What Is The Hikikomori Notes?

日本語で読む

The Hikikomori Notes (Hikikomori no shuki) is a long work in which its in-text writer, an “I” who calls himself a hikikomori, compiles and presents records he claims to have kept over many years about his life, his experiences in a psychiatric hospital, his own ideas, and “two murders.”

In 2021 it was introduced as “the strangest book of the Reiwa era”［1］, and the same year an influencer who covers strange and obscure books featured it as “a mysterious book that keeps getting listed on Kindle and then deleted”［2］. Rumors circulated online that it might have been written by Sakakibara Seito, while other readers praised its prose and rhetoric. In 2024 it was mentioned in a “ranking of literature that drives you mad when you read it,” alongside Finnegans Wake, Gravity’s Rainbow, Naked Lunch, Yapoo, the Human Cattle (Kachikujin Yapū), Dogra Magra, and The World of Despair (Zetsubō no sekai), and some posts describe it as “the ultimate crackpot philosophical novel” or “underground vibe plus literature”［3］. This article sets those rumors aside for now and looks at what the book actually contains, based on the text itself and on publicly available sources.

Contents

What Is The Hikikomori Notes?
What Kind of Book Is It? An Overview Without Spoilers
Five Features of The Hikikomori Notes
Plot Summary of The Hikikomori Notes [Spoilers]
Main Characters
What It Is About: Solitude, Justice, Madness, and Free Will
Three World Theories: Society Is a Stage, Life Is a Story, the World Is a Dream
What Genre Is The Hikikomori Notes?
Why Read The Hikikomori Notes as Underground Literature?
Why Does The Hikikomori Notes Make Readers Uncomfortable?
Who Might Enjoy It
FAQ
Summary: Reading “the Strangest Book of the Reiwa Era” from Today’s Underground Literature

Cover of the e-book edition of The Hikikomori Notes.

The Hikikomori Notes is a long work published under the name MMM. Information about the work and related titles is also available on MMM’s official website. On Amazon, the e-book edition is listed as a four-volume series, volumes [0] through [3]［4］. In 2022 a 602-page paperback edition was also published, collecting the preface, Part One, and Part Two of the e-book edition［5］.

At the center of the work is “I,” who describes himself as “a murderer,” “a person who has been given a diagnosis,” and “a hikikomori,” and who sets out to record his life, his mind, his ideas, and his murders. But this description alone does not convey how strange the book is. While talking about murder, “I” also says that murder is not the core of the notes. While trying to record his own life, he doubts the records he himself has left. Placed on the side of those classified by psychiatry, he turns around and questions psychiatry’s definitions and the logic of its doctors. The Hikikomori Notes depicts the life of one hikikomori, and at the same time it is a record of thought in which that person comes to doubt himself, society, justice, causality, language, and finally the world itself.

What Kind of Book Is It? An Overview Without Spoilers

Since childhood, “I” has left behind a huge quantity of records: writings, drawings, stories, notebooks, scraps of paper. Years later he selects them, rearranges them, revises them, and compiles his life and thought into a single set of notes. What they contain includes his relationship with his mother, school, his refusal to attend school, factory work, life as a hikikomori, the psychiatric hospital, reading, murder, and dreams, along with reflections on free will, justice, society, psychiatry, language, cognition, sex, and the world.

This is not a book you can read by following a single storyline, as with an ordinary novel. A stretch of life memories gives way suddenly to a long theory; dreams and fragments appear in the middle of philosophical passages; and later on, earlier theories are themselves revised. The work describes itself as written for “one in a hundred,” and explains that its story breaks down, its logic is contradictory, its problems are left unresolved, and it is disorganized and hard to read. In other words, it gives up from the outset on being a novel smoothed out for easy reading.

