Katie Kitamura’s Audition, a magic eye of a book, is a novel preoccupied with middles: a woman’s experience of middle age, the midpoint of a romantic relationship, midlife crisis, mid-career creativity, and a surreal shift, mid-book, that has thrilled and perplexed readers trying to make sense of the novel’s multiple realities. The question of how incompatible truths can coexist, even form a cohesive story, seems less important than what the bifurcated narrative itself can do.

This exploration has taken shape for Kitamura across a trio of books, beginning with A Separation in 2017 and followed by Intimacies in 2021. Each narrator—a translator, an interpreter, and an actor—is a woman who works with other people’s language, and the narratorial voice, which feels more shared than not and is often described as cool and precise, possesses a contained and solitary quality. Reading Kitamura, for me, is like following a twenty-first-century flâneuse, alone in the crowd. In different ways, each book is textured by the difficulties of relationality; the perplexing, dividing experience of living among others is always central, never resolved.

I spoke with Kitamura at the New York Public Library while she was on a fellowship at the Cullman Center. We sat in a wood-paneled room and drank black tea. She spoke about her work openly and generously, even when I asked slightly embarrassing questions, like what if anything did she wish she’d known earlier about love.

Photograph by Annette Hornischer

In each of your last three novels, an unnamed narrator “speaks the words of others,” as you’ve put it, for work—she is a literary translator in A Separation, an international court interpreter in Intimacies, and an actor in Audition. I wonder if you could say what interests you about this position, how this relates to questions of authorship or authority, and what you see as the dynamic between what these narrators do for work and the romantic relationships they’re navigating in the books.

That’s interesting. I don’t think there is a strategic or conscious parallel between those two dynamics, which do tend to be the kind of poles around which the books are organized. The central character and her work are adjacent to the role of authorship or authority, rather than in the role of authorship or authority. It’s not a mistake that in A Separation and in Audition, the central character is in a role of interpretation or translation, and the male characters are writers. And they occupy this role of authorship very comfortably.

So there must be some question or some tension about authorship and control of narrative in their romantic and marital lives as well. There is a level of disavowal on the part of the central characters. I think they actually have a great deal of control over what is happening to them, but there is a certain amount of proclaimed passivity. And I think that becomes increasingly the case over the course of the three books.

In Audition, one of the slow realizations the narrator comes to is that, in fact, she has impacted other people a great deal. She has thought of herself as an instrument of other people’s authorship, but she has actually created the weather that the entire family or the entire constellation of characters, however you think of them, are living inside.

All of the books are interested in estrangement, from the self and from others, and in Audition, estrangement from familial roles and dynamics. You write, “What is the family if not a shared delusion, a mutual-construction.”

It turned out to be far more controversial than I expected. [Laughing] A lot of people take issue with that statement.

We’ll return to that. But I’m interested in that moment you mention, when Audition’s narrator realizes she is actually the problem, the force of disturbance in the trio of characters, in a way she hadn’t seen before.

And it’s in all three books. In A Separation, the character does all kinds of questionable things—but often without taking full responsibility for them. The most obvious example is she accepts a lot of money that she’s not really sure is hers.

In Intimacies, I was interested in a character who would initially think of herself as being passive—but then would come to feel increasingly implicated in the machinery of the institution she is a part of, which is a war crimes tribunal.

By the time I came to Audition, I really wanted to write about a slightly dramatic character who feels herself to be impinged upon all the time, then, at a certain moment, understands that she acts upon the world. It’s a kind of parallel realization to the one the character in Intimacies has, where she realizes that she changes the language as it passes through her body [interpreting for the court], and it changes her, and there is a kind of constant—I don’t want say contamination or co-contamination, but there’s the way in which you do not pass through the world without changing it.

In Audition, I wanted that to be heightened. The novel is structured so that the two male characters have these very clearly defined narrative arcs that are quite traditional. The young male character has a kind of bildungsroman arc where he starts as someone who doesn’t seem to have a voice or direction, then ends as a writer who has a fully articulated creative voice. The older male character has a fairly classic midlife moment of collapse.

I always thought of Audition’s narrator as being a character in the middle of all of that, who doesn’t change. I’m really interested in writing characters who don’t change because I feel that’s kind of the tragedy of all of us—that we change much less than we would like to be able to change. But I did want to give her a moment of perception; she is not unaware. And so, there is a moment where she has this realization. That’s the greatest moment of change for her, and she has this realization that she is the boulder that everybody has been maneuvering around for the entire book.

Right. It’s like the stage lights go up and she can see herself, as if both in the audience and on stage, at once.

