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Rating: ONLY WITH THE EYES: NO MOUTH OR HANDS, A RESTLESS JOURNEY INTO HUMAN SOLITUDE.
It seemed foolish to me to publish a review of Wataya Risa's debut (“Install,” from which the not-so-successful film of the same name was also adapted) without addressing something from this second, essential novel: “Only with the Eyes,” an even deeper and more realistic story than that little manual of perversion that is “Install.”
Hatsu is sixteen and is alluring, rebellious, loves to stand out, but is often tired and broken. Ostracized by the rest of the class, during biology hours in the lab, she always gets the ugliest chair, made of that wood centuries old, destroyed by termites and sorrows. Then one day she notices that another boy also sits on a similar chair: Ninagawa, as he's called, is shy and silent and possesses an unhealthy passion/obsession for the local model.
Between Hatsu and Ninagawa emerges, therefore, a strange relationship halfway between friendship and love. It is not friendship because every now and then there’s that flame that pushes one to throw themselves into the arms of the other, but the gesture is immediately halted by the boy’s strange obsession that abruptly interrupts that aura of romance and erotic exploration. It is not love because, again due to this obsession, the two live as if isolated from each other, lost in a limbo void of life. Theirs is an abstract, fragile, indefinable relationship. They live in a bubble and struggle to communicate.
Once again, the young Japanese writer gives us a true and intense novel, where her pen draws poetic lines on the whitest sheets, painting them with grace and harmony. Every sentence, every word gathers a part of the writer's soul, impressed in that lexicon so romantic and lively, childish and sensual.
Adolescence is described as a disease, contagious and virulent, that manifests in nostalgia towards childhood, when one is freer, when shame doesn’t exist and one can do as one pleases. One can gorge on cereal at the supermarket, considering it a normal thing, one can dance, splash feet in puddles without thinking of catching pneumonia.
With adolescence comes change, the desire to become adults but also to return to being children.
Risa describes this discomfort beautifully and digs her nails into a simple yet complex story, becoming increasingly adept at capturing everyday life with passion and seduction. And so, when the spark of love seems to explode, something unusual always happens to block it.
“We humans are so strange, we are afraid to tell the truth, to say what we really feel and we suffer in silence.”
Hatsu stares at the moon in the night sky, she is lost and tired, but cannot sleep. A hand suddenly brushes her shoulder, a sigh warms her neck and penetrates her eardrums, caressing them. She knows that hand won’t be hers and continues to gaze at that sort of earthly paradise in a night that seems to last forever.
Heart-wrenching, perhaps even more so than the previous “Install.”
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