I wondered if I would have to go on living every day, whispering to myself, I can’t take it anymore.

Is that okay? What do you think?

I worried back and forth about this for a little bit; in the end, though, I just signed the contract.

Meanwhile, Misaki, shutting the contract back in her bag, grabbed my shoulders and pulled me close. Our eyes met at point-blank range.

And then, in a loud voice, she declared, “Welcome to the N.H.K.!”

Her overly enthusiastic expression struck a humorous chord. Fending off a fit of stifled laughter, I thought to myself, I don’t know how long this can continue, but I’ll try as hard as I can.

I made this small decision.

N.H.K. Member #1, Satou Tatsuhiro, had been born.

First Afterword

In the beginning of the twenty-first century, the hikikomori phenomenon suddenly broke out wildly across Japan.

As a sharp-eyed man, I thought I’d jump on the tide of the times and earn a ton of money. I’ll write a story about hikikomori and become famous! I’ll become a best-selling author with my hikikomori story! I’ll go to Hawaii using the royalties! I’ll go to Waikiki!

My dreams stretched out endlessly. However, once I actually started trying to write the story, I soon regretted it. It was painful.

What happens when a real hikikomori writes a hikikomori story? Inevitably, you start having to use your own experiences in your creation. You start having to write about yourself.

Of course, stories are fiction, and no matter how much one of the characters I used looks like me, he is himself, and I am myself. Even if we speak the same way and live in the same apartment, we are still unconnected. We inhabit separate worlds.

Regardless, it was still painful. It was embarrassing. I felt as though I were taking my own shame and revealing it to the whole world.

In the end, I got caught up in paranoid fantasies.

What if everyone is secretly laughing at me while I write this kind of story? I really thought this.

In truth, I still can’t read this story objectively.

Each time I reread it, I start to have light hallucinations. I break into a cold sweat.

Each time I approach one of a few specific places in the plot, I start wanting to throw the computer out the window.

At other particular points, I start wanting to run away from home to live deep in secrecy in the mountains of India.

That was probably because the themes addressed in this story are not things of the past for me but currently active problems.

I can’t look at it from afar, thinking, “How young I was then.”

This is all a real problem.