The narrator of A Separation starts with a very clear sense of what her story or narrative arc is—she’s on a mission to ask her husband for a divorce. (For unknowing readers—spoiler alert—first she has to find him. He’s missing, and his mother, the narrator’s mother-in-law, who doesn’t know they’re separated, has asked her to find him in Greece. Turns out, he’s dead.) The novel is interested in performativity and the speech act, per J. L. Austin’s famous example of the marriage ceremony’s “I do” enacting the state of being married. In the case of the narrator of A Separation, she is on a mission to officially enact “I don’t.”

But by the end of the novel, that story has unraveled, and she’s lost control of her own plot. I wonder if you could say a bit about what you were interested in exploring, especially as it intersects with this idea of speaking ourselves into being.

Thanks for noting that reference to Austin. I have these jokes in my books that end up being more or less private because almost nobody notices them. [Laughs] Like, there’s a nerdy reference to [John] Cage in Audition that I think exactly one person noticed.

I’ve been interested in performance certainly since A Separation. I think what I wanted to think about in that book was how the performance of a role constructs a kind of reality, and then the gap between the performed self and the “real” self collapses, to an extent. The character performs the role of grieving widow, even though that’s not exactly what she is. Then, at a certain point, it subsumes her actual sense of who she is in the world.

When I was writing that book, I was thinking a lot about the role performance plays in all of our most intimate relationships, and the degree to which it’s activated by this sense of being observed by another person. That’s why exchanging vows seems to matter, you’re doing it for some other observer, whether it’s an institution or family, which is an institution as well. This sense that a relationship between two people can’t really flourish or survive in and of itself interests me. It always acquires that supplement of something else, whether that’s fantasy or being witnessed in some way.

And I suppose that became literally the case in Audition—that a third person [makes possible the relation of the couple]. In A Separation, I was thinking about how the narrator is actually, in a weird way, the third person, rather than one of the two primary [characters]. She’s always observing other couples. She is herself alone, but she’s constantly making herself the third.

She even becomes a kind of third to her (dead) husband and the young hotel worker who was his lover before he died.

Absolutely.

One of my favorite parts in the book is the scene where the narrator has dinner with this younger woman—it is incredibly uncomfortable and interesting, their dynamic—and you juxtapose it with the revelation that begins the very next chapter: “Christopher’s body was found in a shallow ditch.” Right in the middle of the novel, we learn that the narrator’s husband is dead.

I’ve always been interested in writing these bifurcating narratives. I’ve been trying to do it for years. I really wanted the narrative to change in the middle of that book. That dinner scene was so much fun to write.

That comes through. The narrator is observing the total spell of fantasy the lover has been under while she’s also almost being bullied by her. Ordering the most expensive and decadent things on the menu, on the narrator’s dime. Glistening lobster . . .

She’s kind of scathing about it, but she is also almost titillated by it. I think there’s a frisson there, but there’s a lot of sadness and maybe even disgust as well.

I often like to write a character who is able to be direct in a way that the narrators are not. In almost every book, there’s somebody who is able to articulate what they want, which is difficult for the narrators.

In Intimacies, the fraught intimacy between the narrator and the man she’s interpreting for, a war criminal who has overseen a genocide, comes to a head. There’s this fascinating moment where the narrator articulates to herself that his comfort around her comes from seeing her as this “pure instrument, someone without will or judgment, a consciousness-free zone into which he could escape, the only company he could now bear.”

I mean, that’s chilling enough, but coupled with the way they’re the only two people in a full room who can understand the words being said, there’s something really horrifying but undeniably close about their relation. And then they have this exchange. He calls out her complicity in the institution, which feels like a kind of intimacy too, because she doesn’t disagree.

This man she’s working with that has perpetrated war crimes, one of the reasons they’re close is this shared language and the passage of language. But he really sees her very clearly, in a way that none of the other characters do—and possibly, depending, even the reader [misses]. The character is Japanese-American which is not overt at all. It kind of sits slightly dormant after being flagged in the beginning. And then at that moment, the man on trial is articulating a doubled legacy of imperialism. He sees much more clearly where she is from and what that means, the context she’s coming from, even beyond the immediate environment of the court. And there is something very intimate about that moment of recognition.

A moment of recognition that is profoundly destabilizing for her, and it’s implied that, after that moment, she can’t carry on with her work. She kind of can’t believe in the myth of neutrality that the court trades on, that all ideas of justice trade on. Maybe she doesn’t think of it as a neocolonial force, but certainly the official languages of the court are imperial languages or colonial languages. She can’t really escape this anymore. The fact that any language that is not English or French goes through multiple layers of translation before it’s rendered fit for the record. I think that is percolating through the book and through her experience, but it’s only really after that moment of recognition between them that she feels she can no longer live with that dissonance.

