The unnamed central character in Katie Kitamura’s acclaimed novel “Audition” (Riverhead Books, 197 pages) is a middle-aged actress of some repute and of great perception, who offers some rich insights about actors and audiences, including in the three passages that I excerpt below.

At one point, the actress watches two of her colleagues at rehearsal and thinks about the double nature of the relationship between them:

“I could see that they were strongly attracted to each other, in their mutual admiration, their curiosity, but at the same time there was an edge of rivalry between them that had the potential to flare into open antagonism. It was the nature of the work and its rapid, temporary intimacies.  And so, in addition to the story of the play itself, the narrative that was being enacted by Josie and Clarice, I was also observing the drama between the two women, who at times circled each other in the manner of prizefighters, wary and ina posture of constant assessment.
“There are always two stories taking place at once, the narrative inside the play and the narrative around it, and the boundary between the two is more porous than you might think, that is both the danger and the excitement of the performance. The air becomes thin, the senses keener, there is too much reverberation.”

At another point, the actress thinks about how her ethnicity affected her career. (Her specific ethnicity is only hinted at; Katie Kitamura herself is of Japanese descent.)

“For people like me, who looked like me, there were no parts—or rather, there were only parts that were commensurate with erasure, whether through the thinness of stereotype or through simple marginalization, often these characters were quite literally silent, a moving image and nothing else. I suppose it was even worse because I was a woman. At one point, my agent had suggested that I might change my name, he said that there was something racially indeterminate about my appearance, with a different name there would be better parts. Parts—a word that implied that there were parts and then there was a whole, into which those parts might cohere, a whole that might be a play or a film or a series, a whole that might even be a career, a body of work that could exist in the public imagination.
“Of course, I was not indeterminate to myself, and I did not change my name.”

The actress wonders whether a performance allows audience “to live with the hypocrisies of our desires. Because in fact we don’t want to see the thing itself, on a screen or on a stage, we don’t want to see actual pain or suffering or death, but its representation.  Our awareness of the performance is what allows us to enjoy the emotion, to creep close to it and breathe in its atmosphere, performance allows this dangerous proximity.” 

—

To be clear: There is no audition in “Audition,” and while the actress is the narrator and much of what unfolds is during rehearsals and then performances for a play in which she stars, the novelist’s interests are less about theater than about the character’s relationships. The focus is primarily on her relationship with her husband and with a young man named Xavier who in the first half of the novel is a stranger who works himself into her life, and in the alternative narrative of the second half (spoiler alert), has become her son.

Kitamura entitled her novel “Audition” because, as she explained in an interview, “most fundamentally it’s that the characters are in some way trying on different parts. I thought about “Performance” as a title, but I think, to some extent, “Audition” felt like it was more contingent. The characters are trying on different arrangements, auditioning for different relationships with each other.” 

In the novel, for example, Xavier learns the part that is expected of him in life, or, as the narrator puts it, “how critical it was to adapt and be responsive, that to be as other people wanted you to be was fundamental to getting ahead in the world”