Elaborating on Barthes' famous distinction, this article examines the relationship between the writerly and the readerly in Abe Kazushige's novel Individual Projection (Indivijuaru purojekushon). The "writerly" (scriptible) designates an open-ended, playful narrative, giving free rein to the interpretation of the reader who thus becomes a co-writer of the text. The readerly (lisible), by contrast, implies authority and redundancy: it imposes a meaning or message, thus turning the reader into a consumer rather than producer of the text. I argue that Abe's novel is built upon an internal tension between the openness of the writerly and the more assertive and ethical message of the readerly. The first two parts of this essay focus on the writerly side of the text. Individual Projection could be first described as a parody (1. Political Utopia and Genre fiction as Parody in Individual Projection): through its unreliable narrator, the novel toys with stereotypes associated with political utopia and genre fiction. Such distancing with clichés destabilises the text and opens a free space of interpretation for the reader (2. Metafiction as Writerly Text: When the Reader Writes). Yet, the novel ends with a final metatextual reversal which reshapes our understanding of the story and redefines the reader's own relationship to the text (3. Metafiction: Revenge of the Author?). This end illustrates the paradoxical nature of metafiction in its relationship to the reader: its apparent semantic openness can also be a means to assert the author's authority over the text to convey a theoretical or philosophical message. Here, my own understanding of Individual Projection challenges Azuma Hiroki's interpretation of Abe's novel. Azuma saw in the openness of Individual Projection another illustration of his own theory both describing and advocating a free consumption of fiction, relying much more on the logic of recycling and recombination than on the linear path of the plot. If Azuma's interpretation sheds interesting light on the agency devoted to the reader in Individual Projection, it yet fails to apprehend the potentially critical message of the text: Abe's novel also suggests a pessimistic view of contemporary's hyperreality which seems quite antithetical to Azuma's own eulogy of postmodernity.