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Symbols & Motifs
Shores and Deep Waters
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes descriptions of emotional abuse.
The physical imagery of shorelines accompanied by fathoms of deep water collectively becomes a metaphor for the narrator’s approach to method acting, which she also applies to her everyday life. As she struggles to navigate The Challenge of Performing the Self, she relies frequently upon this imagery to describe her deliberate forays away from the grounding influence of reality and into the fluid waters of fantasy and self-deception involved in role-playing.
The narrator discusses her process in Chapter 5, explaining that she often immerses herself in the reality of a role. As she states, “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 […] Otherwise, you won’t survive” (66). The narrator feels it is important to lose herself so deeply in her role that she takes the risk of drowning in the willful fantasy that results. Her use of this technique foreshadows the dysfunctional progression of her and Tomas’s dynamic with Xavier throughout Part 2. Essentially, the narrator becomes so deeply committed to her role as Xavier’s mother that she puts the integrity of her home life at risk. Although she emotionally depends on Xavier, she knows that she must end their arrangement in order to reach the metaphorical “shores” of reality.
Significantly, the play in which the narrator performs professionally is called The Opposite Shore, and in Chapter 6, Max describes the scene that they are rehearsing as an emotional breakthrough for the character. Thus, Kitamura uses the title of this story-within-the-story to suggest that the entire production depends upon the way the narrator performs her onstage character. Because the narrator sees the scene as the transition point between one version of her character and another, it also stands midway between two distinct points—much like the water that lies between two shores.
Pastries
Pastries act as a recurring motif that is connected to the ideas of stability and soft power. They first appear in Chapter 4 as part of the narrator’s recollection of her extramarital affairs. When the narrator realizes that Tomas will not confront her about her infidelity, she feels indebted to him, and she tries to ameliorate this feeling by buying pastries as an act of kindness. Tomas is so moved that buying pastries and enjoying breakfast together becomes a regular ritual between them. The narrator describes the pastries as being so “banal” that they drive her to recommit herself to her marriage.
In Chapter 8, however, the meaning of the pastries shifts when the narrator buys them on the morning that Xavier moves into the apartment. This time, the purchase marks her sense of mourning over the end of her intimate ritual with Tomas, and the gesture also establishes Xavier as a member of their household. By including Xavier in what was previously a private ritual between husband and wife, the narrator’s choice to serve Xavier pastries grants him access to this same sense of emotional intimacy. Though Xavier promptly leaves after moving his things in, the narrator offers to give him some pastries to take to work and share with Anne, effectively negating the original intimate meaning of the pastries by including someone who exists wholly outside the artificial family dynamic.
Finally, in Chapter 11, Hana uses the pastries to usurp power from the narrator. Although the narrator buys the pastries to relieve the tension of her dialogue with Hana, Hana is the one who carries the pastries home and serves them to Tomas and Xavier. This act redefines the boundaries of the household dynamics and strategically excludes the narrator from the new family unit consisting of Tomas, Xavier, and Hana.
Performative Gestures
At the end of Chapter 1, Xavier performs a gesture that the narrator recognizes from one of her older performances—that of sitting back and softly exhaling. This gesture becomes a motif for The Challenge of Performing the Self because it exposes the power dynamics inherent in the act of creating and recognizing one’s true identity.
Xavier’s performance of the gesture in Chapter 1 is not the first time he has employed this nonverbal weapon in his interactions with the narrator. In Chapter 3, it is revealed that Xavier used the same gesture during their very first meeting at the theater. The narrator describes the gesture as one that she would fall back on whenever she “did not know how to work [her] way out of a scene” or “was uncertain of what was happening with a character in a particular moment” (45). By using this same gesture, Xavier wordlessly implies that he has carefully studied the narrator’s past work and has identified the gesture that signaled her weakness as a younger actor. To perform this gesture in front of her signals his awareness of her vulnerabilities, heightening her sensitivity over the sense that she is under constant observation, even in her personal life. During their second meeting, the narrator describes the gesture as “[a] piece of [her], on the body of a stranger” (17), and her observation casts a threatening air over Xavier’s character and compels her to flee from him in both instances.
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