THE MAIN CHARACTERS of Katie Kitamura’s fiction are marginalized figures—middling middlemen—who work as translators or executors of other people’s plans. Their work often takes them far away from home, where much, as the saying goes, can get lost in translation. Her 2017 novel A Separation opens with its narrator on her way to Greece to locate her missing husband, from whom she’s estranged, acting as a go-between for her mother-in-law, who doesn’t know that they’ve separated. The trip results not in retrieval but in the discovery of her husband’s murder—a revelation that presents new complications. A literary translator by trade, the narrator now finds herself caught in further acts of translation: between her in-laws and husband, the living and the dead. In Kitamura’s next book, Intimacies (2021), a woman moves to The Hague to work as an interpreter at the International Criminal Court. Assigned to translate at the trial of a former president, she develops an unlikely union with the accused war criminal. “Of all the people in the city itself,” she comes to realize, he “was the person I knew best.”
In her role as courtroom translator, the protagonist finds herself getting lost in the words of the former president, her disorientation infiltrating even her winding sentences:
This was not aided by the fact that interpretation can be profoundly disorienting, you can be so caught up in the minutiae of the act, in trying to maintain utmost fidelity to the words being spoken first by the subject and then by yourself, that you do not necessarily apprehend the sense of the sentences themselves: you literally do not know what you are saying.
The act of translation is so all-consuming that the narrator can barely grasp the meaning of her own words. Only afterward does she realize how her presence was “soothing” for the accused: “for him I was pure instrument, someone without will or judgment, a consciousness-free zone into which he could escape, the only company he could now bear.” By disappearing so completely into the accused’s language, the narrator loses her own consciousness amid an act that would seem to require it.
For these characters, the work of translation is eminently physical, a labor that travels beyond the linguistic to involve nothing less than the use of one’s whole body. Audition, Kitamura’s latest, is her most corporeal book yet—one in which physical acts of translation take on a life of their own. The novel, which the author sees as forming a trilogy with A Separation and Intimacies, is, as she’s put it, “another book about language, about being occupied by somebody else’s language, about performance—of the three books in the trilogy, it’s most explicitly about performance.” While Audition carries forward shared themes from the two previous novels, the character at its center is a very different kind of intermediary—one who embodies a different form of translation.
Kitamura’s new novel takes place in the world of theater, where the actor serves as a translator between text and audience—a performance of intimacies. Appropriately, the scale of the book is also more intimate, its action largely contained to a few city blocks in Manhattan. A Separation and Intimacies have both been described as thrillers, their plots shot through with international crime and murder. By contrast, everything about Audition is quieter, more muted and mundane—though its effects are just as disorienting and dramatic. It’s as though Kitamura, by setting her story on a smaller stage, inversely imbues her characters’ every movement and gesture with larger import. Even when people are speaking sotto voce, their sighs and murmurs can still be heard from the back of the room. If A Separation narrates the unraveling of a union, and Intimacies dramatizes coming together, then Audition, as its title suggests, might be viewed as a series of trial runs—dress rehearsals for something like the real thing.
Audition is Kitamura’s most formally experimental novel to date, though it can be difficult at first to pinpoint exactly how or why. The narration is disarmingly direct—told in the first person by an unnamed woman whose cold, oblique voice sounds uncannily like the protagonists of Kitamura’s previous two novels. (A thought: Could it be that her translation trilogy is narrated by the same woman, taking on different personas? Should we just call her Katie Kitamura?) As with most auditions, the book begins in medias res: the narrator is meeting a significantly younger man named Xavier for lunch. Tensions are palpably high, yet impossible to attribute. Does the unease emanate from the restaurant’s host, who betrays “a flicker of surprise” when our protagonist—an established older actress—points to the table at which the handsome man is already seated? Or from the waiter, whose gaze the narrator observes “moving surreptitiously from me to the young man and back again”? Or does the discomfort emerge during the “awkward pause” before Xavier apologizes for “how he behaved the last time we met”? Maybe it’s coming from the narrator, who insists, a few beats later, that “no relationship between us can be possible.” Is this the breakup meal following an illicit tryst, perhaps, or something else? Midway through their awkward lunch, something even more awkward happens: the woman’s husband, Tomas, walks into the restaurant and, stumbling upon this scene, wordlessly turns around and walks out.
