Homesick for Another World

The unnamed narrator of “The Locked Room” is a young girl who attends a music school with her boyfriend, Takashi. Takashi dresses eccentrically, trims his eyelashes, draws on mustaches, vomits in public, and has poor personal hygiene. However, the narrator is drawn to him for his fearless rejection of others’ opinions. One spring day, the narrator and Takashi are exploring their music school when they accidentally get trapped in a fifth-floor rehearsal room. The two yell and bang on the locked door but no one can hear them. The room has one window and is filled with chairs, costumes from student productions, and a couch.

Takashi suggests that they stay in the room forever, but the narrator is determined to escape. She makes a long rope by tying together costumes, then ties one end of the rope to a radiator and lowers the other out the window, noting that it doesn’t quite reach the ground. The narrator notices a man who is unhoused walking through the alley and shouts for him, but Takashi pulls her back, telling her to be quiet. She tries to tell him that if they believe they can escape the room, they can do it. She determines to escape by climbing down the rope.

As the narrator begins to climb, a shiny copper-colored car pulls into the alley, and a man jumps out. He angrily yells at the narrator to get back inside, even calling her “young lady” as if he were speaking to his own daughter. She does as she is told, and later wonders whether the man might have been a guardian angel, but she doesn’t voice that thought to Takashi, fearing that he would only roll his eyes. Takashi believes the man was a hallucination, and that he and the narrator are living in a vortex. He claims that nothing is real except the room they are in. Immensely saddened at the thought of being locked in a room with this boy for all eternity, the narrator tells him she doesn’t want to be his girlfriend anymore. Shortly after, a janitor comes to rescue them. The narrator returns home, where her mother serves her a meal consisting of “a cold, boiled potato, black instant coffee, and small container of diet yogurt” (270). Her mother chastises her, saying “You should try harder to please me,” and the narrator says nothing to her mother but reveals to the reader the secret she learned in the locked room: that she should try to please no one but herself.