Such moments of authenticity are rare in Audition, a novel in which everyone is playing a part. A young man named Xavier, an “archetypal son” who may or may not be the narrator’s biological child, embraces the role of a director’s assistant, “like an actor moving on in the wake of a disastrous audition.” A young woman the narrator barely knows starts “playing the role of the dutiful daughter-in-law,” acting in ways that appear kind but are in fact manipulative and malicious. On more than one occasion, the narrator finds herself performing against her will, pretending to be grateful or pleased, because, as she puts it, “I have made a career of knowing what is expected of me, and delivering it.” Even in their most intimate relationships, these characters are as cagey as con artists, dissembling to their own advantages.
In Audition, Kitamura brings together public performance and private performance, revealing the similarities between them. Plays may have scripts and stage directions, but so, too, do restaurant dinners, intimate breakfasts, and exchanges between a mother and a son. In Kitamura’s fictional universe, everyone is always watching and being watched, and adapting their behavior to fit the expectations of others. Even in our most intimate moments, this novel suggests, we are always onstage.
This encounter inaugurates a charged relationship between the two characters, one that bristles with ill-defined danger. They meet for a tense lunch at an upscale restaurant, where they are mistaken for lovers—or at least the narrator, always self-conscious, worries that they are. They run into each other before rehearsal; Xavier has been hired as an assistant on the production, but the narrator, ignorant of his new position, assumes he’s been lying in wait for her. As he fetches coffee and holds open doors, she notes the malleability of his character: “I saw that he was absorbed in, or had been absorbed by, the role of the assistant, that he was performing a part he had studied carefully, just as he had presumably studied the part of my long-estranged son.”
Rather than damaging the marriage, the couple’s mutual suspicion appears to strengthen it. They grow more attuned to each other; they are deliberate in their shared rituals and conscious of each other’s moods. “I thrilled to his presence,” the narrator says of Tomas. “I had a new appreciation of his intelligence and kindness.” Her husband becomes visible to her again as a separate person, one with both surface and depths. “For the first time in many years, I saw our marriage for what it really was, something fragile that could still be tarnished or lost,” she observes. In this novel, as in much of Kitamura’s fiction, a marriage is a kind of provisional arrangement, one that could always change.
The section ends before any such confrontation takes place—a development that is disappointing but, for reader’s familiar with Kitamura’s oeuvres, not surprising. She’s always been more interested in preludes and aftermaths, in the preparation for a fight, or the adrenaline crash that follows one, rather than the fight itself. These are moments of reflection rather than action, times when people self-assess and take stock. What Kitamura works to reveal is how, in these moments of intense contemplation, we almost always reach the wrong conclusions, about others as well as ourselves.
If the nature of marriage is the subject of the novel’s first half, the nature of familial bonds is the subject of this second part. To be bound by blood, Kitamura suggests, is, paradoxically, to have scripted and limited interactions—the opposite of the free and spontaneous relations that might take place between strangers or friends. When Xavier asks to move back in with his parents, they perform their acceptance theatrically. “It was as if I had been given my cue, it was as if I had received my prompt,” the narrator says of her welcoming gestures. They clean the apartment until, in the narrator’s words, it looks “like a showroom of our lives.” When Xavier moves back in, he acts with a kind of studied “naturalness,” laying out breakfast pastries and doing the dishes. The narrator suspects his behavior is a performance of maturity, even though she admits that his actions don’t seem calculated.
Kitamura’s characters are people who recognize but do not know one another, who play at intimacy even when doing so creates feelings of estrangement.
From the narrator’s perspective, Hana, the non–blood relation, is the problem; once she’s been expelled, the family will be as it was. But it’s not clear we can trust the narrator’s evaluation; indeed, Kitamura sows doubts about the narrator’s reliability throughout this section. (The narrator’s unreliability distinguishes her from the cool, cerebral women who narrated Kitamura’s two prior novels, both of whom come across as trustworthy in their passivity.) There are hints that the narrator’s performance of the “good mother” is just that—an act, one that papers over cruelty and misunderstandings from the past. The narrator begins to doubt herself: When she welcomes her son enthusiastically, is she showing her emotions or fabricating them? Has she misread Xavier’s desires, or has she misunderstood her own? In these moments, Kitamura reveals every mother’s fear: that despite her best efforts, she’s failed to love her child in the ways he needed most.
One is tempted to dispute such blanket assertions. Surely there are important differences between being a wife and an ex-wife, just as there is a messy, painful history to family life that distinguishes the family from a group of strangers. Kitamura’s novels tend to skim the surfaces of interpersonal relationships, offering neat snapshots rather than rich and full portraits. Reading her fiction, I often longed for more insight—not into the nature of relationships generally but into the specific people whose lives were taking shape on the page.
Still, Kitamura may be right that the language we have to talk about our relationships is inadequate. Words like “mother” and “son” conjure a set of associations that may be distant from our actual experiences of one another. The more we try to live up to those words, the further we get from ourselves. In her spare, cerebral novels, Kitamura reveals how much lies beneath the surfaces of our bodies and our sentences, and how much about one another we cannot know.
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