Transdimensional Cuckoo

Here​ are two new novels, both highly accomplished, which diverge so sharply that they produce an eerie effect of symmetry. Audition is a slightly wayward choice for the title of Katie Kitamura’s new book, hinting at the narrator’s profession (she’s an actress preparing a leading role for a play off-Broadway) but not at its relevant aspects. In the first half of the book she is preoccupied with rehearsals, in the second she is on stage, coasting along in the late stages of a highly successful run. There was a certain amount of tension during rehearsals, with the leading player, the director and the writer (all women) vulnerable to one another, that being the nature of a collaborative art. One crucial scene in the middle of the piece, an internal transformation played solo on stage, resists being brought to life. The performer suspects that the writer hasn’t really resolved the difficulties of the scene and is shifting the blame onto the actor.

Into this knot of creative tension comes a young man called Xavier. In the first scene of the book, the unnamed narrator (a device that has the effect of making any synopsis sound unbearably stilted) recounts her second meeting with Xavier, though the situation becomes clear only gradually. She is apprehensive, in a way that suggests a disadvantage, perhaps that she is junior in age and/or status. In fact, she’s 48 to his 25, and though that age difference doesn’t rule out sexual attraction in either direction, something more delicate is at stake.

At their previous meeting Xavier had suggested he was the narrator’s son, on the basis of an interview in which she seemed to indicate she had once given up a baby. The dates would fit, but it’s an impossibility, since the interviewer had tactfully softened the circumstances: she had an abortion. Nevertheless, the suggestion has stirred up a certain amount of turbulence in her memory. Some time later, she had again become pregnant, and found that her husband, Tomas, was secretly tracking the foetus’s development on an app. The prospect of becoming a father relaxed his rather stern standards, so that he tolerated and even welcomed the sentimental graphics: ‘he had fallen into the cotton-candy world of the app, the soft corners of its feeling, he was using the app not despite its aesthetic but because of it.’ Discovering this, although he never knew that she knew about it, gave the miscarriage that she subsequently suffered a stark aspect of loss.

At the restaurant with Xavier she interprets the reactions of staff and fellow customers in the light of an occasion many years earlier when she was lunching in Paris with her father. Back then the staff seemed to think she was an escort rather than his daughter, and now she picks up the atmospheric assumption that Xavier is her toyboy. She directs the same fierce beam of interpretation on the young man sitting across the table from her: ‘In that moment, I could perceive the outer edge of his thought, his personal delusion, I could almost reach out and grasp it.’ He sits back in his chair and breathes out. A neutral enough bit of body language, but she recognises the movement from their first meeting and experiences it as a threat: ‘An old gesture of mine he had lifted from my films, my stage performances, and copied without shame. A piece of me, on the body of a stranger, a thing of mine that had been taken into the realm of the uncanny by this young man sitting across from me.’ Is this stranger using one of her own weapons of theatrical persuasion to disarm her? It’s a gesture that has a private meaning for her, a part of her professional repertoire that became a lazy reflex, even a tic. With help from Tomas she purged it from her acting vocabulary, making Xavier’s use of it seem all the more insidious. When he gets a job as assistant to the play’s director, the stage seems to be set for a campaign of displacement, not a direct assault on the narrator’s position but a knight’s move encircling.

Withholding information is the narrator’s prevailing mode in Audition, though occasionally she dispenses more than the absolute minimum. Sentences that begin ‘We lived in the West Village’ or ‘This is how it was’ seem trusting, as if she has had a sudden flattering impulse of confidence in the reader. It doesn’t last. When Tomas, trying to understand the subtle shift in her behaviour, asks her if she is cheating on him ‘again’, she denies it (truthfully) but barely sketches the past history that justifies his suspicions.

What makes Audition distinctive is a precision, a sharpness of focus, bare of corroborating detail. It’s hard to exaggerate how unusual this is in modern literature in general, modern American literature in particular. The obligation to chronicle, to make a record of the times, has always been part of a novelist’s business, though it’s often eclipsed by other concerns. For what is, after its fashion, a realistic novel to dispense completely with the markers of time, place and status – clothing brands, car makes, street names, references to public figures and public events – is almost unheard of. When the narrator assesses another woman’s self-presentation – ‘dressed all in black, black sweater and black trousers and black boots’ – she isn’t exactly vague but certainly generic. Doesn’t an apparently featureless style of this sort crackle with nuances of cut and material?