The husband’s abrupt entrance triggers a meditation on readings and misreadings—and how someone’s interpretation of an interaction might drastically differ from that of even their most intimate partner. (In this way, Audition begins, like A Separation, as a novel about a tenuous union—the marriage plot told from the side of its dissolution.) Back at their apartment, the narrator waits on edge for Tomas to come home. When he does, both act as if nothing has happened, making small talk while discussing where to go for dinner. It’s a mundane performance of married life that, from a distance, might not appear unusual due to its banality. Here, everything is a little vague, from Tomas’s description of their friend’s new paintings (“shapes and colors”) to the actress’s summary of her day (“Fine?”). This is an intimacy that leaves certain things unsaid—an intimacy on autopilot. But at the end of the chapter, the masks come off: as they put on their coats, Tomas asks, very quietly, “You’re not cheating on me again, are you?”
The way Tomas poses the question—at once “direct and distressingly oblique, arriving as it did without context or explanation”—offers a clue about Kitamura’s narrative strategies. Her elliptical plots bloom out of undertelling: they begin starkly, even allegorically, leaving her speakers to sketch in the details retroactively. In their role as first-person narrators, her protagonists perform yet another kind of interpretive work, doling out plot points and back history so readers might catch up. Kitamura’s central characters speak from the wings, half ready to join the action, and half keyed-in to the flow of bodies and props offstage. In this manner, they seem to back into their own characterization; they reveal themselves only after the fact.
Forty pages into Audition, the narrator comes clean. “What actually happened was this,” she begins, offering us a story within the story. She recalls meeting Xavier during a rehearsal. He asks her out for coffee. Sitting across from this attractive man, the narrator falls “regrettably in between roles, neither young enough to be romantic quarry nor prone to any maternal feeling.” Xavier, playing the role of director, believes her to be suited for at least one of these parts. He quotes an interview where she mentions “giving up” a child years ago, and suggests that the child might be him. (We are repeatedly told how much they resemble each other—a reference to their shared racialization, which is nonetheless left vague.) Xavier’s theory, she explains, is impossible. The child she gave up was not adopted but aborted. Unnerved, the narrator quickly gets up and returns to her rehearsal; while walking back to the theater, she experiences a “jolt of unforced admiration, for the totality of his performance.”
Xavier’s insinuation into the protagonist’s life begins, appropriately, in the theater. When she later runs into him on the street, he seems “a completely different person” casually mentioning how he’s now working for the director of the play. Xavier’s relaxed demeanor seems so unlike his prior self that the narrator finds herself questioning her memory of their awkward lunch date—whether “I had misunderstood or misinterpreted or even misremembered the entire unlikely thing.” (And we as readers are invited to question our interpretation of it as well.) At the level of pacing, there’s a kind of inevitable lag effect to these narrative switchbacks, as if someone had scrambled the intertitles of a silent film. Throughout the novel’s first section, the specter of that opening scene haunts the narrator’s consciousness—not because it conveys anything illicit, but because she’s unsure whether it happened at all.
Audition is a kind of backstage novel, where the setting comes to include the domestic sphere. While the protagonist knows “beyond doubt” that Tomas saw her at lunch, she remains unsure about his interpretation of the scene. Regardless of “what actually happened” (a recurring phrase throughout the book), the narrator senses how her marriage to Tomas, once “guarded by a shared reality,” has been altered by his seeing her with Xavier. What exactly constituted that shared reality is never made explicit. Readers apprehend the basic outlines of their marriage—shapes and colors—but never its content.
THE FORMAL STRANGENESS of Kitamura’s novels might be attributed to how they subvert the natural laws of cause and effect, as if to put the emotional climax before the narrative development, the punchline before the set-up. The way her plots unfold can be hard to describe, partly because their generic outlines fail to get at the heart of the matter. Organized around archetypal situations like murder, infidelity, and orphanhood, her books seem to arrive pre-scripted. Their surprising weirdness—what makes them utterly uncanny reading experiences—lies in the sense that you’ve kind of maybe already read a version of this story. That feeling is your cue to look even closer—at someone’s flickering glance, an affected gesture or awkward pause, which might add up to a performance so total you’re finally unsure whether it’s a performance at all. Summary might approach the dramatic irony and rhetorical bluntness of these books, but something more alien is at play in the way her narratives take shape, assuming one configuration and then sharply realigning it. Kitamura’s narrators function like optical illusions, revealing themselves to readers like magic eye puzzles, morphing between discordant views of what appears to be the same scene. As the narrator of Audition reflects during a rehearsal, “There are always two stories taking place at once, the narrative inside the play and the narrative around it, and the boundary between the two is more porous than you might think, that is both the danger and the excitement of the performance.”
