Audition

“I was used to people armed with tremendous will, I was frequently with people whose job consists of imposing their reality upon the world. But now, as he seemed to shrink into himself in a manner subdued and uncertain, I wondered if in the end he was not one of these people, and did not truly know what he wanted from me.”

While watching Xavier, the narrator defines herself in terms of the usual power dynamics that she navigates on a regular basis. While this pattern already foreshadows the increasingly bizarre dynamics of the second part of the novel, in which the narrator reverses the status quo and imposes a new reality upon Tomas and Xavier, this scene also exhibits Xavier’s meekness in the narrator’s presence. The narrator is unsure whether to trust him because of his conspicuously suppliant behavior.

“He sat back in his chair and exhaled and I recognized the movement, it was the one he had done at the theater, when we first met.

An old gesture of mine that he had lifted from my films, my stage performances, and copied without shame. A piece of me, on the body of a stranger, a thing of mine that had been taken and moved into the realm of the uncanny by this young man sitting across from me.”

Toward the end of the first chapter, Xavier employs a gesture that the narrator immediately recognizes from her old performances. This moment implies that Xavier knows more about the narrator than he is letting on, having carefully studied her work. The calculated nonverbal cue also creates a surreal and sinister mood around Xavier, given that this action contradicts his previously subordinate behavior. In this moment, his true motivation for engaging with the narrator remains ambiguous enough to alarm her.

“Hadn’t there also been some underlying curiosity, an old instinct to draw close to other people? When I was younger, that impulse had almost been the governing principle of my life. I had tried many times to explain this compulsion to myself—it was a way of being in the world, of relating to the life that was taking place around me, it was a question of being open. But over the years and in particular once I met Tomas, I had learned to curtail that urge, to see it for what it really was—a passing curiosity, a spirit of bedevilment, and a form of voyeurism.”

In this passage, the narrator works on Achieving Growth by Abandoning Old Impulses. She describes how deeply she has always been defined by her impulsiveness, and although she uses abstract terms to discuss her backstory, it is clear that she used to follow her impulsive curiosity around other people, and she only repressed this tendency when she entered a relationship with Tomas. The recurrence of this impulse around Xavier suggests that the narrator’s old impulses have yet to be fully resolved.

“When Tomas and I met he had been different, everything had been outwardly directed, he had been seeking things from the world. I suppose one of those things was me. Now he had those things and he was another man altogether, and this version of him—this duplicitous person I was imagining—was a stranger to me, or nearly, it was like recalling someone I had briefly met long ago, in another life and country.”

The narrator also reveals Tomas’s backstory by characterizing him as someone who used to gain energy from the world around him. She claims that Tomas was satisfied in his quest to possess the things that would give him energy. However, his early actions in the novel contradict the narrator’s biased characterization of him, and this passage therefore exposes the wide gap in the narrator’s knowledge of her own husband.

“There are always two stories taking place at once, the narrative inside the play and the narrative around it, and the boundary between the two is more porous than you might think, that is both the danger and the excitement of the performance.”

This passage foreshadows the arrangement that the narrator will enter with Xavier and Tomas in Part 2 of the novel. The comment that “there are always two stories taking place” foreshadows the author’s intention to present Part 2 as a performance that paradoxically reveals the true relationship dynamics among the three characters. The porous boundary of the two narratives alludes to the fact that even when they are playing their prescribed “family” roles, the three characters are effectively acting as their true selves, giving free rein to suppress behaviors that contradict the dynamics they are expected to maintain in ordinary reality.

“There had even been a period when it had become something of a tic, a series of movements that I relied upon when I did not know how to work my way out of a scene, when I was uncertain of what was happening with a character at a particular moment, or when the writing was so thin that some weight needed to be affixed to the words in order to give them significance.”

The narrator elaborates on the significance of the gesture that Xavier reflects back to her in this passage. It is important that Xavier performs not only a gesture that the narrator recognizes from her old performances but a gesture that represents her limitations as a performer. This hidden meaning suggests that Xavier knows how to use the narrator’s weaknesses against her, and this unspoken threat deepens the sense of menace that he casts over their relationship.

