A story on the BBC caught the attention of Katie Kitamura a few years ago. It featured Charles Taylor, the former president of Liberia who was facing trial at the International Tribunal in The Hague for war crimes. He was accused of various atrocities: murders, rapes, amputations of guerilla members in Sierra Leone. “There was something very disturbing. He was very persuasive, a great speaker. Even when he said something horrifying, you could feel something in you moving in the direction of his arguments and you had to hold yourself up from doing so,” Kitamura explains. That was one of the starting points – there is never just one – for Intimacies (Sixth Floor), the fourth novel by the American author of Japanese origin and the one that has placed her in the orbit of the great renovators of fiction.
That clip of the genocidal ex-president made her think that it would be nice to set a novel in The Hague, a city she visited as a child, cosmopolitan enough to accommodate characters like those in her book – multicultural, uprooted, a bit lost – but sufficiently small for meetings and coincidences. And also to continue delving into a subject that obsesses her: what is gained, more than what is lost, when a phrase is transferred from one language to another.
If the protagonist of his previous novel, A Separation (Random House) was a translator, now the nameless narrator is an interpreter at the International Tribunal in The Hague, a woman who must translate the words of a war criminal very similar to Charles Taylor. There's a scene where she feels almost complicit in helping him defend himself. "That was a difficult scene to write," admits the author, who was in Barcelona a few weeks ago.
“A lot has been written about how translation can be a form of violence. For example, what happens when a text written in a minority language is translated into an imperial language like English and that translation becomes the basis for the rest of the languages? When I was writing that scene, I wanted to think about what it means to write fiction, to occupy that awkward zone where you're too close to people's stories and wonder what right you have to tell them. You ask yourself ethical questions.”
Being bilingual and bicultural has undoubtedly oriented her to those liminal spaces. Kitamura was born in California to Japanese parents – her father, a civil engineer, taught at the University. “But when I was 16, they moved back to Japan, so for more than half of my life, coming home was going there for me,” she explains. And that also gave him another historical perspective. “In California, the Japanese American identity had a lot to do with the internment camps where the Japanese were held at the end of World War II, but my mother always reminded me that there was also Japan's imperialist aggression in Asia to consider. They are two realities that coexist. In the novel I wanted to reflect that, I wanted to think about that complicity”.
Kitamura has also followed with interest and concern the case of the United States Supreme Court, which struck down affirmative action in American universities, and in which Asian Americans have played a crucial role. Their academic success is often so overwhelming that many students of that origin, especially Chinese Americans, do not obtain the positions they seek, and some end up aligning themselves with aggrieved whites, delving into the idea of the "model minority" that was attributed to them long ago. more than half a century.
"That is a stereotype that is still standing because it is very useful to many people, it serves to drive a wedge between different minorities and uses Asians as a poker," accuses the author. “Of course, it doesn't benefit us, it benefits white people. It is obvious that the community is being manipulated for other purposes, although I have to be aware that there is a large percentage of Asian Americans who think differently than I do, especially very young people, which makes me especially sad. For me, it is a false alliance that they do not consider themselves a racialized person”. In the novel there is a moment in which the genocide says to the interpreter, also an American of Japanese origin: I thought you were one of us, but I see that you weren't. Placing it, in this way, in the sphere of whites.
Kitamura, who also works as a professor of creative writing – her students include, for example, Raven Leilani, who began her novel Brillo (Blackie Books) in the workshop she teaches at New York University – likes “watery” novels. ”, in which not everything is tied and well tied. And yours, although very contained and perfectly calibrated, in a way it is.
The narrator, recently arrived in the city, is, according to her own creator, "quite paranoid". “She has lost her way. She looks for a legibility ”. She has started an erratic romance with a very attractive man, Adriaan, who, as she discovers, is still married to a woman, mother of her three children, who has left him and gone to live in Lisbon. In the game that she establishes with Adriaan, but also with the acquaintances who move around The Hague, everyone seems to have an established value, a kind of market price. Adriaan's wife, for example, strikes the narrator as impossibly outstanding, a clear 9 out of 10, as a frivolous teenager would say. She's not. About her It is in the middle of her life, which did not prevent, to the author's surprise, many critics from referring to her in her (very complimentary) reviews of her as “a young woman”. “It is very curious that I think it is because there is the idea that the possibility, the narrative, is only for young people, and that is false. I have friends older than me—Kitamura was born in 1979—and their lives are in an extraordinary state of flux. The lives of my characters are not grounded."
It has also been said of her that she is an author of thrillers who does not write thrillers. And there is certainly a very suggestive aspect of noir in her novels, a haunting feeling that someone is lying. “I like to play with the genre, especially in my previous novel, which is like a mystery but without resolution. I don't know why but I write claustrophobic novels, in which there is fear and anxiety. In genre novels, I find more pleasure in the moment before the mystery is solved than in the revelation itself.
She also writes book reviews, for The New York Times and other outlets, but she doesn't consider herself a critic. “I was recently talking to a friend who does do this full time and she told me that she always sides with the reader, but when I write a review I have a hard time not being on the side of the writer. I always empathize with the author. Even when something is not working for him, I value what he is trying.
