From the outlines of their plots Katie Kitamura’s novels could be mistaken for melodramas, or concepts for a bingeable TV series. In A Separation (2017) an estranged wife goes to Greece to reunite with her husband, only to discover that he’s been brutally murdered. In Intimacies (2021) an American woman finds herself serving as the mouthpiece for a war criminal when she is appointed as his interpreter at The Hague. In Kitamura’s latest, Audition, an actress is confronted by a young man who claims to be her son, and though this cannot possibly be the case (wouldn’t she remember giving birth?), she invites him to live with her and her husband as their child.
But such summaries are misleading, because the novels themselves are avowedly muted affairs, told by first-person narrators whose defining features are clarity, poise, and restraint. These narrators take the most dramatic events in stride and devote most of their attention to minute observation of the people around them, noting the smallest gestures and contemplating their possible meanings. They are not given to outbursts of emotion, and in conversation they tend to listen more than talk, so consumed by perception that they seem to have little interest in expression (often reporting simply “I nodded” or “I shook my head”). When the narrator of A Separation meets a young woman who has slept with her husband and is now pining for him, her reaction is to pity “the tumult of feeling” this woman must be undergoing. She knows that love leads to “the worst sensations—jealousy, rage, self-loathing—to all these lesser states.” It’s hard to imagine her experiencing these lesser states herself, certainly not at present.
The result is a set of unusually low-key thrillers. Kitamura’s novels have the propulsive quality of the genres she borrows from—the murder mystery, the courtroom drama—even though they are largely concerned with the distance between characters and the fine mesh of misapprehensions that constitutes most relationships. Some readers have found the crisp quality of her writing and her preoccupation with unspoken barriers to be barriers themselves: in these stories about “glamorous, international, well-appointed people,” Dwight Garner has written, “you don’t sense the grit and grain of life.” “The clean, blank surface of the prose inhibits deep engagement,” Sam Sacks wrote in The Wall Street Journal.
But that is the point: all connection is tenuous in the world these characters inhabit. In Intimacies the unnamed narrator’s aloofness is a symptom of political breakdown. Not only is the interpreter—a transplant from New York City—far from home in The Hague, in a relationship with an unavailable man, and working on a short-term contract, but she’s also aware of the precariousness of the court itself, its waning authority in a world that is cleaving apart, despite or because of the efforts of bureaucrats and lawyers to hold it together. The novel is “filled with marriages and international organizations beginning to fray at the edges,” Jennifer Wilson has noted. It’s no surprise when the case against the war criminal ultimately collapses; the narrator has already found a way to ignore the atrocities he has committed. She gets so lost in the technical work of interpretation that she barely registers the meaning of the testimony she is translating.
Audition is a less overtly political novel, and its narrator’s life is more firmly rooted: she’s an established actress, long married, with an established home. (The fact that she owns such a nice apartment in the West Village raises eyebrows among friends, who assume she must be rich, but, she explains, she simply bought the place a very long time ago.) The book is also more disorienting, told in two halves that seem to contradict each other. Its eeriness and detached tone reflect a profound discontent with the narrowing roles available to a woman past a certain age, which tend to circle around motherhood. Instead of teasing out the superficiality of public life, as Intimacies does, Audition prizes open the question of what a family is and what pretenses sustain it.
Audition at first appears to belong to an increasingly popular genre: the slim novel detailing an older woman’s affair with a young man, in the vein of Annie Ernaux’s The Young Man (2023) or Julia May Jonas’s Vladimir (2022). In Kitamura’s novel the unnamed narrator has reluctantly agreed to go to lunch with Xavier, an ambitious film student whose intensity and eagerness make her uneasy. He’s twenty-five, she’s forty-nine, and she’s unsettled by the thought that the waiter and other diners must assume they are a mismatched couple on a date. Certainly the encounter plays like a doomed assignation, with Xavier making cryptic apologies for “how he had behaved the last time we met” and assuring her, “I want you to know I accept what you told me,” while she just as cryptically says, “I don’t think we should see each other again.” He’s irritated when she tries to steer the conversation into distinctly nonromantic territory, asking him how his classes are going and quizzing him on how he likes New York; he can sense he’s being friend-zoned.
