero, rediscovered at the end of the fifteenth century: its underground rooms looked like caves (grotte), and so their mural decorations came to be called grottesche. What they depicted were bizarre ornaments freely mixing human, animal, and plant forms with architectural shapes. From the very start of its history, then, the grotesque was closely bound up with the hybridization of heterogeneous things and with deviation from proper form. Just as the bodily grotesque includes hypertrophy, absence, deformation, fusion, and asymmetry, the mind, too, may undergo hypertrophy, distortion, perversion, lack, splitting, and abnormal conjunction. My argument in what follows is that the true source of the unpleasantness of The Hikikomori Notes lies in the way such malformations surface even in its prose and its structure.
II. The Hypertrophy of Hatred
When thinking about deformities of the mind, the most obvious specimen is the “Theory of Humanity as Vermin” in Part Two.
〈I〉 recalls that during the period he lived in a psychiatric ward, as he researched war, poverty, and discrimination, he “came to loathe the animal called the human being from the bottom of my heart.” He then reproduces in full, without revision, the “Theory of Humanity as Vermin” he wrote at the time, on the grounds that it represents “my state of mind then, confusion included.”
That text does not stop at something as mild as opening with “I hate human beings.”
“I do not write to please human beings. I write to anger them. I do not want to save a single one of them. I want to curse every human being.”
From there the curse upon humanity goes on and on, moving from persecution to violence, torture, massacre, invasion, war, deception, and hypocrisy.
It is painful to read. Partway through, a weariness sets in: yes, we understand that you hate human beings, and still it goes on? In my view, however, this exhausting persistence is precisely what matters. What comes to mind here are the endless philosophical harangues inserted into the novels of the Marquis de Sade. The villains of Juliette lecture for dozens of pages on their reasons for killing before they kill. As Sade’s readers eventually learn, that tedium is not a flaw but a method; Sade’s monstrousness lay in letting emotions that would normally be dispatched in a few lines swell beyond any proper size. 〈I〉’s hatred undergoes the same kind of hypertrophy.
To think of the psycho-grotesque simply as hypertrophy would be too narrow, however, because elsewhere distortion and fusion are more conspicuous.
〈I〉 later describes himself in this period as follows:
“I became a monster, as though someone had kneaded together a clay of hatred and given it a backbone of logic.”
He says that he went on thinking while kneading together a sense of victimhood, a desire for revenge, and an obsession with justice, until he finally reached the point of believing that he had not only a “right” but a “duty” to take revenge on all of humanity.
What is strange here is that 〈I〉 is not simply a villain. If anything, his attachment to ethics and justice is too strong. He starts by reacting to war, massacre, discrimination, and persecution, by finding them unforgivable, and in pressing the logic of justice to its end he arrives at an ideology that condemns humanity as a whole. Rather than a monster who has abandoned ethics, he has become monstrous as a result of being possessed by ethics. In this respect he is not unlike Sade, with his inverted faith: a self-proclaimed atheist who could never stop reviling God.
What is more, he does not settle at that point either. He recalls that while writing the Theory of Humanity as Vermin, or just after finishing it, his thinking “stood on its head,” and he turned from condemning human beings for the sake of justice to condemning justice for the sake of human beings.
There is something uncannily pure about this figure. He hates justice yet cannot give it up. He hates human beings yet cannot bear to see them made to suffer. The person who wrote something like the Theory of Humanity as Vermin later draws up a set of “self-admonitions” for himself, and even adopts a principle of “not killing.”
That is exactly why it is disturbing. If it were mere shock value, one could laugh it off as bad taste and be done. In 〈I〉’s case, good and evil are more tangled. The wish to save people and the wish to curse them, a sense of victimhood and a capacity for harm, a sense of justice and a desire for revenge are fused together with odd seams, like the patchwork body of Frankenstein’s monster. What I call the psycho-grotesque is this kind of “misshapen form” of the mind.
III. A Labyrinth of Records
The Hikikomori Notes contains a great many records. The killing of his mother; a child’s body that turns up where he buried his mother; the dismembered child of Chapter One; the killings referred to as “the first time” and “the second time”; a third killing and its victim; a hand mirror; his father; dates that do not match. With this much material, one would think something could be worked out, but in practice the opposite happens.
〈I〉 explains that it is not that he cannot understand his records “despite there being so many,” but that he cannot understand them “because there are so many,” and he says that his records concerning the killings alone fill eight cardboard boxes. In the structural ledger I keep at hand, too, the records concerning the killing of the child are organized as a set that does not agree with itself.
