Hikikomori ('bedroom hermits')

In Japan’s ailing society, depression is just one of many symptoms that have gone largely unacknowledged (alarming suicide rates and the prevalence of bedroom hermits known as hikikomori are two more). The Japanese are a people in deep denial. They prefer to insist that each phenomenon is nothing more than a failure of individual will, rather than any reflection of wider social dysfunction.

Prozac and Zoloft remain illegal there, despite Japan's suicide rate being higher than the States’ (and their population half as large). Every week in Japan, a nation that prides itself on its wealth and stability, more than 660 people kill themselves. Jumping in front of trains has become so popular that guardrails — and, more poignantly, mirrors — have been installed in the subway system to keep desperate men and women from taking the plunge.

Truth be told, it's more of a man's problem – far fewer Japanese females choose to take their own lives. This same gender imbalance applies to many of the country's most worrisome trends: alcoholism, overwork, and rampant bullying at the job, to name three.

But perhaps the most disturbing pattern of all is the self-imposed isolation now practiced by a growing legion of malcontents called hikikomori. Shacking up with their parents and then locking themselves in their shuttered bedrooms, where they do little more than sleep and eat as their muscles go limp and their hair grows long, these sad, misunderstood cases seem, as the title of this book implies, a perfect embodiment of the anomie that has descended on modern Japan. And 80 percent of them are men.

The hikikomori phenomenon is in part a product of economic decline. It is easy to see why this extreme response to the "insularity, homogeneity, [and] lockstep conformity" of Japanese society might be more common now that the market can no longer guarantee dutiful, self-immolating students the financial success other generations took for granted. But why are men shutting out the sun while women, who make up a comparable proportion of the workforce, aren't? Some believe that it is partly the amae, or dependence, that binds Japanese boys to their mothers and keeps them from developing the self-possession to go forth in the world. The role of the mother may in fact be stronger today than it has ever been: in the infamously demanding corporate culture of modern Japan, it is not uncommon for fathers to go weeks at a time without seeing their own children. On top of that, the idea of the working mom hardly exists. A Japanese woman is expected to give up her job or not have kids. And many these days are opting for the latter. "Parasite singles" – women who live rent-free at home and use their salaries to travel and go shopping with their girlfriends – are the unfulfilled offspring of a society in which consumer fetishes become substitutes for marriage. It's not the fault of females. Some Japanese women say they find Japanese men immature and stubbornly pre-feminist in their attitudes, and want nothing to do with them.

In some villages, the men sit around in bars and play pinball all day. All the young women have left for the city.