Audition

“There was an awkward pause and then we both spoke at once—I asked how his classes were and he apologized for how he had behaved the last time we met. I understand how I must have sounded, he said. You must have wondered if I had lost my mind, if you had reason to worry. His words drowned out my question, the shore of ordinary conversation rapidly receding.”

The novel begins in medias res, and it isn’t until this particular passage that Kitamura reveals the events that happened prior to the start of the novel. Xavier’s priority is to relitigate their previous encounter, but the narrator is merely eager to get to know Xavier. Kitamura also invokes the imagery of the “shore” in this passage to describe the narrator’s mundane question as a quickly abandoned shred of normalcy in a situation that makes her feel increasingly at sea—lost in the fluidity of Xavier’s willingness to rewrite reality for his own benefit. Because the imagery of leaving the shoreline to wander in the water’s depths also invokes the narrator’s use of method acting, it is clear that she is about to immerse herself in the role that Xavier has chosen for her.

“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