“There was no trace of the young man I had encountered only two weeks earlier, vibrating with uncertainty, he seemed to be a completely different person. As he held the door open for me, I saw that he was absorbed in, or had been absorbed by, the role of the assistant, that he was performing a part he had studied carefully, just as he had presumably studied the part of my long-estranged son. Like an actor moving on in the wake of a disastrous audition, shedding the skin of a role for which he had not been destined, and seeking out the next opportunity.”

By imposing the narrator’s performed-self framework onto Xavier, this passage underscores the novel’s examination of The Challenge of Performing the Self. Now that the narrator has rejected him as her son, Xavier latches onto Anne as a surrogate mother, relying on her to supply the emotional needs that the narrator cannot give him. This pivot requires him to recast himself as Anne’s dutiful assistant, setting aside the role of dutiful son that he had been performing for the narrator.

“However, this was immediately something different, it was like coming upon my husband dressed in another person’s clothes, I couldn’t reconcile the essential austerity of Tomas’s nature, the aesthetic precision of his taste, with the bouncing pea pods and cherries that danced across the screen […] I realized that he had fallen into the cotton-candy world of the app, the soft corners of its feeling, he was using the app not despite its aesthetic but because of it.”

During her second pregnancy, the narrator’s perception of Tomas is powerfully contradicted by his enthusiasm over the prospect of becoming a father. This enthusiasm manifests in the adoption of an aesthetic that goes against everything the narrator knows about Tomas, and she is distressed by the realization that she knows very little about her husband. Her discomfiture therefore emphasizes The Uncanny Dynamics of Family Life.

“It was in the aftermath of the miscarriage that the affairs began in earnest. They were usually brief, they never threatened to encroach upon our marriage, although at times they could take me by surprise, I could become more absorbed than I intended. They were an expression of restlessness rather than discontent, of that I was certain.”

This passage once again stresses the importance of Achieving Growth by Abandoning Old Impulses by showing how the narrator’s impulsiveness precipitated her extramarital affairs. She explains that she didn’t engage in affairs because she was dissatisfied with Tomas, but because she was restless in the wake of her miscarriage and all the discoveries contained in her pregnancy. Notably, her detached wording stands as a deliberate attempt to distance herself from her own choices; by stating that “the affairs began in earnest” rather than simply saying, “I had many affairs,” the narrator seeks to portray her infidelity as something that happened to her or in spite of her, not because of her own impulsive choices.

“You can be entranced by an idea, I said, and at a certain point you can no longer see the edges of it […]. I’ve experienced it myself, I continued, it’s something that happens every time I prepare for a role. In some ways the part is only working if I lose sight of the shore. But at the same time, it’s important to be able to come out the other side, you have to be able to come up for air. Otherwise, you won’t survive.”

In this passage, the narrator explains her approach to method acting, which becomes crucial to understanding the arrangement in Part 2 and advancing the novel’s focus on The Challenge of Performing the Self. The narrator relies on immersion to invest herself deeply in each role that she plays onstage, and she freely admits that she places her own sense of identity in jeopardy every time she does this. Her words provide an explicit reason for the thought process that drives her to act the role of Xavier’s son, and the scene also explains her motivation for ending the arrangement in the novel’s final chapters.

“For the first time, I was allowed to be human. I could even be at the center of a story. And later still, there were parts that consumed me, so that I could say the life that was performed, on a set or in the theater, could at times feel more real to me than my actual life […] it was also a danger for a person of my disposition, for whom the managing of these borders was not always easy.”

The narrator’s experience of collaborating with Murata is an idealized representation of her career as an actress. Unlike her other roles, which either rely on stereotypes or limit her to shallow characterizations, the role that Murata gives her requires her to perform a fully realized person. In the present, the narrator yearns for a role that requires a similar degree of commitment so that she can continue to inhabit the role even beyond the end of a production. Xavier’s wish for her to perform the role of his mother conforms perfectly to the narrator’s yearning.

“And I wondered also if that wasn’t the point of a performance, that it preserved our innocence, that it allowed us to live with the hypocrisies of our desire. Because in fact we don’t want to see the thing itself, on a screen or on a stage, we don’t want to see actual pain or suffering or death, but its representation. Our awareness of the performance is what allows us to enjoy the emotion, to creep close to it and breathe in its atmosphere, performance allows this dangerous proximity.”

