Entry 05: Bureaucracies
Intimacies a novel by Katie Kitamura (2021)
The narrator, the “I” of the story, whose name we do not know, is a young Japanese woman of indeterminate age who has left New York following her father’s death and her mother’s subsequent departure for Singapore. After an itinerant childhood, the narrator is rootless, the consummate outsider. She has lived with “slow moving grief” for so long that it has “blunted her feeling.” We meet her at an auspicious juncture, as something is opening up inside her, a “moment when I was more than usually susceptible to the promise of intimacy.” She is lonely.
The narrator has moved to The Hague for a job as a Court Interpreter. She is six months into a one-year contract; four months into a relationship with a man named Adriaan, who is separated from his wife but still married; and she has befriended an art curator, Jana, a woman in her early forties. Her relationship with Adriaan remains ambiguous. Jana provides pithy observations, such as: Being a property owner changes your perception of things, she remarks; this is how people become conservative. “There’s a difference between living in theory and living in practice.”
The narrator, proficient with multiple languages, is employed as a translator. The Court of the Hague tries political figures accused of orchestrating atrocities. Yet critics decry the focus on African nations, castigating the Court as a tool of Western imperialism. At first the narrator attempts to carry out her responsibilities with precision and restraint. Equanimity is viewed as professionalism. Tellingly, it’s when her equanimity falters that she finds her services requested by the former president and his team, for they detect a tremor in her voice… a tremor of emotion. Is equanimity, after all, a worthy goal?
The novel is concerned with bridging all sorts of gaps: interpersonal ones, but also the process of moving from the comfortable illusions of childhood to the complexities and ambiguities of the adult world — a world where people can’t be bothered to throw their cigarette stubs into convenient receptacles; where CCTV cameras contribute to a surveillance state, yet allow one to feel safer. A world where journalists arrive for opening remarks, return at the end, and despite missing a year or more of testimony, construct stories to bridge that gap, cohesive stories they present to the rest of the world. These are presented with conviction rather than complexity — style over substance, in other words. Systems are imperfect — moral justice doesn’t correspond to legal justice, and those who work in systems risk becoming complicit.
Conclusion: This elegant, restrained novel follows a reticent yet oddly vulnerable young woman as she begins to learn about herself and the world around her. “I could understand anything, under the right circumstances and for the right reason. This is both a strength and a weakness.” “For the right reason” nods, of course, to morality, which the narrator values. The narrator’s inner code helps her navigate a complex world. In our age of Pizzagate, anti-vaxxers and climate change deniers, hers is a refreshingly unique perspective. In ordinary times, she might not qualify as heroic… Against the backdrop of Q Anon conspiracists, she just might be the kind of hero we need right now.
2. People in Glass Houses by Shirley Hazzard (1964)
A collection of loosely linked stories also set at the Hague. Contrasting this to Kitamura’s Intimacies reveals similarities in content but variations in tone. Hazzard’s work is wryly satirical, whereas Kitamura’s novel is spare, elegant, and slowly builds tension.
Hazzard was employed at the U.N. in the Hague as a young woman. Her stories offer a keenly observed view of what she calls “The Organization.” In this quietly acerbic novel, Hazzard punctures the presumptions of this world with sly wit. Against a backdrop of bureaucrats preoccupied with rank, promotions, and salary increases, she’s interested in the outliers. Hazzard is adept at the small, telling detail. When the rumor mill hints that her boss is about to be “retired early,” Lidia “would have liked to make him some show of solidarity but could only offer him a peppermint, which he refused.” And this gem: “Words like joy and sorrow are rarely expressed in the auditorium — especially not on Staff Day, which is when the Organization “was at its most impersonal.”
The Organization favors moderation in all things, and cultivating a vivid personality is frowned upon. Algie, a rare free thinker, concludes that, “for someone like me, the real risk is to stay.”
While colleagues summarize their worth in terms of metrics, data, and measurable outcomes, a man named Flinders “had himself been sent to a village where they needed help, and he had done what he could, but he found himself unable to speak with confidence about this work.”
Hazzard and Kitamura agree that working in such an environment is not for the sensitive. I recall similar gaps between reality and intent while employed in the nonprofit sector. Is there any sector these days where corporate and technological jargon haven’t infiltrated? It’s a truism that people will always vie for their own advancement — even those presumably dedicated to serving others.