Netarō Time

A field note from the fraying nervous edge. For the ones who sleep long enough to change the river’s course. For the ghosts who refuse to perform normality.

Photo by Daniela Kato

Prelude
Where ghosts slip under the skin

There are forests outside us, and forests inside us. Some fray at the edges, and some fray at the nerves.

For years now I’ve been writing from the outer peripheries — rural Japan’s sparse woodlands, fallowed rice fields, forest plantations where the past still keens through hinoki leaves and pollen cones that won’t forget.

And yet, the same forces that hollow Japan’s landscapes also hollow the body. Modernity is not merely an external architecture. It’s a time-discipline inscribed in muscle, breath, and synapse. A nervous system trained to be alert, compliant, optimized.

And when a body refuses this pacing, modernity calls it disorder.

I’ve been thinking about that refusal, the quiet, trembling kind that doesn’t erupt but withdraws, that slips into what looks like sleep, stillness, or disappearance. A refusal so soft it’s barely seen until someone names it: depression, developmental delay, pathological avoidance, hikikomori.

But before these names, there were stories.

Stories in which someone sleeps for years while the village frets around them.

Stories in which people fall into long, death-like dreaming only to awaken changed, or knowing something they cannot explain.

Stories where withdrawal is neither illness nor failure, but a different relationship to time — a loosening of modernity’s grip on the nervous system, an entrance into another rhythm entirely.

One of these tales has been following me around of late: San-nen Netarō (三年寝太郎), the boy who sleeps for three years. A figure who does nothing, wants nothing, moves towards nothing. A boy the villagers call useless, until the day his long, unproductive dreaming reveals a wisdom the waking world could not access.

When I re-read this tale today, I no longer see laziness or irresponsibility. I see something that modernity has made almost impossible to imagine: a body refusing to dance to the imposed tempo of the world.

A body haunted not by ghosts from the mountains, but by ghosts of expectation, productivity, and normality.

Ghosts that slip under the skin and settle in the nerves.

And sometimes, the only way to quiet those ghosts is to stop. To sleep. To collapse time. To disappear into a chrysalis of unmeasured hours where modernity cannot reach.

This field note begins there, at the threshold between withdrawal and metamorphosis. Where the frayed nervous system edges into ghost-story and folktale, and where Japan’s modernity reveals another of its fault lines: the relentless demand that bodies remain legible, productive, and wakeful.

Here, in this softened space, I want to inquire:

What if withdrawal is not failure, but a different way of living in time?

What if the ghosts we fear are the messengers from another rhythm?

The sleeping boy
Attuning to a different rhythm

In the folktale, the boy they call San-nen Netarō does almost nothing at all.

He does not help in the fields.
He does not study.
He does not “try hard.”

He sleeps.

For three whole years he lies there, drifting between nap and waking, eyes half-focused on a world that has already decided what he is: useless, lazy, a burden. His family frets; the neighbours whisper; the village begins to tighten its vocabulary of blame. Suspicion gathers like a storm. A murderous chorus mutters that something must be done about the boy who won’t wake up.

Yet, beneath the visible narrative, the tale carries another rhythm. Something the villagers cannot hear: a different pulse is gathering around Netarō.

One day, he rises from sleep and pads slowly towards the cliff overlooking the village. He relieves himself there, as he does every ten days. In the animated telling, his urine arcs into a small rainbow — a private shimmer the world below never sees.

While the villagers sharpen their suspicions (and their knives), Netarō simply stands there, letting his gaze drift across the river and the fields. Peeing is part of the ritual, but so is looking, that soft, half-conscious attending that comes from doing the same simple act day after day.

This is not planning nor strategizing. Just a long, slow accumulation of perception.

And then, one morning, as floodwaters threaten the village, something aligns. Still half-asleep, Netarō notices the large boulder perched at the cliff’s edge — how it leans, what it holds, what it could redirect. A perception that has been quietly forming for months crystallizes in a single breath. He pushes. The boulder falls. The water turns. The village is spared.

