A news item on the BBC caught Katie Kitamura's attention a few years ago. It featured 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 was saying horrible things, you could feel something inside of 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 brought her ·located in the orbit of the great innovators of fiction.
That clip of the genocidal ex-president made him think 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 – multicultural, uprooted, a little lost – , but small enough for meetings and coincidences. And also to continue investigating 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 Tribunal in The Hague, a woman who must translate the words of a criminal from 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 such as English and this translation becomes the basis for the other languages? When I was writing that scene, I wanted to think about what it means to write fiction, to occupy that uncomfortable 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 him towards 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 you 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 places they seek, and some end up aligning themselves with the offended whites and enter into the idea of the " model minority” 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 racialized people." In the novel, there is a moment when the genocidaire says to the interpreter, also an American of Japanese origin: I thought you were one of us, but I see that you are not. It places it, in this way, in the sphere of the whites.
A Kitamura, who also works as a teacher of creative writing - among her students there is, for example, Raven Leilani, who began her novel Brillo (Blackie Books) in the workshop she teaches at New York University - he likes "untidy" novels, in which everything is not tied and well tied. 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 the 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 extremely outstanding, a clear 9 out of 10, which a frivolous teenager would say. She is not. It is in the middle of her life, which did not prevent, to the surprise of the author, that many critics referred to it in their (very laudatory) reviews as "a young woman". "It's very curious, this, I think it's because there is the idea that the possibility, the narrative, is only for young people, and that's false. I have friends who are 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 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."
He also writes book reviews, for The New York Times and other media, but doesn't consider himself 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."
