Katie Kitamura writes novels where the main character never tells you her name – not once. You spend 200 pages with these women and you never find out what to call them. But though anonymous, these figures are not indistinct, but compelling, specific people. What most writers might see as a fundamental challenge of character development, Kitamura has turned into an art form.

A Princeton graduate who earned her PhD in American literature with a dissertation on “The Aesthetics of Vulgarity and the Modern American Novel,” Kitamura brings both academic rigour and artistic instinct to her exploration of identity’s unstable terrain. Her training as a young ballet dancer perhaps explains her fascination with performance and the precise choreography of human behaviour. Now teaching in the Creative Writing program at New York University and a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship as well as the Rome Prize in Literature, amongst other accolades, she has established herself as both a literary artist and cultural critic, writing for publications including the New York Times Book Review, the Guardian, and Granta. Her novels – Gone to the Forest, The Longshot, A Separation, Intimacies, and most recently Audition – are populated by people who seem to be conducting experiments on themselves, testing how much uncertainty a human being can tolerate before something breaks. In her latest, she has literally split the book in half, giving us two incompatible versions of the same story.

But there’s something deeper at work in Kitamura’s fiction than just structural experimentation. These unnamed narrators are manifestations of her central preoccupation with the unstable nature of identity itself. As she told NPR’s Scott Simon, “We find we exist in performance,” an echo of Judith Butler’s infamous maxim that the self is constructed by what it does, not what it is. Kitamura’s characters, as a result, exist in a constant state of becoming, rather than being. The woman in Audition is simultaneously an accomplished actress and a potential mother, a repenting wife and an unreliable narrator, proof that our identities are formed from context and one’s reaction to it, rather than anything essential.

What makes Kitamura’s work so unsettling is how she excavates the gap between our inner experience and the roles we play for others. She writes about the places where relationships fracture not by some dramatic betrayals (though there are those too), but from the slow accumulation of misunderstandings and the daily erosion of shared reality. In Intimacies, her National Book Award-longlisted novel, she follows a translator at The Hague tasked with interpreting for a war criminal while her own relatively new relationship dissolves. Two forms of breakdown happen simultaneously, each reflecting the other’s fundamental questions about truth, complicity, and the stories we tell ourselves. The brilliance of Kitamura’s approach lies in how she makes uncertainty itself a character. Her protagonists are women caught in the space between what they know and what they can prove, between who they are and who they appear to be.

This theme of translation – both literal and metaphorical – runs throughout Kitamura’s work. Her characters are constantly engaged in acts of interpretation, trying to decode the behaviour of lovers, friends, and strangers, yet finding that human motivations remain stubbornly opaque. Language itself becomes a barrier rather than a bridge, with words continually being found to be inadequate. In A Separation, the unnamed narrator functions as a kind of anthropologist of her own failed marriage, observing her missing husband’s Greek mistress and local community with clinical detachment, yet never quite grasping the full truth of what has transpired.

The recurring theme of performance that defines Kitamura’s oeuvre finds particular expression in how her narrators present themselves to the world while concealing their inner turmoil. Her fiction explores characters who have become experts at emotional compartmentalisation, living with profound fragmentation and ambivalence about their own desires and motivations. She has turned emotional restraint into high art. Her protagonists don’t yell and weep; they observe others weeping with the detached fascination of anthropologists studying a particularly curious ritual. They don’t rage; they note the precise temperature of their own anger or grief and file it away for later consideration. Kitamura has discovered that the most devastating truths often hide in the spaces between words, in the things her characters refuse to acknowledge even to themselves.

These women navigate the particular pressures of contemporary life: the expectation to have figured everything out, to present a coherent identity to the world, and to make relationships work through sheer force of will. Instead, Kitamura offers something more honest: characters who embrace uncertainty as a form of authenticity. Kitamura’s first work, her PhD, was her treatise on the aesthetics of vulgarity – vulgar of course originally means common, or ordinary. In all her work since, we can trace an interest in the ordinary, and Kitamura’s genius is to peel away the layers of naturalisation to reveal that the apparently quotidien is, in fact, deeply strange: that investigating the aesthetics of the ordinary reveals that there is no such thing as ordinary at all.

Her female protagonists don’t triumph through traditional narrative arcs of self-discovery or romantic resolution. They find strength in acknowledging what they don’t know, power in refusing to perform the certainty they don’t feel. In a literary landscape still too often dominated by stories that demand women be either victims or heroines, Kitamura creates space for something more complex – women who are neither broken nor fixed, but perpetually, courageously becoming. Butler writes that “we lose ourselves in what we read, only to return to ourselves, transformed and part of a more expansive world.” Kitamura’s work suggests that perhaps the most radical thing a woman can do in contemporary literature is refuse to explain herself, to claim the right to exist in a series of questions rather than answers. In doing so, she has created some of the most psychologically acute portraits of modern womanhood, demonstrating that uncertainty can be a form of artistic and personal expression, even triumph.

Caroline Issa