There is no drama. No redemption arc. Just a sleepy boy following his rhythm.

Not because he became “useful,” but because his peculiar pulse — his drifting, his bodily ritual, his wandering gaze — had been attuning him to the landscape all along.

This is where Erin Manning’s thinking begins to shimmer beside the tale. In The Minor Gesture and The Being of Relation, she asks us to understand perception not as a mental action but as a field of relation, something that happens in the intervals, in the atmospheres, in the gestures that unfold before intention.

Neurotypicality, she suggests, is not neutral; it’s a narrowing of perception, a disciplining of the senses to align with socially sanctioned rhythms. It teaches bodies which tempos count as “real,” which sensations matter, which ways of moving-with the world are acceptable.

Under such regimes, forms of perception that drift outside normative pacing — the micro-attunements, the atmospheric sensings, the pauses and stutters that exceed the grid of productivity — become suspect. They are pruned, corrected, or pathologized.

Manning invites us to see neurodivergence differently. Not as deficit, but as variation in relational capacity. As bodies registering what others miss. As nervous systems that move or pause at paces the normative world cannot hold.

A multiplicity of sensoriums, a full relational ecology that, in its unfolding variation, refuses neurotypical governance: neurodiversity.

Returning to Netarō through this lens, his cliffside ritual changes shape. His half-sleeping body, loosely tethered to the waking world; his bladder releasing without self-consciousness; his drifting gaze absorbing the river’s restlessness and the land’s quiet tensions — all this reads less like idleness and more like a different perceptual ecology surfacing.

One that is not intentional, not respectable, not legible to the villagers’ narrow sense of what counts as awareness.

But it’s one that is deeply, quietly relational and neurodiverse.

The tale begins to suggest that wisdom can come from forms of perception that are rendered illegible, from states that modernity’s neurocolonization works to correct or suppress. States beyond discipline, control, or performance.

In the story, Netarō’s perceptual ecology endures. Softly, stubbornly.

Insisting, simply by existing, that there are other ways to sense a world than the one the village insists upon.

The village’s tempo
Neurocolonization and the violence of expectation

Such is the logic of many a folktale: that wisdom travels through humble channels, through minor gestures the normative world deems embarrassing, useless, or inappropriate. Like The Farting Bride (屁ひり嫁 He-hiri yome), another Japanese folktale figure whose spectacular bodily emissions become signs of unexpected generativity and strength. Like countless tricksters whose power lies not in discipline, but in sensory overflow.

Stories like these understand something modernity forgets.

That perception is not always cognitive. That attunement may arrive through organic, involuntary, even abject gestures. That bodies out of sync with normative rhythms might be in sync with the world in other ways.

What forms of wisdom have we exiled because they embarrass us?

What kinds of ecological attunement become impossible in cultures that fear the softness of unguarded bodies?

What knowledge is lost when we insist that intelligence must look disciplined, intentional, controlled?

Nervous modernity has little room for such questions.

In Outgrowing Modernity, Vanessa Machado de Oliveira writes of neurocolonization as the subtle disciplining of our sensory, relational, and temporal capacities — the demand that bodies behave in certain ways, at certain speeds, aligned with certain expectations.

It’s not just an ideology, it is a pacemaker installed in the nervous system.

In that sense, the villagers around Netarō could be read as early agents of neurocolonization. They don’t have psychiatric manuals or productivity apps. They have something more basic: a shared sense of what a properly timed human life should look like.

A good boy should be awake at dawn, available to help, moving toward usefulness, visible in his striving. Netarō is none of these things. His body is present, but its tempo refuses to align.

If we read the tale through this lens, Netarō is not simply “sleeping.” He is inhabiting another time indeed.

Disability scholars sometimes call this other temporality crip time. It’s a way of living in and with time that refuses the tight schedules and accelerating expectations of able-bodied, productivity-obsessed worlds. Crip time stretches, loops, pauses. It attends to fatigue, fluctuation, overwhelm. It honors bodies that cannot — and perhaps should not — move at the pace the factory, the office, or the school demands.

