(they long to be) close to you— a review of Intimacies by Katie Kitamura

Photo by Danielle Levis Polusi

The unnamed narrator of Katie Kitamura’s Intimacies is a sieve. The novel is largely characterized by a slow-paced reportage, the prose of which reflects the narrator’s occupation as an interpreter. She functions as the translator and transmitter of the world before her, such that I often felt just slightly removed from the action as a reader. The narrator is only passively implicated in some of the events of the novel, but that doesn’t make it any less engrossing. 

Much like ours, the world of Intimacies is one of dissociation and disconnection. Characters are always brushing past each other, coming just short of the kinships they seek. The glimpses of the narrator’s emotional landscape are affective— her reaction to a witness’s harrowing story at the court, her profound discomfort at the emotional manipulation of a man on trial, her strained relationship with her boyfriend, a glimmer of recognition in a friend of a friend. These occurrences often feel simultaneously seismic and unnervingly mundane. 

In the Winter 1998 issue of Critical Inquiry titled “Intimacy,” Lauren Berlant writes: 

To intimate is to communicate with the sparest of signs and gestures, and at its root intimacy has the quality of eloquence and brevity. But intimacy also involves an aspiration for a narrative about something shared, a story about both oneself and others that will turn out in a particular way. Usually, this story is set within zones of familiarity and comfort: friendship, the couple, and the family form, animated by expressive and emancipating kinds of love. 

Hint, the next sentence in this essay begins with “but.” 

Kitamura denies us, in some ways, the turning out in a particular way. Denies us the familiar and comfortable zone. The modes of relationality in Intimacies are difficult to categorize, and not nearly emancipating. At times, they fall short. At times, they are suffocating. At times, they involve tender empathy and longing. And the spareness of the prose mirrors that brevity Berlant refers to. 

This is not a “plot-based novel,” whatever that means. I won’t deny that I often found myself waiting for something to happen. But the unhurriedness of the narrative— its slowness and deliberation— made me question my own waiting. As I moved through the novel, I found myself drawing closer and closer to the narrator, even as she became more and more estranged from everyone around her. I found myself inside her head.

To say that the anonymity of Kitamura’s narrator is meant to force the reader to project oneself onto her is not only an oversimplification but also, I think, the opposite of the point. This novel illuminates a larger-reaching disconnection, employing mystery and pace to do so. The reader, too, is passively implicated in all of the events of the novel through the close narrator. Or, the novel makes us question if implication can ever be passive at all. 

Toward the end of the novel, the narrator comments about the role of the interpreters in a particularly scandalous trial that had taken place at the court:

“We interpreters were only extras passing behind the central cast and yet we moved with caution. We had the sense of being under observation.”

This sense of observation is an inversion of the narrator’s status throughout the novel. The watcher was now watched. Ultimately, the act of witness is an act, active.

Intimacies does in fact lean toward a narrative about something shared, about an interconnectedness that is fluid and unpredictable and challenging, and at times does not feel like interconnectedness at all. But the plurality of the title seems to insist on it.

The book ends with a moment of reluctant agency, even as it maintains the narrator’s overwhelming sense of alienation. It ends with the promise of closeness. There is still estrangement all around the narrator, but perhaps to think of intimacy as a total lack of estrangement isn’t quite right. Perhaps grasping for each other across distance, in the face of disconnection, is a little closer to the mark.

-Kameryn Alexa Carter