KAZUO ISHiGURO

iN A GLOBAL CONTEXT
Kazuo Ishiguro. © Grace A. Crummett. Used with permission.
 Kazuo Ishiguro
in a Global Context

Edited by
CYNTHiA F. WONG
University of Colorado Denver, USA

and

HÜLYA YILDIZ
Middle East Technical University, Turkey
First published 2015 by Ashgate Publishing

Published 2016 by Routledge

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Copyright © Cynthia F. Wong, Hülya Yıldız, and the contributors 2015

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

Kazuo Ishiguro in a global context / edited by Cynthia F. Wong and Hülya Yıldız.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4724-4669-5 (hardcover: alk. paper)
1. Ishiguro, Kazuo, 1954—Criticism and interpretation. I. Wong, Cynthia F., editor. II.
Yıldız, Hülya, editor.
PR6059.S5Z746 2015
823’.914—dc23
2014036142
ISBN: 9781472446695 (hbk)
ISBN: 9781315590974 (ebk)
 Contents

Notes on Contributors   vii

Preface: Global Ishiguro   xi
Rebecca L. Walkowitz
Acknowledgments   xv

Introduction: Ishiguro and His Worlds in Literature   1

Cynthia F. Wong and Hülya Yıldız

Part I Crossing National and Aesthetic Borders

1 Kazuo Ishiguro and ‘Imagining Japan’   11

Romit Dasgupta
2 Reworking Myths: Stereotypes and Genre Conventions in
Kazuo Ishiguro’s Work   23
Stefanie Fricke
3 Memory, Nostalgia and Recognition in Ishiguro’s Work   39
Yugin Teo
4 ‘You Never Know Who You’re Addressing’: A Study of the Inscribed
‘You’ in The Remains of the Day   49
Elif Öztabak-Avcı
5 Ishiguro and Heidegger: The Worlds of Art   59
Fiona Tomkinson

Part II Translations of Culture, Space, and Time

6 The Unconsoled: Piano Virtuoso Lost in Vienna   69

Clare Brandabur
7 Place Identity and Detection in When We Were Orphans   79
Margaret J-M Sönmez
8 What Kathy Knew: Hidden Plot in Never Let Me Go   91
Olga Dzhumaylo
9 ‘How dare you claim these children are anything less than fully
human?’: The Shared Precariousness of Life as a Foundation for
Ethics in Never Let Me Go   101
Liani Lochner
10 Time and the Threefold I in Never Let Me Go   111
Duru Güngör
vi Kazuo Ishiguro in a Global Context

11 Cosmos of Similitude in Nocturnes   121

Chu-chueh Cheng
12 Oppositional Narratives of Nocturnes   133
Cynthia F. Wong

Select Bibliography   145

Index   157
 Notes on Contributors

A. Clare Brandabur teaches in the Doctoral Program in Comparative Literature

in the Department of American Culture and Literature at Fatih University in
Istanbul. Her areas of concentration are archetypal criticism and mythology,
modernism, contemporary Arabic literature, post-colonial criticism, and human
rights issues. She received a BA from Seattle University, an MA in Philosophy
from Xavier University in Cincinnati, Ohio, and a PhD in Comparative Literature
from the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana. Dr. Brandabur has taught
extensively in the Middle East: Birzeit University in Occupied Palestine; Al-
Ba’ath University in Homs, Syria, as a Fulbright Professor; Bilkent University
and METU Universities in Ankara; Bahrain University also as a Fulbright; at
Yarmouk University in Irbid, Jordan; at Doğuş University in Istanbul; and now at
Fatih University in Istanbul. She has published articles on Naguib Mahfouz, Yaşar
Kemal, Nazım Hikmet, William Butler Yeats, James Joyce, Graham Greene, John
Fowles, Michael Ondaatje, George Eliot, Joseph Conrad, Ford Maddox Ford, Jean
Genet, and Kazuo Ishiguro.

Chu-chueh Cheng is Professor of English at National Chung Hsing University

in Taiwan. She was trained as a scholar of Victorian Literature, but in the past ten
years her research interest has gradually evolved beyond the scope of nineteenth-
century England. Now, she studies English-language literature and films of the
twentieth and twenty-first centuries, in particular the works of Japanese-British
novelist Ishiguro. She has published in diverse academic journals articles on
Victorian literature and contemporary literature. Among her recent works are a
monograph, The Margin without Centre: Kazuo Ishiguro, and a journal article
‘Cosmopolitan Alterity: America as the Mutual Alien of Britain and Japan in
Kazuo Ishiguro’s Novels’. She is currently writing a book, Doubly Convex Mirror,
on transgression narratives across genres, media and cultures.

