Katie Kitamura mines the painful tension between intimacy and performance, and their beguiling slippages into each other. Kitamura’s prose—taut, yet full of surprise—is keenly attentive to the intricacies of power and language across circumstances as varied as the turbulent decolonization of an unnamed country, the agonizing days before a professional fight in Mexico, and the disappearance of a woman’s estranged husband in Greece. Her latest, Intimacies, follows a woman at the Hague entangled in the end of a marriage and tasked with interpreting for a former president accused of war crimes. The book throws into relief the ever-shifting nature of guilt, culpability, and knowledge, undermining the appealing veneer of neutrality and asking how to have faith—not only in institutions, but in other people.
Intimacies was one of The New York Times‘ 10 Best Books of 2021 and one of Barack Obama’s Favorite Books of 2021, longlisted for the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award, and a finalist for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize. Kitamura’s third novel, A Separation, was a finalist for the Premio von Rezzori and a New York Times Notable Book. She is also the author of Gone To The Forest and The Longshot, both finalists for the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award.
Kitamura’s work has been translated into 21 languages and is being adapted for film and television. A recipient of fellowships from the Lannan, Santa Maddalena, and Jan Michalski foundations, she has written for publications including The New York Times Book Review, The New York Times, The Guardian, Granta, BOMB, Triple Canopy, and Frieze. She teaches in the creative writing program at New York University.
I met Katie Kitamura during her visit to the University of Michigan, where she read from Intimacies and lectured on play and performance, sporting a GEO pin to show support for the ongoing graduate student strike. In the breakfast room of the Bell Tower Hotel, we discussed courtroom dramas, going on tangents, and misbehaving men.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Urvi Kumbhat (UK): How did you arrive at the idea for your novel Intimacies?
Katie Kitamura (KK): I sit with an idea for a long time before I start writing. Often the only way I know it’s an idea that will sustain a novel is if it doesn’t go away over the course of many years. In the case of this book, the idea first came to me in 2009. I was listening to the radio. I heard a little audio clip of Charles Taylor, the former president of Liberia, speaking. The experience of listening to him speak was deeply disquieting because he’s an incredibly gifted speaker. He possesses the power of rhetorical persuasion. Logically, I could see that the arguments were faulty, that the whole position was incorrect—everything was paper-thin, visibly so—but nonetheless, I could almost take one or two steps down the road he was indicating. And that was troubling to me.
UK: It’s fascinating to think about how a powerful performance can induce a certain moral wavering.
KK: That’s something that really interests me. Not least because there are performances that we undertake without realizing it. There are so many ways that we perform versions of ourselves for other people, and our identity shifts with that performance. It can have a transformative power. I was interested in the setting of the courtroom primarily because it is a theatrical space in a fundamental way. When you go to sit in on a trial, that’s a tension that is inherent to the space of the courtroom. Performance is everywhere.
UK: That’s a great segue into my next question. You’ve mentioned before that you play with elements from the murder mystery genre or the courtroom drama genre. I’m interested to hear you talk more about what conventions of genre can offer when you’re writing literary fiction.
KK: It’s a jolt of energy, a motion forward into the text. My book A Separation is most explicitly related to genre, in that it opens with a disappearance. I love writers like Marguerite Duras and Patrick Modiano, who play quite overtly with the detective genre. I’m not that interested in policing boundaries between genres, but I think it’s fair to say that I start off within a genre framework, and then as I move into the novel, I try to pivot so that answers to the question posed at the start of the novel are located internally rather than externally. That is to say, the solution to the mystery is located not in the plot or what happens in the outside world, but rather in the shifts that occur within the character.
I said at the reading that I ended up writing this very expository paragraph at the beginning of Intimacies because my editors—who I trust greatly—told me the book needed it. And the truth is that to some extent, you do have to drop down an anchor for a reader. If you do that, then you can drift without becoming completely untethered. I’m always trying to figure out what that balance is—when can I wander, and when do I need to think about anchoring or grounding? And sometimes that anchor comes from employing a genre element. I mostly learn about writing through the experience of reading. And there are moments in books I deeply admire when nonetheless I feel I’ve lost my way, in a way that’s not necessarily productive. So as a writer I’m always trying to figure out how I can allow that outward movement, that drift, without alienating the reader.