The heat of their relationship, and the complexity of all of these layers of power and complicity, flares in that moment of recognition.

Yes. And that was the hardest scene to write. I always had the feeling that this moment of reckoning had to come from this person who is a narcissist—beyond being a perpetrator of terrible crimes, he is also superficial and vain. And yet, in that moment, because he is somebody who is skilled at manipulating other people, he’s able to isolate and identify the thing that is making her most uneasy.

There’s another interesting moment in that novel, a quieter moment of reckoning, where the narrator encounters a painting and her response is that only a woman could have made this image. It’s something about the irreconcilable subject position of the two figures and the two ways of reading what is happening, which is now making me think of Audition. Though the narrator comes down on a reading of the painting.

What was important for you about that painting’s tableau, and about the narrator encountering that work at that moment in the book?

It was intuitive. I went to The Hague for research, and I went to the Mauritshuis Museum because I knew I wanted to write a scene there. I had the institution of the court, and I wanted to think about an institution of culture. And think about how they are formed in many similar ways. The Mauritshuis of course was founded by a Dutch slave trader in Dutch Brazil. And I wanted to think about how canons are built and how cultural power is accrued and articulated. In a cultural institution like a museum, you really feel the exclusion of women and people of color, particularly showing older work.

I didn’t even know the history of the painting or what it was about. I just felt it had a really uncomfortable vibration, and I think it was only really when I went back and I was thinking about it, and I looked at it and thought, This is clearly an image of sexual harassment. There’s so many images of sexual violence, but [fewer of] sexual harassment. So I wrote the [scene], and then afterward, when I read the whole book, I was like, “This book is full of sexual harassment.”

That made a lot of sense to me. It’s a book that is interested in power, and sexual harassment is almost always about the articulation of power. I think I started out wanting to think about the exclusion of women from the art historical canon, but then it just ended up being a kind of motif that threads its way through the book—the character’s constantly being both harassed and intimidated by the various male characters in the novel.

The character doesn’t consciously or explicitly make this connection, but she knows it, on some level.

I wrote it in 2016. It was a really interesting moment as well with #MeToo. A lot of women, particularly of my generation, were suddenly looking back, thinking, “Oh, that’s what that was, I thought that was just how it is. But there’s another name for it.” And I suppose there is a way in which she’s not able to name what is happening, but her unconscious or whatever is drawing her to these images knows exactly what’s happening to her.

You’ve said that for you, risk in writing is less about the characters and more about feeling the writer is taking a risk in their work.

I think the real drama is taking place in the relationship between the writer and the work rather than between the characters. And I don’t think that means it’s [necessarily] an increased difficulty [in the writing process]. In some ways, Audition is the book where I took the biggest formal risks, but it was a much easier book for me to write than Intimacies, which came together over many, many drafts. It was a slightly grueling process. With Audition, I felt really exhilarated when I was writing it, and I think that’s because I was taking a risk and it brought a lot of energy to the project. Failure is very invigorating in a lot of ways. I think the novel is such a forgiving form, the perfect novel really doesn’t exist, and is probably not that good if it does. I mean, every time I return to a classic novel, I’m really struck by how eccentric the storytelling often is. I was reading [Joseph Conrad’s] Lord Jim, and the storytelling completely does not follow the standard of what we think of as tight narrative, that’s for sure. Same with something like, I don’t know, The Good Soldier [by Ford Madox Ford] or everything that [Henry] James wrote. It’s really a capacious form that allows for failure.

So I think the most interesting novels often have sections that don’t work, but you can see it. One example for me is Your Face Tomorrow—Javier Marías, who is able to write these unlikely scenarios in a way that is so utterly convincing that you step into the kind of reality of the character and their decision-making, and you believe it completely.

Or Emmanuel Carrère in The Kingdom, where he starts the book saying he’s a non-believer, he’s never really understood Catholicism. And then 50 pages in he says, “I suddenly remembered, when I was 19 or 20, I was devoutly faithful, and I would pray for a couple hours a day.” How did you forget? But I like those moments because it’s much more interesting, to see him trying to persuade the reader of that, than a more ordinary segue.

Most of the writers I really admire, 95 percent of the time, they pull off this unlikely proposition. And then there are a couple times that it doesn’t, to me, completely work, and that’s equally exciting.

Similarly unbelievable, but a real question in Audition: Could you not be totally sure whether or not you might be someone’s mother?

