Misidentifications of a Woman: On Katie Kitamura’s “Audition”

---

“What the lover needs is to be able to face the beloved and yet not be destroyed.”

—Ann Carson, Eros The Bittersweet (1986)

In A Separation—Katie Kitamura’s third novel, and the first in an informal trilogy that ends with Audition—the first-person narrator, an unnamed literary translator, is in search of her missing husband Christopher in the southern Peloponnese. One afternoon after her arrival, she hires a driver, Stefano, to show her around and, on their way to a Byzantine church, he informs her of a local conflict between two farmers that has resulted in a months-long wildfire reflected in the barren landscape out the window. When the conversation turns to the purpose of her visit, she falls silent, as she frequently does, burrowing back into her mind where she can consider whether to continue to suppress who she is, and the fact that her marriage had ended long ago.

“There might be relief in articulating my situation to someone,” she confesses to the reader, who is privy to her mental asides, but then an inherent duplicitousness hijacks her consciousness: “But I did not. I said instead, without entirely knowing why, not even where the words came from, I’m working on a book about mourning.” This irrepressible impulse to impersonate her—as the second half will soon reveal—late husband’s identity opens up a dimension of dramatic irony between what the characters in the novel know, what we know, what the narrator knows and doesn’t want us to know, as well as what she doesn’t and cannot know. Kitamura’s work asserts the view that “truth” is an elusive construction, her narrators cycling through states of mind such as doubt, paranoia, anxiety, shame, guilt and fury. “I felt at once the extent of my deception…notwithstanding the fact that it was a performance, essentially on demand, the entire situation a fabrication,” she thinks; yet, in novel after novel it is these rich psychic sites of a performance that Kitamura’s narrators gravitate and cling to, where, in the face, and force, of ambiguity, one’s perceptions suddenly become marvellous, mutable play-things. 

 In Audition, the narrator, a 49-year-old actress of an unspecified Asian race, experiences the scene of misrecognition from the outset. She finds herself in a restaurant in the financial district with a younger man, Xavier, whose relationship to her is intentionally initially made unclear: a lover, perhaps? His presence across from her triggers an involuntary memory of her late father, who once gifted her a necklace in a restaurant in Paris. “I had not realized until that moment how much I missed the regular company of my parents,” she reminisces, but, as is Kitamura’s way, the memory sours as she continues to recall the waiter also winking at her, harassing her, giving her his number and telling her to call him when she’s done “working.” 

“And I understood,” she says, “that he had mistaken my father and all his beautiful kindness to me that day for something else entirely…the shoe was now on the other foot.” Setting aside how she feels she and Xavier are being perceived, what actually sends her into psychological distress is the sight—and introduction—of her husband Tomas, who suddenly enters the restaurant and then, as though not having seen her, just as suddenly as exits. “When has it happened,” she wonders, now agitated, her mind taking flight , “that I had looked at my husband and seen an emotion or expression that I was not easily able to parse, the meaning of which was not apparent at first glance?” Is her husband cheating on her? Or did he see her and assume she is cheating on him? And who exactly is Xavier? Kitamura’s novels are written under the sign of the distress of a world placed under an earthquake warning: they lack the bulk of details that might vividly render its realistic realms, for there is always a sense that everything could disappear at any moment, that things are opaque enough that everything could flip. There is no certainty in a world run amok with collusion. Of course someone who goes missing dies; of course someone, a manifestation of pure evil, happens to be charismatic. As the narrators make their way to instances of revelation, they experience these psychic fluctuations in the comforts of their everyday life, causing their anxieties to scatter. 

Their emotional lives are snow globes, these women, perpetually watching the dust settle. 

In Audition, within a few pages, she swiftly kicks the intricate narrative trajectories into overdrive on the basis of these ambiguities alone, which, by the end, she’ll partially resolve, never cauterizing the possibility of multiple interpretations. Xavier, notably, remains a figure of ambiguity even after his intentions are revealed. “I think you might be my mother,” he declares in their first meeting, which has taken place weeks before the time of the novel commences. He goes on to explain he was adopted and that the details of his birth align with the child that she claimed to have “given up” in a magazine profile. She confides to us that what she had once referred to the journalist as an abortion had been, alas, misrepresented: “It mattered, the vocabulary, the way a word circulated through society, the context and the atmosphere that was created around it. But in the piece she wrote, she not only failed to use the word abortion, she used language that was confusing to say the least, that seemed destined to obfuscate the reality of the procedure I’d had.” The misinterpretation at the level of the public record, then, enables the plausible personal misidentification central to the novel: that he might or could be her son, if not biologically then, at the very least, on a phenomenological plane, flirting with immanence. 