Five Features of The Hikikomori Notes

Difficult, and very long

The paperback edition runs to 602 pages［5］. But the book’s difficulty is not simply a matter of length. Long stretches of philosophy interrupt the memories, dreams and records interrupt the philosophy, and the theories are later changed. Part Two consists of fragments running backward from 300 to 1, and not only coherent chapters but even an “《Omitted》” marker are placed as part of the work’s structure. On top of that, the work announces in advance that its story will break down, its logic will contradict itself, its problems will go unresolved, and its content will be confused, digressive, and hard to read. Reading it is like reading a difficult philosophical treatise, a not-quite-trustworthy life record, and an experimental novel all at once.

The style keeps changing

The Hikikomori Notes has no single style that holds steady across the book. Reminiscence, theoretical prose, colloquial speech, short fragments, dreams, and poem-like passages are mixed together. This is not treated as a mere lack of unity. The in-text writer believes that because the human mind and human life are themselves incoherent, the words that describe them must also depart from correct grammar and consistent style. The breakdown of the writing corresponds to the breakdown of the mind it tries to portray. In Part Two, the text even records that the writing has been revised with each publication, saying that “with each new edition, the book changes.” It is presented less as a book fixed once completed than as one that changes shape as it is written, reread, and revised.

It provokes the reader

The Hikikomori Notes is not a reader-friendly book. Chapter 0 is titled “A Preface That Mediocre People Will Not Be Able to Read to the End,” and the opening of the work claims that it will be understood and liked by only “one in a hundred.” In Part Two, while acknowledging that it found more readers than expected, the writer says he has no intention of thanking them, and calls himself and his readers “opponents in a duel and comrades in arms.” Then he taunts: “Readers, raise your swords.” If an ordinary book thinks about how to get through to its readers, this one often moves in the opposite direction. The book itself challenges the reader to a duel: read me if you can understand me.

Too aggressive for most mainstream commercial fiction

From the start, the work itself warns that it contains anti-moral, anti-ethical, and anti-commonsense ideas, as well as discriminatory, insulting, and cruel expressions. The range of targets it actually attacks is very wide: psychiatry, society, justice, morality, politics, discrimination, anti-discrimination, the strong, the weak, intellectuals, readers. It shows little tendency to leave any one position standing as a safe zone. What matters is that it does not simply present anti-moral ideas safely as the ideas of a villain. Ideas from which an author or narrator would normally keep their distance are actually developed within the work. Nor does it ask the reader to accept those ideas as correct. Instead it drags the very ethics and common sense that readers take for granted into the open as objects of doubt. In that sense, the book’s aggressiveness goes beyond merely “dealing with extreme subject matter.”

Reality is not mixed with fiction; reality itself is put in doubt

One could describe The Hikikomori Notes as “a work that blurs the boundary between reality and fiction.” But that is not enough. Novels that mix reality and fiction are not rare. There are countless works in which dream and reality become indistinguishable, an unreliable narrator lies, or a story within the story gets tangled with reality. What is distinctive here is not only that the inside of a fictional work comes to seem real, but that the work, from its side, casts doubt on the “reality” the reader lives in as itself a fiction. This movement is supported by three theories: the World-as-Stage Theory, the World-as-Story Theory, and the World-as-Dream Theory. Social roles are doubted, then causality and the stories of our lives, and finally the doubt expands to meaning, logic, cognition, laws, and the world itself. We look at these three theories in detail below.

Plot Summary of The Hikikomori Notes [Spoilers]

In the preface, “I” asks the reader whether they have ever spoken with a murderer, with a person who has been given a diagnosis, or with a hikikomori who has been unable to leave home for decades, and says that he is all of these. The question of murder is immediately connected to the question of free will. If the human mind is just a phenomenon that obeys natural laws, can we really say that people act of their own will? While speaking of murder, “I” holds that conveying what he has been thinking about for many years matters more than the murders themselves.

