THE SHUT INS seems a timely title in this age of lock-down.

Rather than a novel about the consequences of a contagion, Katherine Brabon’s book concerns the phenomenon coined hikikomori in Japan.

Hikikomori is the collective term of those who seek absolute isolation from society, a condition seemingly triggered by Japan’s rigid success driven society and the tradition of loss of face through failure.

Obsessed with structures, maintaining order, pleasing parents and compliance to the company that employs implodes in self imposed solitary confinement.

Fear of failure. Failure to function in the world. This feeling is not specific to one country alone, even though the Japanese have minted the moniker.

Another word, achiragawa, forms a conjugal rite with hikikomori. Achiragawa means to be over there, or, more specifically to be on the other side. There is a world we live in, on this side, and another world, achiragawa, that is a place of dreams, death and possibility.

To the hikikomori, what happened is, that the other side, over there, a place we speak of that is far from our usual lives, became the side they are always on. The sides reversed, and hikikomori couldn’t live on everybody else’s side.

The condition of hikikomori has been likened to a kind of social suicide, a way to escape all those fears without actually dying. Katherine Brabon’s concise, compassionate and contemplative writing coruscates the phenomenon and the twin concepts of loneliness and aloneness.

If anything, the stories – strikingly and ironically interdependent- within THE SHUT INS may help us to live with the loneliness and restlessness that visit like shifting cloud shadow – that is, the natural condition of this side that most of us call normal.

Whether you’re a recovering recluse or recently cloistered, THE SHUT INS is a rewarding and reverberating read.

THE SHUT INS by Katherine Brabon is published by Allen & Unwin

Featured image : Author Katherine Brabon