Tettyo Saito, a self-labelled hikikomori (social recluse) who has never set foot outside of his native Japan, navigates the Romanian language as a “cyberghost.” Saito took the Romanian literary world by storm when, in 2019, he published an autobiographical book written directly in Romanian. How I, a Social Recluse who Rarely Leaves Chiba, Became a Romanian-Language Novelist Without Ever Having Been Abroad details the life of a solitary young man who, while living in his childhood bedroom at his parents’ house, finds joy and meaning in the Romanian language. The literary voyage into Romanian is instigated when Saito sends thousands of friend requests to Romanian Facebook accounts, immersing himself in a Romanian metaverse, and in doing so, breaking free from his self-isolating shackles.

Saito has not limited himself to Romanian, and has begun learning Galician, Luxembourgish, and Welsh. Learning Welsh, or Cymraeg, has, for Saito, invited a potent awareness of English imperialism, given its history as the first language to suffer colonisation by the English, and consequently a realisation that Japanese, in parallel, is also colonising minority languages, such as the indigenous Ainu. The story of Tettyo Saito evokes the limitations and capacities of languages in contact, and the expansive horizons of global connection, countering the internet’s mass-cultural flattening. Here, he explains his approaches to writing, the liberation of writing in a language that is not one’s own, and the radical status of un-monetised hobbies in a life entrenched in capitalism.

EM Why did you decide to learn Romanian?

TS I saw a movie called Polițist, Adjectiv in 2015, and one of its themes is the Romanian language itself. There are discussions about how to use articles, and about refrains in song choruses. In the end the protagonist, who fails to fulfil his mission, is forced by his boss to read the dictionary definitions of words like “police officer” and “law,” and is told to live up to societal definitions, not personal ones. This final scene hit me with a shock. It was as if I were being hit directly on the brain with a dictionary. I needed to learn Romanian to understand this movie and Romanian culture itself.

EM How long did it take you to learn, and what was that process like?

TS At first, I studied Romanian using Japanese textbooks, but there were so few. Only three books were useful for my study, one of which was written 40 years ago in the Communist era. I needed to find another way to learn, and in order to integrate Romanian into my daily life, I sent friend requests to 3,000 or 4,000 Romanian people on Facebook, which completely inundated my timeline with Romanian. To begin with, writing stories was one way to study. I started by writing a diary, then I wrote an introduction to Japanese literature, and when I thought about how to write more difficult texts for the next phase, a story came to mind. So I wrote a short story, named “Un japonez ordinar / An Ordinary Japanese” as part of my study, but somehow it got published in the literary magazine LiterNautica. That’s how I made my debut in Romania. A tweet about my impressions of Politist, Adjectiv remains on X, and according to that, I watched this film on May 28, 2015. My debut in Romanian was on April 1, 2019. I remember the date because it was April Fool’s Day. So it took me about four years to make my debut, which is unbelievable as hell. Maybe it was because I was a hardcore hikikomori at that time, so I was able to study Romanian intensely every day.

EM Is writing in Romanian a form of escape for you? Does it allow you to do things you couldn’t in Japanese?

TS  At first, it was certainly an escape. It was an escape from a miserable reality and from the Japanese language, which at the time I disliked extremely. However, by learning Romanian and writing in it, I became able to see Japanese and my life from a completely different perspective, which was a truly enjoyable, life-changing experience. What started as an escape has become a magnificent joy and an important hobby. The term “hobby” might sound light, but it means that I can enjoy it without the pressure and responsibility of work. I don’t have to do it when I don’t want to, and there’s no need to capitalise on it. As long as we are born into this world, we can’t escape capitalism, but hobbies can be a sanctuary in that reality. Writing in Romanian is still both an escape and a source of pure enjoyment for me.

EM What’s it like to write in a language that isn’t your first? Can you explain how it affects your creative process?