Normally, more information brings us closer to the truth. In this book, however, the more records there are, the more the contradictions in the details multiply, until it becomes impossible to tell which to accept. Recall Piranesi’s series of Carceri (Prisons). In those etchings, each staircase, bridge, or beam that is added makes the space vaster and ever more lacking in exits. The proliferation of records is likewise nothing other than the extension of a labyrinth.
A mystery novel would at this point discard the noise and make the plot cohere. The Hikikomori Notes complains even about that operation. It suspects that excluding contradictory testimony and picking up only the information that fits, so as to construct a single life or a single case, is itself an act of processing reality into a story.
It is tiresome. It seems one could simply say, “It is hard to read because it contradicts itself,” but the work’s 〈I〉 shoots back: “Why do you assume reality is free of contradiction?” One can retort, “That is a separate issue from a novel being poorly organized,” and yet the question the work has thrown back does not go away.
In this book, it is not only the mystery that remains indeterminate. The method of reading itself becomes a point of contention: what it means to understand, what it means to turn events into a single plotline. Because the book entangles itself even with the interpretive tools the reader is using, the harder you try to read it closely, the less you know how to read it.
IV. The Snake That Eats Its Own Tail
Reading The Hikikomori Notes, it can seem as though he doubts everything and negates everything. Society, psychiatry, morality, common sense, justice, causality, language: he attacks them one after another. Yet if you read this 〈I〉 as a nihilistic paradox-monger or a glib relativist, you will miss him.
Justice is the typical case. 〈I〉 does not dislike justice and then stop at saying “justice does not exist.” In Part Two he earnestly formulates “Seven Principles of Justice,” setting out the conditions under which norms may be imposed on others. Later, however, he writes:
“I discarded the Seven Principles of Justice. To be precise, rather than discarding them, I critically reexamined the Seven Principles of Justice.”
and so he tears down his own theory. However ideal the principles one devises, in reality, when a “giant” such as a great power, a majority, an intellectual authority, or political power brings a norm down on others, it passes as justice. So he next devises the “Reverse Seven Principles of Justice,” switching from “theorizing ideal justice” to “analyzing what is actually called justice in reality.” He is thinking seriously. And as a result of thinking, he fails.
The manner of this failure is interesting. When his theory cannot explain reality, he does not bend reality to fit the theory; he first breaks the theory. He builds a new theory. Then he doubts that too. Alchemical imagery includes the ouroboros, the snake that eats its own tail, and 〈I〉’s skepticism is exactly this snake: he bites his own ideas with the same teeth he uses on other people’s. 〈I〉’s critical spirit keeps baring its fangs without limit in every direction, at himself and others alike.
So if you try to criticize him by saying “he just negates everything,” he has already doubted that negative attitude himself. Call him “a nihilist who does not believe in justice,” and he has spent endless pages thinking about what justice is, going so far as to draw up seven principles. Point out that “his theory is contradictory,” and he is already aware of the contradiction and begins to think about it further.
V. Trading Places in the Dock
This, I think, is what is especially unpleasant about reading The Hikikomori Notes.
In general, the reader is the one who criticizes the work. This character is mad, this idea is childish, this novel is logically incoherent, this protagonist lacks social skills: we are free to judge as we like. The reader is, so to speak, a judge seated in a safe chair.
The Hikikomori Notes can of course be criticized as well. Leaps of logic, overgeneralization, self-justification, claims that are ethically and morally unacceptable, long passages that are simply boring. There is no end of places one wants to criticize. And yet an odd awkwardness remains. The reason is that the book is intensely critical, and its criticism is aimed at human beings and society in general, and even at us, its readers. Before we can criticize it, we are already being criticized.
Call 〈I〉 a social misfit, and you are asked why you consider being adapted to society a value. Say he is mad, and the conversation turns to who decides what is normal and what is abnormal. Say he is morally wrong, and he presses you on who made that morality and who imposes it on whom. Say he is contradictory, and he replies that demanding consistency of the human mind or of a human life is the more artificial thing.
This stance is quite blatant from early on. Against people who call 〈I〉 “ignorant of the world,” he retorts that those who think “I know the world” are the ones excluding people like him from that world, and so are they not, rather, “ignorant of what lies outside the world”?
Our criticisms are not necessarily wrong. Many of them are probably perfectly correct. But if you ignore the criticism aimed at you and point only to the other side’s faults, you inevitably look defensive. Something close to that feeling dogs any attempt to criticize this book.
While reading it, I repeatedly felt as if I were the one being criticized. Just as a man reading a feminist book may feel uncomfortable, and may want to talk back, it is entirely natural that a human being reading this book should feel bad and want to criticize it in return.
〈I〉 is also quite presumptuous about his distance from the reader.
“My words slip smoothly inside you.”
He goes on to write that even if readers forget or deny them, those words will remain inside them and mix with their own words.
