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WORK TITLE: Audition
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WEBSITE: https://www.katiekitamura.com/
CITY: New York
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LAST VOLUME: CANR 335
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PERSONAL
Born June 3, 1979, in Sacramento, CA; married Hari Kunzru (a writer).
EDUCATION:Princeton University, A.B., 1999; University of London, M.Res., Ph.D.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer. London Consortium, London, England, honorary research fellow; New York University, teacher in creative writing program. Also worked as creative consultant to the three-part television documentary The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, 2006; producer of The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology. Guggenheim Foundation, Guggenheim Fellow, 2025.
AWARDS:Lannan Fellowship, 2015; Prix Litteraire Lucien Barriere, 2023, for Intimacies; Rome Prize in Literature, 2023.
WRITINGS
Contributor to periodicals, including New York Times, Wired, Frieze, Art Monthly, and London Guardian. Author’s works have been translated into twenty-four languages.
SIDELIGHTS
Katie Kitamura is a writer. Born on June 3, 1979, she grew up in California and earned her bachelor’s degree from Princeton University. Kitamura later earned both an M.Res. and Ph.D. from the University of London. Kitamura serves as an honorary research fellow at the London Consortium, and she worked as a creative consultant to the three-part television documentary The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema and as producer for The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology. She has contributed to periodicals, including the New York Times and London Guardian. She published her first book, Bushido: Legacies of the Japanese Tattoo, in 2000.
Kitamura published her first novel, The Longshot, in 2009. The mixed-martial-arts fighter Cal has trained hard with his coach, Riley, to avenge his loss by judge’s decision to the unbeaten champion Rivera four years earlier. Set just days before the match, Cal and Riley spend much of the time discussing the upcoming fight while preparing mentally and physically for the anticipated encounter.
In an interview on the website Baby Got Books, Kitamura shared her opinion as to why violent sports make for good literature. Kitamura explained: “I think writers necessarily live in their heads. It’s a disembodied lifestyle, and the highly embodied nature of combat sports can become an alluring contrast. I don’t know that writers are necessarily drawn to writing about what they know, even if they should be. I can only speak for myself, but I’m more often drawn to writing about what I don’t understand. You have to be a little bit in love with the world you’re writing about, and I think it’s easier to fall in love with what you don’t fully know.”
In the same interview, Kitamura also discussed her two protagonists and the unspoken emotional bond between them. She observed: “Any good fight tells an emotionally engaging story through the bodies, and not just the minds, of the fighters. I think I wanted to see if I could do the same in fiction. I didn’t want to do a lot of exposition on the emotions of the men, their motivations and their back-stories. When you sit down to watch a fight, you don’t need to know the back-story of the individual fighters to get drawn in.”
A contributor to the BSC Review website described the novel as “refreshingly modern,” adding that “the story offers a focused minimalism at its best. There isn’t much of a back story; there isn’t a wide angle lens. There is only a tight focus on the here and now. I think by any measurable standard The Longshot is a fantastic book but I would particularly implore fans of noir and crime fiction to make sure that they check it out.” In Kirkus Reviews, a critic called it “a real shot to the heart,” noting that the novel is “a resonant portrait of a man out to prove he can take anything the world throws at him.”
Thomas Gaughan, writing in Booklist, alerted readers that “this is one of those novels that catches the reader by surprise.” Gaughan claimed that “Kitamura is a genuine discovery.” Chris Nashawaty, writing in Entertainment Weekly, found the setting to be “fresh.” However, Nashawaty lamented that “at the final bell, it’s nothing you haven’t read before.” A reviewer in Publishers Weekly remarked that Kitamura writes “with descriptions of the action so vivid the reader feels the pain of every punch and kick.” In a review in Hyphen, Nawaaz Ahmed opined that “Riley’s anguished commitment to his fighter is tangibly moving.” Ahmed concluded that The Longshot “is a knockout book even for non-lovers of the sport.”
Kitamura followed The Longshot with Gone to the Forest, published in 2012. The novel follows three mysterious characters in an unnamed colonialized land. Tom lives under the thumb of his domineering father, known as the Old Man, who took possession of land there and thrived but has undergone steady decline. As the country and his family face destruction, the patriarch arranges a marriage between Tom and Carine, a manipulative woman with a past.
Reviewing Gone to the Forest for the New York Times Book Review, Rob Nixon wrote that the novel “may have a limiting frame, but it nonetheless confirms Kitamura’s prodigious talent. She has honed an austere, psychologically adept voice, one that’s perfectly fitted to the verbal reluctance and habitual physicality her leading men display. This new novel, like The Longshot, pries open, with rare insight and compassion, the dangerous vulnerability, the wounding woundedness, that defines her men.” A Kirkus Reviews contributor, was more critical, writing that “this book wavers, uncertain, between parable and reality, unable to commit to its own demands or come to terms with its premise.” A Publishers Weekly critic, on the other hand, asserted that “Kitamura, with spare, mesmerizing prose, paints a memorable vision of emotional chaos echoed by geologic and political turmoil.” Booklist contributor Thomas Gaughan predicted that “readers will be pondering Gone to the Forest long after they finish that final sentence.”
The unnamed narration in A Separation has happily separated from her wealthy-playboy-writer husband Christopher. He is somewhere in Greece researching his next book, and she is living in England working as a translator. Then Christopher’s mother, Isabella, who is unaware of the separation, calls the narrator and urges her to track Christopher down. Isabella has not heard back from Christopher and is worried that something has gone wrong, but the narrator is almost certain that Christopher has either become enthralled with his research or with a new lover. Nevertheless, the narrator grants Isabella’s request, and she figures at the very least that she and her estranged husband can finalize their divorce. Of course, Christopher is nowhere to be found when the narrator arrives in Greece, and the mystery of Christopher’s whereabouts deepens from there.
Most critics praised the novel, but a Publishers Weekly reviewer warned that “despite the mysterious premise, readers may find that the narrator’s frequent contemplation frustratingly stalls the novel.” Booklist correspondent Annie Bostrom, on the other hand, felt that this “immersive, probing psychological tale benefits from its narrator’s precise observations and nimble use of language.” A Kirkus Reviews contributor was also impressed, announcing that “dread and lassitude twist into a spare and stunning portrait of a marital estrangement.” The contributor went on to call A Separation “a minutely observed novel of infidelity [that] unsettles its characters and readers.”
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The novel Intimacies features a Japanese protagonist who has moved from New York City after her father’s death to The Hague in the Netherlands. There, she works as an interpreter at the International Court, and she hopes to find a new place to call home. Instead, she gets caught up in a series of dramas. One involves her lover Adrian, who is separated from his wife. Another involves an act of violence, with which the protagonist becomes obsessed. She even befriends the victim’s sister. Then her work becomes complicated when she is asked to interpret for a man accused of war crimes.
