About uncertainty, the Middle Ages and the beauty of boredom

“We rely so much on a clear narrative and finality to make not just a book, but a life, meaningful,” says Katie Kitamura. “I’m interested in what it means to live in a state of uncertainty.” In Kitamura’s latest novel Hearinga New York theater actress finds herself in this state when a young man appears claiming to be her son. The book is an examination of psychological duality, revealing the roles we play on and off the stage, what we know and what we don’t know, and what is real and what isn’t.

Kitamura was born in Sacramento, California in 1979. In addition Hearingauthor of novels such as Intimacies (2021) and A Separation (2018), as well as a memoir, For Japanese travelers: Travel Through modern Japan (2006). Hearing was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, the Booker Prize, and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, and is being adapted for the screen by director Lulu Wang; Kitamura’s awards and honors include the Guggenheim Fellowship and the Rome Literary Award. He lives in Brooklyn and teaches in New York University’s creative writing program.

Kitamura spoke to me about turning away from certainty, finding new opportunities in middle age, and disconnecting from productivity.

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Your work is very much about being in between. Tendon Hearingthe narrator of the actress is in a state of suspension as she tries to make sense of her suddenly uncertain existence, and readers are also in limbo because it is unclear what is happening in the narrative. Towards the end of the book, one might think that it will soon become clear whether the young man is the narrator’s son, and whose version – the narrator’s or the man’s – is correct. But that’s not what happens. What attracts you in the absence of determination? This is such a fascinating question. The only situation I can write from is uncertainty. My work as a writer is to turn away from certainty in everything from plot level to sentence mechanism. For me, the question is always: What can you see when you move away from the certainty, the conclusion? For me, this has an almost ethical dimension. There is something moral about a character refusing certainty.

In what way? Presuming knowledge is dangerous. It’s easy to believe that you know, it’s easier to convince. I see this now in the world around us. It is much easier to move toward the comfort of conclusions than to maintain uncertainty. But there is something worth pursuing in denying the conclusion.

It’s striking how we seek certainty even when we know uncertainty is the only thing we can be sure of in life. I don’t use AI and know it changes quickly, but about a year ago it was programmed to be prone to resolution. If you were to try to get him to write a scene where two characters are fighting, it would lean more towards a resolution between the two people. Part of the reason for this is that AI is trained on fiction, much of which has the same tendency. I am not very interested in this, because the lack of determination and living with the lack of determination, which is very difficult, is much more true to our life experiences.

There is something worth pursuing in denying the conclusion.

Your parents are Japanese and Japan for Travelers: A Journey Through Modern Japan it’s about a trip he took to Japan to be with his family and to gain a deeper understanding of the culture. A well-known aspect of Japanese culture is its tendency towards ambiguity and openness. Do you feel like it had an effect on you? Definitely. Many 20th century Japanese writers were important to me in terms of my writing, such as Kawabata, Ōe, Tanizaki. In their work, they avoid the traditional narrative arc that is used to be seen in Western fiction. No story or lesson needed. Rather, it is a series of states and we leave it up to the reader to interpret things.

Tendon For Japanese travelersYou say that you “always have that feeling when you go back to Japan”. Do you feel torn between America and Japan? Yes, I spoke to Salman Rushdie about this once. We talked about my last novel, Intimacieswhich is about a dubbing interpreter who works at a war crimes tribunal in The Hague. The book is about movement between languages ​​and cultures. I told Salman that I don’t feel strongly about any one culture. I must have looked mournful when I said that, because he said it was a huge gift to look to not one, but many. I think this is very true and very wise.

Another kind of bardo you talked about and write about Hearingstate between the Middle Ages. The narrator in it Hearingwho is middle-aged says it is a stage where there is a certain amount of immutability where things no longer change. Well, I think the book proves the narrator wrong. One thing I noticed when I was publishing Intimacies is that people kept referring to the main character – who goes through the change – as a young woman, but she’s in her late thirties. I thought, “Oh, that’s interesting. People feel that change is something that happens to young people.” But this is so transparently not true. In the middle of your life, even if you are in a relationship, job or family, you are still subject to huge changes. And in many ways that change is even more painful because you have these attachments.

I was also interested in thinking about this while writing Hearing: the fact that the middle of a life abounds in narrative possibility. For whatever reason, we are preoccupied with the beginning and, to some extent, the end, but the middle is neglected, especially for women. The male midlife crisis has been written many times, but when Dana Spiotta wrote Wayward In 2021, it was one of the first menopause novels. Now, of course, there are many more, such as Miranda July’s All fourbut the fact that menopause, as something worth writing about, has appeared so recently is extraordinary. Menopause is a change as significant as puberty, but the middle of a woman’s life is often portrayed as a kind of monotony. I wanted to write a book about the changes a woman goes through in middle age.

Now that you are in the middle of life, what changes are you experiencing? I am at the age where we are busy taking care of our parents, end-of-life care. By allowing our children to settle into their lives. Mortality is no longer like what happens to other people.

I feel like I want to experience more time. When I turned 40, I thought I really wanted to slow down time. Not in the sense that I’m not getting older, but in the sense that I’m more present, I’m bored like I was as a child. I miss that boredom because it is so creatively productive.

I dream of this boredom. I don’t have one in my life right now, but I do remember what it was like to lie in the grass on a summer afternoon and watch the contrails in the sky. Or get in a car and stare out the window for hours. Don’t listen to the radio, don’t talk, just look out the window.

I want to try to find this connection again with time. It is difficult both from a practical point of view and because it requires persistent attention. Enhanced monitoring, enhanced presence mode. But I find myself thinking more and more about how I can do that. Reading is one of them. It slows down time, especially as a counterpoint to scrolling time, such as undifferentiated time.

I am part of a Proust reading group and we are currently reading a volume In pursuit of lost time every two months. A lot of people seem to be reading Proust – maybe that’s the answer to how we feel about our lives right now.

I think time is something that we are all very aware of because we feel like life has sped by even though our time is the same as our parents and their parents. And this feeling is related to our fear of death, whether metaphorical or literal, and not wanting things to end. In a novel, time usually collapses, but when reading Proust, time tenses up in an extraordinary way. There is an assumption that you read on because you want to know what happens, but that is not why you are reading Proust at all. You read it because there is an almost viscous quality to the way the world he creates holds it in place. Take a second and hold it for three hours in the reading experience, which is almost the opposite of what we think of a novel. This may be what we are looking for.

However, as much as I love to read – I read in queues at the airport, on the subway, everywhere – there is a part of my brain that thinks about it in terms of productivity, because it is very close to my work, to my ideas about self-education. For example, “If I read a few books a week, it will be a good week for reading.” The danger is that your attachment to your idea of ​​productivity, that you are a productive member of a capitalist society, cannibalizes everything in your life. Detachment from this and being present, looking out the window is very important.