Heightened Performance in Katie Kitamura’s “Audition”

There is a moment halfway through Audition when, like an actor taking a breath on stage, the narrator captures the reader in the possibility of an impending performance. The narrator is an actress refining the last scene before a show’s debut—one that “[sits] in the center [of the show] like a black hole or box.” A director tells her this scene is when her character is supposed to have a breakthrough. A young man who says he could be her son has entered the production’s fabric. Her husband sends perhaps the most unsettling of texts: “We need to talk.” And then, curtain rises on the book’s second act.

Katie Kitamura has a history of writing and dissecting performers and performance. 2017’s A Separation featured a woman separated from a missing husband, striving to maintain appearances. Intimacies, her brilliant 2021 follow-up, focused on a translator in The Hague interpreting for an accused war criminal and fixating on a moment of local violence. Both previous narrators perform—as a loving wife, a placid listener, a concerned citizen. Compelling for Audition, then, is that the narrator is a performer by trade.

Audition’s narrator wonders, before that central moment, if the purpose of performance is to create a container for the competing notions of how someone acts versus how she wants to act, or how she should—people do not want to explicitly experience violence or dread, she says, but “our awareness of the performance is what allows us to enjoy the emotion, to creep close to it, […] performance allows this dangerous proximity.” But how close can one creep to enjoy something without experiencing it? To what degree does the continued creation of these containers—of performative spaces, of performing one’s experience within those spaces, and so on—wind a person into such deep performance that they lose the ability to experience reality at all? “There are always two stories taking place at once, the narrative inside the play and the narrative around it,” the narrator tells us, “and the boundary is more porous than you might think.”

Later, she discusses that same phenomenon with Xavier, the young man who claims that he could be her son—a claim she dismisses as impossible—and adds, “You can be entranced by an idea […] and at a certain point you can no longer see the edges of it. […] But […] it’s important to […] be able to come up for air. Otherwise, you won’t survive.”

Which brings us back to that moment in the middle of the story. Structurally, we are told that the performance is about to begin. However, the narrator has been performing for at least a small eternity. She is in a play, and she does play—she entertains appreciation of Xavier, tells us he “gave good son.” When the narrator finishes that central breath, and the second part of the book begins, Xavier is her son. Her marriage is calm and even. She has nailed the scene she couldn’t, and the performance is a wild success.

All of this is, of course, in opposition to the first half’s narrative. And all of it, of course, comes undone within the second half’s narrative. The narrator has told the readers of the two stories taking place at once, but Kitamura makes them explicit. What Kitamura achieves in Audition is great not only because of the two competing narratives, but because of the interplay between them, and the questions they raise about which (or if both) are performances. How many realities can the narrator be separate from at once, and from how many does she know that she has removed herself?

See Also

Life Disguised as Art in “My Clavicle”

Audition maintains Kitamura’s distinctive style—prose so acrobatic it lands before a reader realizes it has leapt—and is a consummate addition to her already-excellent oeuvre. If you’ve read any of her books, you’ll love Audition. If you have not read any of her books, I am dropping the performance of this review to tell you to go read all of them, Audition included. While there are some contemporaries that also deal in the beautiful dread of questioning both identity and reality—Marias’ The Infatuations is adjacent to much of her work—there is nothing like a Katie Kitamura book. You will reel, you will stagger, but you will not be able to look away from the stage.

FICTION
Audition
By Katie Kitamura
Riverhead Books
Published Apr 8, 2025