Writing in the the New Statesman, Leo Robson called the novel “wonderfully sly” and filled with “aesthetic suspense.” Lacey compared it to a “thriller or ghost story in which the bogeyman is the true nature of things.” Catherine Lacey, in the New York Times Book Review, also used the word “thriller” to describe the story but noted that “character motivation and development are less important here than the systems within which those characters live.” Lacey appreciated how “Kitamura’s prose elegantly breaks grammatical convention,” and she described the novel’s syntax as “sleek and satisfying.” The result for Lacy is a “brief and arresting book” with a “keen understanding of human behavior.” Annie Bostrom, in Booklist, had a similar take, describing the book as both “forthright and mysterious” and a “piercing and propulsive meditation on closeness of many sorts.” She praised Kitamura as a “master of precisely evocative language.”
Audition is a novel in which many things are uncertain. One character, an accomplished middle-aged actress, may or not be keeping secrets from her husband, and for that matter the same is true for him. When she has lunch with a man young enough to be her son, it is unclear what their relationship is. In an interview with the Harvard Gazette, Kitamura was pleased that the interviewer wondered if the novel was embracing the horror genre, and she acknowledged that she had been thinking of the classic horror book/film Rosemary’s Baby when she wrote it. Audition’s story is divided into two parts that are related and yet contradictory. In the first, the young man is not the actress’s son, but in the second he seems to be, almost as if the reader has entered an alternative version of the story.
Some reviewers enjoyed this novel even more than Kitamura’s earlier ones. Joumana Khatib, in the New York Times Book Review, called the book Kitamura’s “most thrilling examination yet of the deceit inherent in human connection.” Khatib wrote that Kitamura “traces the transfer of power between men and women with horse-race precision.” Chloe Ashby, in the Spectator, began the review by writing, “It is remarkable the web Katie Kitamura can spin around a scene as simple as a woman joining a man for lunch.” Ashby called the story “confounding and quietly intense.”
In the New Statesman, Megan Nolan, also heaped acclaim on Audition, writing “Kitamura is totally in control of her prodigious gifts.” Nolan praised Kitamura’s “confluence of style and ruthless intelligence” and ended her review by writing, “we are lucky to read her.” A reviewer in Kirkus Reviews used many of the same words other reviewers used in describing the book: “elegant,” “chilly,” full of “dread.” To those, this reviewer added “searing” and “psychologically profound.”
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BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, June 1, 2009, Thomas Gaughan, review of The Longshot, p. 35; July 1, 2012, Thomas Gaughan, review of Gone to the Forest, p. 23; December 1, 2016, Annie Bostrom, review of A Separation; June 1, 2021, Annie Bostrom, review of Intimacies, p. 34.
Entertainment Weekly, September 4, 2009, Chris Nashawaty, review of The Longshot, p. 65.
Hyphen, January 1, 2009, Nawaaz Ahmed, review of The Longshot, p. 51.
Kirkus Reviews, June 15, 2009, review of The Longshot; December 1, 2016, review of A Separation; February 1, 2025, review of Audition.
New Statesman, September 17, 2021, Leo Robson, “No Place Like Home,” review of Intimacies, p. 55; April 11, 2025, Megan Nolan, “Katie Kitamura’s Study of Social Dynamics,” review of Audition.
New York Times Book Review, November 11, 2012, Rob Nixon, review of Gone to the Forest, p. 15; August 8, 2021, Catherine Lacey, “Lost in Translation,” review of Intimacies, p. 13(L); May 11, 2025, Joumana Khatib, “Performance Anxiety,” review of Audition, p. 16.
Publishers Weekly, June 22, 2009, review of The Longshot, p. 31; June 11, 2012, review of Gone to the Forest, p. 30; November 14, 2016, review of A Separation; May 10, 2021, review of Intimacies, pp. 38+.
Spectator, May 3, 2025, Chloe Ashby, “A Perfect Stranger,” review of Audition, p. 35.
Times Literary Supplement, September 11, 2009, James Martin, review of The Longshot, p. 21.
ONLINE
Baby Got Books, http://www.babygotbooks.com/ (September 1, 2009), author interview.
BSC Review, http://www.bscreview.com/ (September 4, 2009), review of The Longshot.
Harvard Gazette, https://news.harvard.edu/ (April 21, 2025), Max Larkin, author interview.
Katie Kitamura website, https://www.katiekitamura.com/ (June 20, 2025).
London Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/ (April 12, 2025), Sophie McBain, author interview.
Simon & Schuster Website, http://www.simonandschuster.com/ (May 15, 2010), author interview.
Spectator Books Blog, http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/ (August 10, 2012), Samantha Kuok Leese, author interview.
We Love This Book, http://www.welovethisbook.com/ (January 25, 2013), Katie Allen, author interview.
Katie Kitamura’s most recent novel is Audition. She is also the author of Intimacies, one of The New York Times’ 10 Best Books of 2021 and one of Barack Obama’s favorite books of 2021. It was longlisted for the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award, and was a finalist for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize. In France, it won the Prix Litteraire Lucien Barriere, was a finalist for the Grand Prix de l’Heroine, and was longlisted for the Prix Fragonard. Her third novel, A Separation, was a finalist for the Premio von Rezzori and a New York Times Notable Book. Her two previous novels, Gone To The Forest and The Longshot, were both finalists for the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award.
Her work has been translated into 22 languages and is being adapted for film and television. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Rome Prize in Literature, a Cullman Center Fellowship, as well as fellowships from the Lannan, Santa Maddalena, and Jan Michalski foundations. Katie has written for publications including The New York Times Book Review, The Guardian, Granta, BOMB, Triple Canopy, and Frieze. She teaches in the creative writing program at New York University.
What really scares Katie Kitamura
Ahead of Harvard visit, author talks performance, privacy, and horror inspiration for latest novel
Max Larkin
Harvard Staff Writer
April 21, 2025
7 min read
On Tuesday, the Mahindra Humanities Center will host the novelist Katie Kitamura, in conversation with Claire Messud, the Joseph Y. Bae and Janice Lee Senior Lecturer on Fiction in Harvard’s English department.
Kitamura published her fifth novel, “Audition,” earlier this month. Like several of her past books, including 2021’s acclaimed “Intimacies,” it’s taut, engrossing, and occasionally eerie — this time revealing the uncanny underside to life in middle age, inside and out of a family’s New York City apartment.
Kitamura was recently named a 2025 Guggenheim Fellow in fiction. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, the novelist Hari Kunzru. The following interview was edited for length and clarity.
This latest book takes place under a cloud of uncertainty. In midlife, the central character may be very successful, or headed for a fall. She may be a mother, or not. She may be keeping secrets; her husband may be, too. It’s unsettling — is there any chance you’re becoming a horror novelist?
I love this question. With my last three novels, I’ve always thought of a genre as I was writing them. I wrote a novel called “A Separation,” and I thought of it as a missing-persons novel, a kind of mystery. And then I wrote a book called “Intimacies,” which is set in a war-crimes tribunal; I thought of that as a courtroom drama.
With this one, when I started writing it, I thought I’d like to be in conversation with horror, as a genre. The book that I had front of mind was “Rosemary’s Baby,” by Ira Levin — another book about troubled motherhood and New York real estate. These characters, this family: They’re trapped inside this apartment, and things grow increasingly frenetic.
There are also these uncanny moments — is this really my son? Is my husband all that he appears?
I think the really frightening moments in horror are when you look at something that you believe you understand, and you see something that is strange. In Shirley Jackson’s “The Haunting of Hill House,” one of the characters looks out the window and sees a part of the house she shouldn’t be able to see. Something about the entire geography and architecture of this home has changed.
