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3.06 AVERAGE
3.06 AVERAGE
dark
emotional
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
This manages to run on pure feelings but also have an enthralling plot, and I'm now a Kitamura stan for life. Between this and Intimacies I'm now fully entranced by her writing and will read her work until I die.
challenging
dark
emotional
mysterious
sad
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
adventurous
dark
reflective
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
I don’t know what it is about Katie Kitamura’s books but they are compelling. Nothing happens in this one either (just like Intimacies) but dang if I couldn’t stop reading. She is so good at writing about intimate relationships and the strangeness of them. In this one there is a separated couple on the verge of divorce (he’s a serial womanizer and she’s already seeing someone else) and then there’s the mother-in-law relationship which I found way more interesting. Kitamura has such a keen insight into bad relationships. She must’ve had a few.
Anyway, if you like plotless books about deeply flawed relationships and good writing, read it. It’s also short so it doesn’t feel dragged out.
Anyway, if you like plotless books about deeply flawed relationships and good writing, read it. It’s also short so it doesn’t feel dragged out.
dark
emotional
reflective
sad
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
This is a novel of remarkable subtlety—elegant, composed, and quietly devastating. We begin to see ourselves refracted in her world’s surface, as we go further on.
At first glance, the story unfolds simply: a woman travels to southern Greece to locate her estranged husband, who has gone missing. But Kitamura’s genius is in how little plot she needs to create enormous psychological momentum. The search for a missing man becomes a slow, deliberate excavation of absence itself—of disconnection, of emotional opacity, of the slipperiness of truth in relationships.
What’s astonishing is how Kitamura’s narrator, seemingly cool and composed, quietly exerts such hypnotic control over our attention. We inhabit her interiority fully, but even there, clarity is elusive. This is a narrator who observes rather than acts, who interprets rather than reveals.The spaces between people become the true drama.
Katie Kitamura is a master of nuance, and A Separation is a quiet triumph.
After reading and enjoying Intimacies (2020) a few months ago, I was inspired to get further into Katie Kitamura's backlist. I was somewhat disappointed with A Separation (2017), which has a highly similar meta-plot and protagonist to Intimacies, but with less success.
There is a repetitive quality to the book, as the protagonist waits for her husband in a purgatory-like atmosphere of an empty luxury hotel in a remote location. As with Intimacies, the protagonist is nameless, a translator, with little to no background information; she is placed in a new environment and interacts with a limited number of characters; she has a fraught relationship with a man or men; she tries (with and without success) to figure out other characters' motivations through observation and deduction.
More information about the protagonist, the husband for whom she's waiting and from whom she's separated, and his family are slowly revealed over the course of the book. This is not unusual for a novel, however, the delayed reveals felt clumsy to me. The protagonist also has extended thoughts about other characters and makes deductions/assumptions that may or may not be true. The ones that are true are initially unbelievable, but through the delayed delivery of information, the reader has more context to understand why the protagonist made the leap she did. While this method of delivery is successful in revealing information that illuminates the dynamics at play between characters, there is no clear motivation or reason for the delay other than as a plot device, especially since the narrator is looking retrospectively on the events of the novel.
The story came to a whispering end, and for all the speculation over primary conflict of the book's second half, it ultimately felt underexplored.
Overall, I found some fault with the pacing, the delivery of information, and the lack of urgency (I won't share any spoilers). I still enjoyed the style of Kitamura's writing. I find her writing to be vivid and visual; for as much as the book is introspective, I could clearly imagine the protagonist's surroundings and actions.
I'm encouraged to see that Kitamura seems to have hit her stride in the evolution from A Separation to Intimacies, and I'm looking forward to reading Audition (2025).
There is a repetitive quality to the book, as the protagonist waits for her husband in a purgatory-like atmosphere of an empty luxury hotel in a remote location. As with Intimacies, the protagonist is nameless, a translator, with little to no background information; she is placed in a new environment and interacts with a limited number of characters; she has a fraught relationship with a man or men; she tries (with and without success) to figure out other characters' motivations through observation and deduction.
More information about the protagonist, the husband for whom she's waiting and from whom she's separated, and his family are slowly revealed over the course of the book. This is not unusual for a novel, however, the delayed reveals felt clumsy to me. The protagonist also has extended thoughts about other characters and makes deductions/assumptions that may or may not be true. The ones that are true are initially unbelievable, but through the delayed delivery of information, the reader has more context to understand why the protagonist made the leap she did. While this method of delivery is successful in revealing information that illuminates the dynamics at play between characters, there is no clear motivation or reason for the delay other than as a plot device, especially since the narrator is looking retrospectively on the events of the novel.
The story came to a whispering end, and for all the speculation over primary conflict of the book's second half, it ultimately felt underexplored.
Overall, I found some fault with the pacing, the delivery of information, and the lack of urgency (I won't share any spoilers). I still enjoyed the style of Kitamura's writing. I find her writing to be vivid and visual; for as much as the book is introspective, I could clearly imagine the protagonist's surroundings and actions.
I'm encouraged to see that Kitamura seems to have hit her stride in the evolution from A Separation to Intimacies, and I'm looking forward to reading Audition (2025).
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
This one just went nowhere for me. I didn’t care about the characters, nothing much was happening and for 200 pg it was rather slow with detail carrying on for pages (like observing others in a conversation or what the protagonist and another character ordered for dinner) that seemed it might have been intended for a purpose, but which I can’t say.
This book was incredibly boring. The narrator was self indulgent, annoying, and droned on and on. The plot was barely a plot. Awful.
mysterious
reflective
fast-paced
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Katie Kitamura!!