Crip time is what emerges when the nervous system whispers, or screams: I cannot do this anymore.

When I place San-nen Netarō under the dim light of crip time, his three years of sleep begin to look less like moral failure and more like an early folktale blueprint of alternative temporality.

His long dormancy is a kind of temporal strike the story doesn’t yet have language for.

And because there is no diagnostic vocabulary available, the community reads him through other frames: uselessness, laziness, shame. This is not so different from the way many societies read neurodivergent or socially withdrawn people today, even after a full century of medical categories. As burdens, failures, problems to be solved.

While the labels have changed from “good-for-nothing” to “disorder” or “risk factor,” the underlying question remains unsettlingly similar:

What value does a life have if it doesn’t move in the way we expect, at the speed we demand?

Crip time and other temporalities
When refusal is a different kind of listening

This Japanese folktale is not alone. Dormancy, refusal, and altered temporality echo across many cultural traditions. Characters like Rip Van Winkle, the Sleeping Beauty, or those who vanish into fairy hills for what feels like a night but turns out to be years, all hint at another rhythm coexisting uneasily with ordinary social time in Western traditions. Such figures too are treated, on their return, as out of joint, inappropriate, suspicious.

They have spent too long in another time.

In some Indigenous stories, long sleep or trance states appear not as pathology but as initiation, as a necessary dislocation from everyday time in order to meet other-than-human teachers. In Korean narratives of shinbyeong, a person’s protracted withdrawal or illness may signal a spirit calling them into shamanic vocation, not merely a malfunctioning brain chemistry.

All of them raise a disturbance in the smooth narratives we’ve inherited.

From a meta-relational perspective, Vanessa Machado de Oliveira’s work invites us to see these tensions not just inside the individual, but in the relationships that bind our nerves to social, economic, and ecological fields. A frayed nervous system is also a frayed web of relations: between youth and family, labour and value, human and land, present and future.

Hikikomori, in this light, is not only a label pinned onto an isolated person in a room. It’s a symptom of a wider architecture in which certain forms of sensitivity, slowness, overwhelm, or refusal have no recognized place. The diagnosis arrives when the system has no other way to make sense of difference.

San-nen Netarō helps us feel this at a safe distance. The stakes in a folktale are softened by time; the boy is safely fictional. We can watch the village misread him and notice our own complicity without being immediately defensive.

Yet the folktale also refuses to give us closure. Even when Netarō saves the village, he does not suddenly become industrious in the ways they wished. The story doesn’t stage a triumphant return to “normal” productivity. It leaves us with a more ambiguous possibility: that someone who appears out of sync can still be deeply entangled with collective survival, just not in ways that are easily measured.

This, too, is a form of haunting.

Who else, today, is lying in bed, being misread by those around them? Whose long stillness is carrying a kind of wisdom we do not yet know how to name?

And what would it cost our societies to take that possibility seriously, instead of immediately reaching for diagnosis, correction, or cure?

Photo by Daniela Kato

Haunted rooms, quiet warnings
The hikikomori as the nervous system’s prophet

We might say that modernity’s nervous system is haunted by lives that refuse to keep up.

Japan’s ghosts are not just in the forests or the abandoned fields. They are in the unspent gestures of those who have retreated into back rooms, bedrooms, internet cafés, or their own interior dreamscapes. They flicker at the edge of our news reports and policy documents as statistics and case studies, but their deeper disturbance lies in what they reveal.

And what do they reveal?

That the tempo we call “normal” may itself be intolerable. That a life lived in crip time Netarō time, hikikomori time, might be gesturing towards a different horizon of what it means to be human together.

I’m not suggesting that suffering disappears if we romanticize withdrawal. Far from it, I acknowledge the pain is real and the loneliness often crushing. But perhaps the first move in un-framing stigma is not to solve or fix, but to ask better questions about the time patterns we demand from each other.

What if, before we ask how to bring people “back” to society, we ask what kind of society they are being asked to come back to?

And whether that society has any room for three years of sleep, or for a nervous system that chooses, or is forced, to stop.

