The hermit and the Rental Sister

LITTLE ROCK — Time for another book column.

Jeff Backhaus

Hikikomori and the

Rental Sister

Algonquin, $23.95

In his 1998 book Social Withdrawal: A Neverending Adolescence, Japanese psychiatrist Tamaki Saito introduced the word hikikomori (“pulling in”) to identify a disturbing social phenomenon. Saito identified hikikomori as young adults “who withdraw entirely from society and stay in their own homes for more than six months, with onset by the latter half of their 20s, and for whom other psychiatric disorders do not better explain the primary causes of this condition.”

Some sociologists see a causal relationship between hikikomorism and changes in Japanese society, particularly since the increasing globalization of the economy. Traditionally, Japanese institutions are very structured; individuals were expected to transition directly from school into a job (or career) they would likely hold for life. So long as they stayed on this path, their long-range prospects were secure. Those who failed to find employment immediately after graduation were considered failures and generally consigned to the fringes of society.

But as the Japanese economy became increasingly like Western markets, more fluidity and uncertainty were introduced, which increased the stress on people in their 20s. There are no reliable statistics on the number of selfisolated shut-ins, but an estimated 80 percent of hikikomori are male. Most are college graduates from backgrounds prosperous enough to allow them the luxury of social withdrawal; most are supported by their parents and prefer not to engage with the world at large.

In Jeff Backhaus’ tender and deftly rendered f irst novel, Hikikomori and the Rental Sister, he imagines an American hikikomori. Thomas Tessler has locked himself away in his room for three years after a tragedy caused by a moment’s inattention. Yet his wife, Silke, has not given up on him. She sleeps in a room down the hall, talks to him through his bolted door. In the middle of the night he gets up and, careful not to disturb her sleep, steals away from their Manhattan apartment to buy food from a convenience store.

To try to coax him back into the world, Silke hires a young Japanese woman, a party girl named Megumi, who fled Tokyo after the suicide of her hikikomori brother. She is to be Thomas’ “rental sister,” to visit and talk to him through his door. To simply sit and wait for his door to open a crack.

He perceives her as a pest at first, but he listens to her stories. He finally admits her, only to order her out. But she comes back, and one day Thomas is not there. Waiting in his room, she’s trapped by Silke’s unexpected return and bright chatter in the other room. When Thomas finally returns, he f inds Megumi asleep in his bed.

Backhaus’ prose is clear and gentle; it pulls the reader effortlessly through this thin (236 pages) book. It’s only later that you begin to parse the big themes that resonate throughout, the gravity of damage suffered by the principals of this triangle, the deep buried pain that connects them and the palliative lure of the neverending now of the hikikomori experience. To live is to burn, to eventually lose everything you ever held dear. Under the circumstances, it’s a wonder more of us don’t retreat to the cool shadows of our bedrooms, to let our nails grow long.

Sherwood Anderson

Collected Stories: Winesburg, Ohio; The Triumph of the Egg; Horses and Men;

Death in the Woods; Uncollected Stories

Library of America, $35

Sherwood Anderson is one of those authors nobody seems to read anymore, like John Dos Passos or William Dean Howells. In light of the giants who came after him — Faulkner, Hemingway and Fitzgerald — he’s easy to dismiss as a cobwebby oldtimer from American lit’s dead-ball era, someone who was highly regarded in his day but has little relevance to the shiny happy readers of the 21st century.

His story is worth a few lines: On Thanksgiving Day in 1912, an amateur golf champion and businessman with literary pretensions leaves the paint company he has founded in Elyria, Ohio, and walks around Cleveland for four days, sleeping rough. He suffers amnesia and is admitted to a hospital where he’s diagnosed with “nervous exhaustion.”

Over the next few years, he abandons family and business, resolving to become a writer. He publishes a novel — Windy McPherson’s Son — in 1916. In 1919, the modernist story cycle Winesburg, Ohio (subtitled A Group of Tales of Small Town Ohio Life) made him a literary star. Hart Crane wrote that “America should read this book on her knees.”

His reputation slipped a bit in the 1930s, but it rebounded and — like generations of American schoolchildren — I read his Winesburg, Ohio in middle school (as an assignment? I can’t imagine) about the same time I encountered Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology and E.A. Robinson’s poetry. In my mind I conflated them all into a grumbly early 20thcentury voice — call them the dyspeptic Midwestern critics of small-town America. (Whom Thornton Wilder would answer with the celebratory Our Town, which valorized the noble rubes of Grover’s Corners, N.H.)

