Wataya Risa
Install

THE REVIEW

"Why do I have to keep living this life, repeating the same things every day like everyone else? The same class every day, the same uniform... it's true that I don't have a specific dream, but I do have aspirations."

Ah! Adolescence! Blessed youth! The period when you switch girlfriends as if girls were socks, the period when moods become uncontrollable and emotions take over, when you easily tell your parents off when you're scared of being questioned or left out of the coolest group in school.

This is the adolescence we all know, one that we have all encountered, for better or worse. You feel tired and euphoric, depending on the moment, undefined and lacking explanation.

Asako, the seventeen-year-old protagonist of this book, is an exception: she is tired, worn out, and doesn't even have a life ideal. She has few friends, a frequently absent mother, and attends her lessons reluctantly. The days pass by the same, lost among the blankets of her room overfilled with useless stuff, enclosed between the pillow and sheets, while outside, the world goes on seemingly unaware of her shattered soul. One day, however, something clicks within her: she decides to make a clean break.

She begins skipping classes and throws out everything she owns, including an old computer her grandfather gave her. Then, she meets a neighboring child, a computer genius and very intelligent, who buys the computer and locks himself in his room, followed by Asako. Here, the girl discovers the little genius's secret: a secret as disturbing as it is absurd. The young computer whiz often skips school and, in his free time, masquerades as a sexually repressed and eager housewife writing on an erotic website.

Asako, deciding to make a decisive turn in her life, chooses to identify with this child’s female and pornographic alter ego on the days he starts attending school. Gradually, she becomes more and more like this false woman, unearthing the deepest and hidden perversions of the human subconscious.

As I've recounted it, this story of "Install" seems almost like a Japanese and absurd version of any mediocre "Melissa P", yet it's completely different. Everything is written with a poetic and rarefied aura, completely abandoning the explicitly erotic component, focusing instead on the malaise of a society that has shipwrecked, seeking salvation in sex. A world where adults look for new perversions to return to childhood, and where adolescents and children pretend to be adults to feel free, available, ready for anything. "Install" describes it perfectly, with its cynical and sarcastic style, never vulgar, never obscene. Written with naivety, with a childish yet profound style, this little book of barely 130 pages captures a reality where the alter ego takes over the true identity, which will gradually be overridden by the former. Adolescence literally gets lost on a desktop of greenish color (the color of hope, repeatedly referenced in the novel, juxtaposed with almost derogatory terms), where one gets lost in the relentless clicking of a mouse, of windows opened and never closed, of misunderstandings between adults and children.

"Install" by the young Wataya Risa (twenty-four years old), one who has adolescence marked in her blood (as demonstrated by the following and beautiful "Solo Con Gli Occhi"), is an abysmal journey into perversions, not just sexual, leading to a truncated finale of rare beauty.

Because the true human perversion is life.