UK: That makes sense, especially because your books deal explicitly with abstract ideas of language and power. It’s not necessarily that the reader arrives at that abstraction by reading between the lines. It’s more that the characters are actively thinking through those ideas themselves. I wonder how challenging it is to represent that abstract thinking without losing the reader.
KK: I don’t know [laughs]. It’s a real question. I want to be able to directly address ideas that I’m interested in. The only thing that I always try to do is to represent those ideas so that you can see the character working through them. So hopefully the character is not presenting finished ideas—it’s part of a situational response.
UK: Not only situational, but institutional and societal too. All your fiction circles around violence on interpersonal and national and global scales. In both A Separation and Intimacies, the narrator becomes obsessed with a violent act.
KK: In Intimacies, that was something that initially featured much more strongly in the opening chapter, well into the writing process. In the early drafts, the narrator actually witnessed the mugging. I couldn’t make it work and I had to change it, but what I wanted to write about was what it means to witness an act of violence. I wanted to think about what it means to witness something, what it means to take action, to not take action. What was so nice about opening up my writing process and making it more collaborative was that I was able to talk to editors, who told me that ultimately the opening didn’t work as it was. It seemed to entirely center the story on the mugging. The story is thematically interested in complicity and witnessing and observation, but including the mugging itself was too much.
UK: What’s interesting is not the mugging itself, but why she becomes so fixated with it.
KK: That was always one of the starting points.
UK: Speaking of the mugging, Intimacies also investigates the construction of criminality and the usefulness of that category—how institutions get to decide who or what is criminal. At one point, a character named Amina says that interpreting for a militia leader was her “first true encounter with evil,” although the encounter is also more complex than that. I was wondering how crime, and maybe this idea of evil, forms an engine in your fiction.
KK: I was talking to a friend—she’s a novelist—and she was saying the lesson at the end of the book is that everybody gets away with it. They all get away—every man in the book, whether it’s the President or Anton the bookseller, who lies, or Adriaan, who behaves in a certain way. Everyone gets away with it, although that was not the moral lesson I was trying to convey with the book!
UK: But it feels true to life.
KK: I mean, yes. There were so many things about the ICC that were fascinating to me and very hard to ignore. That related quite directly to the themes of the book, especially to language. The official languages are colonial—English and French. The rest are unofficial languages. This idea of a place that is meant to mete out neutral, objective justice, and yet already, from the very beginning, this use of language is traditional in its hierarchies and its presuppositions. I was interested in thinking about it on an institutional level, of course. But I also wanted to think about how we experience guilt or feelings of responsibility, how we experience proximity to an act of violence, on a more individual level.
UK: What I love about the novel is the way power shifts in these minute registers from page to page, which you track so precisely. Speaking of all the men getting away with it, another common thread in your last two novels is that of infidelity. There was a sentence in A Separation that struck me. “It was only on the shores of infidelity that they [men] achieved a little privacy, a little inner life, it was only in the domain of their faithlessness that they became, once again, strangers to their wives, capable of anything.” I’m curious how you see this link between infidelity, privacy, and a man becoming himself.
KK: I’m fascinated by the moment—which I think can occur at any point in a relationship—when you look at a person you think you know very well, possibly better than anyone else, and they suddenly seem like a stranger, like they might be capable of doing things you didn’t believe they’d be capable of doing. I suppose the most trivial example of that tends to be infidelity. It’s a very banal event that nonetheless remains charged for people.
I believe in privacy—I want privacy for myself, to have a space where I’m being myself for myself and not for a relationship, whether that’s a partner or a family. I think that’s one of the reasons why when I write, I’m writing entirely for myself. At least during the initial writing period; it’s true that it changes as you move into editing and you focus on the requirements and experience of the reader. But privacy is not something I would necessarily want to see disappear from any of my relationships. There’s such a tendency, particularly in American culture, to expect that everything should be disclosed between two people. I don’t think that’s possible, but I also don’t know if it’s that desirable. Certainly, it’s not for the vast majority of relationships I know of.
