Comment by salich | Hacker News Reader

Comment by salich | Hacker News Reader

I appreciate the article--I spent about a year as kind of hikikomori.

Nevertheless I feel the need to make some minor critiques...I feel the author makes a number of small errors in trying to prove their point. For example, the author says:

"The Hikikomori phenomenon is now finding a form of narrative legitimacy in cinema, manga and pop culture. It is creating its own iconography. The novel Welcome to NHK (acronym for Nihon Hikikomori Kyōkai or The Japanese Hikikomori Association) plays with the name of Japan national broadcasting giant (NHK) and a story of a conspiracy to create the Hikikomori. The novel became a manga series and a twenty-four episodes anime series. Since then Hikikomori characters multiplied in anime and manga: Rozen Maiden, Serial Experiments Lain, Tatami Galaxy, Anohana: The Flower We Saw That Day, to name a few."

Welcome to the NHK is a novel from 2002, and the anime came out in 2006 iirc, so "now finding a form of narrative legitimacy" is maybe a bit disingenuous...and Serial Experiments Lain, which is from 1998, predated it and to my mind more properly fits alongside other cyberpunk meditations on technology and identity (interestingly, though, there is an 2channel-styled imageboard that has adopted Lain as its mascot). Similarly, I don't think someone would watch Tatami Galaxy or AnoHana and come away from those thinking that the "dominant theme" is about hikikomori-ness. At least, I didn't. You could certainly contest these points, though--the author's method of speeding through points that, if more properly explored, might not fit so cleanly into the essay's thrust, just left a bad taste in my mouth. Just my 2c.

It just crossed my mind that the American writer Tao Lin makes a number of explicit references to this lifestyle in his work; he has an ebook called "Hikikomori", which I haven't read, and his novels almost always have the main character spending days or months not really talking to anyone, feeling depressed, and just "doing things" on the internet. He has a book coming out in the future called "Leave Society".

If anyone knows of other American authors who treat this topic, would be interested. I feel like it has certainly come up in literature, just not under this name.

Yeah, Lain jumped out to me as a questionable inclusion in that list as well. It has hikikomori themes, though I wouldn't have thought of it that way before, but no major characters are hikikomori. OTOH Tatami Galaxy makes sense to me, given the analysis paralysis sort of thing going on in that, even if it isn't always directly about hikikomori. Rozen Maiden is really the only straightforward choice there.

Don't you feel the Lain character was on the fast track to become an hikikomori if the in-story universe didn't follow through with the scifi/fantasy storyline ?

I don't because Lain became steadily more outgoing with each episode.

Ah, you are right. I forgot about that.

DFW examines this phenomenon, obtusely, in Infinite Jest. None of his characters are Hikikomori (and honestly a book about someone sitting around and doing nothing sounds a tad boring and self-absorbed, but I'll have to read Leave Society to find out), but they are all forced to deal with a world over saturated with drugs, politics, sex, tennis, and the TV/video media.

Orin, the main character's older brother, becomes a semi-recluse/sociopath, which is the closest character to an explicit Hikikomori DFW paints in the book. The other major characters rely on other forms of relief to cope with their anxiety, depression, family issues, etc.

DFW wrote Infinite Jest in 1996 before the internet truly took over. I'd love to see another book tackle the issues and repercussions of internet-soaked culture the way DFW tackled the nature of addiction in Infinite Jest.

>a book about someone sitting around and doing nothing sounds a tad boring

May I refer you to the 1859 Russian classic Oblomov -- "Oblomov is a young, generous nobleman who seems incapable of making important decisions or undertaking any significant actions. Throughout the novel he rarely leaves his room or bed. In the first 50 pages, he manages only to move from his bed to a chair."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oblomov

Oblomov is more a treatise on 19th-century Russian nobility, but I find it interesting that lethargy and lack of direction has been democratized. :)

Interesting...sounds very Russian. My favorite book of all time, Blood Meridian, tracks a 17 year-old adolescent known only as "the kid" and a motley band of cowboys he falls in with as they run across Texas/Mexico/California in 1850 killing indians, mexicans, and each other. Perhaps I'll enjoy what sounds like its polar opposite.

We used to have work and war to keep the youth busy. Now, in developed countries, we have...virtual work and war...video games. Part of me thinks that Japan got hit with this phenomenon earlier than the US because they were outlawed from having an army for the past 60 years.

> My favorite book of all time, Blood Meridian

I'm reading Blood Meridian for the second time now - I think I like it even more now than the first time.

After reading Blood Meridian, I needed to read a book to explain to me what Blood Meridian was really all about.

There are many trains of thought.

Personally, I think if you're looking for a strong argument about a single direction for such a thematically complicated novel, you might look at Mavericks at the Border: The Early Southwest in Historical Fiction and Film.

Amazon link: https://www.amazon.com/Mavericks-Border-Southwest-Historical...

Predating that by a few years is the classical Melville story of Bartleby the Scrivener, who, stuck in a dead-end white collar job, 'prefers' not to do anything at all.

Bartleby the Scrivener is good too. The hikkomori prefer not to, as well.

Or "Murphy" by Samuel Beckett. He takes it to the limit.

I agree Lain was an odd choice.

For a more recent exploration of it, ReLIFE is interesting. The main character is a former salaryman-turned-freeter, not a hikikomori, but the "experiment" is for helping NEETs, and one of their other subjects is implied to have been a hikikomori.

For anyone interested, you can watch it for free, legally, here: http://www.crunchyroll.com/relife (you can read it too but that needs a subscription, oddly).

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