Audition

Although the novel’s first scene is deceptively innocuous at first glance, the author’s choice to launch the narrative in medias res imbues the text with an element of ominous suspense, as Kitamura implicitly puts pressure on her readers to deduce the nature of the two characters’ relationship from the paucity of verbal and visual cues provided. By keeping the circumstances of the characters’ previous meeting hidden for the time being, Kitamura creates a situation that plays upon social stereotypes and invites assumptions. Just as the narrator’s fellow diners begin to look upon her with disdain, assuming that she is having an illicit relationship with a younger man, the novel’s descriptions of her discomfiture (as well as her nagging sense of guilt at the sight of her husband) invite an unflattering interpretation of the entire scene.

While the narrator’s nervousness indicates the unusual nature of this enigmatic meeting, her demeanor actually stems from the fact that she is a woman whose profession places her under constant scrutiny, even in her private moments. As an actress, she is regularly observed and judged by complete strangers, and as a result, she is intimately familiar with The Challenge of Performing the Self in public spaces. As an actress of considerable success, the narrator has spent time refining her craft and thinking carefully about the ways in which her actions reveal her character. Crucially, this practice bleeds into her real life and refuses to remain sequestered in the theatrical world. As the narrator herself admits when she describes her reaction to her father’s gift of an emerald necklace years ago: “Perhaps my reactions were in some ways secondhand or performed—the gasp of delight, for example—but the feeling they were designed to express was sincere” (10). This statement reveals the narrator’s propensity for self-conscious criticism—as if she is both an actress performing the real-world “role” of herself and a highly critical director of her own actions, coaching herself on ways to improve her performance in future scenes. With this complex interplay of simulation and authenticity, Kitamura foreshadows the novel’s central focus on the vagaries of living a performance and struggling to discern the difference between prevarication and truth. 

Additionally, the narrator is constantly negotiating between self-knowledge and the struggle to be known by others. The fact that the narrator remains unnamed emphasizes her struggle to maintain her agency over the nature of her identity. If she lets her guard down, she becomes abstract, undefined, and ultimately invisible to the world, ceasing to feel like a real person from her own perspective. Even then, the novel suggests that the narrator’s public persona has always been subject to misinterpretation, as evidenced by her recollection of the waiter who misread her relationship with her father. Notably, the narrator only began to perceive herself as an adult when the waiter believed her to be capable of acts that require considerable emotional maturity. In that moment, the narrator’s innocence was stripped away by a misguided interpretation. Thus, the act of interpretation itself becomes a powerful catalyst in the narrator’s life, mediating her control over her identity and influencing the way she chooses to project herself in the public sphere. At the restaurant with Xavier, the narrator finds herself plagued with similar misinterpretations, and this is Kitamura’s way of delivering a warning against making snap judgments based on mere appearances. This issue will become especially relevant in the second part of the novel, which presents a very different social reality from the one that pervades these early chapters.

The tensions that mark the narrator’s relationship with Xavier are amplified in her relationship with Tomas. Ironically, despite the fact that the two have been married for years, Kitamura portrays their relationship as one with an enormous gap. The narrator begins to suspect that she knows very little about Tomas, even though he is the reason why she “learned to live with greater discipline, to inhabit a certain quietude, so that [she] no longer fully remembered what it felt like to be so open to the world” (20). However, Kitamura’s narrator is somewhat unreliable, for she withholds the fact that the veil of secrecy that Tomas raises against her also exists on her side of the relationship. At the end of Chapter 2, for example, Tomas indicates that he did indeed see her with Xavier when he asks her if she is cheating on him again. This exchange reveals that Tomas has good reason to withhold his trust from his wife, and the fact that the narrator previously chose to omit this crucial detail from her storytelling underscores her need to project a specific version of herself to both her husband and the reader: one that absolves her from the faults that undermine her most important relationship. This instinctive tendency toward performance and deception imbues her narration with a certain degree of unreliability and introduces the novel’s focus on The Uncanny Dynamics of Family Life.

Nevertheless, the narrator justifies her relationship with Xavier by revealing the details of their previous encounter in Chapter 3, and once Xavier explains his reasons for suspecting that the narrator is his mother, it is clear that the truth of this scene is indeed stranger than it initially appeared to be. Although she willfully hides the truth of her past extramarital affair, the narrator is quick to dispel Xavier’s notions by showing that his theory is built upon yet another misinterpretation of her life. She is candid about her past decision to have an abortion, even though this event continues to affect her in the present. When Xavier relays the narrator’s earlier public statement about regretting the abortion, the narrator is surprised by her own previous words and feels driven to relitigate the person she was versus the person she is now in this moment. 

Because Xavier’s claim of being the narrator’s son is effectively impossible, she cannot guess at his true motivations in seeking her out, and her immediate instinct is therefore to suspect him of being a dangerous con artist. This impression is strengthened by the fact that in both of his initial encounters with the narrator, Xavier strategically employs a specific gesture that the narrator herself frequently used in her acting career, and this targeted body language sends the message that he knows the narrator better than the average person would. He has clearly studied her past work and has identified a gesture that represents her inability to define herself properly within a role. In other words, Xavier knows her weaknesses and deliberately uses them against her to assert his power in their unusual dynamic. The narrator therefore has the surreal experience of seeing herself reflected in another person; this interaction suggests that she has been truly seen but also that she is not in control of herself. When Xavier deploys the gesture, the narrator’s instinct is to flee from the implications of his calculated action.