Katie Kitamura, Audition (Penguin Random House, 2025)
Preachers should read novels. Good novels open what otherwise we would not see. What’s more, novels teach preachers (all of us, actually) how to read. How to read, among other things, the Bible. The Bible is frequently novelistic. Or, better, novels are frequently biblical. The ancient Hebrew writers—the writers of the Jacob story in Genesis and the David story in Samuel, for example—taught everyone who has come after them how to write narrative. All narrative is influenced by biblical narrative. Like a novel, Hebrew narrative is various, subtle, and allusive. It bears reading and rereading. Which brings me to Katie Kitamura and her latest novel, Audition (2025).
Kitamura is a brilliant writer. Her prose is spare and accurate. It has, to quote her narrator in Audition, “the stab, the throb, the unruliness of the real.” She says of one character that he “gave good son.” Of another, she says that her “her skin [was so] smooth and her grip so light as to be an act of aggression. . ..” (147) Audition is her fifth novel. It was longlisted for the Booker Prize.
In Audition Kitamura opens up the space between the life we live—what we do that other people see—and the life we live inside of what we do—that persistent voice in us narrating our lives to ourselves. The outside is the play, the drama; the inside is the person playing the part. I might be doing this, I say to myself, but this is not really who I am; it’s the role I play.
Kitamura’s narrator in Audition, as in the two novels previous to Audition (A Separation, 2017; Intimacies, 2021), is woman, unnamed, in this case an actor. She says, speaking of the stage:
Here, it is possible to be two things at once. Not a splitting of personality or psyche, but the natural superimposition of one mind on top of another mind. In the space between them, a performance becomes possible. You observe yourself, you watch yourself act, you hear yourself speak, a line that is articulated and then articulated again, and the meaning that is produced is at once entirely real—as it is experienced on stage, as it is experienced by the audience—and also the predictable result of your craft, the choices you have made, the control that cedes freedom. (195-96)
But this is true not only of the stage; it’s true of life. We go through life observing ourselves, watching ourselves act. Others see us from the outside; we see ourselves from the inside. Life plays out in the back and forth between what we do and what we tell ourselves.
It’s that inner voice of the main character that we hear in Audition. At the beginning of the book, she is in rehearsal for a play. She has reached an impasse. Gradually, over the course of many rehearsals, each scene of the play has come into focus for her. She knows what to do with each of them. All but the scene at the center of the play. She can’t seem to find her way through that scene, the scene that ties together the first and second acts of the play.
In her considerable frustration, she consults the writer of the play, looking for clues for how to play it. In their conversation, it becomes apparent that the writer has left the scene entirely open. She calls her writing “schematic.” The scene, in which the character moves from grief to action, is left to the actor. The writer adds:
Of course, this is the moment when your character achieves a kind of breakthrough, and reaches the opposite shore. . . . It’s absolutely central, she continued. It is the moment when she locates her emotion, when the play breaks opens, when she steps forward into life, if you see. (87)
She doesn’t see. Not at first. But eventually, this scene becomes her favorite. Each night she plays it differently. When she enters the scene, she is never sure who she will be when emerges from it. The play is always new, always a revelation, because of the openness of this scene.
In the novel, Kitamura puts us, her readers, in the same place as her narrator. The novel falls out in two acts. In the first, as I’ve already described it, the play, called in the first act “The Opposite Shore,” is in rehearsal. As the novel opens, the narrator meets a young man she doesn’t appear to know. He, Xavier, wants to talk to her. In a break in the rehearsal, they walk to a nearby café, order coffee, and he tells her that he thinks she might be his mother. Stunning, coming from this boy.
She’s not his mother, at least if her story can be believed. But she clearly is attracted to him. He’s handsome, charming, and intelligent. Soon, he lands a job on the play as an assistant to Anne, the director. The relationship between the narrator and Xavier grows close (with Anne as a sort of rival). Exactly what the relationship is remains indeterminate, but it’s enough to threaten her marriage to her husband Tomas. As we reach the end of the first half of the book, she find herself still uncertain about how to play the central scene. With her relationships to Tomas and Xavier adding to her uncertainty, she’s not ready to proceed. But she must. Anne declares firmly: “We begin now,” and with that the first act of the novel ends.