Yes. [Laughs]

You said something about this earlier, but I wanted to ask how you understand desire in your work, for your characters and yourself.

I really write for pleasure. I really write toward pleasure for myself. I think I give terrible advice to my students because I honestly don’t write a scene unless I want to write a scene. I’m sure sometimes in novels you have to write things that you don’t want to write because that’s what the narrative requires, but I almost never do it.

I almost never write a scene unless there’s something that is intriguing or interesting to me. For example, I’m not interested in backstory, so I never write backstory. I just don’t do it. So I’m very oriented towards pleasure in my work because it’s the one part of the process that is entirely for you and is entirely private. Sitting down with your manuscript. It has to be something you want to return to.

There has to be a world you want to step into that’s seductive to you in some way. If it’s not, it’s very hard to finish a book. I think in that sense, my own relationship to writing is completely fueled by pleasure and by desire. And a book ends when that’s gone. Until then, I keep editing and reworking and reformulating and moving things around and then at some point, the sponge has been wrung dry, and I have to turn it in and get feedback on it.

For your characters, desire is a bit more complicated.

[Laughs] I know. What is going on with my characters?

[Laughs] Each of the narrators seems to experience desire differently . . .

Yeah. It’s usually disavowed in some way. Even in Audition, if on the one hand you read the novel as about a woman who desires a child and conjures that into being in some way, that desire is so profoundly disavowed that the story has to take the structure it takes.

What do you wish you’d known about love 20 years ago, either as a person or as a writer?

Love as a writer is something I’ve not figured out. I would love to write a great love story, but it’s really hard. I mean, it’s really, really hard. I would love to be able to do it. I would love to be able to write one that just runs on tracks. Do you know what I mean? That just runs smoothly and hits the beats it has to hit. Like Brief Encounter [the 1945 film based on Noël Coward’s play], such a great piece of work. I would love to be able to write something like that.

What do I wish I had known? I think I mistook complication for passion. I think sometimes when it works it’s very easy. There’s no complication and there’s not much narrative. When I was younger, I thought there had to be a lot of narrative and a lot of impediment, and now, being older, I find that to be utterly not the case.

That reminds me of what you’ve said about the formal concerns of Audition—and its interest in mid-life—intersecting with your interest in a love story (as between the narrator and her husband Tomas) where the question is not will-they-won’t-they, but something else. What does the question become, or what does that space allow, for the narrator and Tomas?

The book’s [structure is] two halves, two different realities, but there’s a big break, so it’s discontinuous. I wanted there to be a continuous narrative, temporally, across the two parts. Maybe a kind of classic love narrative would have made that easier in a way because the thing about those narratives is they are tropes, so they provide a structure and a kind of reassurance. But I think it’s interesting to think about what change looks like in a relationship when it is not tending always toward this question of rupture or union.

Relationships do change and people do change, and those shifts—they don’t have the same dramatic payoff as a couple breaking up or a couple getting together, but that doesn’t make them any less interesting. A Separation was about the end of a marriage, Intimacies the beginning of a relationship, and I wanted to do the middle. So, it was really a novel about a family rather than a novel just about this marriage.

A climactic moment, and a moment of reckoning for the family, is that wild scene about 20 pages from the end, what you call “the enchanted circle.” It made me think of the scene in Sula when Nel comes home to find Sula and her husband crawling around on the floor, sniffing and licking at each other like dogs—worse, maybe, than catching them in bed together.

There’s something that rhymes for me about these two powerful moments, in Sula and in Audition. I’m trying to think about what it is. Straightforwardly, it’s a moment where the performance or roles they’ve been invested in fall away to expose something rawer beneath. It also seems to be about the power of play—in Audition, the narrator comes home to her husband and Xavier and his girlfriend Hanna playing a game. And it’s disturbing, this game, where something weirder and crueler is exposed. I wonder if you’d talk about that scene.

There are a lot of childhood metaphors and games in the book as a whole. Quite a few people, especially younger people who do not have children—and it’s always interesting how identification works—but a lot of people identify with Xavier [in that scene]. And they were all people who said to me, I’ve been parented by a very inconsistent mother. And I realized it’s a novel about being parented as much as it is a novel about parenting. [These people were identifying with the experience of] a parent who creates a kind of inconsistent reality for the child. I think for that reason, the book is rabbit-duck, it’s spot the difference. I knew I wanted to have a big game.

I watch my children playing games with so much trepidation because games allow them to touch something really real. You know, games are anything but play, in a way. I mean they’re wonderful, etcetera, but a certain kind of game can touch upon something that’s really deadly. And the structure of the game allows people to do something that is not permissible in ordinary life. And then to say, in a way, “It never happened.”