Listing consumer choices isn’t the only way of drawing character, but it’s a highly efficient one. With their clothing, people steer a course between the Scylla of conformism and the Charybdis of oddity, seeking to stand out while also fitting in. When the heroine of Anita Brookner’s Hotel du Lac, for instance, commissions for her wedding a ‘very creditable Chanel copy’ in blue-grey from an elderly Polish dressmaker in Ealing, the rendering of her character in terms of costume is revelatory almost to the point of pre-empting the book’s plot, stilling the faint throb of suspense generated by her acceptance of a proposal. Edith Hope has contrived an outfit which guarantees she will be outdressed by everyone at her wedding. On the day, Edith doesn’t even get out of the hired car taking her to the register office. At her request, it drives on.

There’s only one moment in Audition that testifies to any of the characters, or the author herself, having looked with any attention at the city in which they live, and that’s the observation that restaurants often choose cryptic names with a lot of vowels in them – the examples given are Aita, Elea, Amane – making them easy to confuse. This has to count as a plot point, rather than a piece of noticing for its own sake, since Tomas inexplicably appears at the restaurant where Xavier and the narrator are meeting, though he hasn’t been told about the rendezvous. He can plausibly claim to have come to the wrong place for a lunch date of his own because of those nearly interchangeable names. This trend, and the availability of such things as pregnancy monitoring apps, argues for a date in this millennium, but these reference points are fuzzy rather than exact.

Detail validates a fiction, giving the impression of a world that can be priced and measured, touched and tasted. But for some writers it’s more than ballast – it represents priceless cargo, and the whole reason for the expedition. That was Tom Wolfe’s contention in his manifesto-essay ‘Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast’, published in Harper’s in 1989, in which he offered his own novel The Bonfire of the Vanities not just as a triumph of marketing and a shrewd pusher of zeitgeist buttons but as a template for representing the world as it is. Reported detail is not just roughage but nourishment, and Richard Price’s Lazarus Man could have been written in honour of Wolfe’s prescriptions.

Wolfe proposed journalism as a necessary ingredient of consequential fiction, repeating the prediction he made in 1973 in The New Journalism that the future of the novel would be in ‘a highly detailed realism based on reporting, a realism more thorough than any currently being attempted, a realism that would portray the individual in intimate and inextricable relation to the society around him’. Reporting is not at all the same thing as consulting an archive or searching the electronic resources that didn’t exist then. The celebrity reporter is necessarily an anomaly, a distorting mirror rather than a sheet of clear glass. Price is almost but not quite a household name – the cover of Lazarus Man describes him as ‘award-winning writer on The Wire’ – and might have difficulty remaining anonymous while gathering material, but there’s no lack of precedent for that. Truman Capote, strange and fluting, nevertheless persuaded dazed Midwesterners to talk, and Wolfe himself was hardly inconspicuous, languidly prowling Manhattan in his pale suit. In his essay he conjures up an admiring image of Zola in frock coat and stiff collar being winched down a mine in Anzin while researching for Germinal. Zola posed as an official to gain access, but there may be no mystery in getting people to talk. Taking an interest is all that’s needed.

Price restricts the geographical and demographic reach of his narrative to the area around Lenox Avenue (also known as Malcolm X Boulevard), which runs north-south through Harlem. One character, Mary Roe, is a police detective who has a phobia about crossing state lines: ‘her inability to pick up a suspect in Connecticut or interview a witness in Pennsylvania nearly deep-sixed her career.’ This psychological version of an electronic tag might represent the author’s memo to himself not to stray too far from base. Lazarus Man is set in 2008, which means that Mary’s memories of 9/11 are still vivid. In fact, she made a lasting friendship with a woman who was also part of the team trying to identify bodies in an open-air morgue tent next to Bellevue Hospital – ‘the constant sharp snap of fingers being broken in order to remove rings’ is still with her.

Price names streets and intersections, makes of car and brands of clothes: someone wears ‘a Homestead Grays hoodie, a pair of Jimmy Jazz ripped and distressed jeans with too many pointless zippers, low-top red Superstar Pumas’. New Yorkers customise themselves so relentlessly that he has to come up with a special term for the occasional eccentric who wears a ‘wordless’ blue T-shirt. It must be made clear that the absence of identifying detail is a choice made by the wearer, not a lapse on the part of the writer. Price sketches people’s environments with equal attention. One character lives in ‘a former one-family brownstone broken up into ten kitchenettes, the majority of his co-tenants, all men, were freelance “entrepreneurs”, grey market street vendors selling home-burned old-school soul CDs, bootleg movie DVDs and hot-off-the-presses memorial T-shirts of whoever iconic in the culture had just died the day before.’ That sentence amounts to a landslide of social information, more sheer fact than exists in the whole of Audition.

