‘Not only is 

The Shut Ins a compelling story about ­hikikomori,

those who seek absolute isolation from society, and those
who orbit them in their reclusion, it is also a profound explo­
ration of loneliness, solitude, and that peculiar, ineffable
yearning for inner or unconscious worlds; the chimeric ‘other
side’. Katherine Brabon is a precise and contemplative writer,
her prose capable of intense, almost-heady evocation. I will
read everything she writes.’ – Hannah Kent, bestselling
author of Burial Rites and The Good People

‘I was drawn in utterly by The Shut Ins. It illuminated the

world around me in a strange and beautiful light, and it
continues to unsettle my thoughts in the best possible way.
At once bold and subtle, The Shut Ins is a haunting and
transportive reading experience.’ – Emily Bitto, winner of
the Stella Prize for The Strays

‘Katherine Brabon’s The Shut Ins is quietly mesmerising.

Brabon has created an exquisite portrait of loneliness and
aloneness through the stories of four interconnected people
living in modern day Japan. Her prose is original and vivid,
I found myself entranced by this novel from its first sentence
to its last.’ – Anna Snoekstra, author of Only Daughter

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 Katherine Brabon’s debut novel The Memory Artist won
the The Australian/Vogel’s Literary Award (Allen & Unwin,
2016), was shortlisted in the NSW Premier’s Literary
Awards and longlisted in the Indie Book Awards. She was
co-winner of the 2019 David Harold Tribe Prize from The
University of Sydney for her short fiction, and a runner-up
in the Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize in 2020. Katherine
was an ­ambassador at the Melbourne Emerging Writer’s
Festival in 2019 and enjoys an active role in Australia’s
literary community.
Katherine’s writing has appeared in The Age/Sydney
Morning Herald, Meanjin, Kill Your Darlings, The Lifted
Brow, Island magazine, Southerly and she is a regular
contributor to Lindsay magazine. She has received grants
from the Australia Council and Creative Victoria, and
residencies at Chateau Lavigny, Art Omi and the UNESCO
Cities of Literature International Residency in Ljubljana.

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 the
shut
ins
K AT H E R I N E
BRABON

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 First published in 2021

Copyright © Katherine Brabon 2021

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in

any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,
recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior
permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968
(the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever
is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational
purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has
given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.

Allen & Unwin

83 Alexander Street
Crows Nest NSW 2065
Australia
Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100
Email: info@allenandunwin.com
Web: www.allenandunwin.com

A catalogue record for this

book is available from the
National Library of Australia

ISBN 978 1 76087 974 7

Set in 12/18.5 pt Sabon by Midland Typesetters, Australia

Printed in Australia by Griffin Press, part of Ovato

10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

The paper in this book is FSC® certified.

FSC® promotes environmentally responsible,
socially beneficial and economically viable
management of the world’s forests.

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 I

Mai
Winter to Spring, 2014

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 I was born in Gifu Prefecture in 1986. We moved to the
city—my mother, my father and me—when I was so
young that my memories start there. If you look at me, I’m
a daughter of skyscrapers, not mountains. I wear simple
shirts, a city person’s clothes, and I don’t know anything
about nature. When I was a girl we lived in a built-up suburb
fifteen minutes by subway from Nagoya Station, a bead on
a string of the Shinkansen line between Tokyo and Kyoto.
Now, I live in the apartment J and I rent in Nagoya. J is
my husband. Three months, not even a marriage yet. The
complex was built over fifty years ago, for a thousand bodies
but for no individual soul. Fifty square metres is the average
size of a couple’s apartment in the average building. We have
two rooms, the bedroom and an eat-in kitchen, separated
by a sliding door. The floor is made to look like wood but it
is fake. The kitchen cabinets are an old creamy white. I once
saw a TV news report about an incident in Xi’an, China, in
which a woman was stuck in the elevator to her apartment
building. Most people used another elevator, at the front of
the building, so she wasn’t found until someone reported the
broken elevator after a month, and a repairman was sent
to fix it. By then she had starved to death. She lived on the
fifteenth floor of the apartment building and mostly kept to
herself. Nobody had noticed she was missing.
I think of this story as I stand in my dressing-gown and
slippers in the hallway of the apartment building, surrounded
by residents from nearby apartments. J stands next to me.