It’s also interesting because people often have strong feelings about which half of the book they feel is real. And that often does relate, I think, to their relationship with their mothers.

So—do you think of the three books as a trilogy? Are you annoyed by people asking you that? I think I’ve heard you say, you said that once and now it’s become a thing.

I think they are all definitely in conversation with each other, and there are certain structural similarities, and there’s a progression across the three. There are formal things about relationship to language, authorship, passivity, agency that are pretty tightly threaded through the three books.

I mean, is the book I’m working on now radically different from them? No. [Laughs]

Each of my last three books was, you know, under the sign of a genre. A Separation is a murder mystery. Intimacies is a courtroom drama. Audition, to me, is horror. And now I’m playing around with the idea of a thriller. But as loosely as the other books belong to a genre category.

I can’t wait to read it. What else are you taking in or thinking about, now?

I’m reading a lot of Graham Greene and a lot of Ford Maddox Ford. There’s a particular kind of tone that I’m interested in exploring. And then I think I’m gonna watch all of the Kurosawa films again with my son.

Is that a touchstone in your family?

It is. The kind of Venn diagram of films Hari [Kunzru] and I want to watch and films our kids want to watch is extremely small. I keep thinking Hitchcock, but it’s actually a little too scary. Like, The Birds is too scary.

It’s terrifying.

It’s genuinely very frightening. And then the other ones are maybe a little bit too abstract for them.

How old are they?

They’re almost 10 and 13. My son could watch them. My daughter would not want to watch The Birds. Even Strangers on a Train is actually kind of terrifying . . .

And I’m thinking about Celia Paul’s paintings, for no particular reason. Leonora Carrington’s paintings as well. Not in an organized way, just for pleasure. You do have to go and fill the reservoir a little bit, give yourself that luxury.

Audition was the talk of literary circles last year—it was shortlisted for the Booker and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Is there anything about the book that you’ve wanted to talk about but haven’t gotten a chance to yet?

There’s a thing I can’t work out, which I have talked about, but I can’t work it out, which is a question of control. It’s something I feel very ambivalent about in relation to fiction, to my writing. In a lot of ways, Audition was a book that was interested in giving up control. I’m interested in giving up control in authorship in so many ways. That’s why I’m working on a collaborative novel. It’s kind of an ongoing preoccupation. But one of the things I feel ambivalently about is the more you write, to a certain extent, the stronger your control over a text becomes. In Audition, I think I did exert a lot of control over the book, in particular the way information is released. All of that is incredibly controlled. And that feels like a contradiction I can’t quite get my head around.

I love the way Sheila [Heti] thinks about chance and kind of opening up a book to outside forces. That’s something I’m really interested in. And I think that’s something I’m trying to work my way toward, but it’s hard. I feel very cautious of skill in writing.

Like as a kind of mastery, or?

Yes. It’s undeniable to me that across the three books, this particular prose style and voice has gotten easier and easier for me to execute. And I’m really suspicious of that kind of fluency. In some ways, it was what allowed me to think about structure [in Audition] because I wasn’t trying to find the voice. So that was liberating in a lot of ways, but I think as a writer, you’re very aware of the effect of style and voice, and you have to kind of guard against it. The question of control is something I’m very unresolved about, and something I would like to think about more.

In performance, there’s so much control, but there is also release in it, and Audition is a book about live performance. Because I danced a lot as a younger person, I’m interested in how that kind of exhilaration is only the product of extreme discipline and rigidity. Which I’ve never experienced in writing, I’m never like, “And then the words poured out of me.” I’ve never been exhilarated by my own writing. It seems obscene and absurd.

But it gives you pleasure. There’s a difference.

It gives me pleasure. There is a difference.

I feel exhilaration reading other people’s writing all the time. All the time. I was just reading the last page of Muriel Spark’s The Ballad of Peckham Rye, and there’s something about the imagery and the quality of prose that is just so startlingly, stunningly good. It really shows the capacity and possibilities of writing. That, to me—that’s liftoff. ♦

What is love? How is it best sought, fallen into, lived? What do we express through love, and what of lust? Longing? Who are we in love, and how does love make us? Why do we lose the ones we love, and how do we come to find we’ve lost ourselves?

What to make of this thing we flailingly, failingly call love? Falling Hard attends to the ways we come together and come apart to ask what it means to love—well and badly; romantically, platonically, familially; greedily, freely, and carelessly; unconditionally or conditions required—and to explore the questions most fundamental to love’s labors.