I don’t know why I love writing these male characters. They’re so much fun for me to write. It’s almost the easiest part of writing each book, so they just proliferate. [laughs]
UK: I can see the pleasure of writing these misbehaving characters, the permissiveness they bring to the book.
KK: The narrators are so bounded, so cautious, so watchful, so careful. These male characters are almost a kind of uncontrolled id, wandering around, causing chaos, which I think also provides a bit of energy in the books. That kind of quite controlled narrative is tricky because everything is muted and very rarely directly addressed. If the entire novel were only animated by that I worry it would get claustrophobic, I worry that the energy would suffer without having these chaotic, male, ridiculous figures in the mix.
UK: They’re ridiculous, but sometimes they also seem threatening.
KK: Well, they’re ridiculous, but they’re powerful. I mean, look at political figures—they’re ridiculous, and yet they are also menacing. How can I square those things? The great mistake, one that you could easily make with a figure like Trump, is thinking that, because they’re ridiculous, they’re not powerful. To some extent, they almost gain their power from their ridiculousness. There is a power in being chaotic somehow.
UK: It’s like this emboldened and absurd way of being maps onto exercising power with impunity. I read in a different interview that you also see Intimacies as being a novel about sexual harassment. In some ways, you could read these novels as having a heteropessimistic tendency, though of course Intimacies ends with a renewed commitment between the narrator and Adriaan.
KK: The ending is really interesting. No, that’s overstating it— I didn’t think the ending was that interesting, I just thought it was the ending. What has been interesting is people’s responses, because the ending has been the most controversial aspect of the book. Some people read it as a happy ending and it troubles them that she would take him back. And then other people read it as completely pessimistic, in the sense that she has reconciled to being with somebody who has treated her badly.
To me, there’s something realistic in that—some relationships are built on rocky foundations. You know, the character is not young. That was another interesting thing about publishing the book—she was often described in reviews as a young woman, but she’s explicitly not young. She’s much closer to middle-age. I think of it as a middle-aged romance issue. In that sense, it is a story about compromise. And in that sense, it is pessimistic.
UK: To me, it didn’t read squarely as happy or sad. It read as an interest in seeing what happens next.
KK: That is exactly what I hoped it would be.
UK: Which to me is optimistic, if in a muted way.
KK: Yes, it’s certainly more optimistic than some of my other endings.
UK: To change subjects a little, there’s a narrative strategy I found particularly compelling in both A Separation and Intimacies. In the former, the last chapter begins with a missing cruise ship that hasn’t had any bearing on the plot so far. In Intimacies, we spend several pages with the narrator while she looks at the painting “The Proposition” by Judith Leyster. I’m really interested in how you made these apparent tangents work in novels that are otherwise so tightly contained.
KK: A friend of mine, a brilliant writer, read a draft of A Separation, and the only note he had was about the cruise ship in the book. He told me I needed to cut it. He couldn’t see what it had to do with anything. And although I respect this writer and his opinion tremendously, I didn’t listen. He was correct in many ways, but when I thought about it in terms of rhythm and wanting to insert a breathing space into the book, it felt right to retain it. I tend to think about the individual chapters of a novel in terms of the accumulation of pressure. Within that, it feels important to insert moments of breath within the book.
But, of course, the actual subject matter of both those anecdotal scenes is not very relaxing. [laughs] One is about people disappearing and the other is a woman being sexually harassed. But I just wanted to create a bit of breathing space, an opportunity to step outside the primary narrative. I remember I went to the Hague specifically to find a painting—I didn’t actually know Leyster’s work. I took iPhone photos of maybe ten possible paintings, and then when I got home that was the one that I felt I could actually do a little narrative about, that could address the themes of the book but with a different palette. The book I’m writing now is much more claustrophobic. There is another gap in it, but I’m leaving it blank. So there’s not going to be that breathing space. It’s slightly less gentle of a book.
