Intimacies

Intimacies Plot Summary

Introduction

The interpreter sits in a glass booth high above the courtroom, translating words that carry the weight of genocide. Below, a former president adjusts his tie while testimony about mass graves flows through languages like blood through veins. She speaks for victims whose voices shake with remembered terror, for accused men whose crimes defy comprehension. Each word she interprets becomes part of her, accumulating like sediment in her soul. This is The Hague, city of justice and mirrors, where an unnamed Japanese-American interpreter navigates the labyrinth of international law while her personal life unravels in parallel. She has fled New York after her father's death, seeking refuge in work that demands perfect neutrality. But neutrality proves impossible when confronting evil, and when love arrives in the form of Adriaan—a married Dutch man whose wife has abandoned him for Portugal. As war criminals smile from their cells and victims weep in soundproof chambers, she must decide whether truth can survive translation, whether love can endure deception, and whether justice exists anywhere but in the spaces between languages.

Chapter 1: The Arrival: A New City, A Fragile Beginning

The tram jolts through The Hague's manicured streets, carrying her toward the International Criminal Court like a glass capsule through someone else's dream. She presses her face to the window, watching the city's careful perfection unfold—preserved buildings, trimmed hedges, a civilization that has learned to contain its violence behind polished facades. Six months since leaving New York. Six months since her father's funeral released her from obligation. The apartment she rents sits too large around her, furnished for temporary lives, temporary hopes. Each morning she rides these same trams, walks these same corridors, speaks these same careful words into microphones that carry justice across language barriers. At the Court, she meets Amina, the Senegalese interpreter whose composure never cracks, whose voice remains steady even when translating testimonies that would shatter most minds. Amina tells her about interpreting for an accused militia leader, how his magnetism worked even through glass barriers, how evil has its own terrible charisma. "The first time you listen to an interpreter," Amina explains, "their voice sounds cold and precise. But the longer you listen, the more variation you hear." She pauses, one hand resting on her pregnant belly. "You interpret not just words, but the intention behind them. The humor, the irony, the malice." The work demands perfect accuracy, linguistic tightrope walking above chasms of meaning. A single mistranslation can transform a reliable witness into a liar, can alter the course of justice itself. The Court operates on suspended disbelief—everyone knows the testimony is coached, the drama calculated, yet the suffering beneath remains authentic, untouchable. She learns to navigate the Court's vocabulary, its arcane precision. War crimes and crimes against humanity flow through her voice like prayers in reverse. Each session deposits another layer of others' pain, others' guilt. She tells herself she's merely an instrument, a consciousness-free zone where words transfer cleanly from one language to another. But instruments don't lie awake at night remembering the former president's smile, don't feel their neutrality eroding like coastline under relentless waves.

Chapter 2: Intimate Translations: The Court and Adriaan's Complex Truth

At the Kunstmuseum opening, champagne glasses catch gallery light like promises. She stands among strangers speaking Dutch too quickly to follow, feeling the familiar displacement of linguistic exile. Then Adriaan appears beside her—tall, handsome, wearing his confidence like perfectly tailored clothes—offering her another drink and an escape from the crowd's indifference. He guides her through Mondrian's geometric certainties, speaking about art with the casual authority of someone born to cultural fluency. "The openings are strange," he admits. "People talking to each other and ignoring the art altogether." His self-awareness charms her, this acknowledgment of their own hypocrisy. When they part, he returns for her number with a directness that makes her pulse quicken. His text arrives that evening—simple, unambiguous—and her equally simple response surprises her: "Yes." The affair unfolds with dangerous ease. Adriaan's apartment occupies the upper floors of his childhood home, rooms filled with books and careful arrangements, the detritus of a life lived with intention. Only gradually does she notice the traces: Gaby's coat still hanging in the foyer, gold bracelets scattered in the vide poche, the family photograph on the bookshelf where his wife's beauty blazes like a challenge. At a dinner party, she learns the truth from Kees, a defense lawyer whose oiled hair and wolfish grin disguise sharper teeth. Gaby left for Lisbon six months ago—just vanished one weekend, sent Adriaan an email, never returned. The children, teenagers now, followed their mother to Portugal, leaving Adriaan alone in rooms too large for solitude. "Even from the inside," Kees tells her with malicious satisfaction, "what do you really know of your own marriage? One day you realize you're living with a stranger." That first night in Adriaan's bed, she notices how the absence shapes the space around them. His touch carries both hunger and hesitation, the careful attention of a man learning to trust skin again. They make love surrounded by the ghost-life Gaby left behind, her invisible presence sanctifying and condemning them simultaneously. "You're married," she says afterward, and his answer comes without deflection: "Yes. But I don't know for how much longer. Is that okay?" The question hangs between them like a bridge half-built, requiring faith to cross.