I wanted to try to create that kind of feeling here: The central character is looking at people she believes she knows, and they seem like strangers to her. That, to me, is a very horror-adjacent feeling.
“The central character is looking at people she believes she knows, and they seem like strangers to her. That, to me, is a very horror-adjacent feeling.”
Book cover for Auditions.
It’s been remarked that this novel has a pandemic feel to it. Was that conscious on your part?
Well, there’s not a single mask, or vaccine, or virus in the book. But it was written during the pandemic, and it was only really in the last couple of weeks that I realized in some ways it is very much a pandemic novel: a small apartment with family members coming home, not having enough space and really driving each other up the wall, on some level.
That was not my intention at all. But my feeling is that as a writer, you can’t help but breathe the air you breathe; all of it, everything in the sociopolitical atmosphere, it ends up on the page in some way.
The title is “Audition.” Your central character is an actor — very attuned to other people’s performances, altogether off-stage. And performance has been a theme of yours for a while — the essential malleability, or adaptability, of who we are, how we are with each other.
Yes. And I think people might read my work and think I’m writing a critique of that — that I’m pointing to those performances to say that they’re artificial in some way.
But it’s almost really the opposite: I think we learn how to be through performance, in a fundamental way. When I look at my children, I know they’re learning what it means to exist in the world in part by mimicking things they’ve seen around them. That’s very natural: to play different parts in different situations.
I just think as a novelist, I’m interested in those moments when the crack between parts starts to show, or the script wears thin. And for a brief moment you see something that is not as contained or controlled — and that can be frightening.
We might live with a spouse, a child, a parent for years and years — and never see some whole parts of them. It feels like you ask here how well we can really know each other.
To me, a successful relationship is one that allows the other person a certain degree of privacy.
I think this idea of full disclosure between two people is a kind of myth, and I’m not sure it’s a particularly healthy one. There are parts of myself that I want to have only to myself, that I don’t feel a profound need to share with my partner. And similarly, I believe there are parts of himself he should be able to keep for himself.
Your novels tend to reveal a real love of language and performance, of literature and visual art. And not only are you writing, but you teach writing at New York University. In the AI moment, in a time of ecological crisis, why does it seem so important to you?
The day after the election, my students came into my workshop and they said, “What is the point of writing fiction in times like this?” And I thought, there’s never been a moment when it feels more crucial to me to write fiction.
The way I put it to them is if books were not powerful, then why would they be being banned all across the country? If they don’t pose some kind of threat to power, why would they be continually under attack? To use language with precision and care, to have control of language, that’s going to be tremendously important over the coming years.
One purpose of fiction is, of course, to observe reality as it exists and as we see it. But part of it is also to imagine a different kind of reality. And if we can’t imagine a different kind of reality, there’s no way that we can bring it into being.
So you’d stick up for the English major.
I would! I was an English major, and I felt like I was able to go lots of different places with that. But also, when I think about my day, I think, the most optimistic thing I do every single day is to read a book.
When you read a book, you open up your mind to another person, and that’s actually quite profound. We are easier to subjugate when we’re divided, when we’re atomized. And books are actually a tremendous force of connection. If you are one of the people who is tending the fire, keeping that connection alive, that is really not nothing at all.
Interview
Novelist Katie Kitamura: ‘As Trump tries to take away everything I love, it’s never been clearer that writing matters’
This article is more than 1 month old
Sophie McBain
The Japanese-American author of unsettling new novel Audition talks about why fiction isn’t frivolous, family life with fellow writer Hari Kunzru, and how US authors are facing a critical moment
Sat 12 Apr 2025 04.00 EDT
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Some years ago, Katie Kitamura came upon a headline that read something like: “A stranger told me I was his mother.” The headline gripped her, but she never clicked through to the article. She imagined the story would offer some explanation – perhaps the author had given up a child for adoption, for instance. “I was much more interested in not having a concrete answer but just exploring the situation itself,” she tells me. “I’m intrigued by the idea that you could be very settled in your life … and something could happen that could overturn everything that you understand about yourself and your place in the world.”
The headline provided the inspiration for Kitamura’s fifth novel, Audition, a beguiling and unsettling book that opens with a meeting between an unnamed actor and a handsome college student, Xavier, who claims he is her son. As the story unfolds, the truth of their entanglement becomes ever harder to discern – is he a liar or a fantasist, or is she mad?
Audition deliberately sets itself apart from the recent spate of popular novels – such as Rachel Yoder’s Nightbitch or Claire Kilroy’s Soldier Sailor – that explore the viscerality and intensity of early motherhood. Kitamura wanted to write something that was “temperature wise, on the opposite pole”, a novel more concerned with maternal separation, the unavoidable and necessary estrangement that occurs as children grow up and away from their parents. Her fiction has always been interested in the moments when you look at a person you know well and they appear to you as a stranger, and it occurred to her that this happens often between parents and their children. Her own children, aged 12 and eight, are “very surprising creatures”, she says, and she marvels at how rapidly their relationship, and her experience of motherhood, changes as they change. When she speaks to friends whose grown-up children have moved back home, they tell her it’s “like living with a stranger”. “You do not recognise large swathes of their personality and their way of being in the world,” she says. “Talking with people, it doesn’t seem like it’s a reconstitution of the old family unit. It feels like a reorganisation of the family.”
In Kitamura’s books, the female protagonists are so reserved that they are often accused of being cold or arrogant, but she herself is disarmingly warm and unassuming. “Is it OK if I get a cookie too?” she asks when we first meet, at a coffee shop in Brooklyn, New York. She is dressed elegantly, in a slouchy suit and big sunglasses, and she laughs a lot, generally at herself. At one point, she tells me that when a family friend said she was excited to read her book, Kitamura’s daughter challenged her. “She doesn’t have a book coming out,” her daughter insisted, “I’ve never seen her write!” “And that,” Kitamura says, “feels like a very accurate description of my life.”
Who of us has agency? I mean, what kind of a fantasy world are we living in?
“There’s something very interesting about being a parent, because suddenly there is another person in the world who is telling you who you are to them. And that is, in a lot of ways, the most important identity that you have, but it is somehow othered. I know very much that the person my children think I am is not the person I always feel myself to be – that crack in being, or experience, is something I wanted to explore.” The actor in Audition struggles to piece together the different parts of herself, her overlapping roles, on stage and in real life, as an artist, a wife and possibly a mother. Kitamura can relate. “Sometimes I feel like a teacher or a writer or a friend or a daughter or a wife or a mother, and there’s something that does feel a bit incommensurate about those parts,” she says.
She is married to the British novelist Hari Kunzru. Kunzru writes faster than her, she tells me, and he is better at sitting down to work after the children are in bed, or writing in 45-minute snatches during the day. Ah, I say, is that because of your role in the family: are you the one carrying the household’s mental load? But it isn’t. “My friend said something like, ‘Who does all the playdates and who books the appointments with the dentists?’ – and Hari does all that,” she says, laughing. He also does all the cooking.
