Reading Without Needing Resolution

I picked up Audition by Katie Kitamura after it was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, partly out of curiosity and partly because of the way people kept describing it. Odd. Unsettling. Unresolved. I had heard those words often enough to know they weren’t meant as praise in the conventional sense—and I was aware, too, that many readers resist books like this, books that lean heavily into ambiguity, and refuse to clarify themselves. Still, before reading, I didn’t yet understand what Audition would withhold, or how that withholding would work on me. I didn’t know where the strangeness would live, or what kind of unease it would ask me to sit with. I only knew the book carried a reputation for not explaining itself—and that I was curious, if cautious, about what that might mean in practice.

All of that is to say, I love unconventional narrative and destabilizing plot structures, and my curiosity is often pleasantly piqued whenever someone describes a book as “odd” or sticks their tongue out at the unusualness of a book that makes the reader work hard. So, I purchased my copy, and dove in with excitement, but without expectation.

It was clear the unease wasn’t a puzzle to be solved so much as a condition of being inside the book.

It didn’t take long to realize that the ambiguity I’d been warned about wasn’t structural confusion, but something more deliberate—and deeply intimate. While I had a lot of questions, it was clear the unease wasn’t a puzzle to be solved so much as a condition of being inside the book. The specifics of relationships remained intentionally undefined. Motivations and desires hovered just out of reach. Scenes unfolded without offering the usual cues about how to interpret them, or in what or whom to place my trust. I found myself reading with an alertness, waiting for the moment when things would orient themselves—when the novel would clarify what kind of story it was asking me to read.

Gasp! That moment never came. Instead, the longer I stayed with it, the more aware I became of my own impatience, of how quickly I wanted the book to tell me what to think. Because isn’t that what books are supposed to do? No, not necessarily. It’s just that most books do, and when they don’t, it makes readers uncomfortable.

From the first few pages, Kitamura situates the reader inside a body that already knows something is wrong, even when the mind has not yet caught up. Early in the opening scene, the unnamed narrator stands outside a restaurant, staring through the glass at the man she is about to meet, and admits, “Something uncoiled in my stomach, slow and languorous, and I decided it would be better if I left now, and did not go in to him.”

Nothing about the situation has been clearly framed. We don’t know who this man is to her. We don’t know what kind of relationship we are meant to recognize. What we are given instead is a physical reaction—a private, instinctive recoil—offered without interpretation. When most writers would be pressed to do so, Kitamura refuses to translate sensation into explanation. She forces readers to sit with it, and wonder.

That instinct—to wait for orientation, for reassurance, for narrative ground beneath our feet—is one many of us bring to reading.

That instinct—to wait for orientation, for reassurance, for narrative ground beneath our feet—is one many of us bring to reading. We’re trained, subtly and not so subtly, to expect stories to reward our attention with clarity and confirmation. We look for payoff, revelation, closure. We learn to equate explanation with depth, resolution with meaning. We want to know where we stand. We want the story to guide us there. Even in literary fiction, ambiguity is often treated as something to tolerate only temporarily, something that must eventually be resolved. A failure to do so often means a writer didn’t complete his or her job.

But Audition keeps undoing that desire for stable footing. As I read on, conversation in the novel became unsteady, slightly misaligned, slipping out of the familiar rhythms that usually structure everyday interaction. In one exchange, as two characters speak over one another, the narrator observes “the shore of ordinary conversation rapidly receding.” It’s a small line, but it quietly signals what the novel is doing on a larger scale. We are being moved away—almost imperceptibly—from the familiar structures that usually help us recognize what kind of scene we are in, what kind of relationship we are watching, and how we are meant to read its emotional stakes.

Instead of asking what I was missing, I started paying attention to what the book was asking me to hold on to. The discomfort didn’t disappear—but it changed shape.

Somewhere in the middle of Audition, I noticed a shift in myself. Instead of pushing for certainty, I was lingering over the wonder. Instead of asking what I was missing, I started paying attention to what the book was asking me to hold on to. The discomfort didn’t disappear—but it changed shape. It became clear that the novel wasn’t withholding accidentally. It was withholding deliberately. More than that, it was trusting me to stay and accept.

This is one of the book’s quietest and most destabilizing moves. Audition refuses to orient the reader emotionally in the ways we’ve come to expect. It offers proximity without access, intimacy without confirmation. The narration remains controlled, but beneath that restraint is a constant sense of misrecognition—of people projecting, interpreting, misreading one another, or lying altogether. The tension doesn’t come from what is revealed, but from what is never named or expressed. Explanation would collapse the very space the novel is creating.

That space is reinforced again and again in small moments when the narrator could choose differently, but doesn’t quite experience that freedom as real. “I was under no obligation to obey,” she thinks, when invited to follow the host into the restaurant. She could leave. She could turn away. And yet, even though she recognizes her willpower, she denies it. The sentence names agency only to immediately expose how fragile it feels. The novel keeps reminding us that clarity about what we are doing is not the same thing as clarity about why.

What surprised me most was how relieving this became once I stopped resisting it. There was a freedom in no longer needing the story to resolve itself into certainty. I didn’t have to solve anything. I didn’t have to arrive at the correct interpretations or conclusions. I could stay with the unease, the partial knowledge, the unanswered questions—and trust that this, too, was a complete reading experience.

I’m less impatient with ambiguity. Less insistent on being guided. I’m more willing to let a book remain strange to me, even after I’ve finished it.

Since then, I’ve noticed how much this shift has changed the way I read. (Yes, one book can have a huge impact on those that follow!) I’m less impatient with ambiguity. Less insistent on being guided. I’m more willing to let a book remain strange to me, even after I’ve finished it. I don’t feel the same urgency to decode or explain. Instead, I pay more attention to tone, pressure, and to what a story is doing beneath the surface rather than what it declares.

This has carried over into my writing life as well. I’m more comfortable leaving emotional space unfilled. More willing to let scenes end without being tied off. I’ve noticed how often my impulse to clarify comes not from the needs of the story, but from my own anxiety about being misunderstood. (I’m working on this in all aspects of my life, really.) Reading a novel like Audition reminded me that trust cuts both ways—that writers can (and must!) trust readers, and readers can trust themselves.

Surprise! I wrote this essay deliberately using some of the same narrative tactics Kitamura uses in Audition. You may have noticed how much I’ve told you about the novel without telling you very much about its plot at all—no clean summary, no reveal of who these people are to one another, no explanation of what ultimately happens. That was an intentional choice. I wanted this piece to offer a parallel reading experience—to keep your attention on tone, hesitation, proximity, and emotional pressure rather than outcome, and to let meaning accumulate slowly instead of arriving all at once. (How’d I do?)

In a small way, I tried to let this essay behave like the book itself: withholding context, circling what feels unsettled, and trusting you to do some of the interpretive work alongside me. It’s my way of honoring the kind of narrative trust Kitamura extends to her readers—and of practicing that same trust with you.