No love, no sex, no marriage, no kids — such, in glum outline, is Japan today. It's too bleak a picture, it can't be true! But it can't be false either. If it were, people would be marrying, making babies and having love affairs. Instead, statistics reflecting everything from marriage and childbirth to condom sales and love hotel use are falling or, having fallen to record lows, stagnant. Even many teenagers — more than a third of boys, more than half of girls — find sex a bore and a nuisance, as a Japan Family Planning Association survey found earlier this year. Overseas, they look at Japan and snicker. "No sex please, we're Japanese," quipped USA Today back in 2004. "Only in Japan," it observed, "would a popular weekly news magazine" — Aera, as it happens — "deem it necessary to exhort the nation's youth to abstain from sexual abstinence."

The July issue of the monthly Takarajima features an interesting slant on abstinence, in the form of a meditation on the neologism himote, meaning unpopular. The article's author is Mami Amemiya, an "adult-video writer" who is clearly nonplussed by all this non-sex. Himote and its antecedent equivalent, motenai, used to refer, somewhat derisively, to the growing number of men and women who have never had a sexual relationship. Lately, Amemiya notes, the term has shed its negative image, to the point where some people even boast of being himote. Virginity, it is said, fuels creativity. Look at "The Train Man," the 2005 runaway bestseller that turned its poor mope of a protagonist into something of a spokesman for his generation. Not bad for a guy who couldn't even ask a girl for a date, let alone get one. Himote became an asset, a virtue. Himote types used to suffer discrimination. Now, says Amemiya, the shoe is on the other foot — you're more likely to suffer abuse if you're non-himote!

Sex, boring or not, nuisance or not, is not easily banished. It is not a gracious loser. Fling it out the front door, it slinks in through the back. It haunts people, or at least tries to, and not everyone is immune. Some who aren't figure in the weekly Sunday Mainichi's recent report on stalking.