After ending a nine-year relationship, and months away from turning 30, Ruge feels like a stranger in her own life. A tourist to herself and to that exotic single life, she begins to explore her sexuality through encounters with strangers she meets on an app someone suggested she download. “I think of forest fires, collective tragedies, mass suicides. Catastrophes that would make me feel less alone,” she reflects, while racing forward. She riffles through the catalog; she scrapes it. Encounter after encounter, she loses her sense of reality. She marvels at it, gets dizzy, and lets herself go. An ascent and a descent; a journey through the search for meaning and liquid love; boredom, frenzy, intimacy, and extimacy. As humorous as it is exasperating, Japen brilliantly and simply exploits the game of the double—one of the most fascinating literary devices—to create a dark and visceral heroine who addresses her sexuality without makeup, while trying to define, between the virtual and the real, on that border between the mental and the spiritual, the person she was and will be.
“Japen is a fast-paced, meticulously constructed narrative that, through images that combine personal and historical time, reflects the relationship between the subject and capitalist interpersonal mediations. Its endearing narrator critically, even ironically, addresses the universal crisis of human relationships in real life and in today's elaborate fiction of social media,” Iris García, Alejandro Arteaga, and Daniel Ferreira, jury of the 2019 Sergio Galindo Prize.