Halfway through the novel, the narrator finds a crack in one of her stories, which then splits the novel in two. In rehearsals, she keeps struggling with a particularly tricky scene—a monologue described as “a black hole or box,” “indeterminate and cold,” much like her character. The difficulty of performing the scene becomes inextricable from that of interpreting it, and she finds the monologue impossibly belabored—“all a way of talking rather than talking itself.” Yet in close reading the scene, the narrator starts coming around on it: maybe it isn’t supposed to make sense. What if the playwright had simply grown tired of her character, and so “created this impossible scene to segue between not two versions of the same character, but two different characters altogether.” She relaxes, realizing there’s no way around “the rickety transition between the two halves of the play”—which become the rickety transition between the two halves of Kitamura’s novel.
The narrator’s easy acceptance of the shift between versions—of her character, of the play—only exacerbates the reader’s disorientation, because the two halves of the novel do not add up to a coherent story. The second “act” of Audition takes a near-surrealist turn, revealing Xavier now to be, in fact, the narrator’s son after all. The way Kitamura gets there is slippery—her approach both direct and distressingly oblique. The reader turns the page and suddenly, it’s months later, and the three characters from the opening scene are back together. “We were seated at a table for three, in the center of the restaurant, beneath a spotlight. . . . It was the same restaurant where I had met Xavier for lunch, all those months ago.” This time, there’s no ambiguity about their relationship to each other: the narrator and Tomas are married, and Xavier is their son. Nothing else changes besides this plot detail, which is of course to say that everything does.
KITAMURA’S TRANSLATION TRILOGY, as the titles suggest, takes not character types but relations as their central conceit. One obvious way to read Audition, then, is to view the first half as Xavier’s “audition” for the role of son, and the second half as his performance of it. (Remember: there are always two stories taking place at once.) That characters must remain plausibly coherent under unlikely circumstances is perhaps the organizing premise of realist fiction. But Audition pushes this governing logic to its narrative limits—not by changing how characters act, talk, or look, but by adjusting the relational sinews that bind them. Shift the interpersonal context, and you shift the fictional grounds.
Part two of Audition begins with a literal homecoming. Xavier asks his parents if he can return to his childhood apartment and live with them temporarily. “Just for a couple of months,” he reassures, and given his long hours at work, he’ll “barely be there.” Yet when the adult son reenters his aging parents’ home, he seems to them more like a “familiar stranger.” As in the first half, Xavier’s uncanny presence catalyzes a shift in their marriage, this time bringing them closer instead of pushing them apart. “We soon developed a routine,” the narrator reflects, “a way of being together again. A new constellation of old parts.” They form an odd throuple—with son reconciling husband and wife—as if to suggest that what makes a sustainable marriage is constant role-playing.
In interviews, Kitamura has framed the problem of marriage as a problem of perspective. Marriage has always been, at minimum, a two-body problem, in which both parties must arrive at some mutual understanding—if not agreement—of the other’s point of view. In this way, it is also a problem of two stories, always taking place at once. Love, here, is not about union so much as the ongoing problem of other people’s minds—that they have them and that they change them. A Separation and Intimacies both depict romantic fallouts, narrated solely from the woman’s viewpoint (a shift from Kitamura’s first two novels, The Longshot and Gone to the Forest, told from emphatically masculinist perspectives). Yet even when women find themselves scorned or betrayed, Kitamura never lets their version of the story take over. In A Separation, the narrator meets, and finds herself consoling, the younger woman with whom her dead husband recently had an affair. Even in such undignified circumstances, Kitamura remarks, “it’s not necessarily clear who is doing the abandoning, or who is betraying who. In the end, the question of fidelity isn’t only sexual, but it’s a question of belief—who is the first to lose faith in the idea of the marriage?” If marriage involves ongoing acts of faith, then it demands that both members behave accordingly—a two-person performance where each half must commit to the bit.
