Two people meet for lunch in a Manhattan restaurant. She’s an accomplished actress in rehearsals for an upcoming premiere. He’s attractive, troubling, young—young enough to be her son. Who is he to her, and who is she to him? Two competing narratives unspool, rewriting our understanding of the roles we play every day – partner, parent, creator, muse – and the truths every performance masks, especially from those who think they know us most intimately.
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.
