A young interpreter adrift in The Hague

Intimacies by Katie Kitamura is her second novel narrated by an unnamed woman.  The first was A Separation and that narrator was a married translator. Intimacies' narrator is single and an interpreter at the International Court of Justice in The Hague. (She has native fluency in English and Japanese "from my parents" and French "from a childhood in Paris," plus professional proficiency in Spanish and German. A polyglot.) Both novels have interesting things to say about language and the difficulties in moving from one to another. 

The narrator in Intimacies has come to the Netherlands to escape New York and work at the Court. Her father is dead, her mother lives in Singapore, she has no siblings, no friends, no lover. She is looking for a place to finally call home.

She meets and becomes the lover of Adriaan who is separated from his wife but still entangled in his marriage. She makes friends with Jana who witnesses a seemingly random act of violence virtually on her doorstep. The interpreter becomes increasingly obsessed with with the crime as by chance she befriends the victim's sister (The Hague is not a big city.). And she's pulled into an explosive political controversy when she’s required to interpret in a trial in which the former president of an African country is accused of war crimes.

The publisher says, "A woman of quiet passion, she confronts power, love, and violence, both in her personal intimacies and in her work at the Court. She is soon pushed to the precipice, where betrayal and heartbreak threaten to overwhelm her, forcing her to decide what she wants from her life."

I had a sense of a woman adrift. She is good at what she does, indeed the Court offers her a permanent position. Interpreting the words of an accused mass murderer, however, is too much for her. Adriaan goes to Lisbon to meet with his estranged wife, leaving the narrator with the keys to his apartment and a promise to call. He doesn't, and I found it difficult to understand why she does not do something to resolve the situation until a resolution is forced on her.

Kitamura's descriptions of the former president's arrival in The Hague, the preparations for trial, and the trial itself are brilliant. I had a clear sense of the narrator's involvement with and attitude toward the former president and the man's feelings about his arrest and trial. For me, however, this was not enough to endear Intimacies to me.

A character who is looking for connection

Katie Kitamura's first two novels were told from male points of view. She told an interviewer from The New Yorker that "I didn’t want to [write about women] until I was sure I was really good enough. You know, writing male characters is not very difficult because there is a vast canon of male characters written by men, for men, for any writer starting out to draw from. Finding the voice of a male character is in so many ways what a Ph.D. in American literature trains you to do."

She's now published three novels with three somewhat different, unnamed female voices. The first was A Separation, published in 2017. At the beginning of the book the narrator's husband has left their five-year marriage and, when the novel begins, has gone to Greece to research professional mourners for a book he's writing.

The narrator, a translator, who appears to be in her late 20s, early 30s, travels from her London home to the Greek hotel where her husband has been staying. He's not there, although he has not checked out and she spends much of the book waiting for him to return so she can tell him, finally, she wants a divorce.

It's late in the season and the hotel is almost empty. The narrator interacts with the driver who takes her sightseeing notwithstanding the landscape has been blackened by fires. She talks to a young woman on the hotel staff and realizes (concludes) that her husband has slept with the girl and discarded her, not the first time such a thing has happened. The husband's appearance two thirds of the way through the book is a shock, but it follows naturally from the place and the situation.

I especially enjoy Kitamura's apt observations about people and life, perhaps because I can't do it. "People were capable of living their lives in a state of permanent disappointment, there were plenty of people who did not marry the person they hoped to marry, much less live the life they hoped to live, other people invented new dreams to replace the old ones, finding fresh reasons for discontent."

One more example as the narrator muses about differences in age between a man and a woman: "Of course, at twenty girls do not care so much about age, a woman of thirty would think twice before embarking on an affair with a man more than two decades older, should the affair develop into something more serious—and the odds of a woman wishing for it to become something serious grew exponentially as she aged—then a gap of two decades would become critical, nobody wanted to marry a man who would soon be at death's door."

Obviously, these are the thoughts of A Separation's narrator. They are not necessarily those of the author. They add to the character's personality and character, and are yet another reason to relish the book. Which I did.

When is a translation "faithful" to the original?

The unnamed narrator/protagonist of Katie Kitamura's 2017 novel A Separation is a translator. Her profession is irrelevant to the main story, but at one point she muses about translating Balzac's story Colonel Chabert, "although not with particular success."

Katie Kitamura

She writes, "I had not been able to find the correct register for capturing the particular density of Balzac's prose, I generally translate contemporary fiction, which is an entirely different affair—the colonel of the title is presumed dead in the Napoleonic Wars."

Because Balzac was born in 1799 and his first book published in 1823 even he may have had difficulty finding the appropriate French register for his story written years after Napoleon. 

In any case, Kitamura observes that "translators are always worried about being faithful to the original, an impossible task because there are multiple and often contradictory ways of being faithful, there is a literal fidelity and there is in the spirit of, a phrase without concrete meaning."

Being faithful to the original is something I worry about when I translate Japanese. Because I'm translating popular, contemporary fiction—not "literature"—I believe most of the meaning is on the surface and I can do okay. But because I have to work so hard to understand many sentences, I'm sure I have not done some justice. 

The English I produce is interesting, reads well, and makes sense. Is it faithful to the original? I can only do my best and hope.

Three of the pleasures Audition offers

Karie Kitamura's slim novel Audition affected me so strongly, so positively I have obtained two of her earlier novels, A Separation and Intimacies, something I never do. (Probably because there are so many books I want to read. I do read the new book of an author I've enjoyed on the theory that the writer tends to grow more skillful with experience, an obviously false assumption).

Audition's narrator is a middle age actress in the last week or so of rehearsing a new play in which she plays the lead. She lives with her husband Tomas who sounds like an academic who writes articles about art.

The novel has two parts, preparing for opening night and after the production's phenomenal success. I am not going to say more because the novel's structure is one of its pleasures.

Another delight is the (unnamed) narrator's thoughts about life, acting, and art. Is she an unreliable narrator, unable to distinguish between life in the world (real life) and life on stage (playing a role). Until I finished the book and thought about it I had not considered that the narrator may not be the most objective, disinterested reporter of events. I had taken everything she said as verifiable, if fictional, truth.

(Indeed, is any novel's first-person narrator ever a reliable source? Can you—should you—ever entirely trust a narrator's account of events? Something to think about when I'm reading. And writing.)

Another pleasure of Audition is Kitamura's writing. The book is a joy at the sentence level. She is not afraid of long sentences: "And although the actor was only in his sixties, as soon as I heard the story of the notes on the counter, the forgotten lines—not even forgotten, because they had not been retained and then lost again, they evaded his mind's grasp altogether—as soon as I heard this, I was able to envision his death, I was able to imagine the parabolic arc of his decline, I understood that eventually his mind would disintegrate to the point that his memory of the world and of himself, would be lost, and with it everything that formed his being."

I hope that picking out one 99-word sentence does not discourage readers from trying Audition; this one is unusually long, chosen to make my point. If I have deterred a literature loving reader. I apologize. And I apologize to Ms. Kitamura whose work I enthusiastically admire.