Chapter 3: Borrowed Time: Living in the Shadows of Another's Life

Winter deepens around The Hague like a judgment. In the Court's glass chambers, she interprets testimony from victims whose voices carry across oceans of trauma. A young woman describes watching her father and brothers murdered, how she tried to stop bullets with her small body, how their blood mingled on the floor while killers ate her family's lunch. "I said," she translates, her own voice trembling where the witness's remains steady, "There was the sound of shouting coming louder and louder and then the men started banging on the door." Each "I" she speaks belongs to someone else, a theft of identity that leaves her more hollow with every session. The former president watches from his chair, adjusting his tie with mechanical precision. His gaze finds her booth during testimony, a nod of acknowledgment that feels like contamination. She realizes with horror that of all the people in the courtroom, he might be the one she knows best—his boredom during technical discussions, his contempt for his own lawyers, his strange charisma that bends attention like gravity. Evenings with Adriaan provide temporary sanctuary. He cooks elaborate meals in his pristine kitchen, operates the espresso machine Gaby selected, speaks with careful tenderness about his children in Lisbon. Their relationship develops its own rituals, its own geography of avoidance around the subjects that matter most. She moves clothes into his wardrobes, learns the housekeeper's schedule, begins to think of the apartment as partially hers. But Gaby's belongings disappear piece by piece, creating negative space that somehow makes her presence more vivid. The family photograph remains, immovable as a shrine. At dinner with Jana, her friend from the Mauritshuis, police sirens wail outside the window. Jana has just bought an apartment in a gentrifying neighborhood, making herself vulnerable to the city's hidden violence. "There was a shooting last year," Jana mentions casually, but her nervousness betrays deeper fears about the randomness of harm. They discuss a recent mugging—Anton de Rijk, a book dealer beaten nearly to death. "It could have been one of us," Jana says, and the statement hangs like prophecy over their careful domesticity.

Chapter 4: Confronting Power: The President and the Words Unspoken

The call comes at midnight. A jihadist has been extradited, will arrive at the Detention Center within hours. Bettina, the head interpreter, needs her there to translate his first moments in custody. "This is strictly confidential," she emphasizes, hands trembling with the weight of the secret. The Detention Center squats in darkness like a medieval fortress. Inside, fluorescent corridors lead to a cell that resembles a corporate hotel room if corporate hotels had bars on their windows. Court officials cluster nervously, discussing the accused with the bureaucratic distance that transforms human monsters into administrative challenges. When he arrives, the accused appears smaller than expected, older, worn down by transport and circumstance. He speaks Arabic, refuses her French, creating an immediate crisis of communication. The officials exchange panicked glances as their carefully orchestrated procedure collapses into linguistic chaos. "Do you understand?" she asks in French, desperate to salvage the situation. "Yes," he replies at last, then lies down and falls asleep with shocking suddenness, leaving them all staring at his unconscious form like anthropologists studying an alien specimen. Weeks later, she's assigned to the former president's case. Kees appears as defense counsel, his buffoonish party demeanor transformed into courtroom gravitas. She watches in fascination as he commands respect from colleagues and opponents alike, his shallow personality somehow irrelevant to his professional competence. In the interpreters' booth, she begins her long education in the banality of evil. The former president nods to her each morning, a gesture of recognition that makes her skin crawl. His supporters cheer from the gallery while she translates accusations of ethnic cleansing, mass murder, systematic rape. During witness testimony, her role becomes surreal. She speaks as victims, using their "I" to describe unimaginable trauma, then speaks as prosecutors detailing the mechanics of genocide. The former president listens with the detached interest of a scholar, occasionally taking notes as if the subject were academic rather than the destruction of human lives. "The interpreters couldn't entirely eschew these dramatics," she realizes. "It was our job not only to interpret the words but also to express the demeanor, the nuance and intention behind their words."