This passage comes as the narrator wraps up her recollection of an actor whose best performance is revealed to have been a result of the director’s exploitation of his dementia. The narrator values the power of the performed self because it demonstrates agency over what the person shows to others. In the case of the actor with dementia, the narrator realizes that the artifice of the actor’s best performance allowed her to enjoy his expression of the role as an act of agency. When she discovers the sordid truth behind his performance, the information sours her perception and deepens her fear of becoming the target of similar levels of misinterpretation.

“I understood why Anne had said that we could be mother and son. It was not because of the physical similarity between me and Xavier, or it was not only or even mainly because of that. It was because Anne had recognized in Xavier an archetypal son. He fell into the role, performing filial affection and duty, creating an atmosphere that Anne had been compelled to name, if only unconsciously and indirectly. She had not, I realized, been speaking of me but of herself, and that glint of frustration […] because consciously or unconsciously she worried that she had in some way revealed herself.”

This passage shows that the narrator has a subtle rivalry with her director, Anne, who stands in as a surrogate mother figure for Xavier. Although the narrator initially rejects the notion of Xavier being her son, Anne’s interpretation of Xavier as an ideal son figure awakens the narrator to the possibilities of how he could fulfill her emotional gaps if she were to accept his odd premise. The rivalry between the narrator and Anne is ultimately the impetus that drives the narrator to become possessive of the natural affinity she has with Xavier.

“Our faces were in partial shadow, moving in and out of the light as we spoke, sat back, as we took up the menus and reached for our glasses. It was the same restaurant where I had met Xavier for lunch, all those months ago, before he began working with Anne, before the success of Rivers, although this time we were together, the three of us: me, Tomas, and Xavier.”

Part 2 begins by casting the narrator, Tomas, and Xavier under theatrical lighting, as if they are on a stage. The scene also returns to the location of the restaurant, using the familiarity of this setting to emphasize all that has changed between the characters themselves. Kitamura’s evocative references to theatrical conventions are the first subtle clues that the three characters are beginning to enact the performance required by their arrangement.

“The experience felt wholly private, even though I was onstage. It was not that I forgot about the audience or the parameters and construction of the set. It was that here, the gap between my private and performed selves collapsed, and for the briefest of moments there was only a single, unified self. Did this happen only in those few minutes on that stage and nowhere else? It felt that way.”

The narrator’s success in her latest performance resonates with the flavor of fulfillment that she found while working on Murata’s film. In this passage, the narrator explains that she has reached a point in the production where the self that she performs onstage overlaps completely with her real self. She is therefore able to exercise her agency and display all of her vulnerabilities without the fear of being exploited. This moment signals her complex relationship with The Challenge of Performing the Self.

“Whenever Anne joined, I was always aware of the delicate negotiation taking place between Xavier, Anne, and me—Anne, who was Xavier’s mentor and employer, someone who had taken a meaningful interest in him […] Anne on the one hand, and me on the other, Xavier’s mother.”

This passage marks the first instance in which the narrator openly embraces Xavier’s faux-familial social premise and refers to herself as his mother. Because Kitamura omits the events leading up to the narrator’s acceptance of this role, the author uses the quiet rivalry between Anne and the narrator to display the narrator’s internal pivot in a more deeply jarring fashion.

“As I walked down the street, I was suddenly overwhelmed by my sense of the life we had together, Tomas and me. It was one we had built over the course of our marriage, and it bore the texture of many shared intimacies and affinities, a weave so tight that it seemed impossible that it could accommodate another person. I entered the café and ordered, face still cold from the outside. I reminded myself that it had been, for so many years, the three of us. That our life, having contracted, could expand again. A departure, and now a return, that was the way to think of it.”

This passage subtly hints at the existence of the trio’s arrangement, and it also portrays the fact that the narrator is straining against this contrived social circumstance and mourning the implications that it has on her real life. Only when Xavier moves into the apartment does the narrator realize that she is sacrificing the intimacy of her shared life with Tomas in order to accommodate Xavier’s request and fully immerse herself in the imposed role of Xavier’s mother.

“In truth, it was not exactly like having our child back home again, it was like having some ideal version of him returned, altered in all the ways we had hoped. As the days passed, I realized how little continuity there was between the child or even the young man I remembered and the person now living with us. He was like a familiar stranger, someone you have known for a very long time but at a distance, or perhaps someone you knew long ago, for a brief but intense period, so that the familiarity was always mitigated, always compromised, always a little uncanny.”

