Hikikomori

Just a little thing I wrote a while back. Isolation is so seductive when the world is falling apart.

On Seollal mornings when I was little and my grandmother was alive, the family would crowd into the anbang room to give and receive new year greetings. The adults sat on one side of the room, in order of status. Grandma sat front and center, surrounded by her sons and her sons-in-law, while her daughters sat behind her in the second row. The wives, including my mom, would be toiling in the kitchen preparing breakfast. My cousins and I would line up on the other side, in the order of our age. One by one, we would take turns kneeling and pressing our foreheads to the ground in a grand bow, wishing our elders good fortune and health in the new year, and we would receive a little pocket change in return.

I, being the youngest, would usually get the smallest amount—usually a one, sometimes a five, if an uncle felt generous that year—but at that age, any amount of money was a great amount of money, so I would clutch the bill tightly in my fist and run to my mom to show off my earnings, into the kitchen where she was busy with the aunts by marriage.

She’d shoo me away—not now, my hands are wet—and turn back to the peeling, chopping, and the frying. A little deflated, money still in hand, I sat myself down at the kitchen table and quietly watched her and my aunts work. I was young, young enough to run around the beach naked, and so young enough that I could occupy spaces incognito; the women barely registered that I was there. This meant that they spoke freely, keeping their mouths as busy as their hands.

There was great interest in marriages and real estate. A cousin of an in-law married a handsome fellow who’s cruel—but wealthy. An in-law of a cousin married a girl who’s too ambitious for her own good. An in-law of an in-law bought a place downtown, too close to her mother. Big Uncle is about to buy a house two hours away. Everyone thinks it’s a huge mistake, the property market’s shit.

“But hasn’t it recovered a little?”

“No. Not even a little. Not since the crash.”

One aunt, who was squatted on the floor washing cabbages out of a plastic basin, made a sudden, loud declaration that owning property and becoming a landlord was the ultimate marker of success. She was Big Uncle’s wife.

The women eventually came to the end of the list of weddings and properties, and the squatting aunt dusted off her apron and hoisted the basin to the table, set it down in front of me with a thud. She asked, carefully and lightly, how the old cousin was doing. There was a silence. Then animation.

The cousin was the eldest son of the family’s eldest daughter. At a young age, he was sent off to a boarding school in Japan, where he stayed until college to study architecture. When he came back to Korea after finishing his degree, he shut himself into his room, never to be seen again. I have never met this cousin, not to this day.

His self-imposed isolation was mysterious, and the aunties loved a mystery. Big Uncle Auntie, cabbage in hand, first speculated that he suffered a terrible heartbreak. “She was a wealthy Japanese girl he met during his studies,” she claimed. I suspect that this romance was totally fabricated. But it was made true in the kitchen, and each woman chimed in, piling details to the tragic romance that never was: he broke up with her after he found out she was the daughter of a Yakuza family, that boy wanted to save his own skin. No, it’s that she was married to a famous Yakuza family and our cousin was the secret affair. No no no, she was a normal girl from a normal family with a respectable business–but she thought she was too good for our cousin and refused to come to Korea with him.

One aunt then interjected, claiming that Japan had corrupted him, plain and simple. She turned around from her station at the stove and waved her spatula emphatically toward the rest of the kitchen, splattering droplets of cooking oil on the walls.

“You know how creepy the Japanese are (she made a face). That’s how he’s become a, what’s it, a hi-ki-ko-mo-ri.” She drew out the syllables like she was testing the shapes on her tongue.

“He’s picked up some bad ideas from that lot. I tried to warn Big Aunt, I really did. Sending our cousin to Japan was a mistake. I was real honest with her. I said: if you can’t afford to send him to America, don’t send him abroad at all! Everyone knows that Korean schools are the best. Except for maybe, what’s it, Har-var-de. Even then, what good is it—the kids get addicted to drugs and come back degenerates. It just isn’t worth it. But she didn’t listen. Said I was overstepping.”

A few women hummed in agreement, a few women just tutted. A moment of silence followed. Then my mom, the youngest of them all, softly wondered, “Wasn’t it ‘98 he graduated?”

No ‘97, they corrected. He returned to Korea in ‘97.

Just as the IMF began, then?

Yes, just in time for the IMF. Some sighs, more tutting. The room was quiet again.

IMF is how the ‘97 Asian Financial Crisis is referred to in South Korea. They spoke again, more quietly now, remembering those sad, bad times. The country was failing rapidly and drastically, a hundred businesses closed each day, a million people lost their jobs. Everyone knew someone—friend, family, foe—who had taken their own life. “My fellow citizens,” said the solemn president in a televised address to the nation. “Our economy is in a very difficult situation. It is time for all of us to tighten our belts once again, share the pain, and rise up to overcome this crisis.”

Spatula aunt spoke. “Our poor cousin. He couldn’t land a single interview after college. Not one. I still remember him sitting here at this very table, hunched over applications, filling them out, page by page. The stack was so high it reached his shoulders. He mailed every single one. Nothing came back, of course. There weren’t any jobs. And I was right here, slicing fruit for him.”

tighten our belts. share the pain.

His routine began to fray after a year. The application stack was slowly replaced by manga and VHS rentals, mostly wuxia fantasy. He sank into a quiet stillness. He stopped helping in the kitchen. Then he stopped coming to Grandma’s house altogether. Eventually, he just stayed home, taking over one of the two bedrooms his family of four shared. He only grudgingly joined dinner.

A few months into his self-imprisonment, he emerged from his dark room, paler than a piece of paper, and rushed outside without a word. Big Aunt, his mother, was hopeful. Maybe he’s finally decided to end this nonsense. Get a life. Be a real man. Maybe, just maybe, he’d gone out to meet a nice young lady.

Cruelly, he was back within the hour, lugging two large boxes. A home computer.

He stopped coming out for meals after that day.

tighten our belts. share the pain.

Cabbage aunt spoke again. “We’re just glad that he didn’t kill himself, like that uncle of my sister’s in-laws—awful, just awful. Took all of the family money to start a business, and right as it took off, IMF hit. Went bankrupt. Poor fellow couldn’t handle the humiliation. So selfish! Only thought of himself, didn’t he, and left the family with nothing but devastation and despair. Tut.”

“Anyway, that poor thing, our boy. We had a lot of hope for him, the family jangnam, our eldest son. It’s too bad he’s turned out this way. He’s given up on everything. The door’s closed. The world’s moved on.”