It is an arrogant claim. Yet this arrogance suits the experience of reading the book well. You think you are a guest reading the work, and before you know it the work is prying into your character and values. You begin reading intending to put the work in the dock, and somehow you find yourself under interrogation too. Judge and defendant trade places.
You can criticize the book back. But that does not invalidate the criticism you received from it. Even if your rebuttal succeeds, the question first thrown at you remains. Therein lies this book’s unpleasant strength.
VI. A Deformity of Style
The psycho-grotesque is not confined to 〈I〉’s ideas and emotions. The same distortion appears in the prose.
The book itself declares:
“The story is broken and the logic is contradictory. The problems are not resolved and there is no moving ending. The content is confused and digressive. It is incoherent and hard to read.”
So the book declares of itself.
And so it is. Just when a recollection seems to be under way, a lengthy theory suddenly begins, and dreams, diary entries, and fragments are interposed. In Part Two the numbering runs backward from three hundred to one. Theories reverse themselves midway, and the text even records that past passages have been revised.
Above all, it is long. When he comes to hate human beings, the “Theory of Humanity as Vermin” goes on and on. When he thinks about justice, seven principles are born; he breaks them, and the reverse seven principles are born. He was supposed to be writing about his own life, but partway through he moves on to the world, reality, fiction, cognition, and logic. While reading, one frequently thinks, “Please, stop.”
There is no need to praise all of this as “sophisticated literary experiment.” There are passages that are simply verbose and that I think would be better cut. Announcing that one’s work is broken does not make its brokenness a virtue. Yet it is also hard to call this prose merely clumsy.
To show an audience the bodily grotesque in a horror film requires the craft of special-effects makeup and modeling. Putting something ugly on screen does not automatically produce a frightening image. When the sixteenth-century surgeon Ambroise Paré collected deformities in On Monsters and Marvels, what he needed was not to be astonished but to describe. In the same way, showing the human mind as grotesque also requires expressive power.
What The Hikikomori Notes depicts is not a neatly organized “madness.” It is the unsightly movement of a human mind that suffers, struggles, thrashes, hates, shrieks, and curses, while at the same time seeking salvation. In the latter half, 〈I〉 admits that he has been driven into a miserable corner, and he also moves from imposing justice on others toward drawing up self-admonitions to protect himself.
I have read this book through at least three times (the fact that a lazy person like me has read it through three times already seems to prove something), and each time I notice how densely the classics of thought, philosophy, and literature are woven into the text. There are overt quotations, but that is not all. Classical modes of argument, compositions, and turns of phrase are embedded behind the prose as parody and transformation, and there are many places one passes by without noticing.
Indeed, even the “The horror! The horror!” abruptly placed at the opening of the Theory of Humanity as Vermin is no mere spur-of-the-moment curse. Needless to say, these are the last words Kurtz utters in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Calderón stands as the epigraph to Part One, and throughout the text Nietzsche, the Bible, and thinkers and writers of every age are repeatedly in view. 〈I〉 himself boasts that, through books, he has taken writers, philosophers, scientists, thinkers, mystics, and religious figures of all times and places as his “faculty.” There is, of course, no need to take this self-assessment at face value. Still, the text is too oddly intricate to be dismissed as “a crank document dashed off on sheer momentum by someone out of his mind.”
The intelligence and technique are, at least in places, considerably high. But that ability is not straightforwardly put to use in conveying things clearly to the reader, making a beautiful novel, or completing a well-ordered system of thought. It has developed instead in the direction of digging further into problems, multiplying the points at issue, undermining the other side’s premises, and destroying even his own theories. It is, one might say, a teratological development of the intellect.
Nor can the prose be called fine writing. It is rough and repetitive, yet strangely raw and forceful. In prose that intertwines rhetoric and logic and pushes back against the other side’s premises again and again, I sense an old-fashioned power reminiscent of pre-twentieth-century philosophical treatises and polemical literature. It may be closer not so much to the garrulousness of the Underground Man in Notes from Underground as to the voice of Lautréamont at the opening of Les Chants de Maldoror, where he menaces the reader. It is a kind of prose one never sees in Japanese literary fiction today.
VII. The Unedited Monster
The fact that this book was not published by an ordinary commercial publisher is not unrelated to its unpleasant texture.
Madness appears in abundance in ordinary commercial entertainment, too: serial killers, misanthropes, characters with shattered personalities, anti-ethical ideas. But in the process of delivering a work to many readers as a product, editing comes into play. What is too long gets cut. What does not get its meaning across gets reorganized. Parts where readers are likely to drop out altogether get adjusted. Madness, too, is processed into easily consumable forms such as horror, suspense, mystery, and the attractive villain. Madness in commercial works is, as a rule, “something cooked to be fed to the customer.” In commercial works, madness is tidied up, the poison diluted, and the fangs blunted; The Hikikomori Notes has received no such safe editing.