Audition Katie Kitamura
Do they ever get jealous of one another, I ask, now openly stirring. No, she replies, because they write such different books: his are big and multistranded, hers are more compacted. Then she leans forward and says: “What does happen is one of us will have an idea and we’ll say to the other, ‘That’s something you should write’.” Her manner is confessional, as though this weren’t the opposite of what jealous people would do. They are each other’s first editors and always undertake a final read of one another’s work before submission. On a day-to-day basis, Kitamura says, she appreciates her husband as the unloader of dishwasher and purchaser of laundry detergent, and then she’ll read his new book and think: “This is smart! You’ve had all this going on in your head as well!”
In light of her family dynamic, it’s interesting that her female characters in novels such as Intimacies and A Separation are often married to writers but themselves work as interpreters, translators or actors – mediums for other people’s messages. Kitamura says she is uncomfortable with the idea of being a writer and sees her own role as closer to interpreting, to channelling other people’s voices. The women she writes about are often passive in their professional and personal lives, which she believes is true to life. “Who of us has that much agency? I mean, what kind of a fantasy world are we living in? We have the illusion of agency,” she says. “I’m interested in passivity in part because it’s the condition most of us live in. But I’m also interested in passivity because it is itself a kind of action.” She’s fascinated by the point at which passivity becomes complicity. Her characters often find themselves in ethically unsustainable positions: working for institutions they disapprove of, for instance, or accepting an inheritance although it isn’t rightfully theirs.
Katie Kitamura.
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‘I have to write from the middle of my life’ … Katie Kitamura. Photograph: Benedict Evans/The Guardian
We meet in late February, and it seems everyone I’ve passed today in New York has been discussing politics. Kitamura has not been sleeping well. She never sleeps well during a Trump presidency, she half jokes. She teaches on New York University’s graduate creative writing programme and says that the day after the 2024 election her students asked her what the point was of fiction: did they not have an obligation to resist Trump more directly? She had struggled with that question herself in 2016, but the second Trump administration has been so extreme that she can now see with greater clarity the urgent importance of writing, art and education. This is, she says, “in part because they are being targeted so fiercely, but also because [Trump and his allies] are trying to take away everything I love and care about. It’s never been clearer to me that writing actually does matter. It’s not a frivolous or useless task.”
In an immediate way, she continues, writers are well placed to respond to Trump’s attacks on language, the obfuscation and doublespeak, the moral panic over pronouns or the renaming of the Gulf of Mexico. More broadly, fiction can act as an antidote to authoritarianism. If authoritarianism thrives when people are isolated, fiction brings people together, she says. “In the most basic way, writing is about opening yourself to another person’s mind. The most intimate thing I do on a daily basis is pick up a book and open myself to another person.” And, while the Trump administration may be forcing one way of life on the world, fiction’s job is, as always, to remind people that there are “other ways of being”.
Before Kitamura wanted to be a writer, she wanted to be a ballerina. She was raised in California, where her parents had moved from Japan for her father’s job as a professor of engineering at the University of California. Throughout school, she left class at noon to dance, and she planned to go professional. But she got injured and says that was “the nail in the coffin” because it was becoming clear that she wasn’t quite good enough to make it. Having never thought she’d go to college, she won a place at Princeton University, where she studied English. Kitamura sees similarities between dance and writing. Both require discipline: “It’s doing the same thing over and over again, reworking and reworking.” It strikes me too that if ballerinas excel at masking the pain and physical effort required for their art, Kitamura’s writing shows similar restraint and contrast, between the streamlined, exacting prose and its roiling undercurrents.
It’s really a brutal exertion of power over another person – but it’s also just parenting
In 1999, after Princeton, Kitamura moved to the UK to study for a PhD in literature at the London Consortium. She worked part time at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (where she met Kunzru) in the early 00s, and found London’s art and cultural scene vibrant and exciting. “People were taking incredible risks with their work, and that was interesting to see,” she recalls. In 2009, she published her first novel, The Longshot, about a mixed martial arts fighter preparing for his comeback match. She has retained a keen interest in performance, “both the pressures and incredible freedom of it”. In Audition, the actor believes that “a performance existed in the space between the work and the audience” and Kitamura believes the same to be true of books. She wanted Audition to be open to multiple, mutually exclusive interpretations, so that a reader could form their own conclusions. She’s curious about what it may say about a reader that they settle for one reading over another, concluding ultimately that the “son”, Xavier, is a con artist, perhaps, or that the actor is a “bad” mother.
Audition forms a loose trilogy with her two preceding books, A Separation and Intimacies, novels that similarly have a keen eye for the sinister, for the subtle and yet threatening shifts in power between people, for the moments when closeness becomes dangerous or suffocating. “We have such a tendency to think of intimacy as something desirable, something we seek out with other people,” she says, “but it can also be an imposition.” In Audition, the narrator is almost pathologically attuned to the power renegotiations in the family. The person who is most desired holds the upper hand, the actor observes. Money also shapes how the characters relate to one another, sometimes in unexpected ways: at points, characters try to buy power, but their generosity only weakens them, exposing the extent of their need.
Kitamura says she is both fascinated and horrified by the occasions when she has exerted power over her children. “Those moments make me very uncomfortable. It’s really simple things, like when you send them to their room or you lose your temper, or when they are little, you pick them up against their will. It’s really a brutal exertion of power over another person, but it’s also just parenting,” she says, revealing her ability to identify the disquieting elements in everyday interactions. At the same time, she observes, parenthood can make you feel powerless. She often feels powerless to protect her children from the world.
She has already started on her next novel, which she says will be very different from her previous books. She checks herself: “Well, it’s not a maximalist … it’s a difference that will be significant to me and nobody else.” She is itching to write, but there’s the book tour, her teaching and, of course, family life. Like any working parent, the fact that she has so little time to herself, so little solitude, could make her unhappy, but she’s come to accept that “work comes from the mess of life”, creativity doesn’t come from a vacuum. “I have to write from the middle of my life, that’s all I can do,” she says. “I’m not going to wait for a decade to pass until I have more time.”
Audition by Katie Kitamura will be published by Fern on 17 April. To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Katie Kitamura
Kitamura in 2025
Kitamura in 2025
Born 1979 (age 45–46)
Sacramento, California, U.S.
Language English
Education Princeton University
London Consortium (PhD)
Notable works The Longshot
Spouse Hari Kunzru
Children 2[1]
Katie Kitamura (born 1979) is an American novelist, journalist, and art critic. As of April 2025, she was teaching creative writing at New York University.
Early life and education
Katie Kitamura was born in Sacramento, California[2] in 1979 to a family of Japanese origin,[3] and raised in Davis, where her father Ryuichi was a professor at UC Davis Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering.[4][5][6]
Kitamura graduated from Princeton University in New Jersey in 1999. She earned a PhD in American literature from the London Consortium.[7] Her thesis was titled The Aesthetics of Vulgarity and the Modern American Novel (2005).[8]
Earlier in her life, Kitamura trained as a ballerina.[9][10]
Career
Kitamura wrote Japanese for Travellers: A Journey, describing her travels across Japan and examining the dichotomies of its society and her own place in it as a Japanese-American.[11]
Kitamura was introduced to mixed martial arts in Japan by her brother.[12] Her first novel, The Longshot, published in 2009, is about the preparation undertaken by a fighter and his trainer ahead of a championship bout against a famous opponent. The cover art of the US edition of her book features the title tattooed on knuckles; the knuckles are her brother's.[9] Kitamura's second novel, Gone to the Forest, published in 2013, is set in an unnamed colonial country and describes the life and suffering of a landowning family against a backdrop of civil strife and political change.[13]
Kitamura's 2017 novel A Separation will be adapted for a film starring Katherine Waterston.[14] Her novel Intimacies appeared in 2021.
