THE MAIN CHARACTERS of Katie Kitamura’s fiction are marginalized figures—middling middlemen—who work as translators or executors of other people’s plans. Their work often takes them far away from home, where much, as the saying goes, can get lost in translation. Her 2017 novel A Separation opens with its narrator on her way to Greece to locate her missing husband, from whom she’s estranged, acting as a go-between for her mother-in-law, who doesn’t know that they’ve separated. The trip results not in retrieval but in the discovery of her husband’s murder—a revelation that presents new complications. A literary translator by trade, the narrator now finds herself caught in further acts of translation: between her in-laws and husband, the living and the dead. In Kitamura’s next book, Intimacies (2021), a woman moves to The Hague to work as an interpreter at the International Criminal Court. Assigned to translate at the trial of a former president, she develops an unlikely union with the accused war criminal. “Of all the people in the city itself,” she comes to realize, he “was the person I knew best.” {read}