Katie Kitamura and the cognitive dissonance of being alive right now
Not long after her father died, Katie Kitamura remembers hearing Charles Taylor speak.
She was driving on the Bay Bridge in California in 2009, and Taylor, the former president of Liberia, was on trial for war crimes at The Hague. She listened to him over the radio, his voice a simultaneously magnetic and monstrous force as he defended himself.
That memory is perhaps the simple answer to how and when Kitamura’s latest novel, “Intimacies,” began.
“I had such a clear sense of a performance taking place,” she said in a video interview last month from her home in New York City.
She was also drawn to “that kind of pliability and mutability of language” — the ability to mold it, to persuade even on the starkest of stages, to defend the worst of crimes. Not long after, Kitamura wrote an early draft of “A Separation,” her 2017 novel focused on a steely translator.
“Intimacies,” which Riverhead published on July 20, also features an interpreter, this time a woman who has moved to The Hague to work at the International Criminal Court. Coming from New York after her father’s death, the protagonist is assigned to translate for a former president on trial for war crimes, a job that she takes on with exactitude as well as anxiety. Her personal life adds to the story’s complexity, as she begins a relationship with a married man and becomes preoccupied with the violent mugging of a friend’s brother.
The novel, Kitamura’s fourth, resembles “A Separation” in that it confines its perspective to the perceptive, circuitous mind of an unnamed first-person female narrator in a city that is unfamiliar to her. “Intimacies,” though, has a different, more expansive feeling, in part borne of the politically chaotic time in which she wrote it.
Kitamura, 42, began writing fiction in her late 20s, after a somewhat roving early life: She was born in Sacramento, Calif., and grew up in nearby Davis before leaving for Princeton at 17.
“She’s not somebody to toot her own horn too much, but she was kind of a prodigy,” her husband, novelist Hari Kunzru, said in a phone interview.
By the time she was 20, Kitamura was in London obtaining her doctorate in literature and working on projects and talks at the Institute of Contemporary Arts.
“I remember being intimidated by her, but then she was so nice and always goes to such lengths to make others comfortable,” author Zadie Smith, a longtime friend who met her at the ICA, wrote in an email. (Both Smith and Kitamura now teach creative writing at New York University.)
Kitamura’s first serious attempt at writing fiction became “The Longshot,” a novel about a mixed martial arts fighter. That debut, along with its follow-up, the cutting colonialist allegory “Gone to the Forest,” tackled wildly different subjects — a way for Kitamura, who is Japanese American, to assert the kind of creative freedom she saw in the work of white male counterparts. But the voices of “A Separation” and “Intimacies” are her “closest expression to what it feels like at the moment as I’m trying to navigate everything that’s happening around us,” she said.
“Intimacies” quietly reflects the absurdity of existing at this time in the wake of, if one chooses to notice, persistent doom.
“There’s a real cognitive dissonance as a person in the world,” Kitamura said. “Your consciousness can only accommodate so much, and certainly it’s been incredible to me how I can simultaneously be very worried about the state of democracy and also thinking, has the turkey gone off?”
Embedded in that dissonance is a kind of complicity, the act of participating in systems responsible for terrible things — a notion that, to Kitamura, is perhaps the book’s central concern. “These things are happening, but it’s never enough. Whatever you do, it’s not going to be enough,” she said.
The sentiment can be applied to any contemporary crisis of one’s choosing. She paused for a while.
“The phrase ‘not in my name,’ but how is it not in your name?” she said. “How can you sever it so completely?”
In the book, the trial of the former president forces the narrator to confront a kind of moral ambivalence about working at the court. In 2016, Kitamura visited The Hague and interviewed interpreters who, as in the novel, spoke into the ears of war criminals.
“Logically and by the evidence that you’ve observed, this person has done the worst things that a person can do,” she remembers them telling her. “And yet you can feel relieved when they are not found not guilty.”
She has felt some of these quandaries herself over the past few years. While the world is on fire and the planet heats up, she has been rather happy in her comparatively tiny life, finding stability and raising two children with Kunzru. “Intimacies” is often reflective of this balancing act: the evil on trial and the banal bureaucracy that manages it, or the narrator’s desire to find security in a world seemingly streaked with malice.