She is perhaps more acutely aware of their age difference and its potential unseemliness (“For women the judgment is always harsher”) because of her profession. Substantial parts for older actresses are lamentably scarce. In her work, as in this meeting, she falls “regrettably in between roles, neither young enough to be romantic quarry nor prone to any maternal feeling.” One way for the novel to imagine an alternative role for her would be by presenting the story of a woman who is older and remains romantically active. Audition does something far stranger: the narrator begins to act like a mother, whether she considers herself suitable for the role or not.
Xavier’s oddly loaded allusions to “what you told me” become clear when the narrator recalls their first meeting. One day he came to the theater where she was rehearsing a play and told her that he believed he was her son. He had read a magazine article about her some years earlier, in which she had “talked about giving up a child.” Xavier grew up in an adoptive family. Having studied their faces and lined up certain dates, he has come to believe that child was him. Up to this point the reader might have inferred that Xavier’s behavior “last time we met” took the form of an unwanted advance, but the reality turns out to be much more jarring, more intimate and intrusive. The narrator can see the physical resemblance between them, “which was more than the fact of our shared race, it was an echo or mirroring in our features that had no explanation, no purpose.” He even appears to share some of her mannerisms, which she guesses he has seen in her films and “copied without shame.” His impersonation undermines her sense of herself as a unified whole, breaking her up into replicable pieces.
Xavier’s announcement is doubly unsettling because the article he mentions contained a crucial error. She never told the journalist she had given a baby up for adoption. She said she had had an abortion, but the magazine tiptoed around the term and decided to use fuzzier language instead, and so broadcast an alternate version of her life in which she had a son somewhere out there. (Later she had another pregnancy, which ended in miscarriage. There was no long-lost son waiting to be found.) Even after she’d explained that to Xavier, he pursued this second meeting with her at the restaurant. The false narrative that the magazine introduced won’t go away.
One of the pleasures of Kitamura’s novels, however, is that no one reacts to affronts or disturbances quite as expected. The actress does not dwell too long on the obfuscations and assumptions that have landed her in this situation. She does not particularly care to be understood by others and often corrects people who presume to “get” her. She dislikes being recognized; even a fan’s admiration is something she feels she must endure. When Xavier compliments her on her breakthrough role in a foreign-language movie called Parts of Speech, she deflects, telling him that she barely understood the lines she was delivering—she did them “phonetically”—and worked with the famous director “through interpreters.” When Xavier’s girlfriend, Hana, later talks about how much the movie meant to her as a matter of representation (“to see someone who looked like me on the screen”), the narrator repeats the phrase back to herself mockingly (“seeing someone who looked like me”) and only obliquely refers to her own identity (“our shared race.”)
The mother–son confrontation with Xavier allows her to act out the most remote, unknowable version of herself; at first she brushes him off in the polite professional manner of “a bank manager or hotel concierge.” This first encounter and its sequel at the restaurant also set the narrator thinking about the doldrums of middle age. She agrees to the follow-up meeting, even though she can see the “red flag,” because she is bored: “I had entered the stage of life where there is a certain amount of immutability, in middle age, change is experienced primarily as a kind of attrition.” Though her feelings about Xavier are a mixture of “repulsion and excitement,” she warily admires his opportunism. “I could already see that Xavier would succeed,” she thinks, “not simply because he was exceptionally mutable but because that mutability did not seem to cost him very much.”
The narrator doesn’t have the same freedom to change her identity, even though she routinely transforms herself onstage: in her real life, people know the current version of her and rely on it. Her meeting at the restaurant with Xavier feels like a betrayal of her husband, Tomas, because it’s the first hint that she might start to behave unpredictably. Even though their lunch is innocent, in the sense that she and Xavier are not conducting an affair, and she’s not concealing from her husband a son he didn’t know about, she is concealing her wish to change herself, and therefore their life together, in some barely defined but drastic way. This is perhaps the most common form of betrayal in a Kitamura novel—quietly becoming a different person.