Part One: A life, a psychiatric hospital, and two murders

In Part One, the life of “I” from childhood onward is reconstructed through records and memories. It depicts his relationship with his mother, an incident involving a hand mirror, school life, his refusal to attend school, work at a bread factory, seizures, and life as a hikikomori, and along the way “I” begins to build his own ideas, such as the “World-as-Stage Theory” and the “World-as-Story Theory.” Eventually his mother takes him to a psychiatric hospital, and his exchanges with a psychiatrist begin. But “I” does not simply accept the diagnosis; he goes on to question the logic of those who diagnose: “What is illness?” “What is normal?” “What is a fact?”

Then comes a scene presented as an attack on his mother, a strangling, and a burial in the garden. Later, however, when he digs again in the garden where he buried his mother, a body appears that “I” recognizes as that of an unknown child. “I” himself describes killing his mother as his first murder and killing the child as his second. But it cannot be established whether the dismembered child who appears in Chapter 1, the child’s body that emerges from the garden, and the second murder described in later years are the same incident. At the end of Part One, a “third murder” is foreshadowed.

Part Two: Fragments counting down from 300 to 1, and the “third murder”

Part Two is made up of fragments running backward from 300 to 1. “I” builds theory after theory about justice, rules, psychiatry, language, free will, causality, sex, dreams, and the world, then revises and reverses them. There are also passages about the people he meets on the ward, including a girl with round glasses who becomes involved with other girls, is later isolated, and jumps from the roof.

Toward the end, the “third murder” comes to the foreground again, and there are even statements that the preparations and a rehearsal have been completed. But the original target is never revealed, and although near the end he speaks of needing to kill himself, it remains undetermined whether the target changed along the way and whether the third murder was actually carried out. What the book finally shows is not a killing or a suicide but “I” walking through the town at night toward the river. No clear “truth” is handed over, right to the end.

Main Characters

The in-text writer “I” is the central figure of the work, describing himself as a hikikomori, a murderer, and a person who has been given a diagnosis. However, what “I” says about himself is not the same as facts independently established within the world of the work. Nor can the in-text writer “I” simply be treated as the same person as the real-world author, MMM.

The mother is at the center of Part One from his childhood onward, and is involved in the hand mirror incident, domestic violence, the visit to the psychiatric hospital, and the later killing scene. The landlord is involved in the mother and son’s daily life, rent, meals, administrative paperwork, and money, and is also someone “I” suspects of watching and controlling them. A male psychiatrist appears in Part One, and in Part Two a psychiatrist whom “I” calls “Doctor” appears, but whether they are the same person is not established.

The girl with round glasses appears on the ward in Part Two, portrayed as someone who reads books and copies passages into her notebook. Her jump from the roof, and the event “I” later calls a “suicide,” connect to the criticism of justice and society in the latter half of the book.

What It Is About: Solitude, Justice, Madness, and Free Will

The Hikikomori Notes is both a story and an enormous record of thought. Certain questions recur: the problem of solitude (can we ever truly understand another person’s mind?), the question of whether humans have free will, the question of who decides what is normal and what is abnormal, and the question of what justice is. What is distinctive is that no final answer to any of these questions is fixed.

A telling example is the “Seven Principles of Justice” and the “Seven Reverse Principles of Justice” that appear in Part Two. “I” first constructs fairness, self-application, consistency, falsifiability, verifiability, and so on as conditions for imposing norms on others. But then he criticizes his own theory on the grounds that it cannot explain the “justice” that actually holds power in the real world. This time he organizes asymmetry, one-sidedness, flexibility, popularity, unfalsifiability, unverifiability, and coercive force as the properties of justice as it actually operates. A theory that tried to build an ideal justice reverses into a theory that observes real justice.

In The Hikikomori Notes, thought is not a conclusion but a movement. Theories are built, doubted, revised, and sometimes demolished by their own author. The act of thinking itself becomes the story.