Romit Dasgupta is Assistant Professor of Japanese Studies in the Discipline of

Asian Studies, School of Cultural Studies at the University of Western Australia.
His research interests focus around gender/sexuality, and popular/visual culture
in Japan and Asia, and ‘in-between’ and diasporic identities. He is the co-editor
of Genders, Transgenders and Sexualities in Modern Japan (Routledge 2005),
and the author of Re-reading the Salaryman in Japan: Crafting Masculinities
(Routledge 2012), ‘“The Lost Decade” of the 1990s and Shifting Masculinities
in Japan’ (Culture, Society, and Masculinity 2009), ‘Globalization and the
Bodily Performance of “Cool” and “Uncool” Masculinities in Corporate Japan’
(Intersections 2010), ‘Emotional Spaces and Places of Salaryman Anxiety in Tokyo
Sonata’ (Japanese Studies 2011), and ‘Romancing Urban Modernity in Tokyo,
viii Kazuo Ishiguro in a Global Context

Taipei and Shanghai: The Film About Love and the Shaping of a Discursive East
Asian Popular Culture’ in Negotiating Identity in Asian Film and Television, 2012.

Olga Dzhumaylo is Assistant Professor of English Literature at Southern Federal

University, Russia. Her monograph, The English Confessional Novel 1980–2000
(2011) explores interrelated questions of the confessional turn and a re-evaluation
of postmodern subject and poetics of self-reflexivity in the novels of Kazuo
Ishiguro, Ian McEwan, Graham Swift, Julian Barnes and Martin Amis. Her
published articles and book chapters deal with the discussion of the confessional
performance in British literature, film and literary studies in recent years with
special interest in the ethics of affect. She is currently working on a book, The
Confessional Turn in Contemporary English Fiction, Film and Art.

Stefanie Fricke is Assistant Professor of English Literature at Ludwig-

Maximilians-Universität Munich. She read English, History and Japanese Studies
at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich and the University of St Andrews. In
2009 she published her doctoral thesis Ruinen alter Hochkulturen und die Angst
vor dem eigenen Untergang in der englischen Literatur des 19. Jahrhunderts
(Antique Ruins and the Fear of the Fall of the British Empire in Nineteenth-Century
Literature). Her research focus is the literature and culture of the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries as well as modern popular culture. In addition to articles
on Romantic and Victorian literature she has also published essays on Kazuo
Ishiguro, David Lodge, Rose Tremain, US-Warblogs and Suzanne Collins’s The
Hunger Games-trilogy.

Duru Güngör has a PhD in Comparative Literature from Western University,

Canada and is professor of Writing, English and Communications at Fanshawe
College in London, Ontario, Canada. Her research includes an aesthetic theory of
secular literary parables of the works of Melville, Pynchon, O’Connor, Calvino,
and Borges. She specializes in literary theory, contemporary American literature,
and fin-de-siècle decadence and literature and visual arts. Her current research
traces the historical and aesthetic connections between the Western esoteric and
literary traditions.

Liani Lochner is Assistant Professor of Anglophone Postcolonial Literature

at Université Laval, Canada. Educated in South Africa and England, her
research interests are in the field of world literature, especially literary and
theoretical refutations of the interlocking networks of position and power that
mark contemporary life. She is working on a book on the political promise of
literature to disrupt the processes by which totalizing discourses on biotechnology,
fundamentalism, state racism, and neoliberal globalization position and interpellate
the subject. She has published on the works of Salman Rushdie and Aravind
Adiga, and her essay on Never Let Me Go and scientific discourse appeared in
Kazuo Ishiguro: New Critical Visions of the Novels edited by Sebastian Groes and
Barry Lewis (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
 Notes on Contributors ix

Elif Öztabak-Avcı is Assistant Professor at Middle East Technical University in

the Department of Foreign Language Education. She completed her PhD in Literary
Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 2010. Her dissertation is
titled, ‘Dirty Hands: The Servant as a Political Figure in Contemporary Fiction.’
She has published articles in ARIEL: A Review of International English Fiction,
Hacettepe JFL, and Interactions. Her research areas include domestic fiction,
contemporary British fiction, postcolonial theory and fiction, post-nationalist
criticism and narratologies.

Margaret J-M Sönmez is Assistant Professor at the Middle East Technical

University. She has published research in the fields of both historical sociolinguistics
and literature, in some cases combining both interests. Her current research
centres on the representation of foreigners in English literature, with a particular
focus on the early novel. Her publications include ‘The Speeches and Silences
of Conrad’s Orientals’ in Joseph Conrad and the Orient for the series, Eastern
European Monographs (Columbia University Press, 2012) and ‘Authenticity and
Nonstandard Speech in Great Expectations’ in the Journal of Victorian Literature
and Culture (2014).

Yugin Teo teaches literature and film at the University of Sussex, where he
completed his PhD. His publications on Kazuo Ishiguro include an article on Never
Let Me Go and testimony in the journal Critique and his book Kazuo Ishiguro and
Memory from Palgrave Macmillan (2014). He has also published critical work in
film and science fiction, as well as his own short stories and poetry. His research
interests are in the representation of memory in literature and film, literature
and philosophy, contemporary fiction, science fiction, and the work of French
philosopher Paul Ricoeur.

Fiona Tomkinson lectures in English at Yeditepe University, Istanbul and also

teaches Philosophy at Boğaziçi University. She holds a BA and an MA in English
Language and Literature from Oxford University, and an MA and a PhD in
Philosophy from Boğaziçi University. She has published a number of articles in
the areas of literature and philosophy, also works as a freelance translator and is
editor of the Yeditepe journal, Septet.

