The Performance of Life

On Katie Kitamura's Recent Novels

Pierre Bonnard, Earthly Paradise, 1916 - 1920, Oil on canvas

When I was a young man I enjoyed a brief, accidental career as a business executive. In my surprising success, I discovered skills and aspects of my personality — my self —that I hadn’t previously known I possessed. Because all along I felt my true self to be, very differently, what I ultimately chose to become, a writer and professor of English, I sometimes felt like an imposter. Who is this person making decisions, issuing directives, strategically angling advantages in corporate maneuverings — perceived, in his small world, as important and powerful?

We categorize and label identities, of others and of ourselves, even when the categories may be incommensurate to our various selves acting in the world, and this produces discordances. Central to a discordant sense of identity is that defining human attribute we call self-consciousness.

Consider that as part of my work, I often had to persuade clients, partners, and employees to do what I wished — sometimes needed — them to do, in order to advance my and my company’s objectives, which didn’t always, for various reasons, precisely align. I always believed in what I was doing, and I didn’t seek to disadvantage anyone. But sometimes the course of action I argued, not necessarily always by my own choice, didn’t appear on the surface as advantageous to the other party as I suggested it could be. Sometimes they were right. Initially, it might not be. I had to persuade them, against their self-protective mistrust — using the personal trust I had earned from them, in conjunction with my persuasive skills — that in the longer run, it would be. And I understood how they might perceive the matter differently or at least fear that there was something they weren’t seeing, information they didn’t have, maybe even that I was withholding. Such situations opened up substantial space for speculation about motives, projection of one person’s intuitions onto another’s character, and so on. The more naturally inclined business personality might spend little if any time in this discordant mental space of self-conscious questioning of its own authenticity. A more naturally introspective personality might spend a lot of time there — time better spent becoming a master of the universe.

This is the space we enter under the narrative direction of Katie Kitamura. Kitamura’s 2017 novel, A Separation, begins with a deception, a lie, an omission — withheld information. The unnamed narrator — a professional translator — and her husband, now separated from each other (she is already living with another man) have finally decided to divorce but have not yet told anyone, even about the separation. Then, when the husband’s mother cannot reach him during his solo research trip to Greece, she urges the narrator, presumed to be an equally concerned wife, to travel in search of him. This does not seem to the narrator quite the right time to inform her mother-in-law of the true state of affairs, which in any case seemed information more appropriately provided by the son, who would have had his reasons for not yet informing his mother. The separated couple had, indeed, agreed for now to keep their decision to themselves.

Deception, a lie, an omission — withheld information. There is always a point at which something is known to ourselves but not yet revealed to others, for many possible reasons. “And you didn’t tell me?” is a common line of dramatic dialog. “I’m telling you now” is the common reply. The time between knowledge and revelation of it can be short or long, with the reasons for the duration good or bad, simple or complex, or countless gradients in between. The words we choose to characterize the interval (I might have written “delay”) can accurately describe, or rather shape, what we say is the truth.

Beyond the separation of the couple themselves, A Separation begins, then, with that additional separation, of reality from what is represented as reality. In search of her husband, the narrator performs for all who encounter and observe her the role of concerned wife. Needless to say, she spends almost the entire novel — a matter of some days, and then, differently, long after — feeling like an imposter. From beginning to end, the novel is replete with narrative ruminations, encounters, and dramatized real and imagined scenes that represent and reiterate this theme of separation of appearance from reality, with appearance represented as a performance that establishes the separation. It all offers one of the more impressive examples of extended metaphor across an entire novel I have read.

In one extended set piece, A Separation’s narrator spies an animated conversation in a hotel lobby between the female front-desk clerk she presumes to have become involved with her missing husband and the male taxi driver whom the narrator believes is in love with the clerk and jealous. The narrator has at that time no concrete evidence for any of these beliefs, but she observes and narrates the conversation through these perceptions, first through a window, on which her reflection is superimposed, and then from a chair in the lobby, seated, as if an audience member. The conversation takes place in Greek, which the narrator doesn’t know, so her entire reading of the conversation is both interpreted for herself from physical signs and translated to the reader through the filter of her own speculative subjectivity.

The protagonist of Kitamura’s next novel, the 2021 Intimacies, also unnamed, is, indeed, rather than a translator, a professional interpreter, newly employed at the Hague International Court of Justice. Intimacy, as a state of closeness, conjures — is a trace of — its opposite, separation. An interpreter, like a translator, is dedicated to approaching the separation in represented reality between two languages — or, as the narrator of Intimacies puts it, “As interpreters, it was our job to throw down planks across these gaps.” Authentic meaning — the reality or truth of an expression — is found in the original language. To the degree that a translation or an interpretation fails, it falls into the gaps, the separation, between authenticity, the original, and what is merely a representation of it.