Three World Theories: Society Is a Stage, Life Is a Story, the World Is a Dream

The clearest illustration of how the book’s thought develops is the trio of the “World-as-Stage Theory,” the “World-as-Story Theory,” and the “World-as-Dream Theory.” This article reads the three not as independent doctrines but as stages in a process by which “I” progressively doubts what is believed to be “reality.”

The World-as-Stage Theory: Isn’t society just a play?

The World-as-Stage Theory holds that “every event in the world is nothing but a fake, like a play on a stage.” Social attributes such as father, mother, child, teacher, student, and office worker are reconceived as something like roles and costumes on a stage, and each person is playing the part they have been given. What matters here is that the theory is not aimed only at the characters in the book. “I” tells the reader that attributes such as university student, university professor, company executive, father, or mother are likewise nothing but masks, costumes, and roles handed to them. And he claims that it is not the world of his notes but the world the reader lives in that is the stage, the story, the fiction.

The first thing put in doubt is social reality. Who is normal and who is abnormal, who is a teacher and who is a student, who is a doctor and who is a patient: are these not roles that exist within the stage called society, rather than absolute essences? Everyday life and the social order themselves are relativized as one gigantic play.

The World-as-Story Theory: Aren’t causality and life also stories?

In the World-as-Story Theory, the scope of doubt widens further. The issue now is the “causality” that links events together. “I” compares causality to constellations. Stars exist in the night sky. But it is humans who decide which stars to connect to form a constellation. Isn’t the same true of events? One can explain that “bullying caused him to become a hikikomori.” But by choosing different events, one could construct an entirely different causal chain. The events themselves may exist, but which event is linked to which is arbitrary. And perhaps even the coherence of a life or a world that emerges from those lines is a story made by humans.

This doubt is also directed at The Hikikomori Notes itself, because the book, too, is a story of “my life” made by selecting, arranging, and editing some events out of a vast body of records. If the World-as-Stage Theory doubted social roles as fictions, the World-as-Story Theory doubts the very causality and stories that humans use to make sense of reality.

The World-as-Dream Theory: In the end, the world itself is doubted

In the World-as-Dream Theory, which appears near the end, the skepticism expands further still. What it declares from the outset is the idea that “the world is a dream.” The dream here is not simply an “it was all a dream” ending. A dream exists in the sense that it is experienced. Yet it can also be said not to exist, in the sense that it fades away. It can be called both real and fictional. “Dream” is used as a concept in between. And “I” doubts what people naively call reality, fact, and truth as itself a fleeting dream.

The skepticism then moves beyond meaning and logic to causes, grounds, and laws. He treats what governs the world not as “physical laws” but as “laws of cognition,” and argues that a life form with a cognition different from ours might find different laws in the world than humans do. In other words, the question of “how the world is” and the question of “how the world appears to us” become impossible to separate. Doubt that began with social roles spreads to society, life, causality, meaning, logic, space-time, laws, and the perceived world itself. And the World-as-Dream Theory is itself described as “a theory that presupposes its own collapse” and “a poem of logic written on the surface of water.” Not even the final theory is fixed as absolute truth.

The relationship between reader and work is reversed

Reading the three world theories as this sequence reveals the strangest structure in The Hikikomori Notes. Normally the reader is in “reality” and reads the “fiction” of a novel; the reader observes the world of the work. In The Hikikomori Notes, that relationship is reversed. Perhaps it is not only the characters who are playing roles on the stage of society; perhaps the reader is playing a role too. Perhaps it is not only the characters’ lives that are stories; perhaps the causal connections readers believe in about their own lives, society, and history are stories as well. Perhaps it is not only the world of the work that is a dream; is the world the reader returns to after closing this book really an absolute reality?

In this book, even when readers think they are observing “I,” the hikikomori, it is “I” who observes the reader and society. The usual arrangement, in which a real reader analyzes a fictional work, is folded back in the opposite direction. This is not simply a work that mixes reality and fiction. It is a work that, from the side of fiction, tries to criticize what readers believe to be reality as fiction. This reversal is likely the key structure that ties together the World-as-Stage Theory, the World-as-Story Theory, and the World-as-Dream Theory.