In act two of Audition, the narrator reflects on the “many shared intimacies and affinities” that constitute her marriage, “a weave so tight that it seemed impossible that it could accommodate another person.” Given that marriage is already hard enough to sustain with two people, what happens when you introduce a child—another body—to this arrangement, even if just temporarily (even if you barely see them)? In part one, before Xavier becomes the narrator’s son, he asks her a distressingly direct question about children: “You didn’t want to have any?” She falls silent, though her interior monologue launches into a philosophical aria: “People always talked about having children as an event, as a thing that took place, they forgot that not having children was also something that took place, that is to say it wasn’t a question of absence, a question of lack, it had its own presence in the world, it was its own event.”
One could read Audition as the dizzying thought experiment that emerges out of this void. The actress dodges Xavier’s question with a “short laugh” and an excuse about how “it was too late, and I was too old.” But her internal narration keeps running. A memory gets triggered:
What happened is this, I became pregnant a second time, and I did not immediately decide to have an abortion, but instead miscarried, eleven weeks into the pregnancy. This was far enough along so that the event was visceral and unmistakable. . . .
But—although that was not nothing, the physical process of passing the fetus or the embryo or the tissue, the range of possible worlds itself an indication of how mutable, how fraught the experience was, not something that could be swept under the carpet, it was among the more difficult experiences of my life, and I still did not know what to think about the fact that I had briefly borne death in my body—what actually stayed with me many years after the miscarriage itself was the texture of those two months, the two months before the positive test and the miscarriage, when I did not decide to have the baby but I did not decide to have an abortion either, and when the story of our life as a couple seemed suddenly open.
Kitamura’s sentences, which swell and recede, enact the uncertainty they describe. But as much as these passages sound a dramatic high note, they’re ultimately not the main event. The narrator tells the reader that “it was in the aftermath of the miscarriage that the affairs began in earnest.” Tomas never said anything, “never even acknowledged the fact of betrayal,” though the narrator senses a “yawning imbalance” in their marriage and decides one day to address it.
It begins with breakfast. One morning, she wakes up early and buys pastries for the two of them. The look of surprise on Tomas’s face when he sees her setting the table brings home just how long it’s been since she’d “performed even so small an act of kindness.” When he suggests they do it again, “that we do it daily,” she hears the urgency in his voice. While she doesn’t believe they’ll keep it up, this is what actually happens: they do, “first for a week, and then for a month, and then for so long that it became habit and routine, and in that small act of domesticity, I recommitted myself to the marriage.” She repeats: “In those rituals of daily life, I committed myself to the marriage, in all its mundanity, all over again. At least for a time.”
In Audition, the stability of marriage and family are repeatedly put to the test—radically destabilized not at the level of plot or personality, but through glances and quick gestures, small daily acts. Kitamura’s characters are continuously in the process of close-reading, sometimes too closely, the body language of other people, such that reading her fiction can produce the vertigo of trying to keep up with someone already mired in the megalomaniacal process of analysis. But if her protagonists are interpreters, then our role as readers is to put their acts of interpretation through their paces. They are unreliable narrators, though not in the generic way that all narrators might be described as unreliable. Instead, the bewildering angles at which her characters approach the potentially devastating facts and minutiae of their lives involves not just the coping mechanisms of self-deception, but also the searching efforts of deductive reasoning. After all, the work of literary criticism might ultimately amount to something like imperfect translation—explaining a text in your own words—though Kitamura’s books actively resist paraphrase. (Or let me try putting it this way: the experience of reading her novels could be analogized to that of parsing a bad translation, except you have no way of knowing whether the problem lies in you or the text.)
Kitamura’s acute attention to detail eschews easy analogies, but translation is of course an obvious metaphor for what the fiction writer herself performs: What does the novelist do but try to occupy the logic of other people’s minds, down to the grammar of their emotional reasoning, the syntax of their literal thoughts? In laying this process bare, Audition suggests the performative nature of intimacy—not only between fictional characters, but also reader and text—as necessarily always an act. After all is said and done—translated and performed, both a way of talking and the talking itself—we’re still left with the husk of a question: How do we know if intimacy is real? That what I feel in the moment is the same as or at least in dialogue with what you feel? The answer Kitamura’s novels suggest, is something like: practice. Fake it until it’s real.
Jane Hu is a writer living in Los Angeles and an assistant professor of English at USC.