Intimacies by Katie Kitamura
Each Tuesday (one of the few days I don’t work from home in our post-pandemic world), I leave my office on 51st and Park Ave in Manhattan and step into the bustle of Midtown - pedestrians, hot dog-scented smoke from street carts, and the omnipresent hazard of being struck by a bike messenger. To my left is the Helmsley building, to my right the expanse that leads upwards, past Midtown East to the Upper East Side - Central Park, the Met, and outrageously expensive boutique shops teeming with charms. All of it hums between towering steel and glass office buildings that project the power of the people who occupy them.
Intimacies by Katie Kitamura explores how institutions, and the buildings that house them, are a kind of theater. The narrator is recently arrived in the Hague in the Netherlands. She works as an interpreter at the International Criminal Court (the ICC), an international tribunal that tries war crimes. She has fallen into a romantic entanglement with a married man named Adriaan, whose wife recently left him and took their children with her. Adriaan is dashing, from old money, and possibly too good to be true.
In the book, the narrator works in the immense glass building of the ICC and the draconian detention center next door where the accused are held, each of which emits an aura of power and generates a veneer of legitimacy. Yet much like the office buildings of Wall Street, not all citizens of the world agree that the ICC deserves the legitimacy that its grandiose offices project.
Just how pure is the ICC? The narrator notes that most of the accused war criminals are from African countries. Don’t hold your breath waiting to see leaders of the US or China sitting in the court any time soon, no matter how many people they have imprisoned without due process. The court is just for the weak.
Even with the best of intentions, any criminal justice system can lend the stamp of legitimacy to incredibly unjust outcomes – as when an innocent person is convicted for a crime they did not commit. Most lawyers will tell you that sometimes, engaging in these procedures—the performance of justice—generates a feeling of unease.
As a translator in the courtroom, the narrator helps in this performance. “In the Court, what was at stake was nothing less than the suffering of thousands of people, and in suffering there could be no question of pretense. And yet the Court was by nature a place of high theatrics.”
A nagging unease with the moral purity of the mission is, I imagine, part of working for almost any institution in our time, from universities to corporations to media to the military. These organizations are often established before the current operators arrived, imbued with immense power, and capable of being bent to the whims – positive or negative – of those who seize control. See, for example, modern political parties.
Kitamura shows that these institutions are still very human, they still beat to the basic lifeblood of social interaction – the awkwardness, the insecurities, the capacity for understanding, connection and betrayal – the intimacies – that still occupy much of the emotional space of the individuals involved, no matter how grandiose the public mission.
Shortly after I read this book, I walked out of my office at 345 Park Avenue and looked towards the homeless shelter across the street. Sometimes on the sidewalk there are unwashed people in tattered clothes, calling out for help, and the people in suits (myself sometimes among them) generally step around them, not afraid or disgusted, simply numb to their suffering. We cannot bear the dangerous intimacy of helping them, claim that we cannot spare the time. Which is not to say that we are entirely indifferent. When convenient to us, we will turn to more controlled and sanitized means to help – donate through a website, volunteer at a convenient hour. In this way, we use institutions to keep us safe, and free of unwanted intimacies – a questionable reality of modern life. Of the Hague, the narrator notes that “The city’s veneer of civility was constantly giving way, in places it was barely there at all,” capturing the kind of careless grotesqueness that wealth enables, not just in the Hague, but in all cities.
Of all the connections explored in this book – between the narrator and her lovers, friends, acquaintances, and those she works with and translates for, the deepest intimacy may be the one Kitamura generates between the narrator and the reader.
This book is richly layered and full of interesting ideas; definitely worth a read.