What Genre Is The Hikikomori Notes?

It is hard to explain The Hikikomori Notes with a single genre. It has been called “the strangest book of the Reiwa era”［1］, but kisho (“strange book”) is less a strict literary genre than a word of reception and evaluation for books that spill over ordinary categories. How the book is classified changes depending on which aspect one looks at.

Novel of ideas / theory novel

In terms of what the work does, it is first of all a novel of ideas. Reflections on free will, justice, psychiatry, society, language, cognition, sex, dreams, and the world continue with more intensity than the account of events. Further, given that the narrator himself builds, revises, and reverses theories, it could conveniently be called a “theory novel.” Here, however, “theory novel” is not an established, official genre name but a critical label used to describe the nature of this work.

Experimental novel in the form of notes

In terms of form, it can be seen as an experimental novel that uses the form of personal notes. Life records, old memos, dreams, ideas, and accounts surrounding the crimes are compiled into a single set of notes, while the notes themselves are selected, revised, and fragmented. In Part Two the numbering runs backward from 300 to 1, and the style is not unified. What is a recorded life? Once events are selected and put into writing, isn’t it already a different story? That question is built into the form itself.

Transgressive novel

In terms of content and ethics, it can be read as a transgressive novel. It ventures into socially and ethically difficult territory: murder, violence, discriminatory language, anti-moral ideas, misanthropy, hostility toward psychiatry, sex, and suicide. And it doubts the very categories of “normal,” “justice,” “criminal,” and “patient.” It has qualities that can be considered in connection with what English-language criticism calls transgressive fiction.

Heretical literature, underground literature, outsider literature

In terms of cultural position, terms such as heretical literature, underground literature, and outsider literature come close. But these too are better used as critical terms that describe the work’s position than asserted as strict official genres. What characterizes this work is that it does not observe the margins from the center of society; rather, it observes society as a whole in return, from the side of a person placed at the margins.

Can it be read as disability literature?

Because psychiatry, diagnosis, the psychiatric hospital, normality and abnormality, and the relationship between medical staff and patients are treated as important problems, it is also possible to read the book from the perspective of disability literature. This, however, is not a claim about the attributes of the real-world author. It is strictly a question of the literary context in which to read the characters and themes of the work.

Why Read The Hikikomori Notes as Underground Literature?

The reason this book can be connected to underground literature is not simply that its content is extreme. What matters is who is observing whom. “I” speaks as a person placed outside society. Yet he does not end up merely observed, one-sidedly, as someone who has dropped out of society. When called naive about the world, he counters that it is the world that knows nothing of “what lies outside the world.” When diagnosed as a patient, he analyzes psychiatry and the logic of its doctors. When seen as abnormal, he looks back at the society deemed normal.

A person placed at the margins observes the center. And that gaze is ultimately turned on the reader too. It is not the reader who observes the abnormal person; rather, the reader’s “normality” is doubted from the side of the one called abnormal. Given this reversal of the gaze, a structure that departs from ordinary commercial literature, a history of circulation centered on self-publishing and the internet, and its transgressive content, there is ample reason to place this work in the context of contemporary underground literature. The definition and lineage of Japanese underground literature itself are discussed in detail in a separate article, “What Is Underground Literature?”.

Why Does The Hikikomori Notes Make Readers Uncomfortable?

The book contains violence, murder, and anti-ethical ideas. But these are not the only sources of discomfort. Movements of the mind that people normally keep hidden from others are exposed in great quantity: self-love, a sense of victimhood, misanthropy, aggression, skepticism, servility, malice, contradiction. Moreover, the further you read, the more information accumulates, yet the truth becomes, if anything, less stable.

