“I don’t really know what ‘authentic’ means,” Kitamura said in a recent interview about her new novel, Audition. “When you take away all of the role-playing, all of the performance, what is left? I don’t know if that’s your authentic self, or if it’s a profoundly raw, destabilized, possibly non-functioning self.” Audition, which Kitamura describes as the final entry in a loose trilogy, lingers over this curiosity about the instability of the “self,” and her bafflement at how authenticity could have anything to do with something so clearly assembled and performed.