This passage reflects the depths to which the narrator has embraced her faux-maternal role. Her self-deception is so complete at this point that she actively indulges in crafting fantasy “memories” of a past that never existed, merely so that she can place the trio’s performative interactions in a stereotypically familial context. This shift highlights the author’s examination of The Uncanny Dynamics of Family Life, for although the narrator’s reflections are not based in reality, she nonetheless conjures up an objectively accurate facsimile of the dynamics that would reasonably result when an adult son returns to his parents and rejoins their household.

“He was invigorated by Xavier’s presence in the apartment, the whole of his being energized, as if he had suddenly shed years. He behaved like a man who had things to look forward to, and it was only in that moment, I suppose, that I understood how limited it had become to him, the idea of our own future together, nothing more than a downward slope into old age.”

In this passage, Tomas’s emotional reliance on Xavier is gradually revealed, and the narrator finds new insight into her previous dynamic with her husband as a result. In earlier chapters, the narrator put forth an incomplete characterization of Tomas, implying that he satisfied his need to draw energy from the world by marrying her. However, this passage corrects that conception by revealing that Tomas, just like the narrator, never satisfied his own impulses at all. Instead, he merely suppressed them for the narrator’s sake By providing Tomas with a source of emotional affirmation, Xavier liberates him from that self-imposed suppression.

“I realized as we made our way back to the apartment that she was playing the role of the dutiful daughter-in-law, having met me only twelve hours earlier. I chafed at the part she made of me, the aging and difficult mother-in-law, she opened the door to the building for me, her arms full of food, the act ostensibly one of kindness, but in fact designed to make me feel helpless and incompetent.”

Hana functions as a formidable new competitor for Xavier’s attention, and her arrival signals a shift in the narrator’s role in the artificial family dynamic. The narrator is no longer just the mother, but the mother-in-law who disapproves of her “son’s” romantic partner. This new antagonistic development puts the narrator at a disadvantage as the arrangement carries on.

“As he passed into the living room, I had again the terrible sense of familiarity, the knowledge that I could not place or source and therefore could not trust, so that it was not knowledge but understanding, which is not dependent on proof, and which therefore cannot be refuted—the anger, like the words, the challenge, the feeling of his insufficiency, none of it was new, all of it had taken place before.”

As Tomas commits himself to the role of Xavier and Hana’s servant, the narrator experiences a surge of anger that predates the arrangement. This inner shift signals the start of the narrator’s rejection of this quirky fiction. As the fragile illusion of family life crumbles, the old resentments and insecurities resurface, ironically providing the narrator with the grounding that she needs to return to the metaphorical “shores” of reality.

“When I spoke, it was with all the finality I did not feel, I spoke as if the words were an incantation of sorts. I said, It’s over. And although neither Xavier nor Tomas moved, instantly the space had transformed, so that we were no longer a family standing in a room—a family with problems, with dramas and resentments and everything else, but still a family—and instead three distinct people, atomized, standing in a room suddenly devoid of meaning.

[…] what was a family if not a shared delusion, a mutual construction?”

Even as the narrator puts an end to the arrangement by naming it a “delusion,” signaling the shift away from the artificial family dynamics, her words also indict actual families as “mutual constructions” that are equally “delusional” in nature. Thus, even as her words shatter the group’s shared illusions, Kitamura uses the scene to inject a broader critique of humanity’s most passionately defended and championed social structures.

“We had been playing parts, and for a period—for as long as we understood our roles, for as long as we participated in the careful collusion that is a story, that is a family, told by one person to another person—the mechanism had held. But the deeper the complicity, and the longer it is sustained, the less give there is, the more binding and unforgiving the contract, and in the end it took very little for the whole thing to collapse. It was as if a break had been called, as if it had suddenly occurred to both of us that his lines were insufficient, my characterization lacking, the entire plotline faulty and implausible.”

In this passage, the narrator conducts an autopsy of the arrangement and the conditions that caused it to fail. This is the first time that the narrator explicitly refers to the arrangement as something that she entered into with Tomas and Xavier, clarifying the events of the narrative in Part 2. Despite their best attempts to immerse themselves in the reality of the arrangement, the three characters chafe beneath the weight of the fiction that they construct, and the scenario becomes less plausible until one of them decides to collapse that reality entirely.