Above all, readers themselves cannot remain safe observers. You thought you were observing a monster from outside its cage, and partway through you realize that the monster in the cage has been observing you as well. This psychological grotesqueness is discussed in detail in a separate article, “Deformities of the Mind: The Hikikomori Notes and the Psycho-Grotesque”.

Who Might Enjoy It

The Hikikomori Notes is not for everyone; the work itself declares that it is meant for “one in a hundred.” For readers who like difficult books such as Dogra Magra, Notes from Underground, or Naked Lunch, or who enjoy novels of ideas, experimental literature, underground literature, transgressive fiction, bizarre internet texts, unreliable narrators, and works that refuse to deliver a neat solution, it will be a rather unusual reading experience.

Third-party assessments are also extreme. In 2021 it was introduced as “the strangest book of the Reiwa era,” while some readers highly praised its rhetoric and literary quality［1］. A 2024 post scored it 85 for literary quality and 90 for madness, and recommended it to fans of strange books for its “unique aftertaste you can’t experience with other works”［3］. It is, however, quite tough going for readers who want a clear story, a stable style, an explained truth, and a tidy ending. This is not “a fun book you can recommend to anyone.” It is closer to a book that people looking for something out of the ordinary pick up at their own risk.

FAQ

Is it worth reading?

That depends on the reader. It is very poorly suited to readers looking for a clear story or entertainment. It is long, much of it is philosophical writing, the story is fragmented, and it contains many elements that may be found unpleasant, such as violence, anti-moral ideas, and discriminatory or aggressive language. It is not a book to recommend to everyone. On the other hand, readers looking for experimental literature, novels of ideas, underground literature, transgressive fiction, or extreme works rarely encountered in ordinary commercial literature may find it worth reading. In Viscera’s assessment, the book’s value lies less in being “a polished work of entertainment” than in how far it tests the novel as a form, morality, common sense, and the reader’s own perception of reality.

**How does it compare with Dogra Magra?**

The two cannot be compared simply in terms of artistic accomplishment or importance in literary history. In terms of intellectual and ethical “danger,” however, Viscera judges The Hikikomori Notes to be the stronger work. This is not an objectively measured fact about danger but a critical evaluation based on comparing the works.

Dogra Magra is also an extraordinarily strange novel dealing with questions of the mind, heredity, identity, and normality versus abnormality. At the same time, it is structured as a single full-length novel and is a literary work that was commercially published. The Hikikomori Notes, by contrast, openly admits that its story breaks down and its logic contradicts itself, and incorporates stylistic deviation, provocation of the reader, and even anti-moral ideas into the structure of the work. Through the World-as-Stage, World-as-Story, and World-as-Dream theories, it extends its skepticism to social roles, causality, meaning, logic, cognition, and laws. Its “poison” does not lie simply in grisly content or depictions of madness. It lies in trying to make readers doubt the very world they take to be real. At least in terms of how directly it attacks the reader’s common sense and perception of the world, Viscera reads The Hikikomori Notes as the more blatant and less controlled work.

How many pages is it?

According to Amazon’s product listing, the paperback edition published in 2022 has 602 pages［5］. Because the e-book edition is divided into volumes, the 602 pages of the paperback cannot simply be matched to the page counts shown for each Kindle volume.

Summary: Reading “the Strangest Book of the Reiwa Era” from Today’s Underground Literature

When you start looking into The Hikikomori Notes, you run into odd reputations and rumors: “the strangest book of the Reiwa era,” “deleted from Amazon again and again,” “maybe Sakakibara Seito wrote it,” “the writing is uncannily good.” If you line up only those stories, you could consume it as just another of the “scary books” or “mysterious books” that surface online from time to time.

But the real strangeness of this work lies in the text rather than in the rumors. The World-as-Stage Theory doubts social roles as parts played on a stage; the World-as-Story Theory doubts causality and life itself as stories made by humans; and the World-as-Dream Theory doubts even meaning, logic, cognition, laws, and the world itself. And finally, the relationship between the reader and the fiction is reversed.

