Audition

Published in 2025, Audition is a literary novel by Japanese American author Katie Kitamura. Kitamura’s previous novels, A Separation and Intimacies, explore the nuances of language, identity, and relationships. Audition continues these themes by exploring them in the context of theatre and performance. 

Audition is told from the perspective of an unnamed female protagonist who works as a film and stage actress. During the rehearsals for her latest role, she is approached by a young man named Xavier, who claims to be her son. Although the narrator initially denies Xavier’s claim, she finds it necessary to inhabit the maternal role that Xavier is imposing on her. This dynamic has profound repercussions on the narrator’s relationship with her husband, Tomas. Kitamura uses the pair’s unraveling dynamics to explore The Challenge of Performing the Self, The Uncanny Dynamics of Family Life, and the challenge of Achieving Growth by Abandoning Old Impulses. 

This study guide refers to the international trade paperback edition published by Riverhead in 2025.

Content Warning: Both the source text and this guide feature depictions of pregnancy loss and termination, as well as elder abuse and emotional abuse.

Plot Summary

The unnamed narrator of the novel is an actress who is preparing for a new stage role written by an emerging playwright. The novel begins when the narrator chooses to have lunch with a young man named Xavier who visited her at the theatre two weeks prior. Xavier is an aspiring dramatist who admires the narrator’s work. During the lunch, the narrator becomes aware that other diners are misinterpreting her and Xavier and are assuming that the narrator is having an affair with a younger man. The narrator eventually explains that she and Xavier cannot have any kind of relationship. Their lunch meeting abruptly ends after the narrator’s husband, Tomas, enters the restaurant. The narrator is afraid that Tomas will see her and Xavier together and assume that she is having an affair, but she calls out to Tomas anyway. Tomas leaves before registering her presence.

Later that night, the narrator learns that Tomas had come to the restaurant to meet with another mutual friend. However, he left upon realizing that he had entered the wrong restaurant. Tomas implies that he saw the narrator there and asks her if she is having another affair. The narrator denies this but later senses a strain in their relationship. 

It is revealed that when Xavier visited the narrator at the theater two weeks earlier, he told her of his belief that he is her son. The narrator refuted his claim, which is based on Xavier’s misinterpretation of a profile that he read. (It is impossible for the narrator to be Xavier’s mother because she has never had any children.) During their initial meetings, Xavier performs a gesture that he has copied from the narrator’s old performances. The gesture intimidates the narrator and causes her to flee from Xavier.

Several weeks after their lunch encounter, Xavier informs the narrator that the director of the play, Anne, has offered him a job. Realizing that she can no longer avoid Xavier, the narrator clarifies the source of his misinterpretation; Xavier had assumed that the narrator gave up a child at birth, but the truth is that the narrator terminated a pregnancy when she was still single. 

She does not tell Xavier that her marriage to Tomas is also fraught with the trauma of a second pregnancy that resulted in a miscarriage; this event quietly devastated Tomas, who had been excited by the prospect of becoming a father. In the wake of the narrator’s miscarriage, she engaged in extramarital affairs to satisfy her restlessness. Lately, to make up for her transgressions, the narrator has instituted affectionate rituals between herself and Tomas, such as preparing breakfast.

The story returns to the present moment, Xavier and the narrator walk to rehearsal. The narrator approaches the art of acting by becoming fully immersed in the psychological reality of her chosen characters, but she is also careful to maintain the boundary between her real self and her performed self, recognizing that in order to survive, she will need to exhaust her immersion and return to reality. The narrator feels that she is struggling to immerse herself in her current role, and she soon discovers that her difficulty is due to the inconsistent writing of the character she is playing. Xavier assures the narrator that she is doing well, and his condescension only irritates her. Just as the rehearsal is about to start, Tomas confronts the narrator over text, hoping to have a conversation about their relationship.

The novel jumps forward several months to reveal that the narrator’s show is a massive success and has extended its run several times. One day, the narrator meets with Tomas and Xavier at a restaurant, where Xavier reveals that Anne has invited him to work with her on her next project, a film. By this point, the narrator has become so immersed in the role that Xavier has imposed upon her that she now thinks of herself as his mother and implies that they have had a relationship for years, implicitly casting Tomas in the role of Xavier’s father. At a casual dinner that the three attend together, Xavier asks if he can move in with Tomas and the narrator after the end of the lease on his apartment. The narrator plays the part of the nurturing mother and graciously agrees to his request, but Tomas plays the role of a father who believes that his “son” should find his own way in the world as a young adult.

When Xavier moves into the narrator and Tomas’s apartment, the narrator realizes that she has sacrificed the intimacy of her shared life with Tomas in order to accommodate Xavier. The three enter a new domestic routine based upon the mutual fiction that they are a family, though Tomas and the narrator acknowledge that Xavier is not yet fully comfortable living there. Tomas exhibits a growing fondness for Xavier, openly supporting Xavier’s aspirations to become a writer. Tomas even goes so far as to buy Xavier an expensive writing desk and an office chair so that he can have his own workspace. This gift positively affects Tomas’s mood, invigorating his spirit as he works on his own writing.

One month into his stay, Xavier asks Tomas and the narrator if he can bring his friend, Hana, over to stay with him. When Hana arrives, the narrator immediately registers an antagonistic dynamic and realizes that she has now been recast as the untrusting mother-in-law. Hana obstructs the narrator’s access to Xavier, forcing the narrator to please her in order to maintain Xavier’s approval. The narrator becomes frustrated when she observes Tomas submitting himself wholeheartedly to this sudden shift in the group dynamics; instead of acting the part of a stern father, Tomas has become Xavier and Hana’s gracious servant. It is clear that Tomas now relies on Xavier for a form of affirmation that he cannot get from the narrator.

As the play in which the narrator is performing approaches the end of its final run, she becomes despondent, fearing the process of letting go of her role. One night, she returns home to find Tomas, Xavier, and Hana in the midst of a childish game, and the absurdity of the group’s faux-familial arrangement becomes fully apparent to her. The narrator throws Hana out and tells Xavier that their arrangement is over. They stop inhabiting the roles of father, mother, and son, and Xavier eventually leaves.

However, Tomas and Xavier remain in contact. One day, Xavier visits and meekly presents a play that he has written for the narrator. The novel ends with the narrator performing the play for a full audience, understanding that Xavier’s ambitions are like her own were when she was his age. Instead of warning him about the vagaries of success and attention, she hopes that Xavier will learn about the fleeting nature of attention on his own.