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Brain Diving - The NHK Took My Baby Away

Finally, the anime seemed to focus on the "pervert" angle far more than in the book.

Beyond echoing the praise for the novel (far, far better than the manga - haven't seen the anime) it's worth pointing out that Michael Zielenziger's Shutting Out The Sun - How Japan Created It's Own Lost Generation is a very accessible, affordable and engrossing read for anybody interested in the hikikomori phenomenon (as well as various other Japanese social problems).

Really? I actually got the opposite impression when I read the novel. The scene you brought up made a good point, but the heavier emphasis on the lolicon side to Yamazaki's otakudom made him really unlikeable in the novel version to me--to the point where I was actually relieved spoiler[when he left to go back home].

MorwenLaicoriel wrote:

Really? I actually got the opposite impression when I read the novel. The scene you brought up made a good point, but the heavier emphasis on the lolicon side to Yamazaki's otakudom made him really unlikeable in the novel version to me--to the point where I was actually relieved spoiler[when he left to go back home].

Well, as I said in my first paragraph, I didn't get more than a few episodes into the anime, I really didn't like it. It's entirely possible that there were later scenes where the balance shifted the other way. I also think you're not supposed to like Yamazaki -- he is a bad influence on Satou, to say the least.

And perhaps the biggest flaw in the anime for me in terms of the pervert angle was, well, the DVD packaging. *shudder* Give me a nice Abe cover any day.

And perhaps the biggest flaw in the anime for me in terms of the pervert angle was, well, the DVD packaging. *shudder* Give me a nice Abe cover any day.

For some reason, Satou is called Satoru 5 times in this article.

I'll admit that I don't always read books in the proper order. In the case with Welcome to the N.H.K., I started out with the two author afterwords in the back of the book before I moved on to the main story. After finishing the book, I realized that they were in fact key to understanding the motivations behind the novel. In the first, written in 2001, author Tatsuhiko Takimoto implies that the main character of the story was based on his own experiences as a hikikomori and that “the themes addressed in this story are not things of the past for me but currently active problems.” Yet he concludes with an acknowledgment that he is going to try harder (presumably to become less of a hikikomori). In the second afterword, written in 2005, Takimoto admits that his life hasn't improved much – he is still a hikikomori and he is simply living from the royalties of his book and has not written any new stories in the intervening years. Even so, he holds out a faint hope that he will one day be able to cure his condition and do away with the persistent problems that have been driving him to remain a hikikomori.