Several years ago, a vogue of interest in shut-ins, or hikikomori, saw researchers from France touring Japan and meeting reclusive youths. Such was the prevalence of the disorder, said psychologist Nicolas Tajan, that “if you ask people in Japan about hikikomori, almost everyone will say, ‘I know somebody like that.’ But there is no such word in France.” 
 
 I Called Him Necktie, by Milena Michiko Flasar 
 
 Translated by Sheila Dickie. 
 
 New Vessel Press, Fiction. 
 
 Almost everyone? Well, there may be hundreds of thousands of people in Japan who shun social contact, as some experts claim, and many seem to be 20-somethings who still live with their parents. Why? The causes are myriad. Mental illness is basically still a taboo subject in 21st-century Japan, and those who admit to depression face social stigma. This country, after all, has one of the world’s highest suicide rates. 
 
 It’s not surprising to see foreign academic and cultural interest in the phenomenon of shut-ins. In 2012, that curiosity sparked two novels from German-speaking writers. One, by Kevin Kuhn, is unsurprisingly titled “Hikikomori.” The other, by Milena Michiko Flasar, has just been translated into English as “I Called Him Necktie.” 
 
 “Necktie” focuses on Hiro Taguchi, a 20-year-old who has spent the last two years holed up in his parents’ Tokyo home. He spends his days not surfing the Web or watching anime, but contemplating a crack in the wall. Thankfully Flasar doesn’t spend too much time on that pastime, but soon propels Taguchi into the outside world. The trigger? A “flight of cranes” he sees through his window. 
 
 Setting aside the fact that there are no wild cranes in Tokyo, or anywhere else on Honshu for that matter, we are told that Taguchi is compelled to go outside. He soon finds himself observing people in a park, particularly a salaryman, Tetsu Ohara, who sits across from him on a bench for hours on end. When the two acknowledge each other, Taguchi eventually begins to talk for the first time in ages. 
 
 The two men slowly trade life stories, told through conversation and flashbacks, and form a tenuous friendship. Taguchi is revealed to be scarred by the loss of two childhood friends, and his parents cannot penetrate the mental fortress he has built against adulthood. 
 
 In private reflection he muses: “Growing up signifies a loss. You think you are winning. Really, you are losing yourself. I mourned the child I had once been, whom I heard in rare moments pummeling wildly in my heart.” 
 
 Ohara is too ashamed to tell his wife that he has been laid off from his job, and maintains the ruse of bringing her homemade lunches with him when he goes to “work” every day. Meanwhile, he fantasizes about jumping onto the train tracks. He’s also haunted by his past, and has never recovered from the death of his handicapped son whom he could not bring himself to love: “My hardness prevented me from feeling the softness of his cheeks deeply and sincerely. Of the two of us I had the serious heart defect.” 
 
 Flasar attempts to create honest, imperfect characters, but while they do have psychological depth, they often come off as cloying stereotypes. The hikikomori rejects the strictures of maturity and society while the repressed salaryman is crushed by them. Taguchi’s parents, fearing ostracism, believe the family’s “name and reputation must be preserved at all costs.” A schoolgirl is bullied to death. A hopelessly sensitive poet is cut down in the prime of youth. 
 
 The gloom would be overbearing if the narrative didn’t focus on prying Taguchi from his shell. 
 
 The author has a Japanese mother and is familiar with Japan, but there are some clumsy oversights that detract from the story. Aside from the cranes, a key plot point comes when Taguchi seeks out Ohara’s house — thanks to the home address written on his business card. I’ve collected countless cards from salarymen over the years but they’ve only ever had their company’s address. To readers who know Japanese well, there are some exchanges in the running dialog that ring hollow. 
 
 Where Flasar shines is in style. The writing has been described as a prose poem, and the English translation by Sheila Dickie displays a lyrical sensitivity to language and form. It omits quotation marks and other conventions in favor of a refreshingly elliptical but direct approach with economy of words; the story only runs 128 pages. Its lucid style is more Japanese than some parts of the narrative. 
 
 Writing a novel about hikikomori is ambitious and risky. “I Called Him Necktie” is a flawed yet probing rumination not only on the tragedies of the characters themselves, but Japanese society’s failure to accept its own faults. Japan’s many shut-ins themselves — people whose stories are not told — are testimony to this. As Ohara says in a revelation about isolation: “We must all, every one of us, relate to one another.” ||||| Officials in Miyazaki prefecture urge people to be careful and keep close eye on children after gruesome discovery 
 
 Residents of a remote village in south-western Japan are coming to terms with a gruesome mass murder after six people, including five members of the same family, were found dead inside a farmhouse. 
 
 Police said they later discovered the body of a seventh person who had jumped or fallen from a nearby bridge into a river in Takachiho, Miyazaki prefecture, a mountain village of 12,000 people and a popular tourist destination. 
 
 Investigators discovered the body of a woman outside the house and the bodies of five other people, including a young girl, inside, on Monday. Media reports said some of the victims appeared to have been stabbed. 
 
 Police named three of them as Mihoko Iihoshi, the 66-year-old wife of the house’s owner, 72-year-old farmer Yasuo Iihoshi, their seven-year-old granddaughter Yui and a male acquaintance, 44-year-old Fumiaki Matsuoka. 
 
 The bodies of the remaining three victims – two men and a woman – were yet to be publicly identified. 
 
 Police went to the house after a relative told them his calls to the family had gone unanswered, according to Kyodo news. 
 
 The seventh body, whom police believe could be that of Yasuo Iihoshi’s son, was found in a river about three kilometres away. It appeared he had driven to the bridge in the family car. 
 
 The area is near Takachiho valley, a popular tourist destination known for its scenic gorge and connections to Japan’s indigenous religion Shinto. 
 
 The discovery sparked fear among residents, with local officials urging people to exercise caution and collect their children from school, Kyodo said. 
 
 Mass killings are a rarity in Japan, which is considered one of the safest countries in the world, thanks in part to its strict gun laws. However, killings carried out with knives occasionally make headlines. 
 
 In 2001 a man with a history of mental illness forced his way into a primary school in Osaka and fatally stabbed eight children aged between six and eight. In 2008 seven people were killed when a man slammed a truck into a crowd on a busy shopping street in central Tokyo and then launched a frenzied knife attack. In July 2016 Satoshi Uematsu, who claimed he wanted to make people with disabilities “disappear”, killed 19 people and injured 27 others in a knife attack at a care facility in Sagamihara, south of Tokyo.
– Japan is grappling with a mysterious problem among young people. Some 500,000 to 2 million are affected by a condition that leaves them unable to leave the house—or even their rooms—for years at a time. It's called hikikomori, a word that has been commonplace in Japan since the 1990s, though a few cases have also been seen in the US and other countries. "If you ask people in Japan about hikikomori, almost everyone will say, 'I know somebody like that,'" a psychologist said in the Japan Times last year. It's considered by many to be one of the country's top health issues, but what is going on, and whether those considered to be hikikomori are living with a mental illness, remains unclear, the Wall Street Journal reports. Treatment of the condition, which often affects young men, has been elusive. Every prefecture is legally required to have a treatment center, but few hikikomori actually visit them, and even when they do, few receive successful care. Now, international researchers are trying to understand the condition in the city of Fukuoka. As it stands, just half of hikikomori would likely receive a psychiatric diagnosis in the US, but a US researcher working with the Fukuoka team developed new criteria for the condition in 2010, the Journal notes. Experts are using that criteria to help develop a better understanding of the situation in a country where, the Times noted, mental illness remains highly stigmatized. (Another strange case: five siblings who walk on all fours.)