The trick at the center of Audition is that the novel itself turns into a different book halfway through. The first half sketches Xavier’s overtures toward the narrator, the narrator’s strained marriage, and her struggles to hone her performance in a new play, titled The Opposite Shore. Her particular difficulty on the stage involves making a pivotal scene work; she doesn’t know quite how to pull off the transformation. At the end of the first half of the novel, it appears she’ll fail; by the beginning of the second half, she has made the scene a glorious success, a centerpiece in her career. But something else has changed too: in this half of the novel, Xavier is her son. She and Tomas talk about his studies and career opportunities in the cautious tones of anxious parents, and she even reminisces “that it had been, for so many years, the three of us.” Over dinner Xavier tells them that he has decided to defer his last semester of graduate school in order to accept a position as assistant director on a film—and they agree that to save money he should give up his small apartment and move back home with them.
The question that hangs over this second half of the novel is how it connects to the first: Did the narrator and Tomas just decide to treat Xavier as their son and act as if he always had been, so thoroughly committing to their roles that they even lay claim to evocative memories of his infancy, “what it was like to embrace him as a child, the animal scent of the skin”? Or is it actually the case that Xavier was the narrator’s son all along, and she was lying about the abortion in the beginning? Or do the two parts not directly connect at all—does one show us the narrator if she did not have a child, and one show us a different reality in which everything else is the same but she did?
What’s striking is how much these three scenarios overlap. Xavier often seems unfamiliar, his behavior surprising to the narrator and Tomas. This could be because they only met him a few months earlier. Yet these fleeting moments of incomprehensibility also ring true of a relationship between parents and an adult child. Watching her son around the apartment, the narrator marvels at his diligence—the “naturalness” with which he washes dishes and takes care of his laundry, cooks himself a simple meal, and hangs up his coat—and she begins to wonder where he learned these good habits, better than any she has taught him. The thing that’s most impressive to a parent after guiding their child for over two decades is his independence, but it’s also the most disorienting, since now they have to rethink their own place in his life.
The narrator is struggling to switch between being and not being a parent in a way that’s recognizable in many families after children have left home. When Xavier was away, there were periods, she confesses, when she did not think about him or their relationship at all—an absence that might be unthinkable to the mother of an infant but that may be inevitable when children are a little older. Even when she regrets that her memory of Xavier’s childhood is “alarmingly inconsistent and full of gaps,” it might make her claim to be his mother more real: Isn’t the unreliability of memory, after all, its most authentic feature? If “none of it seemed like the record of events that had actually taken place,” that could be because there’s no simple way to string together years of exhaustion and care, the mix of imperceptible growth and rapid transformation that children undergo. In this way Audition makes a refreshing companion to a recent spate of literary considerations of the strangeness of motherhood—whereas books like Kate Zambreno’s Drifts (2020), Rivka Galchen’s Little Labors (2016), and Ayşegül Savaş’s The Wilderness (2024) focus on becoming a parent, Audition comes out on the other side. What follows after the most intense period of motherhood?
The unsettling distance between parents and son, however, is amplified here in almost every sentence by the way that Kitamura keeps open the possibility that Xavier doesn’t just seem a stranger now that he’s all grown up, but that he truly is an impostor:
He was changed, he had grown and matured in so many ways, and there were moments when I could see that Tomas was feeling no small pride in this transformation, and when I felt the same. 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. As the days passed, I realized how little continuity there was between the child or even the young man I remembered and the person now living with us. He was like a familiar stranger,…perhaps someone you knew long ago, for a brief but intense period, so that the familiarity was always mitigated, always compromised, always a little uncanny.
This set of double meanings sharpens a climactic fight when son addresses mother “as if the word Mom were in quotation marks,” and the narrator spits out, “You’re no son of mine.” So much in this family can be taken both literally and not, even the narrator’s musing, “What was a family if not a shared delusion, a mutual construction?” The scenes between the narrator, Tomas, and Xavier can feel stagy, with each actor hyperaware of their role as Mother, Father, or Son, because these roles are always subtly shifting, and have to be reasserted and renewed, as each person demands more attention or freedom.