Chapter 5: Silence and Distance: When Communication Fails

Adriaan announces his departure with the casual precision of a weather report. "I'm going to Lisbon to see Gaby and the children. I'm going to ask her for a divorce." His words should bring relief, but his misery complicates everything. She sees the months of hope and hesitation that led to this moment, the internal debate he kept hidden from her. He leaves keys on the kitchen counter with a note: "I will imagine you here while I'm away." One week becomes two, becomes a month. His messages arrive sporadically—brief observations about Lisbon's weather, vague reassurances that accomplish nothing. She realizes she's been stored like furniture, waiting for a man who may never return. Kees appears at the Detention Center for defense meetings, his recognition of her carefully concealed behind professional courtesy. After one session, he corners her in the corridor. "Adriaan is unlikely to succeed," he says with oily satisfaction. "Gaby is very wrapped up in this new man of hers." His casual cruelty confirms her worst fears about Adriaan's silence. At the Court, she's promoted to Chamber I, replacing Amina during maternity leave. The former president requests her specifically for private consultations, sessions that unfold in conference rooms under the mechanical eye of security cameras. His legal team discusses strategy with the detached precision of surgeons while their client grows increasingly bored with his own defense. "His French is terrible, much worse than he thinks," the former president confides about Kees, establishing an intimacy she neither wants nor can refuse. She realizes she's become his confidante not through choice but through proximity, the only person in the room who shares his linguistic isolation. The trial's technical complexity creates a strange dissociation. Hours pass while she translates discussions of evidence chains and jurisdictional challenges, the actual crimes becoming abstract through repetition. "You literally do not know what you are saying," she recognizes. "Language loses its meaning." But fragments penetrate: cross-border raids, mass graves, armed youth. The words accumulate like poison, each session depositing another layer of complicity. She's not just interpreting anymore—she's becoming part of the machinery that transforms human suffering into legal procedure.

Chapter 6: Unexpected Encounters: Facing the Past and Present

Jana's exhibition opening at the Mauritshuis celebrates still-life paintings with elaborate food displays, art becoming reality becoming art again. Among the cultured crowd, she meets Eline, an art historian whose brother Anton was the book dealer beaten in Jana's neighborhood. Their friendship forms quickly, built on shared displacement and the recognition of kindred spirits navigating Dutch society from the margins. At Eline's dinner party, she finally encounters Anton de Rijk. His injuries remain vivid—scarred forehead, dragging limp, the ornate cane that makes his disability seem chosen rather than imposed. But his personality fills the room with magnetic energy, stories spilling out in elaborate spirals that hold his audience captive. He tells of visiting friends who filled their library with expensive books purchased solely for their leather bindings, books sold by Anton's own shop to an interior designer who valued appearance over content. The irony delights him—selling worthless volumes at premium prices to people who transform knowledge into decoration. But something darker lurks beneath his performance. Eline asks repeatedly about the assault, probing his claimed amnesia about why he visited her neighborhood. "I can't remember a damn thing," he insists, yet his evasions suggest deliberate concealment rather than trauma-induced gaps. "Simply a selective amnesia," he claims. "The brain's response to the awful trauma of the whole thing." But Eline's skepticism mirrors her own—his story contains too many convenient holes, too many details that shift under examination. Later, she encounters Anton at a restaurant near the Court, accompanied by a blonde woman whose obvious sexuality contrasts sharply with her plain features. Their desperate intimacy suggests an affair, not a business meeting. Anton's hands roam constantly over his companion, his excitement palpable despite his physical limitations. When she overhears fragments of their conversation—references to locations near Jana's apartment—the puzzle pieces align with horrible clarity. Anton wasn't randomly attacked. He was visiting this woman, conducting an affair that required secrecy, lies, and ultimately silence when violence intervened. The realization brings no satisfaction, only the cold understanding that even victims carry their own deceptions, their own carefully guarded territories that remain protected even from the people who love them most.

