Katherine Brabon, The Shut Ins.

 

- This magnificent novel from Katherine Brabon is best read slowly, absorbing the detail and atmospherics in every sublime sentence. Brabon knows how to represent the ‘deep down inside’ of people. Her recent trip to Japan made her aware of the well known condition of Achiragawa, the 'other side'.

- She tells the stories of four Japanese people, connected to each other in family and other ways - Mai, Sadako, Hiromi and Hikaru. Mai and Hikaru were friends at school, Sadako is a bar hostess who 'entertains' Mai's husband 'J', and Hiromi is Hikaru's mother. The setting is Japan in the spring and summer of 2014. 

- J, never fully named, is comfortable with being part of the systems that make the world run smoothly. He’s a salaryman, a corporate loyalist, a man who decries ‘individual deficiencies’. He's barely human in other words. Mai and J are unhappy in marriage. Hikaru, on the other hand, began to truly leave this world and inhabit somewhere else. It was a form of 'social suicide', a peculiar Japanese condition labelled Hikikomori.

- Brabon's expository reflections on Japan and feelings of solitude and loneliness struck me very personally. I lived and worked in Tokyo for two years in the early 80's, managing a company with 35 employees, all Japanese. Not only does she perfectly capture the experiences of many gaijin (foreigners), but she brings alive so much of the anguish, pressure and stress of navigating this rigid society, the deadening social and cultural expectations, the imprisoning traditions, and most importantly, the deep misogyny of Japanese society. (Westerners constantly remark on the ‘politeness’ of the Japanese. It’s not politeness as we know it, but simply a social ritual, a distancing from any sort of personal engagement, and quite meaningless. We're in a world of transactional relationships). 

- Mai's story perfectly conveys the boring, standardised social lives of ordinary Japanese people - little individuality and total conformity. There is a comfort in everything unfolding as it should.

- The bar hostess Sadako's body was struggling to cope, as if rotting inside...I’m no good, she told herself. The roles she plays, and the pretence. Inside her there was a cold stone, perhaps impossible to remove.

- The young man Hikaru suffers from the condition severely: …I could avoid mistakes and consequences if I just stayed on this side of the door. He had a fear towards anybody who worked, anybody who was part of the systems everybody lived by. The people in charge said we had been raised in a society that made us focus on sacrificing individual preferences for a collective goal, and this made us struggle to express individual desires. Shutting ourselves away was the only way we knew how to do this. 

- Brabon reflects at the end: If anything, the story may help us to live with the loneliness and restlessness that visit like shifting cloud shadows - that is, the natural condition of this side.

- I can't recommend this superb novel highly enough. It's a major achievement.