The entrancing power of Kitamura’s writing is her way of capturing the way a train of thought both rises then collapses on itself, realizing the irreconcilables it aims to animate. “I turned to look at Xavier,” the narrator says, “and then I saw it—the similarity between us, which was more than the fact of our shared race, it wasn’t an echo or mirroring in our features that had no explanation, no purpose. In that moment, I could perceive the outer edge of his thought, his personal delusion, I could reach out and grasp it. But then the feeling receded and the gap between us yawned once more,” emphasis mine. This notion of “the gap” previously appeared in Intimacies, in reference to Judith Leyster’s 1631 painting ‘The Proposition,’ which is described as a schism that “represented two irreconcilable subjectives positions” which the narrator realizes “was the true inconsistency animating the canvas and the true object of Leyster’s gaze.” 

What elevates Audition from its predecessors is the way she re-writes that concept to embrace that gap. “But perhaps he was both those things,” the narrator says in A Separation; in Intimacies: “But of course, it is possible to be both.” In Audition, as the narrator, Xavier and Thomas pretend to be a family, Kitamura can actualize her desire to dissolve the binary, to not merely split a “personality or psyche, but the natural superimposition of one mind on top of another mind.” The way to contain disorder, Kitamura suggests, is not by imposing a false order upon one’s exterior world, but in finding a way to reconcile the ambiguities in a form suited to allow them to fraternize without cancelling each other out. It is a matter of re-inventing your life. 

The thrilling difference in Audition is the formal embodiment of the gap. All three novels have been, in some way, split in two. In A Separation it occurs temporally: between chapter seven and eight, time has passed and the narrator, as though re-starting, catches us up on what we missed in the past tense. In Intimacies, that split is less defined but occurs between Chapter Eight—when the narrator shadows Amina in Chamber I and tries her hand at it for the first time—and Chapter Nine: when she is personally requested by the former president on trial for war crimes and Adriaan leaves. But it is most intentional in Audition, with a “Part I” and “Part II” distinction, which is not a distinction alone, but a shift in the rules of the game; a temporary suspension of disbelief that goes unexplained for a long time, meaning that our desire to know—and Kitamura’s intention to withhold—ingintes our imaginations. “We live in a state of I know but I do not know,” the narrator of Intimacies concludes; Kitamura’s preferred shore.  

The image of the shore, when it appears in A Separation, possesses a personal significance. The narrator, sick of land, goes for a swim: “I closed my eyes against the sun’s glare and then reluctantly turned and began swimming back to shore. I had gone further than I intended, I did not know how long I had been in the water.” This sense of having crossed a line, having overstayed one’s welcome, falls in line with the narrator’s behaviour, who we know has assumed her husband’s identity and resists the urge to tell her in-laws the “truth”; but what it also reveals to us about the character is that she perceives her experiences as substances, masses which she enters into, wading and submerging herself, only to inevitably exit it and begin the process of waiting to dry off, a film coating the skin. When two local men tell her the water is too cold, she’s proud to brush them off, but what follows one of Kitamura’s signature digressions that lift us up and transport us from location to location, where the narrator realizes she is seen as an outsider, a tourist who was “by definition a person immersed in prejudice, whose interest was circumscribed…a perspective entirely contemptible but nonetheless difficult to avoid.” The shore becomes a literal stage for her presence to cause a ripple, triggering a state of hyper-attunement.