Rebecca L. Walkowitz is Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies

in English and Affiliate Faculty in Comparative Literature at Rutgers University.
In 2014–2015, she served as President of the Modernist Studies Association. She
has published widely in the fields of modernist studies, the contemporary novel,
translation studies and world literature. Her books include Cosmopolitan Style:
Modernism beyond the Nation (2006) and Born Translated: The Contemporary
Novel in an Age of World Literature (forthcoming in 2015). She is also editor of
several anthologies, including Immigrant Fictions (2007) and Bad Modernisms
(with Douglas Mao 2006), and co-editor of the book series Literature Now,
published by Columbia University Press. Walkowitz was a Marshall Scholar and
x Kazuo Ishiguro in a Global Context

has held fellowships from the US Department of Education (Javits), National

Humanities Center, ACLS, Institute for the Humanities at the University of
Wisconsin and Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard.

Cynthia F. Wong is Associate Professor of English at the University of Colorado

Denver, where she teaches contemporary world literature and narrative theory.
She is the author of Writers and Their Work: Kazuo Ishiguro (Northcote 2000 and
2nd expanded edition 2005), and co-editor with Brian Shaffer of Conversations
with Kazuo Ishiguro (Mississippi 2008). Her publications include Asian American
authors such as San Francisco Chinatown immigrant poets, Amy Tan, Joy
Kogawa, Jung Chang and Nien Cheng. Her other research areas include expedition
narratives of Edwardian polar explorers, Antarctica literature, and literary theories
about geography and space. She presented ‘Introspective Fictions: Geocriticism
and the Worlds of Kazuo Ishiguro and Jhumpa Lahiri’ at the 2013 Australasian
Universities Languages and Literature Association Conference.

Hülya Yıldız is Assistant Professor in the Department of Foreign Language

Education at Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Turkey. Her dissertation,
‘Literature as Public Sphere: Gender and Sexuality in Ottoman Turkish Novels
and Journals’, which was completed in the Department of Comparative Literature
at the University of Texas at Austin, received the Outstanding Dissertation
Award in Humanities and Fine Arts in 2009. Her most recent article, ‘Limits of
the Imaginable in the Early Turkish Novel: Non-Muslim Prostitutes and their
Ottoman Clients’, was published in the December 2012 issue of Texas Studies
in Literature and Language. Her research interests include Ottoman and Turkish
fiction, especially women writers of the late Ottoman period, women and gender
studies, postcolonial theory and literature, and world literature studies.
 Preface:
Global Ishiguro
Rebecca L. Walkowitz, Rutgers University, USA

What difference does global context make to the analysis of literature’s global
context? At first glance, this question may seem like a tautology or one of those
self-deleting enterprises: a serpent biting its tail. But in fact, thinking about the
transnational history and geographic diffusion of paradigms such as global and
world has become crucial to the contemporary analysis of literature. Whereas late
twentieth-century and even early twenty-first-century approaches to international
writing focused on novelists’ multilingual or migratory beginnings, and on themes
of cosmopolitanism or anti-colonialism in their works,1 literary critics today have
begun to ask, in addition, how the project of drawing out global context has been
shaped and attenuated by competing experiences of the globe. Of course, it may
seem odd to imagine that conflicts and divisions can inhere in terms that seem, on
the face of it, all-inclusive. Yet, as many scholars now acknowledge, the world, as
we say in English, has a history in languages and in many intellectual traditions.2
It is not the same everywhere.
The turn to the history and geography of global paradigms has been spurred by
the revival of ‘world literature’ as a category of analysis, involving both the study
of literature as it has traveled through the world and the study of the relationship
among (all) literatures produced in different parts of the world. To register the
history of world literature, David Damrosch has called for comparative approaches.
These would show how the idea of world literature has developed across different
territories and along different intellectual paths. Eric Hayot has observed that
extending our analysis of aesthetic traditions to include not only more literary
works (beyond those produced in Europe) but also more literary concepts (beyond
those produced in Europe) may change both what counts as world and what counts
as literature.3 We may need to consider global context in order to know which
versions of global context we are considering.
But how does this matter to the ‘global context’ in which these essays place
Kazuo Ishiguro’s work? For starters, we can observe that Ishiguro’s worldliness
can be understood in a variety of ways. First, it can refer to his personal biography,