Yet reading Anderson as an adult reveals an artist of subtlety and complexity, who seems less interested in debunking American selfcongratulation and hypocrisy than exploring the complexities and contradictions of the human heart. When I read Anderson’s work today, the American writer he reminds me of the most is Raymond Carver, but not in terms of prose style. There is still a 19th-century syntactical dew on Anderson’s diction, although by the time we get to his story “The Man Who Became a Woman” (in 1923’s Horses and Men), we begin to see a leanness and punch that anticipates Hemingway.

“The Man Who Became a Woman” reads like a lost Hemingway story, in its style and cross-sexual strangeness. The narrator relates a story from his youth, when he was employed as a “swipe” at a race track, fell in love with a horse — Pickit-boy — under his care and began to wish that Pick-itboy were a man and he a girl. One night he wanders into a bar, orders a drink and looks into the mirror behind the bar to discover his reflection “wasn’t my own face at all but the face of a woman. It was a girl’s face ... and a lonesome and scared girl too.”

Returning to the stable that night, he strips off his clothes and goes to sleep in a loft above Pick-it-boy’s stall. But no sooner does he fall asleep than he’s awakened by two black men who, having mistaken him for a woman, mean to take advantage.

But the boy escapes into the rainy night, into a slaughterhouse field filled with bones where he falls into the skeleton of a horse, feeling a terror “like the finger of God running down your back and burning you clean .... It burned all that silly nonsense about being a girl right out of me.”

Anderson registered some of the same confused masculine vibrations that would make Hemingway indelible — he understood and wrote about what he called “the terrible importance of flesh in human relations.” It is a shame that he’s now remembered chiefly as the architect of Winesburg. As fine as that ubiquitous title is, it’s not the sum, or the best of Anderson’s work.

The new Library of America edition gathers all of the short story collections Anderson published during his lifetime — Winesburg, Ohio; The Triumph of the Egg (1921); Horses and Men (1923); and Death in the Woods (1933) — along with 15 stories previously uncollected or unpublished at his death.

Ai Weiwei (edited and translated by Larry Walsh)

Weiwei-isms

Princeton University Press, $12.95

A lot of people were introduced to the Chinese artist and political dissident Ai Weiwei through Alison Klayman’s 2012 documentary Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry. In that film Ai emerged as a living rebuke to the repressive Chinese communist government, a playful yet dangerous force who risks imprisonment and worse every day.

His latest provocation is this small book of aphorisms, deliberately styled to echo Mao’s little red book (Ai’s is black). After Mao, it’s an audacious political act for a Chinese dissident to collect aphorisms into a little book. Many of the quotations came straight off the artist’s Twitter feed or blog — beasts he has been feeding hourly for years.

Though the tone of many of the sayings is light — such as “The government computer has one button: delete” and “If Shakespeare were writing today, he might be writing on Twitter” — the stakes are high and Ai is determined to fight:

“I will never leave China, unless I am forced to. Because China is mine. I will not leave something that belongs to me in the hands of people I do not trust.”

Ray and Diane Hanley and the Newton County Historical Society

Images of America: Newton County

Arcadia Publishing, $21.99

Newton County is, for some of us, a place of mystery, the setting for Donald Harington’s fictional Stay More. Some of us know it as a wild and rough place — a place to backpack or to float the Buffalo River. But Ray and Diane Hanley, with the help of the Newton County Historical Society, remind us it’s also a community with an indigenous population and a fascinating history.

It’s where the state’s first non-log courthouse was constructed in 1872, built with rocks hauled from the Little Buffalo River. A drawing of that courthouse is included here, among dozens of illustrations, postcards and black and white photographs that begin by recalling the courthouse square in Jasper in the early part of the 20th century.

Primarily a picture book, the paperback collects photos of hard-bitten farmers with Dorothea Lange faces, barefoot kids on burros, post offices, cemeteries, fishermen and their catches, homes (including a cave shelter), schools and churches, long-gone tourist attractions such as Diamond Cave and Arkansas 7 with its service stations, motels and scenic vistas.

But the most intriguing, alarming and beautiful images are those of the faces of the people of Newton County.

All proceeds from the sale of the 127-page book, available from Arcadia Publishing (arcadiapublishing. com), benefit the Newton County Historical Society.

E-mail:

pmartin@arkansasonline.com