A blisteringly incisive, coolly devastating tour de force of controlled menace ... Kitamura...writes sentences that glitter with steely power and produces fiction of uncommon psychological nuance ... A radically disquieting and eerily unnerving meditation on the nature of identity and the construction of selfhood. It insistently raises questions about the things we most take for granted ... Kitamura gets behind the masks of common vision and produces fiction of visionary impact. Bold, stark, genre-bending, Audition will haunt your dreams.
The first time I read Audition, I found it a deftly crafted, slow-burn psychological thriller full of sly metafictional reflections on the nature of storytelling and identity, on just how much rehearsal, interpretation and collaboration it takes to produce these performances we so blithely call our lives ... Any definitive 'truth' would only diminish the deeper and more mysterious truths of Kitamura’s resolute irresolution. The pleasure and the power inhere in the parallax view.
Kitamura excels at creating an atmosphere of foreboding, and, reading this first half, one senses that an explosive revelation must be only a few pages away ... Uncanny ... Chilling ... Kitamura’s novels tend to skim the surfaces of interpersonal relationships, offering neat snapshots rather than rich and full portraits. Reading her fiction, I often longed for more insight—not into the nature of relationships generally but into the specific people whose lives were taking shape on the page ... In her spare, cerebral novels, Kitamura reveals how much lies beneath the surfaces of our bodies and our sentences, and how much about one another we cannot know.
Formally ambitious ... Uneventful yet ominous ... Acquires a dreamlike quality ... The sentences are sinuous, paratactic, reflecting the instability of the characters’ natures and the relations between them, allowing different possibilities to be held in tension before receding again ... Can be unsatisfying ... Kitamura transmits her characters’ discomfort to her readers, denying us the relief of immersion: we can’t be where we are, but we aren’t taken anywhere else ... Kitamura seems to have reached some kind of end point, to have exhausted the possibilities of portraying characters caught in the awareness of their own false positions ... Whether or not the reader feels a shudder of recognition, it’s unclear where the project can go from there.
Kitamura’s novels have the propulsive quality of the genres she borrows from—the murder mystery, the courtroom drama—even though they are largely concerned with the distance between characters and the fine mesh of misapprehensions that constitutes most relationships ... Disorienting, told in two halves that seem to contradict each other. Its eeriness and detached tone reflect a profound discontent with the narrowing roles available to a woman past a certain age ... Prizes open the question of what a family is and what pretenses sustain it ... There’s a sense that the greatest revelations take place deep within the private life—in places so buried that they can be accessed only through secrecy, delusion, or pretense ... Kitamura makes them unfamiliar in new, unexpected ways; the smallest private thought or action can thoroughly change what they’re capable of feeling and doing. We don’t—can’t—know them at all.
Plays again and again with the idea that the shared reality of intimate relationships is merely the result of the performances that unfold between people and the flawed interpretations they invite ... The formal moves by which Kitamura delivers the actor to this place are unusual and interesting, yet the trajectory toward giddy estrangement is familiar.
Mysterious ... Kitamura is a master of writing people who are both inscrutable and glaringly, psychically alive, which is to say real people, and obfuscation seems the point here, making this a perfect fit for readers of literary-puzzle novels.
Slippery and penetrating ... [An] elegant knife of a story ... Kitamura rewards close readers of this through-the-looking-glass disruption. So much glints below the surface in her purring, pared-down sentences ... In this searing, chilly, and psychologically profound story lies insight into some harrowing human questions.
Taut and alluring ... Throughout, she succeeds in creating a complex and engrossing portrayal of her characters’ blurry boundaries. Readers won’t be able to put this down.