Kitamura writes for The Guardian, The New York Times, and Wired.[4] She has written articles on mixed martial arts,[15] film criticism and analysis,[16] and art.[17][18]
Awards and recognition
In 2010, Kitamura's The Longshot was shortlisted for the New York Public Library's Young Lions Fiction Award.[19] In 2013, her Gone to the Forest was also shortlisted for the Young Lions Fiction Award. In 2021, Kitamura's Intimacies was longlisted for the National Book Award for Fiction.[20]
Selected bibliography
Autobiography
—— (2006). Japanese for Travellers: A Journey. Hamish Hamilton. ISBN 978-0241142899.
Novels
—— (2009). The Longshot: A Novel. Free Press. ISBN 978-1439117606.
—— (2013). Gone to the Forest. Profile Books. ISBN 978-1847659071.
—— (2017). A Separation. Penguin Random House. ISBN 978-0399576126.
—— (2021). Intimacies. Riverhead Books. ISBN 978-0399576164.
—— (2025). Audition. Riverhead Books. ISBN 978-0593852323.
Journalism
Art criticism in frieze magazine.[21]
Art criticism in Contemporary magazine.[22]
Personal life
Kitamura is married to author Hari Kunzru.[23]
Katie Kitamura's thrilling new novel, ''Audition,'' examines the performances we put on for others -- and exposes the shams that underpin them.
AUDITION, by Katie Kitamura
In the opening scene of Katie Kitamura's new novel, ''Audition,'' a middle-aged actress of some renown meets with a much younger man in a faceless restaurant in Manhattan's financial district. The woman, our narrator, is deeply apprehensive about the encounter, and is swarmed by thoughts of the various interpretations strangers could be making when they see her with the man: that she is a lascivious predator, or his doting mother, or something else entirely.
This is comfortable terrain for Kitamura, who over five novels has perfected the maneuver of burrowing into such gaps between our innermost selves and the roles we perform for others. Her characters are often passive, but can hardly be called inert. She traces the transfer of power between men and women with horse-race precision, suggesting that in every dynamic, we are constantly being fitted for new costumes and vying for a starring part.
''Audition'' realizes Kitamura's longstanding interests in the form of a woman who inhabits roles for a living. It's her most thrilling examination yet of the deceit inherent in human connection.
The restaurant lunch is the characters' second meeting: The man, Xavier, tracked down the actress, who remains unnamed, hoping to learn whether she was the woman who put him up for adoption years earlier. (It's a fanciful theory on his part; the two are ''comparable in coloring,'' though their races are never identified, and they seem to share little else.) It's ''not possible,'' she explains -- she is no one's mother using any criteria.
But it's obvious Xavier still wants more from her than she will provide, and despite his sweetly immature tendencies -- his order of a burger and fries, his inability to deploy either his charisma or his beauty to maximum effect -- this imbalance threatens her. ''Below the surface demands and obtrusions of his personality,'' she thinks, ''was a ruthlessness I had not perceived or prepared for.''
The narrator is caught off guard throughout the novel's first half. Her longtime husband, Tomas, has earned the right to distrust her. ''You're not cheating on me again, are you?'' he abruptly asks her early on, one of several exchanges that briefly kicked the breath from my lungs.
At the theater, she struggles to make sense of the character she's been cast to portray. We learn little about the play itself except that the actress's part requires a joining of two disparate halves -- ''the movement from the woman in grief to the woman of action'' -- that are linked at best by a rickety footbridge of interpretation.
All the while, Xavier skulks along the margins of the play, worming his way closer to the actress by insinuating himself into the production. So much is left tacit -- are the narrator and Xavier actually having an affair? Will he harm her, or vice versa? -- that every interaction is startling, to the point that a simple encounter involving coffee and pastries takes on the feeling of a hostage negotiation.
Three brisk words from the play's director upend the trajectory of the story midway through the novel: ''We begin now.''
Turn the page and you're in an altogether different universe. The narrator and Tomas are still married in this dimension, and the actress is still starring in a play, to rapturous reviews. But Xavier now plays a central, enshrined role in their lives, encroaching on their aging, creative psyches with the sublimated menace of a young adult chasing artistic mastery of his own.
Few writers have nailed the interpersonal thriller better than Kitamura. ''A Separation'' (2017) follows a woman who somewhat ambivalently travels to Greece to search for her missing husband, from whom she has been secretly separated for months. In ''Intimacies,'' one of The Times's 10 Best Books of 2021, Kitamura stages interiority on a grander political scale: An interpreter at The Hague must translate the testimony of accused war criminals, a job that requires her to enter the minds of monsters.
In comparison, the dominant mood of ''Audition,'' to elegant effect, is an even quieter form of dread. The actress is an ideal figure to further refine questions that propel Kitamura's earlier work: Is it possible to ever truly know the people who surround us? How can we reconcile the acts we put on, even for our most cherished loved ones, with our slippery, truest selves?
The book's structure mirrors that of the play in Act I, with its nearly impossible task of interpreting two competing versions of a character. As in rehearsal, the actress wrestles in life with the various roles she plays -- wife, artist, adulterer, egotist.
''Too many parts -- those onstage and in life -- don't endure, and once they are gone, their logic is impossible to regain,'' the actress admits. Until then, it's up to her to use the ''voice that has been given to me,'' and plunge into ''the waiting darkness'' that surrounds her.
AUDITION | By Katie Kitamura | Riverhead | 197 pp. | $28
Joumana Khatib is an editor at the Book Review.
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Khatib, Joumana. "Performance Anxiety." The New York Times Book Review, 11 May 2025, p. 16. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A839141424/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=4368b891. Accessed 5 June 2025.
Audition
by Katie Kitamura
Penguin, [pounds sterling]18.99, pp. 208
It is remarkable the web Katie Kitamura can spin around a scene as simple as a woman joining a man for lunch. His name is Xavier. We don't know her name, but we do know she's a successful actress. He's beautiful, almost half her age, and she's aware of how that must look to the other diners, the waiter hovering at her elbow, and her husband, who inexplicably enters after their food arrives before exiting in a hurry. She and Xavier had met two weeks earlier when he appeared at the theatre where she was rehearsing for a play and said he had something 'complicated but important' to tell her: he had good reason to believe she might be his biological mother.
This is the piece of information around which Kitamura's confounding and quietly intense fifth novel shapeshifts. The text is divided into two equal parts, which are at once intricately entwined and polar opposites. In the first part, the narrator explains to Xavier that she can't be his mother because she has never given birth. To the reader she explains that she has been pregnant twice, and had one abortion and one miscarriage. In the second part, she and her husband are back at the restaurant, with Xavier, 'our child', discussing the prospect of him temporarily moving in to their apartment in the West Village.