It is not only the reader who looks at the fiction. The fiction looks back at the reader’s reality. This may be the strangest part of The Hikikomori Notes. The label “the strangest book of the Reiwa era” does not guarantee the work’s value. But read it, and you will understand fairly well why someone wanted to call it a “strange book.” Even after you close it, the reality it has put in doubt does not return to how it was.

About the Research for This Article

For this article, we used the text of The Hikikomori Notes as the baseline for checking the work’s structure, characters, incidents, ideas, chronology, testimony, and the relationships among documents within the work. We also consulted bibliographic and sales listings on Amazon and elsewhere, information published by the author’s side, third-party introductory articles, and reader posts.

We distinguish between the in-text writer’s statements about himself in the work and facts about the real-world author. We do not treat the murders described in the work as crimes committed by the real author, and for incidents that allow multiple readings in the text, we do not fix them to a single truth.

For claims such as “it was deleted from Amazon many times” or “Sakakibara Seito is the author,” we also distinguish between the fact that such rumors or testimonies have been published and whether their content is itself true. In this article, assessments such as “underground literature,” “transgressive novel,” and “more intellectually and ethically dangerous than Dogra Magra” are not confirmed bibliographic facts but critical classifications and evaluations by Viscera based on the structure and content of the text.

Notes

Most sources below are in Japanese. Original titles are given with English translations in brackets.

HorrorCat, “おすすめ令和の奇書『ひきこもりの手記』” [Recommended: The Hikikomori Notes, the Strangest Book of the Reiwa Era] (note, February 2, 2021). Introduces the work as “the strangest book of the Reiwa era” and reports readers’ assessments and rumors at the time.
奇書が読みたいアライさん [Arai-san Who Wants to Read Strange Books], “2021年2月” [February 2021] (note, March 1, 2021). Introduces the work as “a mysterious book that keeps getting listed on Kindle and then deleted.” This statement does not independently confirm the fact, number, or reasons of any deletion by Amazon; it is cited as a third-party source showing that such information was circulating at the time.
“現役東大生だが『読むと頭がおかしくなる文学ランキング20』を全部読破した” [I’m a Current University of Tokyo Student and I Read Every Book on the “Top 20 Literature That Drives You Mad When You Read It” Ranking] (a 5channel post of December 20, 2024, republished by 哲学ニュースnwk [Tetsugaku News nwk]). The poster describes the work as “the ultimate crackpot philosophical novel” and “the underground vibe of early web novels plus literature,” among other things. These are all the poster’s personal assessments.
Amazon’s series listing shows Kindle volumes [0] through [3] as a four-volume series. Amazon: 『ひきこもりの手記』シリーズ [The Hikikomori Notes series] / Amazon: Kindle edition, main text, Volume 1.
Amazon, “ひきこもりの手記（HIKIKOMORINOTE）: ペーパーバック版” [The Hikikomori Notes (HIKIKOMORINOTE): Paperback Edition]. Amazon’s product listing shows the author as MMM, the publication year as 2022, and the length as 602 pages.

References and Main Sources

Text of the work and information published by the author’s side

『ひきこもりの手記』 [The Hikikomori Notes], text of the work
MMM official website, “Literature”

Bibliographic and sales information

Third-party introductions and reception

Translated from the Japanese original, “『ひきこもりの手記』とは？｜あらすじ・内容・評判、「令和の奇書」と呼ばれた作品を解説”. Quotations from Japanese sources are our own translations.

*This is an ATTESTED article. Factual statements are based on existing, verifiable sources; where it includes third-party views or the author’s inferences, interpretations, or evaluations, these are presented so as not to be confused with confirmed facts. It contains no deliberate fiction or fabrication presented as real-world fact.

Presented by MMM (publisher of The Hikikomori Notes)

What Is The Hikikomori Notes? | Plot, Themes, and Reception of Japan’s “Strangest Book of the Reiwa Era” Explained