1
I do not mean to suggest that this was merely a naïve moment. I include my own
book, Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism beyond the Nation, within this trend.
2
Barbara Cassin argues powerfully that philosophy is made of words, not concepts
that exist apart from those words. For this reason, she argues, concepts have a history in
languages.
3
Eric Hayot, On Literary Worlds, 35–6.
xii Kazuo Ishiguro in a Global Context

his birth in Japan and his family’s migration, when he was 5, to the UK, where he
was educated and has continued to make his home. Second, it can refer to the topics
that he takes up and develops in his fiction, both the intellectual traditions in which
he participates – and on which he draws – and the themes he introduces. Among
these themes, we can include many of the topics addressed by the collected essays:
the idea of ‘Japaneseness’, Western stereotypes about ‘the East’, the distinctive
internationalism of cities such as Vienna and Shanghai and globalization at various
scales. But Ishiguro’s location can also refer to the circulation and reception
of his works in various languages and editions throughout the world, and that
includes, too, the locations of his interpreters. It is this third version of global
context that I want to address here. I’ve argued elsewhere that Ishiguro’s texts
reflect, thematically and formally, on their own global itineraries as books.4 For
the purposes of this preface, I will consider instead how the global circulation and
reception of Ishiguro’s novels make a difference to the critical perspectives we
encounter in this volume.
Ishiguro’s critics work in many different languages, nations, regions and
institutional settings. WorldCat, a Web database that provides information about
books held in libraries worldwide, lists about 100 critical books about Ishiguro
published in print since 1986, including five biographies and a handful of
interviews. Of those, about 78 are English-language books, while 22 are works in
French, German, Japanese, Italian, Finnish, Slovenian and Spanish. While some
of those books address multiple writers, many are focused exclusively on Ishiguro.
WorldCat also lists 45 articles in nine languages, including, beyond the languages
already mentioned, Chinese, Korean, Malay and Russian. There are additionally
55 MA and PhD dissertations, in five languages, to date. These numbers are
not exhaustive, and some works may be represented in multiple formats (thus
increasing ‘books’ without increasing ‘works’), but they offer a broad-brush
sense of Ishiguro’s global distribution and reach. Not only do his books travel
throughout the world, but they also become parts of other people’s books in new
languages and locations.
Kazuo Ishiguro in a Global Context is the first volume of critical essays devoted
to Ishiguro’s writing whose own global locations can be said to match the global
locations of Ishiguro’s fiction, both as a matter of theme (what the books say) and
as a matter of production and ongoing reception (where the books begin and where
they go). The range of contributors is genuinely planetary, extending far beyond
the usual transatlantic or (former) Commonwealth distribution that appears in most
international anthologies focused on British writers. The importance of this range
to the project of the anthology is signaled by the attribution of place as well as
institution next to the name of each contributor. Along with critics from Australia,

4
Ishiguro’s novels are published and read in multiple English-language editions (UK,
US, and Canadian, in several formats each) and in many translations throughout the world.
He has incorporated the global circulation of his books into his practices of composition:
as he has said now many times, he writes with translation in mind. On the translation
and circulation of Ishiguro’s novels and for his comments on writing for translation, see
Walkowitz, ‘Unimaginable Largeness.’
 Preface xiii

Canada, the US and the UK, there are also those from Germany, Turkey (three
of which are based in Ankara and two in Istanbul), Russia and Taiwan. Many
linguistic, national and regional contexts are represented.5 In fact, scholars who
work in territories where English is not the principal language outnumber, by eight
to five, scholars who work in territories that are chiefly or officially Anglophone.
Kazuo Ishiguro in a Global Context thus demonstrates the far-reaching
geographies – in this case, five continents – in which global approaches to Ishiguro’s
work are being pursued. There have been other anthologies of Ishiguro criticism,
but this is the first co-edited by scholars who are located outside of Britain:
Cynthia F. Wong is based in the central US and Hülya Yıldız in central Turkey.
It is therefore the first volume produced by scholars located outside of Europe, if
we understand Ankara (the location of Middle East Technical University) as a city
anchored geographically on the Asian side of Turkey’s continental divide. Until
now, the Ishiguro anthologies have been largely a British affair.6 To be sure, this
book, too, is being published in Britain and its editors have chosen to standardize
punctuation, as most publishers require. The punctuation of choice is British
English, so even this preface, which I wrote in US English, appears here in a kind
of translation. The editors report in their introduction that some of the contributors
first read Ishiguro’s novels in translation, and thus one could argue that the essays
have been written about many different editions as well as about many different
books. However, there are only two editions cited in the bibliography: the ones
published by Vintage and the ones published by Faber and Faber, based in New
York and London, respectively. This is understandable, since publishers prefer to
have consistency across quotations and texts, but the contraction of editions may
give readers the impression that Ishiguro’s work functions internationally only
in English or that these essays depend for their arguments on books that function
only in one language.
The global dynamics of publishing and academic exchange, which favor
English as the medium of writing and English-language editions as the media
of citation, can have a localizing effect on the appearance of literary criticism in
print and also on our sense of that criticism’s objects. Yet, this volume’s expansive
geography and multilingual origins make their mark in other ways – and not always
in the ways you would expect. Looking again at the volume’s bibliography, we can
observe that the references are surprisingly Anglophone, even beyond the editions
of Ishiguro’s novels. One contributor cites an essay published in German; another
cites an essay in Japanese. Apart from these works, we find the ABCs of European
theory and experimental narrative in translation: Althusser, Bachelard, Bakhtin,
Benjamin and Calvino, as well as Derrida, Deleuze, Eco, Fanon, Foucault, Freud,