It's unclear what's real and what's not: whether Xavier is a man in a muddle--after all, 'the dates and ages, they line up'--or 'a grifter', 'a con artist', 'in the grip of some serious delusion'. Even when the reunited family of three develop a new routine together, the narrator notes that Xavier still feels like a stranger: 'In truth, it was not exactly like having our child back home again; it was like having some ideal version of him returned, altered in all the ways we had hoped.'
Things become increasingly strange and jumbled: Xavier's friend Hana comes to stay, and the two of them slowly take over the apartment. As the balance of power changes--'the shift being entirely in Xavier's favour'--the narrator begins to question her own behaviour and memory. Having initially struggled to commit to the role she's performing onstage, she's left grappling offstage with the roles of mother and wife. What's really going on? If you're asking the question you're already caught in Kitamura's web.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 The Spectator Ltd. (UK)
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Ashby, Chloe. "A perfect stranger." Spectator, vol. 358, no. 10262, 3 May 2025, p. 35. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A838974372/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=4a66fb44. Accessed 5 June 2025.
Last year, at a New York event commemorating the late Paul Auster, I glanced over the crowd and saw Auster's widow, the prolific novelist and critic Siri Hustvedt, speaking to Katie Kitamura. I watched them for a few moments, and thought to myself that, apart from their mutual, once-in-a-generation brilliance, what they had in common was this: I would be mildly terrified to share close space with either of these writers, despite my ardent admiration, because of the dazzling, worrying acuity with which they observe social falsities. Very different novelists in some ways, they share the ability to coolly elucidate not just a particular milieu, but, somehow, the fundamental business of co-existence, all the ways we hide from and misunderstand one another, how we try and fail to disguise the fissures between us.
Kitamura's fourth novel, Intimacies, was her breakout success, received with near-universal acclaim and chosen by Barack Obama as one of his books of the year in 2021. Intimacies deals in part with how we fulfil the roles assigned to us by others and by the systems from within which we struggle to survive. A translator working at the International Criminal Court at the Hague observes the well-choreographed functionality of the justice system and notes the essential absurdity of performing such roles in response to moral injustices of the most unthinkable and nonsensical proportions: acts which have no redress but which nonetheless we are compelled and obliged to answer to with whatever limited tools we have agreed upon.
Now, Kitamura has written Audition, a novel as fascinated by the assignment of roles and the failures and functions of our social contracts as its predecessor, but focused on a more confined and private set of dynamics. The narrator is a successful actress entering middle age. When we meet her, she is sharing an ambiguous, fraught lunch with a beautiful young man half her age. Her husband, Tomas, enters the restaurant, to her alarm, but fails to see her and exits. Soon it is revealed that the young man, Xavier, had formerly and incorrectly believed her to be his biological mother, an impossibility which prompts her to recall her experiences of pregnancy with Tomas, once ending in abortion and once in miscarriage. Xavier is going to become an assistant at a theatre where the narrator is currently rehearsing an important role.
Halfway through the book, the reader is wrong-footed when an alternative version of this reality is presented without comment, introducing a world in which Xavier is and has always been her and Tomas's child. This Xavier is also an assistant at the theatre company, and is moving back in with his parents to save a little money, bringing with him, soon enough, a girlfriend named Marta whose incoherent and provocative manner confuses and enrages the narrator.
Like Intimacies, Audition is written in a style described by some as chilly or austere, one which observes its characters reacting, moment to moment, to events largely beyond their control, rather than dwelling within their interior monologues. It has the cumulative effect of building an unexpected sense of dread. This is a novel that draws its remarkable strength from the forensic examination of the performance of our social roles, which are doomed to frequent and humiliating failure. Its effect is somewhat reminiscent of noir cinema, particularly the sort which involves the disruptive spectre of the doppelganger. The opening scene, in which the narrator is surprised in the restaurant by her husband but then watches him leave without having seen her, is mundane but deeply unsettling in its depiction of seeing a person close to you as a stranger, an alien, for a moment:
"But at that moment, Tomas froze. He had his hands in his coat pockets and he began rummaging inside, as if looking for something--his phone or his wallet, perhaps his keys. He had stopped in the middle of the restaurant, I should have risen to my feet and gone to him, but I did not move. As I watched, Tomas spoke to the host, who nodded and shrugged. Tomas turned and retreated, walking swiftly across the dining room floor, as if he had forgotten or lost some item of importance. At the same time, alongside or propelling that urgency, was something shamefaced, something hidden and untoward."
There is a creepy sense of the narrator not having identified a doppelganger, but having become one herself through her unintended voyeurism. She is the wife who has just glimpsed her husband as though never having seen him before, but she is also the stranger he perceived her to be, an unknown woman sitting with a beautiful boy.
Some have quibbled with Kitamura's insistence on exteriority, but, as with Karl Ove Knausgaard, the forensic way she itemises her world does not confer bloodlessness but its opposite: a keen interest in human exchange which feels both passionate and sinister. I was reminded, too, of horror films that scare us through the slow erosion of social contracts, in which ordinary, socially minded people end up in terrifying, extreme situations because they are so committed to inhabiting the role of the appropriate, functional citizen. Take Michael Haneke's Funny Games or Christian Tafdrup's Speak No Evil: both almost unspeakably nasty works in which brutality is enabled by an absurd adherence to civilised pretence. In other moments, the scenes between the narrator and Marta--the narrator is certain that only she can see the reality of Marta's odd, manipulative actions-- recall the Emmanuel Carrere novel The Moustache, in which the narrator goes slowly mad after he shaves off his moustache and nobody in his life acknowledges it.
Occasionally, one senses the limitations created by Kitamura's aversion to belabouring her characters' inner lives, though for me never in a way that interrupts or undermines the book's compelling pleasures. We do not know, for instance, what meaning the narrator derives from her work in theatre, how its presence in her life affects her marriage, relationships or general existence beyond enabling the purchase of a West Village apartment and a moderately luxurious New York lifestyle. Admittedly, as the daughter of a playwright, I have an unusual appetite for theatre narratives, but it strikes me that, despite operating as the central organising motif of the novel, the theatre lacks much investigation. It's a lost opportunity, as the theatre world is one in which social conventions are highly specific. The pressure cooker of the temporary saturation in a rehearsal period, the minor devastation of developing intimacy with people you are doomed to lose after a limited period of time: it is a manic, sped-up representation of what it is to know others amid the everyday limitations of ordinary life.
But any complaints of this nature are rooted in praise. Kitamura is totally in control of her prodigious gifts. Her confluence of style and ruthless intelligence is so distinctive that it feels almost like its own genre. Whether she remains in the terrain she has established or not, we are lucky to read her.
Audition
Katie Kitamura
Fern, 208pp, 18.99 [pounds sterling]
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Caption: Photo by Caroline Tompkins / New York Times / Redux / eyevine
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 New Statesman, Ltd.
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Nolan, Megan. "Katie Kitamura's study of social dynamics: The novelist coolly examines how we interact with each other in a deeply unsettling story of reversals and doubles." New Statesman, vol. 153, no. 5810, 11 Apr. 2025. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A836135027/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=72f6080a. Accessed 5 June 2025.