TS  It is definitely a challenge. If you write in your first language, you don’t have to check a grammar book or dictionary again and again, but when you write in a non-native language, you are forced to use the dictionary every 30 seconds or so, to search for words, examples and conjugations. It’s like a puzzle. It takes a day to write sentences you could write in a few minutes in your first language. This cultivates perseverance to write, or more generally to create, which is an important skill to have in order to create your opus. As I mentioned, when you immerse yourself in a foreign language so deeply that your soul is fulfilled, you become able to view your first language as if it were a foreign language. When you become able to analyse its pros and cons objectively, you subconsciously change the way you use your native language. After my experience in Romanian, I wrote a book in Japanese, and people often tell me that my Japanese is unique. In such a situation, I can’t help but reply, “Yes, because it is not Japanese, but Romanian-Japanese!” And maybe what I am writing right now is Romanian-Japanese English. Writing in a language that isn’t your first affects not only your creativity but also your mind. I highly recommend it.

EM Do you speak any other languages? What is the difference between learning an accessible, culturally dominant language and one that isn’t quite so?

TS  Honestly, I can’t really say that I can “speak.” I have been living in Japan my whole life and I’ve never been to a foreign country, and there is absolutely no need to speak anything other than Japanese in my daily life. Therefore, I don’t really speak English or Romanian much. Generally, learning a foreign language is supposed to be for communication, but I actually prefer to use it for reading books and writing. Communication is secondary for me. I would rather learn grammar using texts and dictionaries to create sentences. By focusing my efforts on writing in this way, I was able to become a writer in Romanian. But I’m sure that’s not exactly what you’re asking. The languages I can somewhat understand, besides English, are Romanian, Luxembourgish, and Galician. Learning these minor languages allows me to discover information, knowledge and values that I had no idea about before, and this knowledge often comes from sources only known to native speakers. This kind of unknown excites me. The information you can learn through well-known languages is usually something that someone else already knows, as there are many people studying those languages, even in Japan. By learning minor languages, I get to know about what I don’t even know I want to know... Does that make sense? Anyway, such pleasurable “unknown unknowns” are everywhere in languages like Romanian, Luxembourgish and Galician.

EM Recently in the US and UK there has been a lot of buzz about Mircea Cărtărescu’s Solenoid. Did you enjoy it?

TS In Japan many people, including me, think, “Why is Murakami so popular in the world?” – and I have the same feeling towards Cărtărescu. In fact, I find many similarities between Cărtărescu and Murakami. They’re both candidates for the Nobel Prize, are deeply influenced by American culture, and both are obsessed with women’s nipples. In other words, misogyny abounds, and it prevents me from enjoying or reading their works. Still, I must say I’m not a good reader of his work. Solenoid, oh Solenoid! Reading Solenoid in Romanian, or any of his labyrinthine novels generally, is one of the most agonising penances for a Romanian learner, or maybe it is in any language. So, I’m surprised at the bombastic buzz. I already know there’s a lot of interesting Romanian literature, so I can’t go back to those days when I could enjoy that kind of penance as innocently.

EM How did you get your first book published?

TS I remember it vividly. When I tried to improve my hikikomori condition, I went to the shopping mall close to my home and read a book from the library named Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore by Elizabeth Rush. Then I checked my Gmail account through the free WiFi in the mall, and I found a message with a proposal to write about my life and experience with the Romanian language and culture. Truly suddenly, and out of the blue. I didn’t expect it to happen, and I didn’t wish to publish a book written in Japanese published in Japan – rather, I wanted to publish a book in Romania written in Romanian. But when I got the message, I thought, “Gee, finally writing has become my profession.” I started to write a book at a furious speed and finished the first manuscript after just three weeks. After spending nine months refining its writing style and content, my first book was published in February 2023 – an unforgettable moment for me.

EM What are your books about?

TS How I, a Social Recluse who Rarely Leaves Chiba, Became a Romanian-Language Novelist Without Ever Having Been Abroad is an autobiographical account of my 30-year life, centred on a deeply virtual yet meaningful grand tour through the Romanian language and culture. To my surprise, that book gained popularity, pushing me out of my room and into society. That shockwave became the core of my second book, The Revolution of My Life of Making Me Less Shitty and More Courageous, where I explore what I call “de-hikikomorisation” – the messy, liberating process of re-entering the world. It’s also about reconstructing masculinity in a healthier, more compassionate way, drawing on feminism and queer theory, and finding how to live those ideals in everyday life.