Thus, while telling very different stories, A Separation and Intimacies work similar territory. Their tone is detached and cool, even when recounting scenes of strong emotion, and their narratives, particularly in Intimacies, follow loose strings of sometimes chance occurrence rather than any compelling course of causation. They are atmospherically tense while dramatically casual. A curious further element of Intimacies is how little actual intimacy there is to be found in the novel, though, of course, the title is plural, and there may be lines of insight to be followed by exploring that difference. Almost all the key relationships in the novel are new, without a deep, intimate history. They are all, also, tenuous. We are told about the central romance of the novel, such as it is, between the narrator and a man living, once again, in a state of unresolved estrangement from his wife, that the two feel almost immediately intimate with each other, comfortable in their physical and emotional relation to each other, as if a natural pair. But the relationship is really only minimally sketched; there is little substance to this intimacy. Indeed, in another, discontinuous, set piece, the narrator decamps from her own apartment to stay in the much more settled home of her lover while he goes off to Lisbon to contend with the family ramifications of his separation. He doesn’t return on schedule and soon becomes incommunicative, and the narrator is left to wonder, in this empty home not her own, how much of a foundation there really was to this intimate relationship.

Most compelling of the intimacies we explore in the novel so titled is that between interpreter and interpreted subject. Kitamura, through her narrator, surveys this terrain in fascinating detail: how the interpreter becomes a kind of performative stand-in for, and to, a subject. In one early scene, a defendant accused of war crimes is the only person requiring and receiving the interpretation into Swahili, so that the act of interpretation becomes an experience of extraordinary and disturbing intimacy between the interpreter and the young, charismatically handsome accused, who one time looks up to the interpreter’s booth and stares directly at her, upsetting and intimidating her. In a late scene, the narrator is conscious, in her effort truly to represent a witness’ testimony, of merging her sense of identity with that of the witness: she narratively introduces the testimony with the words, to the reader: “I said.”

Something more about these two Kitamura narrators: they’re somewhat unreliable. They aren’t unreliable in any sense of apparent dishonesty or purpose to mislead, themselves or the reader. I will call them unreliable speculators instead. They are like close third-person narrators who speak, rather, in first person, so that the reader is locked, a bit claustrophobically, into their perceptions of events and people. Often, first-person narrators will, like an omniscient narrator, deliver reliably objective information about the world in addition to their first-person subjective experience. Compared to A Separation, there is more of that in Intimacies, where we receive so much information about the ICC and its trial experience and the work of interpretation. Nonetheless, the narrators deliver enormous amounts of speculative reporting on the feelings, motivations, and relationships of other characters and of events — as, indeed, we all internally engage in — without fully acknowledging it as speculation that might be mistaken. On occasion, we receive independent verification that the speculation was correct, on occasion incorrect. But the narrators never concede how much of their account, and how much of the story, might actually be different from how it is represented by them through their internal conjectures projected as narrative. This may be true of the way we all live — those narratives about ourselves and others that pop and pro psychologists alike inform us, and we recognize, we internalize and tell ourselves all the time — and that is a kind of unreliability that casts a shadow not only on these Kitamura tales but also on all storytelling.

Now we come to Kitamura’s latest novel, Audition, and its once more nameless first-person narrator. All of the themes Kitamura has been developing over the previous two novels, of separation and intimacy, of authenticity and represented distance from it, of the self as role and performance and relationships as ever developing and transforming scenes of situatedness to others, are brought to the fore. This time, the narrator, rather than translator or interpreter, is an actress.

The first two chapters of the novel may easily be received as scenes in a play, the latter, two-person, the former effectively so, though there are other actors on stage. The first chapter launches us into the chance that rules in these novels: a middle-aged woman who doesn’t want to enter a restaurant is swept against her reluctance and indecision by an opening door and the flux of moving bodies to a table and her young male lunch date she has only just met. The director, we may easily imagine, has offered this guidance to his actors: the young man will not mention in this scene what he has previously told the actress, that he believed the woman is his mother. She, having earlier established that she could not be, will not reveal what neither of them knows, which is why she agreed to this follow-up lunch in the first place. Play the scene, offers the director, under that sky, that canopy, that cloud. Let the underlying disturbance of these suppressed truths rule. Every word and gesture will be informed by them. And so the scene plays out, the chapter reads.

