Katie Kitamura is one of those writers whose books generate a particular kind of divided response, not between people who think she is talented and people who think she is not, but between people who find her novels emotionally cold and people who find that coldness itself to be a kind of emotional precision. Reading Audition is an experience that falls almost entirely on that fault line, and where you land probably tells you something about your own reading preferences that is more interesting than any judgment about the book's quality.
The novel is short, barely over two hundred pages, and written in Kitamura's characteristic prose, spare and formal and so precisely controlled that every word feels like it has been placed rather than written. There is almost no register of the casual or the spontaneous in her sentences. Every utterance or gesture, as one reviewer accurately observed, carries subtext, and the effect of reading her is less like entering a story and more like watching a very skilled and very composed person perform the act of telling one. That distance is not an accident. It is the entire point.
The central premise, an actress and a young man whose exact relationship remains deliberately unspecified, is Kitamura at her most formally playful. She is interested in what happens when the same scene is replayed under different conditions, what changes and what stays the same, what the difference reveals about character versus circumstance. The two-halves structure, in which the first half presents the narrator as a woman without children and the second presents her as a mother, is a theatrical device in a very literal sense. It is the kind of experiment that a playwright might design, and Kitamura, who is writing about a theatre director and actress and working from a play called The Opposite Shore, is clearly aware of the formal parallel she is drawing.
The young man at the center of the novel is genuinely interesting in his opacity. He is not a villain, not a lover in any conventional sense, not clearly anything that would allow the reader to organize their understanding of him into a familiar category. He is a presence that means different things in the novel's two halves, and the meaning produced by that shift is the novel's central argument, though Kitamura, characteristically, never makes the argument explicit. She presents the data and trusts the reader to draw conclusions, or not, depending on what they bring to it.
What Kitamura does better than almost any other novelist working in this register is the rendering of social discomfort, the texture of a conversation in which what is being said and what is meant are operating at a significant distance from each other, in which both participants are performing something they have not consciously chosen and cannot quite control. Her scenes at the restaurant, in the theatre rehearsal room, in the apartment where her narrator lives with a husband who seems increasingly like a character in a different kind of novel, have the particular energy of situations in which nothing is settled and nothing can be made to settle.
Where the novel is less satisfying is in the question of what all this formal machinery is ultimately in service of.
Kitamura's previous novel Intimacies generated the same division, but there the emotional stakes felt more grounded, the novel's inquiry into identity and complicity more viscerally felt. Audition is, as one Goodreads reviewer put it, perhaps trying a little too hard to be clever, and the structural experiment, while genuinely interesting as an intellectual exercise, can feel at certain points like a display of technique that the novel's emotional content is not quite sufficient to fully justify.
This is not a disqualifying criticism.