The book’s characters make up a demographic cross-section, perhaps skewed towards middle age, often with the implied moral seriousness parenthood brings, however fractured the ensuing family. Mary shares custody of their children with her ex-husband in an uneasy, inharmonious arrangement, each alternately living in the family home and in a rented flat nearby. Her unpredictable schedule means she must often ask her ex for help with extra childcare, though any warmth they show each other must be closely watched in case intimacy resurfaces in a moment of absent-mindedness. She has occasional uncommitted dates with a colleague, who brings along with him a UV flashlight and a bottle of Luminol, both pinched from the Crime Scene Unit, to check for traces of blood or other fluids not visible to the naked eye. ‘In one motel, the purple beam had picked up so much unknown DNA off the pillowcases, blankets and sheets that the bed turned psychedelic.’

Meanwhile, the undertaker Royal Davis encourages his reluctant school-age son to hand out business cards at scenes of trauma. Royal is a ‘freelance mortician’, two words that by rights should have nothing to do with each other. What this means in practice is that his business is not doing well: the time when cocaine turf wars and Aids gave him three or four bodies a day is long gone. To make ends meet, he must subcontract from undertakers lucky enough to have more work than they can handle. The decedents he is offered by phone in the small hours are the least desirable ones:

‘Where in the apartment.’

‘Bathroom,’ the man said.

‘Floor, tub or toilet.’

‘She had a heart attack on the pot, fell off and wedged herself good between that and a wall.’

‘How long she been there?’

‘Roughly eight hours, not much more than that.’

Eight hours … It would be like extracting a statue that had been twisted into knots and stuffed into a pigeonhole.

‘Yeah I know,’ the man said. ‘We’ll bump your fee to three hundred.’

‘What bump. That is my fee.’

‘Three twenty-five. I’d go to three fifty, but I’d have to wake up the director for that.’

Royal says no. Nothing grounds a narrative more securely than authoritative testimony, above all, professional secrets, tricks of the trade, particularly when they’re sordid or grisly. Lazarus Man features some beauties. For instance: inserting a finger into a casualty’s rectum is a useful way of assessing the extent of injuries. Strong sphincter response rules out paralysis of the lower limbs. Morticians collecting a body wear thick-soled hiking boots dyed black, so as to minimise their risk of slipping on bodily fluids. Details of such immediacy have a residually oral, nobody-knows-this quality that makes them particularly effective in a book. They seem freshly arrived from the wild, not fully tamed by their enclosure in print.

Nabokov proposed that ‘raisins of fact in the cake of fiction are many stages removed from the original grape’ – but who says baking is the only option? Fruit salad has a lot going for it. Yet his underlying point stands: a written text has by definition been processed, and can make only rhetorical claims to the status of the raw. Any novel is a closed system, but most of them take a lot of trouble not to appear that way. Readers generally enjoy an impression of openness, the sensation that air is freely circulating, but it can only be an impression. What is unusual about Audition is how little it strives for this effect, and how little it turns out to matter. The fans have been turned off, and by rights the atmosphere of the book should hang heavy but somehow doesn’t. Kitamura hardly condescends to persuasion by circumstantial evidence, those appeals to a shared reality so ubiquitous we hardly notice them, preferring the route of fascination.

Short of a Shandean clump of blank pages, there’s no easy way of prompting readers to perceive a substantial gap between two parts of a book. In the second half of Audition, some weeks have passed, but there has also been a shift in reality. The name of the play has changed: Rivers instead of The Opposite Shore. More dramatically, Xavier is now the biological son of the narrator and Tomas. In its first half, if it qualified for genre pigeonholing at all, the novel might have seemed to promise a melodrama of usurpation in a theatrical milieu, but now with the arrival of a transdimensional cuckoo it suggests a wilder narrative. Not a variation on All about Eve but on Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Xavier’s embedding himself in the narrator’s professional world has lost its hint of threat, at least for her. She’s just pleased he’s making his way.