UK: That breathing room really expands the context the narrator is in in an extremely efficient way.
KK: They’re very top-down books. At various moments you have to look up and say, this is the world I’m operating in, before you move back down. I am really aware of the fact of the voice and the constraints of the voice.
UK: Yes, it comes across as intentional. I love the Leyster aside, because for me it mimics the experience of going to a museum with an intelligent and perceptive person, and looking with her as she does a close reading of the painting. That made me wonder about how your academic background and work as an art critic informs your fiction.
KK: I had to unlearn quite a lot of academic language in order to write fiction. But the armature of that trained thought is very useful in writing fiction. I worked on this documentary series about psychoanalysis and cinema, which is quite academic in a way—I found that experience incredibly useful for writing fiction. Those ideas provide a kind of structure I can build a piece of fiction around. So much of the way I think about power and language are from my academic background.
In terms of art criticism, I wrote criticism for quite a long time and one thing I always found difficult was the description of painting. Particularly in a work of fiction, you need that description to stand on its own, so the challenge was to try to capture not only how it felt to look at the Leyster painting, but also to describe what the painting itself looks like. I don’t know if I succeeded, because so many people said, I looked up the painting to see if it was real. [laughs]
UK: I think I could picture it, but there’s also something about not being able to see the painting that’s generative for me—having only the language through which to construct the image, so that the image takes on this ghostly quality.
KK: It’s a great painting. It’s incredible that she made it when she was 22.
UK: I’m also thinking about your political commitments across your work—Gone to the Forest is most explicitly political, perhaps, with its interest in processes of decolonization. Do you have particular political goals in mind as you write?
KK: I’m thinking about systems, institutions, hierarchies, the way narratives are constructed, the way narratives are manipulated. I’m trying to work out, particularly with Intimacies, what the role of the individual is within that. My husband has written novels about characters that are explicitly radicalized, but my interest is in smaller and more ordinary internal shifts. I’m trying to work out what it means to be an individual in a compromised system and how you live with that cognitive dissonance. You can feel like there’s nothing you can do about it, which might feel very much true, but I think you have to still remain alive to the outrage that is happening everywhere around us. Your ethical responsibility is not to allow this process of normalization wherein we say, it is how it is or it’s out of my control or it’s never going to change. Rather than that, I think it’s this idea that you are responsible for maintaining an awareness of the monstrosity that’s happening around you. That was what I was thinking about in Intimacies.
Then, there’s also the question of who gets to tell the story, which is central to the ethical concerns of any novel. For example, in the trial, I knew from the beginning that I did not want one particular character—the former president accused of war crimes—to be the one to tell the story of his own crimes. I didn’t want to give him that platform. I always knew that I wanted it to be a witness, in tandem with one of the interpreters, who would tell the story. A question that comes up for me as a writer is how to tell a story that isn’t mine, particularly when it’s of this nature. And the only way that I could reconcile myself to that was to put the problem directly into the novel. So the narrator, who is the interpreter in this scene, explicitly says that she doesn’t feel right speaking these words. She doesn’t feel like the first person is capacious enough to contain this woman’s experience and then her experience as an observer-bystander. That’s one of the big dilemmas of writing fiction, and so I thought I would put that dilemma directly into the book.
UK: That seems like such a thoughtful way to make the reader aware of the ethical problems of constructing a narrative. It’s better than not putting it in at all.
KK: It’s something I thought about a lot while I was writing this book. I knew I had to represent it in some way.
UK: You’ve gestured at this throughout the interview, but I wanted to end by asking about what you’re working on now.
KK: It takes more formal risks than anything I’ve written. So it’ll either be more formally experimental than everything else, or it won’t be, because it won’t work and I’ll have to change it! I think of the three books as a trilogy, as fitting together—it would sit alongside A Separation and Intimacies. It’s another book about language, about being occupied by somebody else’s language, about performance—of the three books in the trilogy, it’s most explicitly about performance. It’s about an actor. It’s been really fun to write. It’s the first book where the male character is actually present for the entirety of the novel. [laughs]
