Chapter 20 - "Welcome to the Starry Sky!"

'''Welcome to the Starry Sky! '''("Hoshizora ni yōkoso!", 星空にようこそ！) is the twentieth chapter of the Welcome to the N.H.K manga.

Summary
A flashback to Tatsuhiro Satou's childhood; he is gazing up at the stars with his parents. His father is impressed with his knowledge of the stars, and child Satou remarks that he will one day grow up to be a nobel-prize winning scholar. A later flashback to high school, he is observing the stars through a telescope in his club room. Before he gets a chance to show Hitomi Kashiwa the stars, she shares her ruminations with him, her thoughts of how insiginificant their lives truly are.

Back to present day, Satou is seen walking away from Misaki Nakahara at the park, telling her that he forgot something and has to depart. Tatsuhiro collapses to the ground and is once again flooded with suicidal thoughts. Misaki lifts him up and gives him some green tea. Satou is again confronted with the burn marks on Misaki's arm, and realizes that Hitomi was right. He is seen sprinting away.

Misaki rushes over to their apartments, and urges Kaoru Yamazaki to find him immediately, afraid that he is going to kill himself. Satou left directions to his location on his computer, and they follow him on train. Yamazaki reassures her that Satou is far too weak-willed to kill himself at the turn of a dime. Immediately after reassuring her of that, he seems to fortify the idea that Satou is as useless as he makes himself out to be. He is making no progress on their eroge, and it is his fault that Yamazaki must return to Hokkaido with his parents. He is relying on his parents to cover his expenses, and his "Senpai" abandonded him for a much better guy. He then comes to the realization that Satou is more than likely to commit suicide.

Satou is seen hiking to the precipice of a mountain. Misaki and Yamazaki arrive just in time, but lower in elevation than he is. Yamazaki attempts to climb up while Misaki talks him out of jumping. Satou cannot hear her, and admits that she was right about everything she said about him. He is a hikikomori, too afraid to do things that scare him, having hit rock bottom in almost every respect, and in an irredeemable position. He says that he is jumping for her, because despite being in an even more miserable position, she showed him kindness. He is jumping so his parents' life insurance funds for his son can go straight to her. However, Misaki also cannot hear him because of the wind. She admits that everything up to this point that she told him was a lie. She says that she had only said all of that to make him feel bad. Her parents are doing fine, and the burn marks were self-inflicted. Yamazaki arrives at the top, and Satou quickly makes up other excuses to justify his suicide. He tells Yamazaki to snap a picture of him, captioning that he had committed suicide for world peace. Then, he tries to crack his skull open with a rock, and says that he is splitting his head open to donate his brain to the metaphorical girl with "Alzheimer's" that they're creating the game for.

Misaki and Yamazaki help him up, Yamazaki reassuring him that he has not given up yet, and that he will not let Satou give up. They stare up to the starry night sky, now filled with stars.