Just a few days ago I had just finished reading Welcome to the N.H.K.. I remember someone telling me as I picked up this book that it was about the dark side of anime fandom. Upon reading it I can tell you with absolute certainty that this is not true. Certainly you can associate this book with the most extreme cases of fanaticism within any particular hobby be it anime, comics, movies or even stamp collecting. What this book is about is the dark side of the human psyche, the part that tells you that you aren't good enough, that nobody out there cares for you; the part that whispers into your ear every so often when you're at your lowest that maybe you should just give up and die. It's about the people that have held you down all your life; the teachers that gave you bad grades, the boss who fired you, or the girl who wouldn't go out with you. It's all a conspiracy purported by a single organization meant to keep you down. The truth, though as ugly as it may be, is that the only one holding you down is yourself. That's the just one of the lessons that author Tatsuhiko Takimoto includes in his work of autobiographical fiction. It's through the eyes of the main protagonist, Satou that we come to realize the truth of the matter that the N.H.K. doesn't seek to keep us down because we're already doing a good job of that ourselves.
Who is Satou though? Well Satou is a twenty-two year old college dropout who now holes himself in his small apartment afraid to venture out and even have social contact with people who had delusion's that the N.H.K. is conspiring to keep him and other people like him down and locked away from society altogether. It's through meeting two people does Satou's world only slightly start to change. The first is Misaki, a young girl that Satou meet's while answering the door for some evangelists. Misaki realizing what Satou is decides to break him out of it. Even going as far as to draw up a contract and have him sign it. Her reasons for doing this are puzzling but she provides a light side to Satou's life as she tries in her own little way to break him out of being a shut in. The second person in Satou's life is Yamazaki, an anime otaku with a very disturbing lolita fetish. A recluse in training he tries to bring Satou into his world by trying to impress his fetish on to Satou and trying to make him see the light. The light in Yamazaki's mind being that real women are not even human but monsters that don't even need love, that the only path for true love is in loli images and moe anime characters. Yamazaki is the dark side of otakudom, the dark side of any fandom. A person who feels that they can't connect to the outside world and therefore burying themselves in there escapism of choice so much that the real world isn't real anymore only the world only the world that they have created for themselves is. It's through these characters does Satou only really start to think about his future. You see Satou knows what he is exactly, and he has no qualms about it. He wants to change himself, he wants to get out there and be part of the human race again but he just can't. It's by the way of interacting with these two people does he even start to make any progress towards that goal. It's not all sunshine and rainbows throughout. In the course of the book we watch him slightly rise up then fall down even lower than before.
Does this book succeed in telling its story though? Well yes it in fact does. The author does an excellent job of relating to the reader what is exactly going through Satou at any particular point in time. The narrative is very clear and never confusing. It easily relates upon the reader Satou's thoughts and emotional state at any time. The book as a whole is a bit dark. Billed as a dark comedy, depending on the reader there may be too little of comedy to be seen in it. It may hit to close to home for the crowd that it is being aimed for. It's not as if the situations that the author puts Satou in aren't funny it's just that a person would have to have either a really good sense of humor or a really sick sense of humor depending on the situation. Something else to think about is that the author writing this would have had to gone through some of the same experiences himself to write some of the stuff in this book. He even admits it in the two afterwords that these experiences have come from his life in some form or another.
Was it enjoyable to read though, yes it was. That is to say if you think you would enjoy reading about a shut in who hates himself so much that he feels life at times isn't worth living. Is Satou a likable character? No, but then he's not supposed to be. Satou is what he is, a person with deep psychological issues that needs serious help in overcoming them. Satou is supposed to be a broken person because that's the person he reflects in the reader. When you read along with Satou and what he's doing you're initially supposed to laugh at this worthless human being and then feel either compassion for him and hope he gets better or utter disgust and hopes that he dies in the fieriest pits of hell. Something I liked about this book is that while it is being marketed toward the anime crowd it's defiantly accessible to just about anyone. You don't have to have a deep understanding of otaku knowledge to enjoy what is going on in the book. Being a light novel this makes it a very easy read as the page count clocks in at two hundred pages. Welcome to the N.H.K., is not a must read but is still a pretty fun read either way especially if reading about someone falling into a dark hole that is his life is entertaining to you then by all means give it a shot.
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