In Intimacies, a rather dramatic turn towards the shore occurs as the setting of its climax. When it becomes clear that the trial is over, the narrator has an aggressive interaction with the former president, who lashes out on her: “You think my morals are somehow different to those of you and your kind. And yet there is nothing that separates you from me,” he says. She rapidly exits the court, emerging “out of that darkness and into the cold outside…I walked instead toward the sea, onto the dunes, I walked until I could see the water and the sound of the tide blocked out the road and the city and the Detention Centre and the man inside.” In this iteration, we see the shore as a place where she can receive the layers of distance from a confluence of circumstances so that she might decide what to do, where to go, because always, on Kitamura’s clock it’s about time to draw a conclusion. And because this is Kitamura—who is not merely interested in interpreting the signs but in actively deepening them through their repetition within each of the novels in the trilogy—the shore must bear another significance: she calls her mother who informs her that she had been there in her childhood, resulting in this conclusion: 

“Perhaps in the end it was not something I could explain—the prospect that had briefly opened, the idea that the world might yet be formed or found again. It was only a simple stretch of sand, the same water that lapped on the shore elsewhere. And yet for a brief moment I had felt the landscape around me vibrate with possibility. I had been trying for so long to put things in their place, to draw a line from one thing to the next.” 

Metaphor, Herbert Read writes, “is the expression of a complex idea, not by analysis, nor by direct statement, but by a sudden perception of an objective relation,” so by the time we arrive at Audition, we expect a scene at the shore, but, instead, since meaning is made when the pattern is broken—because nothing in Kitamura’s world the state of things can shift in the turn of a page—it appears in an unexpected guise, fully formed as a metaphor: “You can be entranced by an idea and at a certain point you can no longer see the edges of it,” the narrator tells Xavier: “In some ways the part is only working if I lose sight of the shore.” One cannot go back, Kitamura’s work seems to suggest, nor change the past, but you can move forward, with it, and turn it into an inhabitable space where a single, and singular, consciousness can attempt to articulate “the wounds you do not know you do not know about, and the course of which you cannot predict.”  

Towards the end of Audition, when the unnamed narrator enters into her apartment and catches Tomas, Xavier and Hana in a frenzied scene, she must realize her role in it: “It is no small thing to realize you are the one is waited for, and it is also the perpetual condition of motherhood, the waiting never stops.” One can hear the “Waiting” section of Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse here: “The being I am waiting for is not real….the other never waits,” but it also echoes of the voices of the other narrators, such as Intimacies’, who after Adriaan ghosts her calls herself a “woman waiting for her lover,” or the very last sentence of A Separation: “Although what we were waiting for, what exactly it was, neither of us could say,” which renders this moment in Audition another point at which an arc, weaved throughout the trilogy, has reached fruition: from “the lover” to being “the beloved,” from observer to taking action. 

The difference between ambiguity for ambiguity’s sake—of those bulky tales stuffed with red herrings and dead-ends—and ambiguity as a methodology, as it is in Kitamura’s novels, is the paragraph above: a synthesis that the expectant, attentive reader lies in wait for, which is the real climax of dramatic development of the text: the way that a naggingly persistent memory, or a complicated character whose interior life remains out of reach from the narrator—since every perspective is necessarily inherently biased, narrow in its own way, limits not being something Kitamura shies away from—can become a revelation, a path for the narrator to understand the parts of herself that would otherwise be inaccessible by simply being herself.

At the end of Audition, we also see, in Kitamura fashion, another unpredictable development occur, a new era: the result of a work of art, a play-length monologue for her to inhabit. Unlike the end of A Separation, where the narrator begins her life in earnest with Yvan, or Intimacies, where she seems to get back with Adriaan, Xavier, then, young, ambitious and not romantically involved with her, is not the first of the men to give her hope for the future, but he is the first to see her as the artist that she is, unafraid of stepping into the darkness, in swimming in the ambiguity, since passivity, as Kitamura demonstrates, is not a weakness but a weapon. 

The linguistic gap in Audition exists in the title of the play the actress is rehearsing,  which is referred to in Part II as Rivers, is called The Opposite of The Shore in Part I. “I wanted “The Opposite Shore” to be a kind of black box in the middle of the book,” Kitamura said in an interview with Jennifer Wilson for The New Yorker. “For the character to go into that scene and then come out of it as a different character. That is the structure of the novel as well.” A black box, as the dictionary has it, is a metaphor for opaque systems in which the inputs and outputs are known, but the inner workings are incomprehensible. The shore—or a novel, for instance.