Because Kitamura is Jamesian in her scrutiny of consciousness and the implications of every gesture and deferral, we begin by this set-up in the latest novel a descent into close quarters with each facial expression and half-expressed thought or unuttered word. The turned heads, bodily postures, and glances of all around the two are read and reread by the narrator, offering her take on what she is experiencing as if it were, as they say, gospel, when she really has no idea. Henry James, whom I have invoked, like most writers, has his passionate enthusiasts and detractors, and Kitamura, in truth a very different writer, will have hers. That claustrophobia of close consciousness may reach a peak for some in Audition. For some — for all, perhaps, sometimes — the reading experience may suggest that distinction between acting for the stage and for the screen. One has to play larger on the stage; the closeup of the camera calls for diminished scale. The effect in Audition of reversing that scale of attention and projection can occasionally produce a fisheye lens. The filmmaker Robert Bresson did something like this with the material world: if a character checked his back pocket for his wallet, Bresson offered a closeup of the hand at the pocket grasping the wallet and giving it a squeeze. Too many shots like that in close proximity can produce an effect that is purposeful from both Bresson and Kitamura but not necessarily desirable in the reader.

One way to see Kitamura is as a phenomenologist — a philosopher of consciousness — crossed with a personality psychologist and writing as a novelist. Rather than a writer drawn to tell stories, which will have their themes emergent from the writer’s experience and view of her subject, Kitamura appears — appearance is key for Kitamura — a writer with ideas who constructs tales in order to communicate them. In that way, in Audition, she recalls Borges, and by the end, Kafka. She is not a world-builder of climes you would wish to visit or even of places you will recognize. Ostensibly, Audition is set in Manhattan, but in its generality, it could be anywhere. To the extent that Kitamura is depicting a world we live in, especially in Intimacies, in the international city of the Hague, with most residents from elsewhere and a biracial protagonist really from nowhere — her father dead, her mother living now, in all ways distantly, in Singapore, she most recently from New York, which we see from Audition doesn’t make much of an impression — that world is one dissipating into post-postmodern non-particularity.

The second chapter of Audition is consequent to the first, with the director’s guidance to the actors playing the actress and her husband exactly the same. Except in this case, with the wife rather than a third-person narrator relating her thoughts, a crucial piece of information is withheld not only from the narrative but also from the narrator’s consciousness, in a way that produces a surprise chapter ending but that also doesn’t seem at all believable. It does, though, produce, this time, a fully unreliable narrator, and that ain’t nothing in this story. By the end of the novel — which midway, in a grand conceit, upends and rearranges quite cleverly its whole foundation — the narrator will have revised and contradicted her perceptions, judgements and representations of other people, herself, and reality so many times even Nate Silver couldn’t track them.

It is harder, though hardly impossible, for nameless narrators to hold much distinct identity, in themselves or from each other, and by the end of Audition, this one has fulfilled all of their entropic potential. The nameless narrators are not flat but rather thin, or better, hollow. They are aggregations of sharp perceptions and strong judgments, ever shifting, so like Gertrude Stein’s Oakland in Everybody’s Autobiography, “there is no there there.” Which in these novels seems Kitamura’s project — presumably, in some way, ending with Audition. By that novel’s end, the narrator will have depicted and discussed identity entirely in terms of performance and her three major characters as “three distinct people, atomized, standing in a room suddenly devoid of meaning.” One wonders why Kitamura doesn’t write indistinct people, which is what they are, but that may be expressive of the narrator’s continuing delusion.

In this regard, Kitamura’s seemingly casual but purposeful treatment of race is congruent with the rest of identity. All three narrators make some passing references to their unspecified racial difference, like their nameless selves, Audition’s a bit more than the other two. In a different kind of novel, one could read this treatment of racial identity as one method of decentering whiteness. Why have a character identify her race as something other, as deviation from a centered norm, especially when reporting her own immediate thoughts, where one is less likely to name one’s own race, so immediately known to the self? Yet this treatment of race, in these largely culturally denuded novels, like every sleekly modern high-rise glass metropolis, is very much to the point of amorphous identity.

Kitamura is not prone to lyricism. Her sentences offer no marvels of construction, no delicate or daring suspensions or leaps among metaphor, clause and phrase, only very occasionally a striking image. They are short or carefully moderate in length, with a fondness for the two- or three-sentence run-on, to conform, in form, to close thoughts. What Kitamura does offer is that close scrutiny of perception and observation so penetrating and precise in its articulation and geolocative execution that one feels delivered — looking about in wonder at it and how one got there — to the precise, exact spot. Of something, if it exists, which is the question.

