The Shut Ins

By: Katherine Brabon

Narrated by: Anna Hruby, Kimie Tsukakoshi, Taiyo Hara

From the winner of the Australian/Vogel's Literary Award, this tour de force explores loneliness and desire, the peril and beauty of solitude - and our need for connection.

Mai and Hikaru went to school together in the city of Nagoya, until Hikaru disappeared when they were 18.

It is not until 10 years later, when Mai runs into Hikaru's mother, Hiromi Sato, that she learns Hikaru has become a hikikomori, a recluse unable to leave his bedroom for years. In secret, Hiromi Sato hires Mai as a 'rental sister', to write letters to Hikaru and encourage him to leave his room.

Mai has recently married J, a devoted salaryman with conservative ideas about the kind of wife Mai will be. The renewed contact with her old school friend Hikaru stirs Mai's feelings of invisibility within her marriage. She is frustrated with her life and knows she will never fulfill J's obsession with the perfect wife and mother.

What else is there for Mai to do but to disappear herself?

©2021 Katherine Brabon (P)2021 Allen & Unwin

Critic reviews

"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 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)

"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 exploration 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." (Hannah Kent, best-selling author of Burial Rites and The Good People)