This sort of mid-narrative twist, metaphysical or even ontological, is uncommon in literary fiction and not widespread even in genre fantasy. At the end of the first episode of Series Five of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the heroine’s mother asks: ‘Buffy, if you’re going out why don’t you take your sister?’ Both girls protest – ‘Mom!!’ They’re dismayed. So too is the audience, since Buffy is an only child. There was cunning in the placement of this mystery, giving the audience a week to wonder what is going on. Have the screenwriters decided to jazz up the family drama? Will there be an explanation? As it turns out, Dawn, the newly minted sibling, isn’t a person at all but only disguised as one to put demon pursuers off the scent. Unfortunately, eavesdropping, she learns the truth about her non-human status and acts out, shoplifting and generally going to the bad. So what if you’re not a person? Doesn’t mean you don’t have feelings.

The moment one element in a fictional universe changes, there are inevitable repercussions. The question is when to call a halt to them. There’s no reason for the reality of Audition not to ladder like a stocking, but the only apparent knock-on effect of the transformation is that Xavier is now the sole proprietor of the previously contested gesture. The narrator observes it neutrally: ‘Yes, I know, Xavier said, and he sat back in his chair, exhaling gently, a movement he often made, a nervous tic of his.’ She hasn’t merely scrubbed it from her own repertoire of gestures, but had never adopted it in the first place. There’s no change to her behaviour as narrator. She goes on minutely assessing the swirls of power and emotion that surround her as the world of the book passes through the looking-glass. Xavier, following a plausible generational template, moves ‘back’ into the family home to save money, puzzling the narrator with his inability to remember which things are kept in which kitchen drawer. In due course he introduces his girlfriend, Hana, into the apartment. This is the woman with the generic black outfit, though the narrator’s observation of her body language is much more piercing: ‘I took her hand in mine – her skin smooth and her grip so light as to be an act of aggression, it left me with the sensation that I was holding on to nothing. She made it so that I was the one who was grasping, the one who was seeking more than was being given.’ A muted confrontation the next morning continues the subliminal struggle for dominance:

He’s never mentioned you, I said flatly.

Oh really? she replied.

She spoke in a voice that was completely unconcerned, as if the fact said more about my relationship with Xavier than hers.

Every point of contact (‘her feathery touch suddenly seemed to sprout claws’) is a potential ambush.

The obvious logical explanation for Xavier’s new status – that this is a more fully embodied version of George and Martha’s fantasy son in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? – is also obviously wrong. It’s not just that the narrator is troubled by odd gaps in her ‘memory’ of Xavier’s earlier years, asking herself ‘was it normal for a mother to be so unreflective?’, in a way that makes no sense if she’s aware of making it all up. She also ‘remembers’ discrepancies between his past behaviour and the way he is now:

One morning, in a sudden fit of nostalgia, I asked him why he no longer seemed to read. He stared at me, his face at once startled and blank, as if he had been caught off guard, as if the question was freighted in some way. Beneath the blankness I could see his mind at work, a series of rapid calculations, I understood that he had experienced the question as a criticism, even an accusation of sorts. The moment seemed to extend, I observed its viscous spread.

It’s not unusual for a narrative to be energised by a single impossible fact, whether it’s a virgin birth, a man waking up as an insect, or a 2 February that refuses to make way for its successor. It’s more the placement of the anomaly than the fact of there being one that makes reading Audition so disconcerting. The generative contradiction usually comes at or near the beginning of a story, not bang in the middle, where it’s too late to be part of the donnée, too early to qualify as a twist. Price, too, strays from convention by locating his impossible fact well into Lazarus Man: the miraculous discovery of a survivor (hence the book’s title) virtually unscathed in the wreckage of a building 36 hours after its collapse. The survivor’s presence was undetected by sniffer dogs, and the resonance microphones used by the emergency services also failed to pick up any sign of life.

In Wolfe’s​ version of the novel, journalism provides the bricks, fiction the mortar. With pleasing perversity Price makes a building collapse the basis of his own construction, allowing him, as Wolfe prescribes, to ‘bring the many currents of a city together in a single, fairly simple story’. Felix Pearl, a compulsive amateur photographer (he ‘hunts for moments’), finds himself recording scenes of destruction and its aftermath that may be saleable. After the dust has settled, Mary the policewoman has to make a list of the residents and determine what happened to them. Not all can be accounted for. On her own initiative she tries to track down a man whose wife died in the building. He hasn’t been seen since. Is there something sinister about his disappearance?