J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye memorialized that Holden Caulfield moment of adolescent experience when the teenager has fully recognized the breadth of adult — and the world’s — hypocrisy, the distance between our professions of who we are and who we actually are. To the extent that each of us “comes to terms” with this separation and incorporates the realization into what one tries to develop into a matured, integrated self, are we perpetrating a deceit, propagating a delusion? Some people will claim all their lives not to have accepted these terms. They are truth tellers, they will declare. In response, Leslie Bibb’s Kate in The White Lotus’ Season 3 will say, “One person’s fake is another person’s good manners.” This is an ongoing conversation.

Digging far deeper than social manners and their pretenses, Kitamura’s deconstructive method works, by her own characterization, to “atomize” the self and all the constituent and relational components of identity. Yet relatively few of us end up Travis Bickle in front of a mirror. Zeno’s arrow does reach its target. Even Kitamura, particularly in A Separation and Audition, draws back from the deconstructive chasm of the self she has worked to reveal. The former’s narrator says of the grief she had pretended for her estranged husband, “The emulation had become the thing itself.” Audition’s actress refers to “the natural superimposition of one mind on top of another mind” and of a performance, that “the meaning that is produced is at once entirely real . . . and also the predictable result of your craft.”

While we are disposed to criticize people for their pretenses and for performing a self rather than presenting an “authentic” one, we recognize all the ways that our experience in the world and our relation to others benefit from flexible and adaptable modes of self-expression. We acknowledge the need for and utility of code-switching, which many people do even between their families and friends and everyone else. We work to imagine being what we want to become (“visualize success”) as an important element in becoming it. To some degree or another, most of us are polite — we withhold the expression of some truths we think will produce unnecessary discomfort in others. That is, we withhold the expression of our completely true selves, which include all we know about ourselves and others. We regularly pretend not to know what we know, sometimes not to be all that we are.

Do we, in contrast, really wish to live among the scrims and screens of a life, of painted backdrops and charcoal smudges of people on the street? Of thumbnail character sketches simply and sharply delineated? The flatness of that world? Do not the separations, the distances, the representations and performances, and the real and conjured absences that light and shadow the gaps Kitamura excavates and exposes also serve to enrich the drama?

Part of what made my brief business career accidental and surprising was what a self-consciously insecure and hyper-sensitive person I had been in life until that point. I had, however, been actively working for a long time to appear — to perform — a more confident and secure individual. In my business success, I fully became that, and I learned separately that during those teen and later years, when I had been feeling so intensely my inadequacy, there were other people who had been misguided by my pretense and thought me “cool.”

I also privately self-dramatized. Making consequential decisions for the first time in my life, I stood at my office window at night, looking out over my view of my small portion of New York City. I saw myself standing there, feeling the weight of my responsibility, as if viewed from behind. But despite my self-conscious gravitas, there was no one else in the room, no camera over my shoulder, and I don’t go through life thinking I’m performing as the star of anything other than my hopes for tomorrow.

And then there was the dinner at a Manhattan restaurant, one of those nouvelle cuisine establishments so popular back then, where for the main course there sat a delectable medallion at the center of a large plate. My companions were two of the three company principals — the executive vice president, in charge of sales, and the president of the international subsidiary, my direct superior — along with the New York VP of sales. All three, in their late thirties, were a decade older than I. We ate, drank, and talked with animation, mostly about growth and operational matters, which meant that I, in charge of international operations, did my full share of talking. At some later point in the evening, an older man of perhaps sixty, at the table beside ours, politely interrupted. He couldn’t help overhearing, he said, and found the conversation interesting. He had to confess that he had been trying to guess, having already concluded that we all worked for the same concern, what each of our positions was in the business. We were amused and invited him to go on. You could see on his face his working to make final determinations in his mind before he spoke.

I would say, for instance, he began, that he — and now he indicated me — is the president of the company.

We all reacted with what we all felt (I think) was further amusement, and the guessing game having gone so immediately awry, we ended it and informed our fellow diner of all our true positions. I wondered that with my being clearly younger than the other three men, our neighbor had not discounted the likelihood of his guess on that score. Maybe he had and then changed his mind. One can’t know, but one can speculate. I was, as it turned out for him, not the president of the company, though I appeared to be.

And I could have been.

A. Jay Adler is the author of the 2021 poetry collection Waiting for Word. He currently divides his time between work on a California noir novel and a historical fiction of the Ferdinand Magellan expedition. He publishes weekly on his Substacks Homo Vitruvius and American Samizdat, where he just completed serializing his memoir Reason for Being in the World.