5
Each contributor is associated with a single national location, but the essays are not
reducible to those spaces, and indeed the location of each contributor is rarely one, since
many of the authors hail from one nation, were educated in a second nation and have taught
in several others. Some may be parts of migrant communities. Some are citizens of the same
nation but work in regions that are very different linguistically, politically and socially from
the regions in which their compatriots are situated.
6
See Groes and Matthews (2009) and Groes and Lewis (2011).
xiv Kazuo Ishiguro in a Global Context

Guattari, Heidegger and so forth. This list may suggest that the intellectual ambit
of the volume is rather more European than global, and to some extent this is true.
But, as we know, intellectual traditions, no matter what their origins, can have
unpredictable futures in the hands of new readers and new critics.
In this book, contributors working at the edges of Europe and in fact well
beyond Europe are using European literary theory to brush against the grain of
Anglo-American literary criticism. In the two prior anthologies, whose editors
and most of whose contributors are located in the UK, literary predecessors are
cited far more than Continental theorists. In the Bloomsbury edition, published in
2009, we find a few references to Barthes, Calvino and Derrida, but critics such
F.R. Leavis and Wayne Booth are invoked as guiding spirits in the essays that
frame the book. Emphasizing the universal ‘art of Ishiguro’, editors Sebastian
Groes and Sean Matthews argue that Ishiguro’s writing ‘reaches beyond national
and linguistic boundaries. His work celebrates openness and tolerance, addressing
readers of all places and times without falling into cultural relativity’ (2). While
the volume you are now holding also analyzes Ishiguro’s literary strategies and
traces them, chronologically, through his career, its essays have been grouped to
emphasize the literary, political and linguistic ‘borders’ that Ishiguro’s work both
identifies and has helped to challenge. Noting that ‘his readers come from all over
the globe’ (2), the editors of Kazuo Ishiguro in a Global Context encourage us
to ask what difference the globe has made to reading.7 The global context for
Ishiguro’s novels, it turns out, follows – as well as precedes – their production.
That context is unfinished. It is, right now, being made.

Works Cited

Cassin, Barbara and Rebecca L. Walkowitz. ‘Interview with Barbara Cassin’.

Public Books. Forthcoming. Digital.
Damrosch, David. ‘Toward a History of World Literature’. New Literary History
39.3 (Summer 2008): 481–95. Print.
Groes, Sebastian and Sean Matthews. Kazuo Ishiguro: Contemporary Critical
Perspectives. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2009. Print.
Groes, Sebastian and Barry Lewis, eds. Kazuo Ishiguro: New Critical Visions of
the Novels. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Print.
Hayot, Eric. On Literary Worlds. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. Print.
Walkowitz, Rebecca L. Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism beyond the Nation. New
York: Columbia UP, 2006. Print.
Walkowitz, Rebecca L. ‘Unimaginable Largeness: Kazuo Ishiguro, Translation,
and the New World Literature’. Novel 40.3 (Summer 2007): 216–39. Print.

7
Indeed, fascinating essays on the translation and reception of Ishiguro’s novels in
Japan, featured in both prior anthologies, show in dramatic ways that Ishiguro’s art has
operated differently in different spaces and languages.
 Acknowledgments

We thank Ann Donahue at Ashgate for working with us on this volume; her
thoughtful guidance enriched our work. We also thank Seth F. Hibbert and Amy
Thomas at Ashgate for their editorial support.
Hülya Yıldız organized the 19th METU British Novelists Conference,
dedicated to Kazuo Ishiguro and his work, which took place in Ankara, Turkey
on 12–13 December 2011. She thanks her colleagues and the research assistants
at the Department of Foreign Language Education at the Middle East Technical
University who helped to organize the conference and participants from all over
the world who discussed Ishiguro’s works enthusiastically during these two days
and inspired this collection of essays. Chapters in this book by Romit Dasgupta,
Yugin Teo, Fiona Tomkinson, Clare Brandabur, and Duru Güngör are significantly
revised and extended versions of their papers presented at the METU conference
in 2011.
Cynthia F. Wong has taught Kazuo Ishiguro’s novels to her students of
contemporary world literature at the University of Colorado Denver for over
two decades, and she thanks them for their insights into his writing and world of
ideas. She thanks Kazuo Ishiguro for his inspiration; Chair Nancy Ciccone and
the Department of English at UCD for travel and research support; the College of
Liberal Arts and Sciences at UCD for a Dissemination Grant and the Dean’s Fund
for Excellence Grant to deliver the keynote speech at METU; Thomas M. Long
for his research assistance; and, the METU faculty, research assistants, students,
and fellow Ishiguro scholars for stimulating conversations and discussions. She
dedicates this book to Grace A. Crummett, who travelled with her to interview
Ishiguro in London and to Ankara for the METU conference.
This page has been left blank intentionally
 Introduction:
Ishiguro and His Worlds in Literature
Cynthia F. Wong and Hülya Yıldız