The curse upon humanity runs on for thousands of characters. The self-justifications remain at full length. The discriminatory expressions, the sense of victimhood, and the hostility toward the reader are all laid out quite nakedly. There are any number of passages that I imagine an editor would have cut heavily. Incidentally, Sade’s novels, too, were a literature without editors, written in a cell in the Bastille with no prospect of publication. The writing of the confined has a distinctive concentration, never having been exposed to the outside air. The Hikikomori Notes, too, is, as a matter of course, a literature of confinement.
The writer within the work shows little inclination to give the reader a pleasant read in the first place. From early on he sneers at bestselling novels as “simple, easy to understand, and nice,” and tells readers to read something else if they want entertainment. And later he writes:
“We are opponents in a duel and comrades in arms. Readers, raise your swords……!”
and he calls an extraordinary book “a slow-acting poison.”
As a product, it is remarkably unaccommodating. I have no intention, of course, of making a virtue of its being unedited. Its flaws remain as they are. There are many places that would be easier to read if cut further, and at times the focus of the ideas blurs under overlong explanation. In this work’s case, though, its unprocessed state raises the concentration of the discomfort. The thorns that would be removed and the poison that would be diluted in ordinary entertainment reach the reader almost raw. In short, it circulates uncensored, without the corrective work that an entertainment product would normally undergo.
VIII. The Specimen Jar
〈I〉 writes of his former self that he “became a monster, as though someone had kneaded together a clay of hatred and given it a backbone of logic.” This metaphor of the monster suits not only the character but the book as a whole.
In the Theory of Humanity as Vermin, hatred becomes hypertrophied. In the theory of justice, a sense of justice and a desire for revenge fuse in a strange shape. His self-understanding is split, and both his self-love and his self-loathing are put in doubt. Records proliferate excessively and, far from revealing the truth, blur its outlines. Skepticism is not directed only outward; it eats away even at the theories he himself has built. And that mind writes hundreds of thousands of characters of prose.
So similar malformations appear in the prose. A single emotion swells to thousands of characters. Thinking about justice, he makes seven principles, breaks them, and makes the reverse seven principles. The hypertrophy, distortion, splitting, and lack in the narrator’s mind seep into the style and structure as well. Teratology, systematized in the nineteenth century by Étienne and Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, father and son, among others, sought to understand monsters not as prodigies outside the laws of nature but as anomalies continuous with the normal processes of formation. The deformities of this book can probably be thought about by the same logic.
This is where the expression “a monster is writing this book” comes from. I am, of course, not calling the real author a monster. I am talking about the shape of the mind called 〈I〉 constructed within the work. Near the end, 〈I〉 himself writes that to readers he may have looked like “a monster unlike any of the people I have talked about so far,” and says that even so he wanted to anger readers, make them laugh, surprise them, and wear them out.
This book makes its readers feel bad. Yet it is also hard to throw it away as merely a nasty book. 〈I〉 is not a figure driven by shock value alone. Monstrous on the one hand, he is oddly pure on the other. He has not abandoned ethics; he has thought about ethics too much and ended up in a strange place. Nor does he lack intelligence; in places it is considerably high. The prose is unrefined, but on one point, making visible the unsightly movement of a mind, it has a distinctive expressive power.
So it does not strike me as very surprising that it has found a certain number of readers. There are almost no comparable works, and it has a certain kind of literary intensity. There is no need to agree with its ideas, and no need to rate it highly as a finished piece of literature. Still, it would not be strange for connoisseurs to appear who enjoy this book as a kind of “deformed treatise of ideas.” If it were plainly foolish, you could mock it and close it. If it were plainly evil, you could condemn it. If it were plainly inept, you could discard it for lack of skill. The Hikikomori Notes fits cleanly into none of these. That, more than anything, is what makes it uncomfortable.
In short, the psycho-grotesque of The Hikikomori Notes is not simply that a mad character appears in it. It is that the hypertrophy, distortion, perversion, lack, and splitting of a mind appear in the prose, that this prose builds a vast structure, and that in the end the book itself takes on a somehow monstrous shape.
It is misshapen. There are places that are abnormally swollen. There are places where something necessary is missing. Separate organs have fused together. The two sides do not match. I intend to keep this book for a while in a corner of my bookshelf, like a specimen jar holding a deformity. Because at times I feel as if it is looking out at me from inside the jar.
Presented by MMM (publisher of The Hikikomori Notes)
Translated from the Japanese original, “精神の畸形｜『ひきこもりの手記』とサイコグロテスク”. Quotations from Japanese sources are our own translations.