As the second act opens, everything has changed. Now Xavier is her son—or plays her son. She, Tomas, and Xavier are having dinner when Xavier announces that he would like to move in with them. His lease is up, and he has a month to wait for Anne’s next project to begin. It would make good sense for him to move temporarily into their New York flat. They will hardly notice him being there, he assures them.
It doesn’t stay that way. Xavier’s time in their apartment extends. Soon it no longer seems all that temporary. He occupies more and more space in the apartment, and in their lives. He brings in a “friend,” Hana, to live with him. They together co-opt Tomas, who desperately wants to be included. Everyone appears happy. Except our narrator, who sees herself being pushed out of her own life. It spins more and more out of control until, at last, it all blows up.
How should we, Kitamura’s readers, stitch these two acts of the novel together? Is the second half a fiction? Or, the first? Is the second act a drama, perhaps written by Xavier? Or is it something that the three and, eventually, four of them enact: a play in real life, as it were, a play at being family. I’ll not spoil it for you. Kitamura leaves hints laying around everywhere in the novel, especially in the rapid second act, allowing you to put the stories together in your own way.
What interests me for the purposes of this post is the implicit eschatology of Kitamura’s novel. She captures in a singular way the position we find ourselves in, individually and collectively. In our own lives, we are always playing that central scene. The first act is over. It may have been short, as when we are young, or long, as it is now for me. We have to decide who we will be for the second act, how we will emerge from the present into the future, as we head for “the opposite shore.”
For the narrator of the novel, it’s in this scene where she becomes most herself. She says that she “was dazzled each time by the scene’s infinite contingency, the range of possibility laid out in front of me.” (99) “The experience felt wholly private,” she says. “even though I was onstage. It was not that I forgot about the audience or the parameters and construction of the set. It was that here, the gap between my private and performed selves collapsed, and for the briefest of moments there was only a single, unified self.” (99-100)
It’s where we live, in that scene. How will you play it today? Tomorrow? How will I? But it’s not our private lives I have in mind as I write this. I’m thinking of us together. I’m thinking of us as a nation at this moment in the wake of the assassination of Charlie Kirk. It seems that we have entered a space where we as a nation can become many different things. We seem to be between acts. How will we play it?
We can become vindictive. Go war with each other. We are being urged to do so. We can make the events of the past few days a blood feud: tribe against tribe. It’s what humans have long done. Or we can come together in some new way. Kitamura’s narrator says of the dysfunctional story she, Tomas, and Xavier had been living out:
We had been playing parts, and for a period—for as long as we understood our roles, for as long as we participated in the careful collusion that is a story, that is a family, told by one person to another person—the mechanism had held. But the deeper the complicity, and the longer it is sustained, the less give there is, the more binding and unforgiving the contract, and in the end it took very little for the whole thing to collapse. It was as if a break had been called, as if it had suddenly occurred to both of us that his lines were insufficient, my characterization lacking, the entire plotline faulty and implausible. (189-90)
Increasingly, this is what living in our time feels like: as if our lines are insufficient, our characterization lacking, the entire plotline faulty and implausible,” as if the whole thing is about to suddenly, catastrophically, collapse.
Is there another way through, another way to play it? Biblical eschatology is always about just this: about other ways to play it. We may be up against the sea, as were those ancient Israelites, with Pharaoh’s armies hot behind, but even then, there was a way through. But will we find it? Not unless we believe, the biblical story suggests. Unless we believe there is a way through, we will not find our way through.
I am grateful for the art of Katie Kitamura, who so carefully accurately places us where we are: between the acts. We hear the Director say, “We begin now.” It’s always now. We cannot wait. We have to play it the best we can.
Clay