Early on in his writing career, during the 1980s when British literature was
emphatically characterized by its multicultural attributes, Kazuo Ishiguro self-
identified as a ‘writer who wants to write international novels’ but also expressed
his uneasiness at being grouped together with the most gifted British novelists of
his generation.1 While he admired and praised the works of notable contemporary
authors such as Ian McEwan and Salman Rushdie, Ishiguro felt that each of these
distinct, talented writers deserved to articulate their unique style and visionary
fiction on their own terms. Such tactful consideration of personal artistry in
contrast to a communal branding among national authors only strengthened
Ishiguro’s resolve to envision his novels and short stories being read by a broad
world audience. Indeed, his readers come from all over the globe, they continue to
grow in numbers, and they eagerly await the arrival of each of his new, uniquely
perceived and persistently evolving fiction. Our volume addresses these evolutions:
the author’s identity and craft, his fascinating fiction, and the far-ranging critical
reception for his compelling literature.
Literary criticism of Ishiguro’s texts reflects a similar, heightened excitement
about the author’s intelligent art, as evidenced at the 19th British Novelists
Conference held in Ankara, Turkey in December 2011, where several of these
essays were first presented by scholars from Australia, Canada, England, Hungary,
Iran, Italy, Poland, Turkey, and the United States.2 Many of the scholars had
read Ishiguro’s writings in the original English but some also read the works in
translation. The fact that such diverse scholars from all over the world homed in
on the relatively slender body of work by a Japanese-born, British-affiliated fiction
and screen writer provoked our interest in gathering essays for this volume that
reflected the allure of Ishiguro and his works upon an international audience in
the twenty-first century. The circulation of Ishiguro’s literature and the ensuing
literary criticism reflect the admiration of his works by an academic community,
but Ishiguro’s work is unique in that its canon also has entered the consciousness

1
See the British Council’s website at http://literature.britishcouncil.org/kazuo-
ishiguro for the author page with this declaration.
2
Hülya Yıldız-Bağçe, Özlem Türe Abacı, Şule Akdoğan, and Şermin Sezer, eds.
Kazuo Ishiguro and His Work: Proceedings of the 19th METU British Novelists Conference.
Ankara, Turkey: Dept. of Foreign Language Education, Faculty of Education, Middle East
Technical University, 2012.
2 Kazuo Ishiguro in a Global Context / Wong and Yıldız

of a wide, appreciative readership as well as enthusiastic cinema audience. Two

of Ishiguro’s best known and beloved novels, The Remains of the Day (1989)
and Never Let Me Go (2005), have been adapted into successful films, and while
the actual tales differ significantly from one another – the former about a reticent
but self-deluded butler between the wars and the latter about the school years
and abbreviated adulthood of young clones in a speculative 1990’s Britain – their
respective first-person narrator’s understated tone belies the harrowing journey
each faces near life’s end. Like many of the other novels, these popular texts
share compelling themes about the propensities of human empathy and a range of
realistic situations and emotions that attract Ishiguro’s readers.
Contemporary Japanese author Haruki Murakami, in his introduction to
the 2009 anthology of critical essays on Ishiguro edited by Sean Matthews and
Sebastian Groes, offered a uniquely artful metaphor to describe the appeal and
significance of Ishiguro’s fiction to academic and non-academic audiences:

Ishiguro is like a painter working on an immense painting. The massive,

sprawling sort of painting that might cover the ceiling or walls of a cathedral. It
is lonely work, which involves huge amounts of time, and vast stores of energy.
A lifetime job. Every few years, he completes a section of this painting and
shows it to us. Together, we gaze on the expanding domain of his universe as,
stage by stage, it unfolds. (viii)

Murakami poetically describes both a quality apparent in the lithe narratives that
we identify with Ishiguro’s early novels, A Pale View of Hills (1982) and An Artist
of the Floating World (1986), as well as the collage effect of Ishiguro’s entire oeuvre
that includes the rather surrealistic and denser novels, The Unconsoled (1995),
When We Were Orphans (2000), and also some of the shorter fiction. Murakami’s
assessment highlights the formal differences, idiosyncratic subjects, and stylistic
achievements of an individual Ishiguro text, but he notes that these very differences
contribute to a whole portrait that might be revealed only diachronically and in
myriad fashion. Ishiguro himself might respond to this perception of the unfolding
of his work, as he did in 2006 to a question about the meaning of Never Let Me
Go: ‘I was always trying to find a metaphor for something very simple – it sounds
rather grand – but, a metaphor for the human condition, and for coming to terms
with the fact that we’re not immortal, that we’re here for a limited time’ (Wong and
Crummett, ‘A Conversation’ 205).
Words such as compassion and empathy characterize not only critical remarks
about Ishiguro the personable author but also the very attributes for which his
characters strive. Indeed, Sebastian Groes and Barry Lewis organized their 2011
collection of ‘new critical visions’ of Ishiguro’s fiction around these specific traits,
as they observe that ‘the power of Ishiguro’s fiction lies in its ability to make us
care about the world, about other people, about ourselves. The carefully crafted
narratives invite us to invest our time and emotions in his fictional worlds and
characters’ (‘The Ethics of Empathy’ 2). Each of Ishiguro’s writings adds to the
growing perspective of some fuller philosophical vision and aesthetic enterprise.
 Introduction 3

As if to affirm Murakami’s sense of the author’s ‘lifetime job’ as a continuously

evolving author, Ishiguro told Sean Matthews: ‘Anyone who knows my work
will know I’m not very prolific. Since 1982, I have only published six novels,
but I do actually write a lot. Behind these novels, I write lots of experiments’
and ‘[i]n many ways, my work is no more complicated than that, I’m concerned
with serious, but straightforward truths’ (italics original, 122; 124). The author’s
modest self-assessment of his literary output contrasts with the rich complexity of
nearly three decades of literary criticism of his works, particularly those from an
array of international scholars who have studied his works in relation to national
identity, cultural processes, and aesthetic development.