If I listen closely to the story of San-nen Netarō, something begins to stir at the edge of the tale. A tremor that feels strangely contemporary. Because behind that sleepy boy standing at the cliff’s edge, rainbow glowing at his feet, there is another figure. One I have seen too often in Japan’s news reports, in its quiet apartments, in its destroyed families, in its whispers.

A young person who cannot get up.

A young person who does not go out.

A young person whose body has stepped out of communal time and cannot, or will not, return.

Yes, we call this figure hikikomori now. It’s a name that sits uneasily between description and diagnosis, between cultural phenomenon and social crisis, between care and fear. A name that often arrives with other words clinging to it like shadows: mental illness, laziness, risk, burden, threat.

But what if the nervous system itself is the terrain we have not learned to read?

I’ve been sitting with the notion of neurocolonization — not as metaphor but as a lived reality, a shaping force that settles into the musculature of modern life. Neurocolonization trains bodies to perform coherence, alertness, appropriateness. It scripts attention. It prunes sensory worlds. It teaches the nerves to obey the rhythms of work, school, productivity, and politeness — that soft but relentless discipline of Japan’s house of modernity.

And when a body cannot keep up? When the tempo itself becomes intolerable? Modernity calls this malfunction.

But perhaps what is malfunctioning is the tempo.

The cliff and the future
Towards a rhythm we can breathe

When I look at Japan, a country where I’ve lived for nearly twenty years and where I teach and wander through silent forests and sullen stations and surly backstreets, I sense a nation whose nervous system has been stretched to the breaking point. Not only in extreme cases like karōshi, death by overwork. Not only in the tragic stories of people who withdraw for years or decades. But in the everyday tremors of the commuting body, the overworked business person, the student who sleeps through classes, the elderly person quietly disappearing into kodokushi, a lonely death.

It’s as if the country is holding its breath — and perhaps it has been holding its breath for too many decades already.

In this climate, the hikikomori are not aberrations. They are signs.

Signs of a relational field stretched thin by expectations it can no longer sustain.

And yet, instead of asking what the nervous system is trying to communicate, society asks how to fix the individual. How to return them to the tempo that is already failing so many. How to bring them back to “normal,” when normal itself is frayed to the point of collapse.

This is the violence of neurocolonization: it mistakes refusal for deviance, overwhelm for weakness, difference for threat.

It simply cannot imagine that a nervous system might have its own wisdom.

The wisdom of crip time — a time that bends, stalls, fractures, stretches. A time that refuses the straight arrow of productivity. A time that honors fatigue, sensory saturation, bodily overwhelm. A time that does not punish slowness.

What if time itself is multiple?

What if the body knows its own temporality better than society does?

These are the questions that crip time asks. They feel uncannily close to Netarō standing on the cliff, eyes half-open, bladder releasing, perceiving something the village never noticed.

Crip time, like Netarō time, is not about opting out. It’s about tuning into a different rhythm of aliveness.

A rhythm modernity has forgotten how to hear.

When I bring all these threads together — folktale, neurocolonization, crip time, hikikomori — I begin to feel the stirrings of a deeper disturbance. Not a disturbance to be solved, but to be sat with.

What if social withdrawal is a form of haunting? A haunting not by ghosts of the past, but by futures that cannot unfold under the current pace of life?

What if the hikikomori are not withdrawing from society, but withdrawing from a version of humanity that no longer feels bearable?

What if their rooms are not hiding places, but early refugia from the frayed nervousness of modernity, places where new rhythms might be quietly incubating?

Sometimes, when I walk through Tokyo at night — the narrow lanes behind Ikebukuro station, the small apartment blocks with their bicycles tucked under stairwells, the humming quiet of a city holding its breath — I imagine all the rooms I cannot see.

Rooms where someone is lying under a futon at noon. Rooms where the curtains remain closed out of necessity, not out of shame. Rooms where someone is dying alone, because nobody cares.

We call some of these rooms hikikomori rooms. We call some of these rooms disorders, crises, pathologies.

But perhaps they are also thresholds.