EM How has the reception of your speaking Romanian been in Romania – not just the reception of the book? As an English speaker speaking Romanian I was always met with confusion – but you seem to meet a lot of excitement.

TS  People from Romania are surprised by me. A famous novelist once said, “Why does a person from the country of Yukio Mishima and Yasunari Kawabata write in Romanian?” I felt pure delight. Moreover, there was a satirical collective who claimed that “Tettyo Saito” was a fictional writer they created, and one of Romania’s literary critics thought I was a fake because of that. This whole situation sounds like a story from a novel, which is quite hilarious. When I was thinking about this question, a word popped into my mind: unorthodox. I’m unorthodox in a religious way (Romania is a country of the Orthodox Church, but I’m not Orthodox), and I’m unorthodox in a metaphorical way. This word represents my situation, a Japanese person who writes in Romanian although he’s never been to Romania. Being unorthodox like this is wonderful.

There was a satirical collective who claimed that “Tettyo Saito” was a fictional writer they created, and one of Romania’s literary critics thought I was a fake because of that

EM How does it feel to be disconnected physically from your audience? Is this a help or a hindrance to your creative endeavour?

TS This situation is interesting. It might be a hindrance to publishing a book, but still, wandering through the Romanian literary world like a cyberghost feels pretty good, delightfully weird. It allows people to see my bare spirit, stripped of any unnecessary physicality. And the fact that this soul is being appreciated by  Romanian people is a gigantic honour. If I were living in Romania, writing in Romanian would no longer be a hobby. A hobby is a sanctuary for me to escape from the mundane tasks of everyday life, but there, using Romanian would become just one of many mundane tasks, which is ironic. I want Romanian to remain extraordinary beyond ordinary things, forever. So, personally, this spiritual situation isn’t bad for me.

EM What other languages are you studying?

TS  Now I’m studying Welsh, which should be called Cymraeg. One of the most exciting music scenes in the world is Cymraeg music by the younger generations of groups like Adwaith, Ynys, Tristwch y Fenywod, Cyn Cwsg and Tokomololo. Cymraeg is geographically the closest foreign language to England, but it’s completely different from English and any other European languages. Its uniqueness and beauty surprise me. Learning Cymraeg is also to be more deeply conscious of English imperialism, because this language was the first one colonised by the English. Cymraeg makes me also realise that my language, Japanese, is currently colonising minority languages in Japan like Ainu, Ryukyuan and Japanese Sign Language. I hope that Cymraeg and Cymru are recognised with dignity, as they should be. Diolch yn fawr!

EM What books are you excited about at the moment?

TS The Romanian philosopher Emil Cioran, who is one of the most influential people in my life, says, “What makes bad poets worse is that they read only poets (just as bad philosophers read only philosophers), whereas they would benefit much more from a book of botany or geology. We are enriched only by frequenting disciplines remote from our own.” Overwhelmed by this aphorism, I started to read books in different genres from literature and philosophy, like economics, biology and recipe books. I read a medical guidebook about high blood pressure. In particular, economics has made my perspective on society drastically change. The books currently making me excited as hell are Free Market: The History of an Idea (2022) by Jacob Soll; A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet (2017) by Raj Patel and Jason W. Moore; Weeb Economy: The Weebs Will Save Japan (2025) by Noah Smith; Visions of Inequality: From the French Revolution to the End of the Cold War (2023) by Branko Milanović and The Philosophy of Government Policy by Tsuyoshi Nakano.

EM What are you doing next?

TS I’ve spoken a lot about how having a hobby matters to me, but now I want to prioritise living a trivial daily life. Until recently, as a hikikomori I have focused on making art and doing my hobby while leaving tasks like making a living and doing housework to my parents. However, while writing my second book, I realised the importance of managing those aspects of daily life myself. I hope to create art that is inspired by the triviality and importance of daily life, which is completely opposite to my previous attitude, but all the more meaningful to me. .