Innermost thoughts

Having read Kitamura’s Intimacies (2021), her fourth and most recent publication, I sought out more of Kitamura’s writing because I had rather enjoyed her introspective, almost stream-of-consciousness style. Some reviews have compared Kitamura’s writing to Rachel Cusk’s, with good reason; there are indeed similarities in the prose style, the beautifully connected unfolding of complex, nuanced thoughts and introspections, and the strong, spare style. The Separation is Kitamura’s third novel, published in 2017, and having recently read Intimacies, I find the protagonists curiously alike in both novels. Both are unnamed in the novels, the novels are told through the first-person narrator and is mostly what goes on in her mind; imagined, remembered, recounted, projected, anticipated all alike. (The strength of the writing ensures the reader is never left confused as to what is being conveyed, whether memory or mere imagining.) 

In both novels, the protagonist is a translator, and in both, she is ‘foreign’, but unspecified – foreign in what way(s) exactly? – just, the outsider status is mentioned in passing, a factor but seemingly not a determining factor. In both novels, the protagonists’ characters, given their narration and mental processes, seem very alike; in fact, they could nearly be the same person, there is very little difference in personality type or mental consciousness, it seems to be the same speaking voice. Not that this detracts from the quality of the novels, both are good reads, well paced and strongly delivered, deliberately and extremely understated. 

The Separation is so titled because the thrust of the plot is the protagonist has been estranged from her husband, Christopher. In the last 6 months, they have lived apart – hence the separation – and she in fact has even moved out of their apartment into the home of a new partner, incidentally, an old friend of Christopher’s. Christopher himself had gone travelling, to Greece, without informing the protagonist. In fact, she had not heard from him for a month, until Christopher’s rather dominating mother phones and says her son has not been in touch, asks where he is, and is surprised when his wife does not know his whereabouts. The protagonist, in fact, had made up her mind to ask for a divorce, but she does not disclose either the separation/estrangement, or her intention to seek a divorce, to her mother-in-law.  

The tension of the novel lies in how despite the fact legally she is still married, in her life, she has actually already moved on, but has not made this socially publicly known as yet, so she is almost leading a double life.

And the law remained only too keen to declare the bond between Christopher and myself. We were married, there could be no doubt on that account – and yet we were not […]a resonance that was the product of the mutual chasm between the letter of the law and the private reality. The question was which to service, which to protect.

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That last sentence is a good example of the brevity and precision of Kitamura’s writing and analytical though, that excellent condensation of the tension into one short, telling sentence. 

At her mother-in-law’s behest, the protagonist goes to Greece in search of her missing husband. She is not sure why she is making this journey except that she is being exhorted and expected to, and also because she then thinks it may be better to ask for a divorce in person, so she goes. She finds Christopher’s mistress at the luxury resort he was staying in, and a rather more complicated situation than she had anticipated, particularly when he is located, dead. 

The tension of the situation – of her legal status mismatching the actual status of the relationship – is exacerbated because her husband’s death locks her into the former, without space or opportunity to disclose the separation and impending divorce. The protagonist muses on both marriage as well as grief:

But there was less difference than I thought, between the grief that I experienced and what I thought of as the legitimate grief of a legitimate wife – the grief I attempted while with Isabella and Mark [Christopher’s parents] and then before the world in general, to emulate. The emulation became the thing itself, in the end there was not that much difference between the grief of a wife and the grief of an ex-wife – perhaps wife and husband and marriage itself are only words that conceal much more unstable realities, more turbulent than can be contained in a handful of syllables, or any amount of writing.

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Part of the delight of Kitamura’s writing is how she reveals the protagonists’ very private minds to the reader, lays bare the innermost and even the ignoble thoughts in a starkly authentic rendering. The protagonists do not attempt to deceive themselves; they in fact do the opposite, trying to excavate the truth of their feelings and locate the most sincerely experienced thoughts and wishes that lie deep within themselves.  

The passages about how grief is experienced also makes excellent reading. Isabella, Christopher’s mother, grieves both performatively, but also sincerely; Kitamura shows us that performance does not negate authenticity. The protagonist does not make any show of mourning of course, which would be distasteful given she knows she was already moving on in her life and already has a new partner, and so in her mind, is quite separated already from her legal husband. But being a reticent, decorous woman, she does not reveal her lack of grief either, which would have been insulting to Christopher’s parents. She muses philosophically about the processes of grieving, and how we perpetrate illusions for ourselves even when mourning, perhaps in self-defence:

It is easier to mourn a known quantity than an unknown one. For the sake of convenience we believed in the totality of our knowledge, we even protected that illusion. At a certain point, if we were to encounter a diary with the record of the dead one’s innermost thoughts we would refrain, most of us would not open the book but would return it to its resting place undisturbed, even the sight of it would be horrifying. In this way, I thought, we make ghosts of the dead.

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This is searching, thoughtful, intelligent writing, well constructed and deliberated. It is a great pleasure to see writing of quality which is so non-fussy, with a certain quiet power, increasingly celebrated on the literary stage, particularly in a time when so much is overblown, with too much fanfare and more advertisement than substance; Kitamura’s writing elegantly and decisively counters this tide.