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 Katherine Brabon

J’s stomach softens in his dressing-gown; his stocky frame

reveals what his body wants to be; what it may look like
when he’s old. My mother says I’m thin but not in a way that
is good. I cut my hair to my shoulders after we married, as
though it would make me seem older, more like a wife. We
listen to the ambulance radios down below. We have been
told to stay where we are; an evacuation is not necessary. It’s
nearly six in the morning on a Friday in February. During the
night, a girl in our apartment building committed suicide.
We were woken by the sirens.
The night before had been completely ordinary. I returned
from work around seven in the evening. J arrived at eight
thirty. We ate the meal I prepared, and then J watched TV
while I scrolled through my phone. I was preoccupied because
I had run into the mother of an old school friend on my way
home from work. She was leaving one of the department stores
below Nagoya Station while I was passing along the walkway.
Mrs Sato- is her name. She’s the mother of Hikaru, who I have
not seen since high school. Mrs Sato- and I exchanged pleas­
antries; I told her I had recently married, and I asked after
Hikaru. She nodded and said, Thank you, Mai, as though my
question had offered her something, and said that she would
pass on my regards to her son. Her face, which had aged
only a little since I last saw her, was inscrut­able. Only the
purplish-grey rings under her eyes suggested she might have
been feeling tired. She wore her hair in the same way as when
Hikaru and I were young, tied back in a low bun.

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 The Shut Ins

And so that night, while J and I sat on the floor cushions

on opposite sides of our table, turned away from each other
to face the TV, I looked to see if Hikaru Sato- had an online
profile, but he was nowhere to be found. I had not thought
of him in a long time. I gave up and went to bed, pulling the
sliding door closed behind me.
Standing in the hallway in our gowns and slippers,
the residents in our section of the apartment building are
all strangely united. At first, the information was limited.
Someone called to report a gas leak; another person
complained of a noxious smell coming through the ceiling
vents of his apartment. A man said that he and his wife and
children were experiencing dizziness, sore throats. Nobody
knew the source of the smell or if we were in danger. Then
the news travelled down from the girl’s neighbour, three
floors above us. The girl had mixed laundry detergent with
bath salts, poisoning herself with hydrogen sulfide. She
was fourteen. Her neighbour and a few others are taken
to hospital because of the fumes, but it’s only precaution­
ary; they’re fine. The police and the apartment manager
encourage everyone to return to their apartments. We all
must be at work soon, after all. J and I shuffle back inside.
J takes a shower while I make soup and rice. I don’t feel like
eating, and wonder if I can smell fumes coming in through
the ceiling vents.
This winter, it snowed in the city. That doesn’t always
happen. Nagoya Castle is coated in white like an old

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 Katherine Brabon

woodcut drawing; the red lights of cranes in nearby con­

struction sites are modern fireflies hovering around the old
castle keep. I step out of the apartment building and the
wind tears at my coat. I take the subway to work.
When I was a young girl, my existence didn’t feel particu­
larly special to me. In the morning I dressed in my navy
and white uniform, ate the usual soup-fish-rice breakfast
my mother put on the table, went to school and sat at my
desk, walked home and did my homework, ate the dinner
my mother made—usually just my mother and I—and then
watched TV or did more homework before I went to bed.
My father worked for a company in Nagoya and my mother
was an assistant at a dental clinic in our suburb. I never
had the sense that we were particularly happy, but we were
functional, and functional seemed to be the aim of all the
parents of the other children at school. I did not seek out
what was other than the ordinary. I don’t think it occurred
to me that this might be possible.
I stayed in Nagoya for high school and college, and when
I graduated began working for a local language school. I met
J through a colleague. His attentions were welcome. I have
always been quiet; have often watched the world rather than
participated in it. J might not have known me in some funda­
mental ways, but he offered what seemed to be a chance to
participate in life, in a marriage. My mother said this was
good, accept him, you are approaching your late twenties,
soon you will have few chances for a husband. Take this

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 The Shut Ins

opportunity while you can. I took it. Each night after work,
I open the creaking glass door, cross the threshold into our
apartment building, walk up the stairs, and become one of
the thousand. I guess it is true that my life still doesn’t seem
exceptional to me.
Throughout the day at work I think of the girl who
committed suicide in our apartment building. I think of
the encounter with Hikaru’s mother the night before. I’m
­unsettled by both events. I think of Hikaru Sato- and wonder
what he looks like now.
Hikaru was a strange child. We were in class together
at elementary school. At school we follow a path paved by
everything we have grown up with and the paths of our
parents and grandparents. The path is laid out for all of
us, but taking it did not come naturally to Hikaru. I don’t
know how to account for this. He was different. He did not
respond to questions that were asked out of custom, ques­
tions to which the answer was obvious. He seemed to find
it difficult to laugh with classmates, as though he could not
force himself to laugh in situations when to do so would
have brought him into the group, into any group, if he’d just
played along. The concept of banter seemed beyond him.
When we were younger, Hikaru would sometimes bear
bruises from being pinched or shoved against walls. When
we were older, Hikaru grew taller than everyone, and so
the other students just taunted him or pretended he wasn’t
there, tall and invisible in the crowd. He let his hair grow

