A news item on the BBC caught Katie Kitamura’s attention a few years ago. Appearing was Charles Taylor, the former president of Liberia who was on trial at the International Court of Justice in The Hague for war crimes. He was accused of various atrocities: murders, rapes, amputations of members of the guerrilla in Sierra Leone. “There was something very disturbing. He was very persuasive, a great speaker. Even when he said something horrible, you could feel something in you moving in the direction of his arguments and you had to hold yourself back from doing it,” explains Kitamura. This was one of the starting points – there is never just one – of Intimidades (Sexto Piso), the fourth novel by the American author of Japanese origin and the one that has located in the orbit of the great innovators of fiction.
That clip of the genocidal ex-president made him think that it would be good to set a novel in The Hague, a city he visited as a child, cosmopolitan enough to host characters like those in his book – multi-cultural, uprooted, a little lost – but small enough for meetings and coincidences. And also to continue delving into a subject that obsesses him: what is gained, more than what is lost, when a sentence is transferred from one language to another.
If the protagonist of her previous novel, A Separation (Random House), was a translator, now the unnamed narrator is an interpreter at the International Court of The Hague, a woman who must convey the words of a criminal of war very similar to Charles Taylor. There is a scene where she feels almost complicit in helping him defend himself. “This was a difficult scene to write”, admits the author, who was in Barcelona a few weeks ago.
“Much 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 the meaning of writing fiction, occupying that uncomfortable zone where you are 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 him to these liminal spaces. Kitamura was born in California to Japanese parents – his father, a civil engineer, taught at the University. “But when I was 16, they went back to live in Japan, so for more than half of my life, for me to go back home was to go there”, he explains. And this also gave him another historical perspective. “In California, Japanese American identity had a lot to do with the internment camps where the Japanese were imprisoned at the end of World War II, but my mother always reminded me that we also had to consider Japan’s imperialist aggression in Asia . They are two realities that coexist. In the novel I wanted to reflect this, I wanted to think about this complicity”.
Kitamura has also followed with interest and concern the US Supreme Court case, which struck down affirmative action in American universities, and in which Asian Americans have played a crucial role. Their academic success is usually so overwhelming that many students of this background, especially Chinese Americans, do not get the positions they seek, and some end up aligning themselves with offended whites, entering into the idea of the “minority model” that was attributed to them more than half a century ago.
“This is a stereotype that continues because it is very useful to many people, it serves to open a rift between the different minorities and uses Asians as an instigator,” accuses the author. “Without a doubt, it doesn’t benefit us, it benefits the whites. 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’s a false alliance that they don’t consider themselves a racialized person.” In the novel there is a moment when the genocidal says to the interpreter, also an American of Japanese origin: I thought you were one of us, but I see that you are not. Placing it, in this way, in the sphere of the whites.
A Kitamura, who also teaches creative writing – her students include, for example, Raven Leilani, who began her novel Brillantor (Blackie Books) in the workshop she teaches at New York University – he likes “untidy” novels, in which everything is not tied up and well tied up. And hers, although very restrained and perfectly calibrated, in a way it is.
The narrator, newly arrived in the city, is, according to her own creator, “quite paranoid”. “He has lost his north. Look for readability”. He has begun an erratic romance with a very attractive man, Adriaan, who, as he discovers, is still married to a woman, the mother of his three children, who has left him and gone to live in Lisbon. In the game he establishes with Adriaan, but also with the acquaintances who move around The Hague, everyone seems to have a set value, a kind of market price. Adriaan’s wife, for example, seems to the narrator impossibly outstanding, a clear 9 out of 10, which a frivolous teenager would say. She is not. She is in the middle of her life, which did not prevent, to the surprise of the author, that many critics referred to her in their (very complimentary) reviews as “a young woman”. “This is very curious, I think it must be that 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 change. The lives of my characters are not rooted”.
It has also been said of her that she is a thriller author who does not write thrillers. And there is certainly a very suggestive noir aspect to his novels, a menacing sense 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 resolution of the mystery than in the revelation itself.”
She also writes book reviews, for The New York Times and other media, but she doesn’t consider herself a critic. “Recently I was 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 find it hard not to side with the writer. I always empathize with the author. Even when something doesn’t work for him, I appreciate what he’s trying”