It is in fact Tomas who undergoes the most marked shifts in personality and bearing across the two halves of the book. As he tries out new ways of being (or posing as) Xavier’s father, the narrator feels less and less close to him. He tiptoes around Xavier, eager to be close to him in any way possible, even if only by serving as a waiter in his own home, grabbing trays of drinks and snacks for him and Hana while they lounge in the living room (from which he, like many parents before him, has somehow been tacitly banished). He’s “invigorated” by the mere presence of his son, so exuberant that the narrator remarks that she “would have assumed he was having an affair” if she hadn’t been “so certain of what was behind this change in manner.” This is another surprising facet of the narrator’s experience as a mother or mother figure: very little of it revolves around her own feelings or inner transformation. Rather, being the mom means picking up on and decoding the smallest changes in the boys’ temperatures and moods.
Kitamura’s tight focus on a family of three can make Audition feel narrow compared with the far-flung dramas of Intimacies and A Separation, and less action-filled than her debut, The Longshot (2009), set in the world of mixed martial arts. Audition has the feel of a two-act play: both parts start with Xavier and the narrator in a restaurant, and in both cases the characters’ relationships are a puzzle. We observe them as if they were center stage under a spotlight, trying to infer who they are to each other as we follow their fraught conversations. Much of the rest of the novel unfolds in and around the apartment, or occasionally at the theater between scenes. This is the nuclear family at its most compact and isolated. It’s hard even to know exactly when these events are unfolding: one reference to an app narrows it down to sometime in the last fifteen or so years; there are no other clues about time period.
This move deep into the personal might seem a departure from the more political Intimacies—though that novel is less an engagement with public life than a critique of its hollowness, drawing out the idea that public expression conceals more than it can convey. The war criminal speaks so eloquently at his tribunal that it’s hard to fathom that he is responsible for heinous acts, while the interpreter’s calm manner and appearance further soften his image. And in A Separation, set against the backdrop of post-2008 Greece, plagued by austerity and wildfires, the justice system is a sham, with the police acknowledging that they simply have too few resources to even attempt to solve the murder in question. There won’t be a trial or any public reckoning at all. If the family of the murdered husband wants to piece together his final days, their only option is to talk to the people who last saw him at his hotel and try to unravel the web of adoration and resentment that surrounded him there. It is a fitting end: the narrator believes that in life her husband was at his most authentic when he was acting clandestinely. About men like him she believes, “It was only on the shores of infidelity that they achieved a little privacy, a little inner life.”
Audition continues that shift away from the idea of the public sphere as a place where people can understand themselves. There’s a sense that the greatest revelations take place deep within the private life—in places so buried that they can be accessed only through secrecy, delusion, or pretense. The most affecting moment in the novel comes when the narrator recalls the time during her marriage to Tomas when she got pregnant. She was openly ambivalent about continuing the pregnancy, and Tomas made clear that he would support whatever she decided. When she miscarried a few weeks later, she was relieved. But one day she found a pregnancy app on Tomas’s phone. The app, with its cutesy depictions of the fetus’s size week by week (your baby is the size of blackberry, of a kumquat, etc.), revealed a whole world of anticipation he had been privately living in, taking care not to press his excitement on her but already beginning his own transformation into a father-to-be. The “euphoria that now accompanied him everywhere, inconvenient and irrepressible,” has an almost devastating effect on the narrator—to think that she failed to notice this surge of emotion—and it makes him briefly a stranger to her.
These layers of consciousness make Audition feel like a much denser novel than a study of three characters might otherwise be: each of the three is quietly several different people at once. And though they are, as Dwight Garner remarked, the kind of “glamorous,” “well-appointed” individuals who populate so many well-turned literary novels, Kitamura makes them unfamiliar in new, unexpected ways; the smallest private thought or action can thoroughly change what they’re capable of feeling and doing. We don’t—can’t—know them at all.
English (US) · 