"A. R. Morlan - The Hikikomori's Cartoon Kimono" - читать интересную книгу автора (Morlan A R)

The HikikomoriтАЩs Cartoon Kimono
by A.R. Morlan

A.R. Morlan lives in a Queen Anne House in the Mid-west with her
тАЬcat-children.тАЭ Her work has appeared in over 118 different
magazines, anthologies, and webzines including Night Cry, Weird
Tales, F&SF, The YearтАЩs Best Fantasy & Horror, Full Spectrum IV,
and Sci-Fi.com, and her short-story collection, Smothered Dolls, has
just come out from Overlook Connection Press. The multi-layered
and textured tale that follows is her first story for AsimovтАЩs.

тАЬ...we have to answer the challenge of modernity: what is a kimono, or
what will it become, if it ceases to be a thing worn?
тАФKunihiko Moriguchi (one of JapanтАЩs preeminent kimono painters; from:
тАЬThe Kimono Painter,тАЭ Judith Thurman, The New Yorker, October 17,
2005)

****

I (Obi)

тАЬThe nail that sticks out gets hammered in.тАЭ
тАФJapanese saying

It didnтАЩt matter how often Masafumi saw Harumi Ishii walk through the
autoclave room door in the back of his employerтАЩs tattoo parlorтАФhis
reaction was invariably the same: first, a sharp sudden intake of breath, not
unlike his response to the initial visits of his rescue sister Mieko back in
Japan, in his parentsтАЩ house. Back in Tokyo, the reflexive shortness of
breath was understandable. There was a strange woman standing on the
other side of his bedroom door, bare knuckles touching the thin wood in a
patient, persistent rapraprap, waiting with trained politeness born of dozens
of encounters with other men of his kind, suffering from hikikomori, the
withdrawal. Masafumi had wondered, there in the comfortable, yet painfully
familiar confines of the room he so seldom left for all those months, those
years, if women like Mieko looked upon their job as a form of service, or as
something more insidious, a means of forcing those whoтАЩd chosen to
withdraw from life, from society, and ultimately from unwanted
responsibility, to become a part of that hellish social miasma ... simply
because they, the rescue sisters (or the occasional rescue brother) hadnтАЩt
had the self-reliance necessary to withdraw from life, as he and his fellow
hikikomori had done with such ease, such completeness.
 But no matter what heтАЩd thought of Mieko (with her schoolgirlтАЩs
mini-skirt and bleached-to-coarse orange streaks in her hair, despite her
three-decades-plus age), sheтАЩd kept on coming, twice a week, to stand for
hours at his door, knocking and imploring, begging and rapping, until her
sheer tenacity wore him down, and heтАЩd opened the doorтАФonly a crack,
enough for a quick glance at herтАФand asked, тАЬWhat?тАЭ Not the Why? or the
How? heтАЩd longed to ask (he knew too well that the Why? was cultural
pressure, JapanтАЩs need for all to have a place, to be successful, just as