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 Katherine Brabon

past his ears. The teachers often punished him for this and
must have ordered his parents, Mr and Mrs Sato-, to make
sure their son was better groomed, because every now and
then he came to school with a severe haircut that seemed
like a kind of abuse. On the weekends, if I happened to see
Hikaru, he wore the same clothes: a tattered purple-and-
white t-shirt, grey tracksuit trousers and, when it was cold,
a hooded zip-up jacket.
I don’t recall that we were good friends in elementary
school, but I was aware of him enough that when we both
began at the same junior high, at the age of thirteen, I recog­
nised him. We shared a desk and sat in silence. One day, on
my way to school, I saw Hikaru walking. It must have been
early in the school year because the morning was warmer than
usual, and I remember the sun hitting the concrete buildings.
We walked to school together that day, and began to walk
to school together after that. Along the way, I remember,
there was a construction site. It seemed to have been aban­
doned. I think it was like that for all our junior high years.
I never saw any workers there. Hikaru and I would stop
sometimes at the unfinished building and look at it for a
long time. A few times, we went inside the empty shell. Why
did they never finish it? I did not understand the pointless­
ness of it. Hikaru said he liked the site because it didn’t feel
part of the regular world we lived in.
We were friends, but awkwardly. Sometimes we had very
long conversations; sometimes we could not find anything

14

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 The Shut Ins

to say to each other. When Hikaru started skipping school,

in our last year of junior high, he would go to the construc­
tion site. It was the time for our high school entrance exams.
He would spend the day moving from building to building,
he told me, sitting or reading or closing his eyes in the winter
sun. Sometimes I sat with him before school. I always got
up to leave in time for class, but Hikaru had folded in on
himself, gone quiet, tucked away from the world. Like I
said, the normal path did not come naturally to Hikaru.
I always thought his mind must have been strong, to block
out the consequences like that. When the bell would have
been ringing at school to signal the end of the day, he walked
home. He did this a lot in our final year. But Hikaru’s father
had paid for an expensive cram school which his mother
forced him to attend, and Hikaru miraculously passed the
high school entrance exams.
We ended up at the same high school. It was not a particu­
larly prestigious school, not one good enough to get you into
Waseda University or anything, but it was acceptable. My
parents were satisfied and I was quietly relieved to know
Hikaru would be at the same school. He altered my life in
ways I knew were significant, even if I could not name them.
Hikaru represented something different. Although I had a
few girlfriends, I was comforted by Hikaru’s quiet, slightly
detached presence. He seemed out of place in the world, but
there was something reliable about his character. If he said
he would come to my house at seven forty-five before school,

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 Katherine Brabon

he would be outside the house at seven forty-five. The other

people at school were not so reliable. Of course I was teased
sometimes for being his friend, but this does not seem to have
had any lasting effect on me. In fact, I can’t even remember
the words that were said to me by my schoolmates.
We continued to go to the abandoned construction site,
even though it was not on the way to our high school. Some­
thing about the place drew us both to it. I cannot speak
for Hikaru, but I felt that it was a place without time and
expectation. Once, I stayed there for the morning with
Hikaru. During those few hours, as Hikaru and I walked
around—it was cold and he gave me his jacket—I was numb
to the consequences of my actions. It was a new feeling, both
freeing and troubling. I have felt it on rare occasions since.
I wondered if this was how Hikaru felt all the time, when
he refused to go to school. I had the feeling of crossing over
into a place that buffered me briefly from the world, but
I sensed that if I stayed there too long, I would never come
back. As if caught in a maze without an exit, I wouldn’t be
able to return. I went to school at midday. When my parents
punished me for skipping school, quite severely, I felt almost
a sense of relief because I had made it back to the world
where people lived. I had an inkling of Hikaru’s world over
there; it seemed perilous and alluring. It still seems that way
to me.
Three years later, with just a few months left of high
school, Hikaru’s mother arranged for him to go and live

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 The Shut Ins

with her brother, who owned a shop on the other side of

Nagoya. Hikaru told me this news as we sat against a wall
in the construction site. The place was completely still.
Hikaru had barely been to class that year, the last and most
important year of school. And in the two years of high
school before that, he would be absent for weeks or a month
at a time, and I would not see him anywhere, not even at
the construction site. His parents had decided that a drastic
change was necessary.
A few days later, Hikaru was driven to the other side
of Nagoya to live with his uncle Koji and work at his shop.
We were seventeen. Perhaps it was then, at that significant
age when everything feels heavy and your stomach flutters
at the smallest events, that Hikaru began to truly to leave
this world and inhabit somewhere else—the other side that
people like me don’t really get to see while we live in the
ordinary world.

17

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