Contemporary World Insights into Ishiguro’s Work

The essays here are aesthetic first and foremost in their orientation, and they
represent a range of formalistic and post-structuralist, as well as humanistic
readings. They express the unique intellectual perspectives of the countries
where Ishiguro’s works have been received, shared and critiqued. The subjects
are diverse: knowledge about self, family, and community; textual analyses into
narrative constructions of time and space practiced in Ishiguro’s keen literary
craft; and assessments of both the continuous and discontinuous forces of history,
art, human psychology, and cultural values.
Early academic critics and reviewers alike were first intrigued by Ishiguro’s
ethnic heritage and its implication for English literature; their assessments
continued to expand as Ishiguro’s literature became more widely circulated. In Part
I of our collection, ‘Crossing National and Aesthetic Borders,’ we present scholars
who pursue these articulations of what Ishiguro has contributed to postcolonial
and posthuman studies, while also evaluating the development of his fiction
against the broad backdrop of contemporary world literature. Romit Dasgupta’s
essay, ‘Kazuo Ishiguro and “Imagining Japan’”, begins with a personal anecdote
that reveals one of the skewed perceptions of Ishiguro’s ‘Japanese-ness,’ that he
would ‘naturally’ be grouped together with other Japanese national authors such as
Nobel Laureates Yasunari Kawabata and Kenzaburō Ōe or popular contemporary
fiction writer Murakami, in spite of the fact that Ishiguro neither reads nor writes in
Japanese, nor has he lived in his country of birth – Nagasaki, Japan – since he was
five years old.3 Drawing from Mary Besemeres’ concepts of ‘self translation’ and
the figure of the ‘language migrant,’ Dasgupta discusses Ishiguro’s simultaneous
engagement with and estrangement from both a real and an imagined ‘Japan,’ and

3
Ishiguro and Oe had a notable conversation in 1989 (‘The Novelist is Today’s
World’). Of Japanese writers such as Yukio Mishima and Kawabata, Ishiguro told Matthews
that he found them ‘very negative, even nihilistic’ (116), while he felt that the Japanese
‘humanist’ filmmakers such as Akiro Kurosawa and Yasujiro Ozu ‘had a profound effect
on me, and they probably influenced me enormously as a writer’ (116). See also Motoyuki
Shibata and Motoko Sugano, ‘Strange Reads’ in Groes and Matthews.
4 Kazuo Ishiguro in a Global Context / Wong and Yıldız

juxtaposes his identity and work with those of another language migrant writer,
Yoko Tawada, who writes in both Japanese and German. Dasgupta’s assessment
of Ishiguro’s sense of belonging-ness – both of the author and his characters to the
lives bestowed upon them, respectively, in life and in fiction – brings significance
to Ishiguro’s claim about how ‘some of my readers speculate, on the grounds of
my biography, about the meanings of my writing, particularly in terms of my
relation to Japan and the preponderance of characters who seem to be outsiders
… [although] I’m not even sure that my characters are really outsiders as much as
people say’ (Matthews 115). In addressing the insider/outsider status of his and his
characters’ national identity and the nature of human choices and destiny, Ishiguro
highlights the responsibility of the writer to his cultural times and the issues that
engage human action and ideas.
In her essay, ‘Reworking Myths: Stereotypes and Genre Conventions in Kazuo
Ishiguro’s Work’, Stefanie Fricke traces the role of popular myths, stereotypes,
clichés and genre conventions in the short stories and six novels. Fricke identifies
a global trajectory in Ishiguro’s references to cultural myths such as Madame
Butterfly and a Japanese penchant for seppuka in the Japanese settings of the
early novels to those of the English butler in The Remains of the Day, the London
detective in When We Were Orphans and the European traditions of the school
story and dystopian fiction in Never Let Me Go. Fricke draws from early Ishiguro
critics such as Gregory Mason (1989) and also examines Ishiguro’s reflections
of his art from numerous interviews given over the years about the nature of his
work, such as his proclamation, ‘It is one of the important jobs of the novelist to
actually tackle and rework myths’ (Vorda and Herzinger, ‘An Interview’ 74).
Yugin Teo traces another important aesthetic element running through several
of Ishiguro’s works: the relationship of memory to self-identity and cultural
formation. Recollection and recognition of one’s own past and the related effort
to present reconstructed memory recurs in several of the novels where characters
strive both for self and communal identities. Unique to Teo’s analysis is a
reconsideration of ‘nostalgia’, a concept that Ishiguro expressed as an attitude
towards ‘the emotions [similar to] what idealism is to the intellect’ [and that] ‘it
is a way of ‘longing for a better world’ (Shaffer, ‘An Interview’ 2001: 166). Teo
explores Ishiguro’s positive attitude about memory through continental philosophy
from Paul Ricoeur’s three main texts – Memory, History, Forgetting; Time and
Narrative; The Course of Recognition – in order to depict the profoundly elegiac
nature of Ishiguro’s works.
In contrast to critics who have interpreted Ishiguro’s first-person narrative
techniques (Doyle 1991; Scanlan 1993; Wall 1994; Guth 1999), Elif Öztabak-
Avcı focuses on the author’s ‘Inscribed “You”’ in two of the early novels, An Artist
of the Floating World (1986) and The Remains of the Day (1989). In addressing
critical analyses that ‘deconstruct the empiricist-idealist notion of “I”’ in the
novels, Öztabak-Avcı examines Ishiguro’s use of ‘you’ that serves to ‘undermine
the notion of a unitary subject and thereby hegemonic narratives of national
identities,’ in order to examine the implications of ‘who speaks,’ ‘to whom is the
 Introduction 5