Anthony Carter, the ‘Lazarus man’, is a recovering cocaine addict who had no prospects before his resurrection except a job interview with a branch of High and Mighty. His gift of the gab might have been an asset there, but now his miraculous survival puts him on a higher and mightier level. He appears as a ‘Credible Messenger’, speaking, for instance, at events designed to discourage young men from gang life, where his experience might seem irrelevant. Nevertheless, his testimony, fluent without being glib, is powerfully inspirational, even if there are those who aren’t convinced, like the elderly friend who suggests that ‘if [God] was looking out for you he never would have let a building fall on top of you to begin with.’

Price barely asks how the building collapsed, making it a novelistic starting point itself exempt from being examined. All the emphasis falls on the question ‘How did this man survive?’ not ‘Why did this building fall down?’ – closer to tabloid journalism, with its preference for human interest, than the investigative kind. Price and Wolfe may emulate Zola’s methods, but they leave any radical purpose behind. After appeals for witnesses and examination of CCTV footage, the case is wrapped up in two texts that a colleague sends to Mary. The first one reads: ‘100+ yr old crap tenement v underground subway extension excavations vibrations for months’, the second one simply ‘boom’. No one presses for an investigation. Late in the book another building collapses, this time in the East Village, but the fact is only mentioned to explain why the mayor doesn’t turn up to the memorial event for those killed in the first incident.

One thing that Wolfe was pessimistic about in 1989 was the prospect of doing justice, in the sort of realistic novel he advocated, to the complexities of race in America: ‘Despite all the current talk of “coming together”, I see the fast multiplying factions of the modern cities trying to insulate themselves more diligently than ever before … the doors close and the walls go up!’ The moment both diagnosed and exploited by The Bonfire of the Vanities will not come again, and future realist fiction will have to settle for fewer bricks and more mortar. Wolfe registers this erection of barriers as a professional loss rather than a social one – his journalistic access to material has been restricted. Zola might have been surprised to learn that the roles of reporter and citizen could so easily be separated.

The mutual insulation between factions may not have gone away, but Price seems undeterred by the barriers. It takes a certain amount of bravado, and confidence in his groundwork, for a white (Jewish) writer to have Carter, his central character, ask himself ‘for the multimillionth time in his life – Why does everything have to come down to race?’ and answer his own question with ‘Because it does.’ Anthony’s parents were solidly middle class, his father ‘an Italian Irish pugnacious race warrior’ who taught African American history and literature in private schools, his mother a Black woman whose family owned businesses in Mobile and Birmingham. When Anthony was expelled from Columbia for dealing in the dorms he couldn’t even claim he was being discriminated against, since two white students paid the same penalty for the same offence.

Most people tended to interpret Anthony’s

mixed-race face as Latino, Mediterranean or Arab, a few going so far as to specifically guess Armenian, Israeli, Turkish but rarely the truth … Sometimes he preferred to present as white, other times as Black. Both were true, both were false. And both left him feeling like a spy in the world; a double agent inside a double agent. And both left him feeling psychically exhausted.

Complex or indefinite ethnicities are the norm: Felix, for instance, is ‘by blood, probably some kind of Latin American or maybe North African or Amerindian, but raised Jewish by the family who adopted him in a small upstate town halfway to Canada’. He moved to East Harlem if not to locate ‘his true tribe’ then at least to get away from the locals, ‘a bunch of all-American snowballs if there ever were any’.

Price seems to accept Wolfe’s core assumption about the ‘folly’ of thinking you can portray the individual in a city without portraying the city itself, while Kitamura aligns herself more with Blake’s aphorism about the fool who persists in his folly becoming wise. Not only does she ignore the surfaces of the city, she shows no interest in its cultural underpinnings. Race and gender, engines of so much current writing, are left idling, their explanatory power and experiential richness downgraded if not dismissed. True, there’s a residual sexism in the theatre world, so that a female director can still be criticised for a forcefulness that would not be noticed in a man, but at this stage of social history, having an all-female team (writer, director, lead) isn’t controversial. The narrator refers to there being a parallel between her socialisation as a woman and her choice of profession – ‘I have made a career of knowing what is expected of me, and delivering it, both as a woman and as an actor’ – but there’s no sense of her being defined by disadvantage.

