Becoming inauthentic: capitalism, commodification, and performance in Wataya risa’s Insutōru

Abstract

Asako, the protagonist of Wataya Risa’s 2004 novel Insutōru (Install), is a seventeen-year-old high school student who becomes fed up with the unrelieved sameness of late capitalist Japan. She is intensely aware of the value capitalist society places on her body, bearing as it does the desirable ‘brand’ of joshikōsei (female high-school student). As an act of defiance she stops attending school and throws away all her belongings and furniture, becoming a kind of hikikomori in order to remove herself from alienating Japanese society and capitalist mediation of her body and find some kind of authenticity. However, she comes to the realization that late capitalism is exitless, and her rebellion is doomed to failure. Salvation comes from an unlikely source: a neighbor elementary-school student who introduces her to a part-time job selling chatroom ‘sex’ on the internet. This paper argues that it is precisely the move into a social environment that is highly anonymized and heavily mediated by capital that allows Asako to come to terms with society. Online she plays the role of a 26-year-old housewife, allowing her to perform a different and adult femininity. Asako realizes that both capitalism’s discipline of her productivity and patriarchal society’s discipline of her body into a valuable commodity can be satisfied by inauthentic performance. In the end, Asako overcomes her angst by giving up on the need to discipline her authentic self into someone that can be accepted by a community or society that will provide meaning. Instead, she realizes that all of her interactions with friends, teachers, and society as a whole can be mere transactional performances. For Asako this is a kind of liberation, as she need only perform for society rather than discipline herself to become an authentic member of it.