Chapter 7: The Decision: Between Staying and Leaving

At their final meeting, the former president abandons all pretense of civility. The trial is collapsing, his lawyers confident of dismissal, his contempt for the entire process finally unveiled. He leans close to her in the conference room, his voice dropping to a whisper that somehow carries more menace than shouting. "You think I am a bad person," he begins, then builds his argument with the calculated precision of a born politician. He speaks of American war crimes, of her own country's terrible history, of the hypocritical selectivity of international justice. Each word lands like a physical blow, not because it's untrue, but because truth in his mouth becomes weapon. "There is nothing that separates you from me," he concludes, and she knows with sickening certainty that he's right. Not about guilt or innocence, but about the fundamental human capacity for complicity, for finding ways to justify the unjustifiable. She runs from the Detention Center, fleeing through corridors and security checkpoints until she reaches the dunes beside the Court. The North Sea stretches endlessly before her, and she realizes this landscape carries childhood memories she'd forgotten—a family trip when she was very young, her father chasing her across the sand while her mother watched from the warmth of a seaside café. The phone call to her mother in Singapore confirms what she's already decided. This city holds pieces of her past, but not her future. The Court's offer of permanent employment feels like a trap rather than an opportunity, a guarantee of more years translating other people's trauma until she loses herself entirely in their voices. Bettina accepts her refusal with professional disappointment. "Some people do not have the right temperament for the job," she observes, "and perhaps you are one of them." The assessment stings because it's accurate, but she no longer believes temperament—the ability to remain untouched by others' suffering—is a virtue worth cultivating. When Adriaan finally returns from Lisbon, they meet at their old café like former lovers attempting friendship. He explains the custody arrangement, Gaby's decision to remain in Portugal, the children's choice to stay with him in The Hague. His relief is palpable but tinged with exhaustion, a man who's survived a war but hasn't yet counted the casualties. "I hope you will meet them soon," he says of his children, and she understands this as both invitation and test. The conversation circles around possibilities they're both afraid to name directly, love that's survived separation but might not survive proximity.

Summary

The former president's case collapses under the weight of its own ambitions, dismissed on technical grounds that satisfy no one and vindicate nothing. Justice, she learns, is not the absence of injustice but the careful management of competing narratives, each translated imperfectly across the spaces between languages, cultures, and understanding. Standing on the dunes where her family once walked, she makes her choice. The sea wind carries salt and possibility, childhood memories mixing with adult recognition that home is not a place but a decision, renewed daily through small acts of faith. Adriaan's return offers the chance to build something real from the fragments of their interrupted beginning, to create intimacy that survives transparency rather than depending on concealment. The interpreter's booth taught her that perfect translation is impossible—something always gets lost in the transfer between one consciousness and another. But perhaps imperfection is the point, the gaps and silences where genuine human connection becomes possible. She reaches for Adriaan's hand across the café table, choosing uncertainty over safety, choosing to trust in the spaces between words where love might yet take root and flourish. The city spreads around them like a question waiting for their answer, and for the first time in months, she feels ready to provide one.

About Author

Loading

Katie Kitamura

Kitamura reflects on the intricacies of identity and perception, weaving psychological tension with linguistic precision in her work. Her novels, like "Intimacies", delve into the themes of ambiguity and belonging, reflecting on the performative nature of self. This approach invites readers to ponder the complexities of authenticity and the unreliability of perception, especially within the context of American immigrant experiences. Kitamura’s prose, characterized by its emotional restraint and atmospheric depth, draws comparisons to writers like Elena Ferrante, enhancing the psychological depth of her narratives.\n\nBeyond her thematic exploration, Kitamura's method involves dissecting the nuances of language and communication, a reflection of her background as a journalist and art critic. Her early book, "The Longshot", marks the beginning of a fiction career that continuously pushes the boundaries of narrative form. Her commitment to exploring the intersections of language, identity, and performance is evident in her dual role as a novelist and a professor, where she mentors emerging writers. This synthesis of teaching and writing enriches her bio and establishes her as a leading voice in contemporary fiction.\n\nReaders engaging with Kitamura’s work benefit from her incisive exploration of human psychology and cultural identity, making her novels not only engaging stories but also profound reflections on personal and social complexities. Her accolades, including the Rome Prize in Literature and numerous fellowships, underscore her impact in the literary world, while her works’ adaptations for film and television demonstrate their broad appeal and narrative power.

Read more