As for race, that’s exactly the way it features, as ‘race’, a difference without specificity. The narrator’s career wasn’t held back by her ethnicity. True, early on there were no roles for someone who looked like her that weren’t demeaning or at best perfunctory. Her features, though, were ambiguous, and if she had changed her last name she could have gained access to a broader range of parts, so there was an element of principled sacrifice involved. She made the choice not to pass as Caucasian but to insist on her identity, until such time as ‘a change in the culture, in the writing, a change in the way of seeing’ offered her more rewarding work.

Xavier’s delusion in Part One was made plausible by their ‘shared race’, and when she enters the narrative late in Part Two Hana claims a rough ethnic kinship, declaring herself a great admirer of a particular performance of the narrator’s: ‘Parts of Speech was so important to me. To see someone who looked like me on the screen. You have no idea what it meant.’ This is the only time in the book that the characters address a racial topic, and the narrator takes the remark to be subtly demeaning. ‘Important and great admirer were words so generic as to mean nothing at all, to be almost an affront.’ She is being congratulated not on her talent but her category. This is an almost ostentatiously unreal way of writing about race in the 21st century, as a notional diversity stripped of all complication, when hurt lies in the specifics.

Even motherhood, an issue so broad it seems to have no edges, is invoked only passingly. A cost-benefit reckoning of the impact on a woman’s life of having a child is the last thing on offer here. Motherhood may be momentous but it’s also somehow weightless. Certainly the narrator’s career has reached exactly the same place in the parallel universe of Part Two as it had in Part One. As parents, she and Tomas live in the same apartment – the one they could only afford because they didn’t have the expense of raising a child. Is it possible to write such a book yet hold off from expressing any view of motherhood? Apparently so. There is a single attempt to define it in terms of a ‘waiting [that] never stops’. The emphasis is more on the way the narrator’s marriage mutates with the arrival of this sudden son, since it’s the impact of fatherhood on Tomas rather than motherhood on the narrator that shifts the balance. An alien intelligence with no pre-existing idea of motherhood could hardly reconstruct one from Audition, as (oddly enough) it could from the family histories on offer in Lazarus Man.

Those of us​ who are addicted to detail can still respond to the invigorating detox of Audition, perhaps even feeling that Kitamura should go further. When the books in Xavier’s room are itemised (‘Montaigne, Brecht, Bergman screenplays’) this is jarring, since these are the only real-world names in the book. And if it’s ‘the financial district’ rather than Wall Street, and Broadway is never mentioned, even in its off and off-off varieties, why have the two mentions of the West Village and New York itself? Manhattan is a notional backdrop to the action, no more substantial than the diorama Hitchcock commissioned for the studio filming of Rope.

Audition is unmistakably a novel, while Lazarus Man could reasonably be described as a screenplay-in-waiting, despite the ingratitude that would be involved in undervaluing such a rich knot of particularised lives and voices. (Price’s first novel, The Wanderers, published in 1974, was filmed by Philip Kaufman, and he has written a dozen original screenplays.) The book was also a novel-in-waiting for a long time, to judge by the reference in its acknowledgments to ‘an insanely long gestation period’. The difficulty presumably lay in finding the ‘single, fairly simple story’ that would tie everything together. There’s a rather breathless coda bringing some of the characters, if not fully up to date, then at least some way towards the present.

The distance between the setting of Lazarus Man in 2008 and its US publication last year is only two years less than the gap of time between Bloomsday and the appearance in print of the titanic information dump known as Ulysses. That book’s raw materials, the reconstructed and suppositious events of a Dublin day in 1904, were already out of date when Joyce started putting them together, but their importance for him was somehow consecrated rather than nullified by the events that intervened during the writing – things like a world war and the Easter Rising. Lazarus Man may not have started life as a period novel, but the drawback of such saturating detail is that it can’t easily be shifted from year to year. Price’s book is as indelibly date-stamped as video footage entered into evidence. By 2024, for instance, ‘grey market street vendors’ would hardly be selling pirated DVDs. And since 2008 fentanyl has thrown a lifeline to struggling funeral homes across the United States.

It’s unlikely that the composition of Audition required a similarly extended period, but even if it did there would be no need to worry about blurring a timeframe that has been blurred from the start. Kitamura’s narrator draws the distinction, late in Audition, between knowledge and understanding, ‘which is not dependent on proof, and which cannot therefore be refuted’. That’s what she focuses on, a psychological richness bypassing the standard mechanisms of persuasion – persuasion is rather oddly described at one point as ‘only one step removed from coercion’. Her novel, trading so little in what is verifiable, can float free of the circumstantial tethers with whose friction, and whose chafing, Price must make his peace.