Kitamura, Katie AUDITION Riverhead (Fiction None) $28.00 4, 8 ISBN: 9780593852323
An older woman and a younger man struggle to grasp who they are to each other in a slippery and penetrating tale.
This elegant knife of a story begins at a mundane restaurant in Manhattan's financial district, which the narrator hesitates to enter. Inside, she orders two gin and tonics over a strained lunch encounter with Xavier, who has said he believes he might be her son. The narrator is an actress of some renown rehearsing a difficult new play calledThe Opposite Shore. It isn't going well, and the actress realizes it falls to her to reconcile two impossible halves in its structure. As she fights through her dread, the novel launches Part II months later in the same restaurant, where Xavier and the actress are joined by her husband, Tomas, who toasts "the extraordinary success of the play." In this jarring reset, the trio is now a family, the play is now calledThe Rivers, and the novel is mirroring the irreconcilable halves the narrator sought to resolve on stage with her body and her art. Kitamura rewards close readers of this through-the-looking-glass disruption. So much glints below the surface in her purring, pared-down sentences. When Xavier introduces his girlfriend, "Tomas took her hand in his, his smile already an embarrassment to us both." Kitamura's great theme, explored via two other nameless female narrators inA Separation (2017) andIntimacies (2021), is the unknowability of others. This novel posits that even within a family, each member is constantly auditioning. As the tension mounts, and the narrator's interpretation of events coils back and multiplies, she wonders "what was a family if not a shared delusion, a mutual construction?" Over the shards of this realization, the shaken narrator and Xavier find "the possibility remained--not of a reconciliation, but of a reconstitution." The book ends as another play begins.
In this searing, chilly, and psychologically profound story lies insight into some harrowing human questions.
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"Kitamura, Katie: AUDITION." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Feb. 2025. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A825128215/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=a31c3bd3. Accessed 5 June 2025.
Intimacies
Katie Kitamura Jonathan Cape
230pp, 14.99 [pounds sterling]
The one thing you can say for sure about Katie Kitamura's wonderfully sly new novel--the follow-up to her 2017 breakthrough A Separation, and one of Barack Obama's summer reading picks--is that it offers a portrait of limbo. The unnamed narrator, a Japanese woman raised in Europe, has accepted a one-year contract as an interpreter at the International Criminal Court --identified only as "the Court"--in The Hague. The book's title--which, like that of its predecessor, rejects the firmness of the definite article--refers to the relationship one might ideally have with language, spaces, customs, other people, one's own emotions, the past. It's unclear, at least at first, to what degree the character's own failure to achieve this state herself is a product of temperament or circumstances--whether she is simply adjusting, or whether this is how she always presents, and negotiates, the world.
Another possibility is that tussling with the intricacies of human communication in a strange environment is just what life is like. (A Separation also concerned a translator in a foreign land, in that case the Peloponnese, where she goes in search of her estranged husband.) "Uncanny", the term Freud used to denote a range of uneasy sensations, literally means un-home-like (unheimlich). It's no surprise that the narrator may feel this way about The Hague. But she admits that one of the reasons she moved there was because New York, her previous base, "had become disorienting to me". You're forced to wonder: is there such a thing as the non-uncanny? Early in the novel, the narrator observes that "everything becomes normal after a time". But by her own account, this is totally untrue. Various phenomena--speaking other people's words as if they were her own, the regular greeting she receives from a former African president--retain their weirdness or "wrongness".
Achieving this atmosphere of persistent disquiet is largely a matter of rhetoric--of lists and "or" constructions, and adverbs like "notwithstanding", "regardless", "nonetheless", and "yet". The narrator refers to her "natural inclination" towards "extreme precision", but Kitamura seems sold on the virtues of vagueness, the necessity sometimes of refusing to address things directly. She is one of the few writers --TS Eliot in his prose was another--who can use the words "somehow" and "something" without prompting the thought: "Try harder".
The fear is that the novel's insistence on the murky or multiple will lose its power as a verbal resource or a governing concept. How many times can we read that something is one thing and another--"both serious and tongue-in-cheek", "both guarded and vulnerable", authentic and artificial, brazen and impersonal, a joke and "not a joke"? On one page, we read, "Was it mere politesse or was it something more sinister, more calculating and exploitative?" On the next: "I couldn't tell if he was more subdued than usual, or if it was merely the projection of my own tension." A paragraph reflecting on the idea of a decade begins by calling it "a long time" and ends by saying it "was not very long". And so the novel risks becoming one-note--even if that note is saying that the one-note doesn't exist.
But Kitamura keeps enough balls in the air to maintain variety. A trial involving the African leader develops in tandem with the narrator's agonisingly precarious courtship with a man named Adrian, who claims that his wife has left him and moved to Lisbon, but then disappears for an extended period. An attack on a prominent book dealer, at first raised in passing, gathers prominence when it emerges that the narrator's friend, a black British woman, is connected to the victim's twin sister. And there's always the slipperiness of the novel itself--the aesthetic suspense generated by seeming at one moment like a mood piece and the next a novel of ideas, now like an enquiry into the costs of modern rootlessness, then a parable about the human condition. At times it resembles a thriller or ghost story in which the bogeyman is the true nature of things. Even the novel's potential status as a rehabilitation narrative, which emerges towards the very end, is challenged by the early admission that New York had stopped feeling like home--the countervailing hint, right there in the opening paragraph, that a hard-earned victory like a sense of arrival, or the achievement of intimacy, may recede or undo itself, and you're obliged to start all over again.
Caption: Lost in translation: Katie Kitamura (pictured above) creates a world in which "the bogeyman is the true nature of things"
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2021 New Statesman, Ltd.
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Robson, Leo. "No place like home: In Katie Kitamuras amorphous, disquieting novel, nothing is what it seems." New Statesman, vol. 150, no. 5637, 17 Sept. 2021, p. 55. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A677790853/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=e6960e8c. Accessed 5 June 2025.
INTIMACIES By Katie Kitamura
Early in Katie Kitamura's fourth novel, ''Intimacies,'' the unnamed narrator recalls watching three street cleaners in The Hague ''carefully extracting cigarette butts from between the cracks of the cobbled road, one by one by one ... despite the fact that there were several well-placed public ashtrays on that stretch of street alone.'' The sight of these immigrant men laboring with their ''elephantine vacuum'' exemplifies how ''the docile surface of the city concealed a more complex and contradictory nature,'' and how the ''veneer of civility was constantly giving way, in places it was barely there at all.''
On first read this scene demonstrates the narrator's quiet, observational mood, as she's just left New York after her father's death and ''had begun looking for something, although I didn't know exactly what,'' but on reflection it pierces several thematic layers, and sets expectations. In this interpersonal thriller, Dutch methods of urban trash removal are rendered in greater detail than our heroine's nearly absent back story. Character motivation and development are less important here than the systems within which those characters live.
As a court translator for an unspecified international entity, the narrator is tasked with intimately vanishing into the voices and stories of the ''plethora of war criminals in our midst.'' In her words, ''it was the job of the interpreter not simply to state or perform but to repeat the unspeakable,'' though she later wonders if translating the details of those atrocities caused them ''to recede further and further into some state of unreality.'' She eventually begins to see her colleagues as ''marked by alarming fissures, levels of dissociation that I did not think could be sustainable.''
