Separation (Kitamura) - Book Reviews

Book Reviews
In the hierarchical world of Kitamura’s novel, there is little love or friendship between equals, only manipulation and control, guilt and obedience, humiliation and submission. And behind these power games, one detects an overriding fatalism about the possibility of human connection, a sense that "wife and husband and marriage are only words that conceal much more unstable realities, more turbulent than perhaps can be contained in a handful of syllables, or any amount of writing." It is this radical disbelief — a disbelief, it appears, even in the power of art—that makes Kitamura’s accomplished novel such a coolly unsettling work.
Fernanda Eberstadt - New York Times Book Review

[An] intimate, psychological mystery (Books We Can't Wait to Read in 2017).
Paul S. Makishima - Boston Globe


Kitamura…leaves plot issues unresolved. Instead, she focuses on capturing a disarray of contradictory emotions, delineating the line between white lies and betrayal.… Despite the mysterious premise, readers may find that the narrator’s frequent contemplation frustratingly stalls the novel.
Publishers Weekly


(Starred review.) [A] tautly austere, intensely internal narrative, both adroitly lyrical and jarring. For readers seeking profound examinations of challenging relationships…Kitamura's oeuvre will be a compelling discovery. —Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon, Washington, DC
Library Journal


At once cool and burning, Kitamura’s immersive, probing psychological tale benefits from its narrator’s precise observations and nimble use of language.
Booklist


(Starred review.) Dread and lassitude twist into a spare and stunning portrait of a marital estrangement.… [T]he narrator suggests that "perhaps wife and husband and marriage itself are only words that conceal much more unstable realities, more turbulent than can be contained in a handful of syllables."
Kirkus Reviews