Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2025, Katie Kitamura’s Audition is a profound meditation on the nature of performance and its place in the institution of family. Spare, unsettling, and psychologically astute, the book blurs the line between truth and illusion, between roles performed and lives lived. Composed of two narratives, it probes the fragile boundaries of identity, parenthood, and intimacy.
The first part opens with an unnamed narrator (a middle-aged woman) meeting a younger man (in his mid-twenties) for lunch. The woman is an established actress who can no longer distinguish between what is a performance and what is real. The young man claims to be her son. However, the narrator maintains that she never gave up any child for adoption. She never gave birth; she had an abortion. As the second part begins, the narrator and her husband, Tomas, invites Xavier to move into their home. He is their son, or so it seems.
In the first part, the narrator had been pregnant in the past. Before she could make up her mind about having the baby or getting an abortion, she suffered a miscarriage. While she was ambivalent about the matter, Tomas had concealed his happiness at the prospect of a future with a child. Later on, when the narrator thought about motherhood with any degree of seriousness, it was too late, and she was too old. Tomas’s deep desire for fatherhood finds abode in his relationship with Xavier in the second part. He waits on Xavier as a butler when Xavier brings home his friend Hana. The couple even leaves envelopes of cash to cement their intimacy with Xavier.
As the novel progresses, the narrator, and therefore the reader, can no longer distinguish between what is real and what is unreal. Does a performance make something less real? The reader wonders if Xavier is the narrator’s son after all. The narrator notes that Xavier seems like a stranger living in her house. Is she unable to recognise the son she raised in the grown-up adult? Or is he truly a stranger who has moved into the couple’s home? Or did the narrator lie about her abortion? Perhaps, the narrator never gave birth to a child. Could it be that welcoming Xavier into their home provided the narrator and her husband with the opportunity to be parents for the first time? The two parts of the novel may also be read as the two possible lives the narrator could have had—one where she had a child, and another where she didn’t.
Performing a deconstruction of relationships, Audition challenges our ideas of personhood and family. Kitamura’s storytelling is succinct, delivering one punch after another. Sample this: “What was a family if not a shared delusion, a mutual construction?”
A familial strife exposes the scaffoldings of the relationship the couple have with Xavier—“It’s over. And although neither Xavier nor Tomas moved, instantly the space had transformed, so that we were no longer a family standing in a room—a family with problems, with dramas and resentment and everything else, but still a family—and instead three distinct people atomised, standing in a room suddenly devoid of meaning.” Has the performance ended?
Was the narrator trying to transform her life by performing the role of Xavier’s mother? Or has a real family reached its breaking point, breaking an illusion? The genius of Kitamura is that both these scenarios could be real. Later, the narrator thinks, “As for Xavier, I no longer knew what he was to me, or what I was to him. We had been playing parts, and for a long period—for as long as we understood our roles, for as long as we participated in the careful collusion that is a story, that is a family, told by one person to another—the mechanism had held.”