As another interpreter, Amina, relates an accusation against a former militia leader, she reflexively slips into ''a voice of cold disapproval, as if she were a wife scolding a husband for some small domestic failing.'' The unrepentant man on trial, offended by her tone, levies an intimate and intimidating look upon her. ''Don't shoot the messenger, she almost added, before remembering that this was precisely the kind of thing the accused did, it might even have been on the list of crimes, actually shooting the messenger. Although she knew there was nothing the man could do to her, she could not deny that she was afraid, he was a man who inspired fear, even while sitting immobile he radiated power.''
Kitamura's prose elegantly breaks grammatical convention: Commas hitch complete thoughts together, quotation marks are eschewed and ancillary characters often interrupt the narration midsentence, without punctuation. This style mirrors the book's concern with the bleeding lines between intimacies -- especially between the sincere and the coercive -- while Kitamura's immense talent smooths the seams. Even in complex court scenes when the voices of interpreters, witnesses, lawyers and judges commingle, nothing is lost in her sleek and satisfying syntax.
Despite herself, our narrator has fallen into an entanglement with Adriaan, a man whose wife recently ''went away to Lisbon for the weekend and never came back.'' She learns of the marriage by way of an odious stranger at a party, a man named Kees who is coincidentally a defense lawyer for a former African president accused of ethnic cleansing, whose case she'll soon be assigned. ''It seemed extraordinary that they would trust this man,'' she thinks, ''a man of the flimsiest construction, in this most critical of matters.''
The lawyer's appearance in our narrator's personal and professional lives is one of many serendipities, a web of intimacies that scaffold the book: connections of violence, omission, infidelity or even the brief exposure of an overheard conversation. Intimate, intimacy and intimacies appear repeatedly in the prose, almost annoyingly so, yet synonyms are inadequate; intimacy is the structuring principle of ''Intimacies'' and no other word quite captures her meaning.
One of the most potent scenes in the novel comes when a young woman testifies to seeing her family slain by the former president's militia. When a lawyer asks why she fled her hiding place to witness this horror, the woman pauses, so the interpreter pauses. ''Because I wanted to protect my family,'' she says. ''How did you hope to protect your family?'' the lawyer asks. ''With my body. It is small and it does not look like much but it can stop a bullet.'' As the narrator translates she cannot help looking at the former president, ''who had no need for these layers of interpretation. Who sat bolt upright and did not move, and whose gaze was trained with utmost attention and care upon the witness.''
Reading, too, can be a deeply interpretive act, and a novel like this one offers the reader much to work with, raising a chorus of harmonic questions rather than squealing a single answer. Contemporary American novels too often deliver pre-solved moral quandaries and obvious enemies in service to our cultural craving for ethical perfection -- the correct word, the right behavior, the sole and righteous position on myriad complex issues.
Kitamura works outside of this trendy literality by knowing, as the best writers do, that a story's apparent subject does not determine its conceptual limits; plot summary would do this book no justice. Though the words ''emotional labor,'' ''feminism'' and ''colonialism'' never appear, it is still deeply engaged with these grand social issues, while it also makes subtle comments on everything from art to jealousy to gentrification.
Still -- an ungenerous reader might note the male object of affection and assume the story is about a lonely woman's search for love, simply because the narrator is slightly directionless and waiting for her Dutchman to come home. It is true that ''Intimacies,'' like Kitamura's previous and equally engrossing ''A Separation,'' scrutinizes the knowability of those we love, depend upon and sleep beside. Yet Kitamura investigates these relationships as a lens for larger points, not as an end in themselves. The path a life cuts through the world, this book seems to say, has its greatest significance in the effect it has on others.
''Interpretation can be profoundly disorienting,'' the narrator reflects, ''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. Language loses its meaning.''
This disorientation might feel familiar: In a time when so many intimacies have been forced or foreclosed by quarantine, this novel is felicitous. Breath itself, that intimate air, has united our worlds in death and fear. Even global events -- a pandemic, a protest, a war -- arise first in the delicate space between people.
The sinister man on trial ''is petty and vain but he understands the depths of human behavior. The places where ordinary people do not go. That gives him a great deal of power, even when he is confined to a cell.'' Kitamura's work also contains a keen understanding of human behavior, one that reaches far beyond the pages of this brief and arresting book; she travels to places that ordinary writers cannot go.
Catherine Lacey is the author, most recently, of ''Pew.'' INTIMACIES By Katie Kitamura 225 pp. Riverhead Books. $26.
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Lacey, Catherine. "Lost in Translation." The New York Times Book Review, 8 Aug. 2021, p. 13(L). Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A671105292/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=13be44de. Accessed 5 June 2025.
* Intimacies. By Katie Kitamura. July 2021. 240p. Riverhead, $2619780399576164).
New to The Hague, an unnamed interpreter works in the International Court, her job "to ensure that there would be no escape route between languages." Describing herself as "guarded," she has one close friend and dates Adriaan, who's in a protracted separation from his wife and children. The day before his departure, Adriaan informs the interpreter that he must visit his family in Lisbon and will be gone for a week, maybe more. As a week becomes :is communication with her wanes, she's assigned the high-profile case of a former president accused of election tampering and ethnic cleansing. The defense team for the accused, inured by now to descriptions of his crimes, in addition to requiring her interpretation skills, exploits her emotions as a barometer for the court's reaction to them. Like her protagonist, Kitamura (A Separation, 2017) is a master of precisely evocative language. In her work and in her isolation, the interpreter recognizes how familiarity can obscure intimacy, while its lack can yet lead to discomfiting proximity. The novel takes place so deeply within her that it's truly personlike, at once forthright and mysterious, a piercing and propulsive meditation on closeness of many sorts.--Annie Bostrom
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Bostrom, Annie. "Intimacies." Booklist, vol. 117, no. 19-20, 1 June 2021, p. 34. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A666230114/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=1ea40cbc. Accessed 5 June 2025.
Intimacies
Katie Kitamura. Riverhead, $26 (240p) ISBN 978-0-399-57616-4
Kitamura's plodding latest (after A Separation) follows a group of jet-setting young professionals in The Hague, where a translator finds herself enmeshed in the private lives of her colleagues. There's something vaguely unseemly about the unnamed translator's married suitor, Adriaan, as well as other characters, including her boss in Language Services, the preppy curator she house-sits for, and a book dealer who is mugged during a recent wave of violence. But it's hard to discern what anybody is actually up to.
Meanwhile, in the courts, the translator is entrusted with the cases of a recently extradited jihadist and a well-heeled former president of a West African country on trial for war crimes, with whom she must match wits. There are, unfortunately, plenty of unused opportunities for deeper character development; Adriaan in particular is built up as a nemesis, but he does little more than preen, while even less can be said of the various other dilettantes and sexual rivals. Subtle to a fault, this adds up to very little outside of a plethora of dinner scenes and undeveloped subplots, while the translator simply drifts through a Henry James-style chronicle of life abroad. Kitamura is a talented writer, but this one disappoints. Agent: Ellen Levine, Trident Media Group. (July)
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"Intimacies." Publishers Weekly, vol. 268, no. 19, 10 May 2021, pp. 38+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A662131981/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=b5e5824b. Accessed 5 June 2025.