Name: Human Misery and Modern-Day Heroic Struggle
Item: Welcome to the N-H-K
Rating: 95
Author: Noellae

Human Misery and Modern-Day Heroic Struggle · Waifora

"A story has a defined structure, bursts of emotions, and a clear-cut ending to it. In our life, instead, there is and always will be only a subtle, vague anxiety, relentlessly permeating every one of our days."
[My translation and paraphrase, from Episode 21]

Life in modern society is, in theory, fairly simple: study, get a job, procreate if you must, and die. Nonetheless, however straightforward this might be, or precisely because of such inescapable simplicity, a developing individual might find following said laid out, corroborated, fool-proof process an unbearable, miserable, excruciating nightmare.
NHK ni Youkoso explores precisely this: the experience of those who struggle to find genuine purpose in their everyday life, who have a hard time taking part in the process of wholeheartedly appreciating their existence in society, be it for an unshakeable, deep-seated feeling of inadequacy, for practical, frustrating impotence imposed by one's circumstances, or for the paradoxical, unbearable tediousness of an objectively commendable routine.
Satou Tatsuhiro falls into the first one of these conditions: he is a Hikikomori, i.e. an apparently voluntary modern-day recluse. His reclusion, however, is anything but willful: he has been forced to it by the unshakable paranoia of his person being made fun by each and everyone, to which he once awakened and succumbed, never to recover again. He develops an agoraphobia which debilitates him for four years, having him drop out of university and shy away from any form of human contact, irreversibly becoming an objective failure as a society member: at 22 years old, he's not in employment, education, or training; he's a NEET, for short.
One day, he is approached by a mysterious girl, Misaki, who proclaims to be the savior who'll rehabilitate him: she promises that thanks to her counseling, he will snap out of his Hikikomori phase so he can finally become an integrated, fulfilled member of society; this is how, albeit slowly, in Satou develops an unconscious will to escape inertness, and to start living his life again.
What follows is Satou coming to intermingle with many people's lives - coming to know, inevitably, of the misery plaguing all of their existences, and experience their desparate struggle through them: a hopeless, lonely soon-to-be bride who finds no pleasure whatsoever in her stable routine, an economically unstable girl grimly caught up in a pyramid scheme she's bound to waste her life to barely escape, a young man who sees the wholehearted pursuit of his only burning passion negated to him by inexorable family responsibilities - and finally, a trauma-ridden girl in desperate need of someone laughably more inept than she is to completely depend on her for her self-loathing to be quelled just enough to make life endurable.
There is no resolution to all of these struggles. Every one just lives through them: not necessarily with the intent of overcoming them, seldom driven by the illusory grace residing at their end, mostly tormented by the unrelenting, vague anxiety they know nobody and nothing will ever be able to exorcise. Yet, they keep living; despite life itself evidently being jarringly incompatible with their ideals, dreams, or hopes, they keep trying, ever so chaotically, to make things right, in the blind, desperate pursuit of an even barely more bearable, less mournful existence.
This, is what Welcome to the NHK has made me painfully, viscerally, bittersweetly realize to be the modern-day heroic struggle - and one of the countless reasons I ardently love it.

Nihon Hitojichi Kyoukai ni Youkoso.