Will’s alarm blared. Groggily, angrily, he writhed toward his alarm and hit the “off” button, his struggle further entangling his legs in the twisted bedsheets while removing him just far enough from the warmth of his comforter’s cocoon that getting up now seemed like the easiest option. Will always set his alarm, but in truth there was no reason for it. Setting an alarm was for those who had big, adventurous days—or at least, those who left the house. Yet he still did it. But, unlike the typical users of an alarm, he never touched the snooze button. He didn’t get it. Why would one apportion one’s sleep into ten minute segments? And for Will in particular, the snooze button was useless. His days were already spent at his own discretion, with no deadlines nor time commitments; what reason was there for him to spend his final, valuable hour of slumber in a state of self-imposed conflict between his somnolence and his irrational desire to be awake?
He extricated his legs from the sheets and dangled them over the edge of the bed as he sat up, supporting the weight of his torso on his locked elbows and spread out hands behind him. He then submerged his bare feet beneath the mess of shirts, socks, magazines, and other assorted items that had found their way onto his floor by convenience. His feet found their way to his carpet not so Will could stand, but in search of the warm sensation of the mess on Will’s floor. Will sat on the edge of his bed for almost an hour, staring at the shelves in his room, which were filled with dioramas.
Yes, dioramas: the shoebox-repurposing, elementary-and-middle-school staple project. Will had found one thing to do with his simultaneously useless and inexplicably valuable waking hours, and that thing was making dioramas. He had moved far beyond the crudely-drawn cardboard cutouts and strictly historical prompts of the fourth grade to intricate and even imaginative scenes of beauty. The baker’s dozen or so scenes that resided on his walls recreated only two subjects: islands and Japan. The former he liked for their mystique, their unfettered freedom, and their solitude. They seemed to reflect how he felt in his own head and in his own room: advantageously stranded, able to do whatever he wished, and to create whatever sort of world he wished to inhabit, while also enjoying the raw beauty of nature and surviving off no other effort but his own. But Japan—Japan he liked for the intricacy and oddity of their culture. They lived in something of a technological dreamland, where the biggest and most advanced cities melted into breathtaking landscapes, and the earth’s most ancient customs and architecture clashed with the cutting edge of modernity.
Notably absent from all of Will’s dioramas were people. It was a design choice that resulted not just from his inability as an artist—he had never liked sketching the human form—but more directly from the nature of his craft itself. The art of diorama-making was, for Will, a way to make his imagination a tangible reality, to reify the worlds he resided in within his head. The absence of people was what made his fascinations with both isolated islands and Japan’s sprawling prefectures not inconsistent: he would be perfectly happy to live in either type of world, as long as he was the only one there.
Nevertheless, Will still felt conflict between his two fascinations, one which influenced his frustrating inability to create a perfect diorama: he could never precisely articulate the world within to the world without. This made Will’s life ironic. Among the people of Japan, there is a perfect term to articulate Will’s personality: hikikomori. The hikikomori are, by etymology, the “indoors-stayers”: they are a group of late adolescents—estimated to be a sizeable percentage of the Japanese population—who refuse to leave their homes for a variety of sociological reasons: the expectations of their peers, schools, or lack thereof. And Will, by his intense fascination with the culture which these hikikomori had determined to avoid, became an unwitting member of their diaspora; a “hikikomori in exile” in the west. Will, of course, was aware of none of this, yet aware of his lack of self-awareness, and that made his frustration worse. It is always easier for people like you and I to understand someone else than it is to understand ourselves.
“WILL?”
His mind, which had been lost in pleasant world of his dioramas, now returned to its typical disgruntled state, triggered by the vaguely demanding voice of his father traveling through his door.
“Would you come down here, please?”
Will let out a deep, annoyed sigh, and treaded through the swamp of his floor toward his door.
( 1/? )