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

The Hikikomori’s Cartoon Kimono
by A.R. Morlan

A.R. Morlan lives in a Queen Anne House in the Mid-west with her
“cat-children.” Her work has appeared in over 118 different
magazines, anthologies, and webzines including Night Cry, Weird
Tales, F&SF, The Year’s 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 Asimov’s.

“...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?
—Kunihiko Moriguchi (one of Japan’s preeminent kimono painters; from:
“The Kimono Painter,” Judith Thurman, The New Yorker, October 17,
2005)

****

I (Obi)

“The nail that sticks out gets hammered in.”
—Japanese saying

It didn’t matter how often Masafumi saw Harumi Ishii walk through the
autoclave room door in the back of his employer’s tattoo parlor—his
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 parents’ 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 who’d 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) hadn’t
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 he’d thought of Mieko (with her schoolgirl’s
mini-skirt and bleached-to-coarse orange streaks in her hair, despite her
three-decades-plus age), she’d 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 he’d opened the door—only a crack,
enough for a quick glance at her—and asked, “What?” Not the Why? or the
How? he’d longed to ask (he knew too well that the Why? was cultural
pressure, Japan’s need for all to have a place, to be successful, just as