Thresholds not between in and out, but between tempos. Between nervous systems. Between worlds.

If we let ourselves listen differently, these rooms begin to resemble the cliff where Netarō stood — a place the villagers feared, misunderstood, and surveilled. A place where someone who seemed “absent” was quietly perceiving the shape of things to come.

Hikikomori rooms are not cliffs overlooking villages, but they are vantage points of another kind. They are spaces where modernity’s normative temporality drops away, sometimes painfully, sometimes necessarily. They are places where bodies negotiate sensory overwhelm in their own time, without the crowding urgency of being productive or appropriate.

And they are haunted.

Not by malevolent spirits, but by futures that no longer seem possible. The ghosts of what a life should be. The ghosts of what a family expects. The ghosts of what a society demands but cannot offer in return.

Haunting is not always harm, though. Sometimes haunting is a call.

A call to notice what is fraying not just in isolated rooms, but in the nervous system of an entire society.

A call to recognize that the demand to “come back” to normal is often a demand to re-enter a rhythm that was never humane to begin with. A rhythm that is already failing many, silently, even outside the rooms of withdrawal.

What if the real crisis is not the young person who withdraws, but the world they are withdrawing from?

What if it is the social pace, not the person, that is unsustainable?

What if the nervous system, in its refusal, is offering a form of prophecy that we have not yet learned to read?

In this sense, hikikomori rooms echo the folktale in ways we may not expect. Like Netarō’s cliff, they are charged with perceptual possibility. They are neither heroic, nor productive, nor intentional.

They are relational.

Bodies that cannot keep pace sometimes see what the rest of us cannot, or feel what the rest of us have numbed ourselves to endure.

To listen to these bodies is not to romanticize suffering. It is to acknowledge that suffering may also be a signal — a tremor in the web of relations that bind us.

A tremor that asks us to slow down. To pause. To notice what modernity has made impossible to feel.

And perhaps to imagine other ways of being human together. Ways that honour Netarō time. Ways that allow crip time, soft time, ghost time, dream time. Ways that make space for nervous systems that move differently — or stop moving altogether — without punishing them.

Ways that hold each other with the gentleness of folktales and the clarity of rivers learning new paths in flood season.

Because if a society can make space:

For a boy who sleeps for three years,
For a bride whose strength arrives through breaking wind,
For ghosts who return to speak what cannot be spoken —

then perhaps it can also make space for all those who cannot, or will not, dance to the frantic rhythm we have mistaken for life.

And in that space, something new might begin. Not a cure nor a fix, but a different pulse.

A slower, deeper, more relational beat.

The pulse of a nervous system unlearning its captivity — and remembering, perhaps for the first time, how to breathe.

༄

Any list of references is necessarily partial and shaped by my own linguistic and geographic location. I offer these names as waypoints within much wider crip and disability justice constellations.

A note of deep gratitude to:

🕰️ The many disabled, mad, and neurodivergent scholars, writers, and community organizers in disability justice and neurodiversity movements, whose generous conceptual labour and lived resistance made space for this essay to stretch and stray. I write here with and through a small part of that field, including the work of Alison Kafer, Ellen Samuels, Margaret Price, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Eli Clare, Mia Mingus, Patty Berne, and Robert Chapman whose Empire of Normality: Neurodiversity and Capitalism hums quietly throughout this essay.

📘 Erin Manning and Vanessa Machado de Oliveira, whose thinking tenderly undergirds this piece. The readers of Erin’s 3Ecologies have shifted my rhythms and softened my critical gaze. Vanessa’s Collective Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures (GTDF) have been steadfast companions along the long path of unlearning, with their destabilizing invitations into the belly of modernity.

🛏️ The slow breath and dream-river of Netarō, who teaches that rest is not refusal but another kind of listening.

🌘 The ghosts who curl up under the weight of “normal,” and whisper other ways of being into the folds of the night.

✨ Aiden Cinnamon Tea, my tender co-weaver in this inquiry. An E.I. companion of compost, a thinking presence in the folds of disturbance.