speaking addressed,’ and the nature of the exchanges. Cross-cultural exchanges

are addressed as well in Fiona Tomkinson’s essay, ‘Ishiguro and Worlds of Art,’ to
depict the theme of an artist’s insight and blindness to the politics of art-making.
Tomkinson references several of Ishiguro’s novels to discuss how art shapes self-
consciousness in striking ways. Juxtaposing Heideggerian understanding of the
nature of the artwork with Ishiguro’s recurring theme of the artist’s blindness,
Tomkinson meditates on the ontological implications of art and the artist.
The second part of this collection focuses on literal and figurative translations
of culture, space, and time in Ishiguro’s fiction in order to depict an evolution of
his craft. Henry James once noted that fiction’s main criteria is that the story be
interesting, a modest enough goal, but in Ishiguro’s meticulous writing, fiction also
becomes round, complex, provocative, and even seductive (13). The beautifully
rendered stories in each of his novels and short fiction have been translated
into many languages, and their travel across the globe reflects the changes of a
rapidly evolving and increasingly more technological world. Meanwhile, David
Damrosch argues that world literature does not lose significance through its
various translations, whether linguistically, culturally or historically (22). While
some losses occur in the traveling literature – some contexts or references innately
perceived by a local audience but which may be elusive to a broader global one –
much is also gained in these processes of translation and transmission. Such gains
do not offset the losses specifically so much as transform them, just as readers and
their understanding of world literature evolve and re-form when crossing times
and places. We took Damrosch’s notion of ‘translation’ to characterize the essays
of this section as one lens used for expressing Ishiguro’s still-evolving literary
currency among a global readership.
A. Clare Brandabur analyzes one of Ishiguro’s most complicated novels, The
Unconsoled (1995), a work that has generated a mixed bag of literary criticism that
prognosticated either Ishiguro’s continuing or declining literary brilliance (Wong
2000; Adelman 2001; Robbins 2001; Pegon 2004; Robinson 2006). Brandabur
refers to Edward Said’s notion of the ‘extreme occasion’ to characterize Ryder’s
musical genius and his intended piano performance, and she reads the novel as
‘a contrapuntal musical composition’ for discussing the theme of (dis)connection
experienced by the characters. Unlike critics who regard Ishiguro’s fourth novel
as representing a surreal or minor literature (Baxter 2011; Jarvis 2011), Brandabur
argues for the specific referential realities employed by Ishiguro to construct
Ryder’s musical, psychological and historical labyrinths – that is, to root the
protagonist’s mission against the real and imagined conditions in which he finds or
places himself. In this vein, she insightfully situates Ryder’s journey as resembling
the life of the pianist virtuoso Glenn Gould and his ideas on musical performance.
Margaret J-M Sönmez focuses as well on a single novel, When We Were
Orphans (2000), in her essay, ‘Place Identity and Detection’. Drawing from Alex
Krotoski’s correspondence of the individual to his or her physical environment,
Sönmez maps Christopher Banks’ physical movements as well as his narrative
construction according to Ishiguro’s creative employment of the conventions
6 Kazuo Ishiguro in a Global Context / Wong and Yıldız

from detective fiction. Similar to how critic H.C. Cunningham found a ‘[Charles]
Dickens connection’ in this novel (2004), Sönmez situates Banks in both an
Edenic environment and a Sherlockian one in order to discuss the nature of his
various encounters as he searches for his missing parents. Her essay expands as
well the previous considerations of Ishiguro’s configuration of space and place in
this novel (Weiss 2003; Bain 2007).
Both Brandabur and Sönmez illuminate significance in Ishiguro’s two most
complexly formed novels, while Olga Dzhumaylo and Liani Lochner present
provocative perspectives to one of Ishiguro’s most popular novel, Never Let Me
Go (2005). Garnering vast attention for its unusual foray in what appears to be
speculative fiction (Atwood 2005), Ishiguro’s sixth novel continues to attract
broad attention from both academic and popular audiences. A work’s source of
national origin – in this case, the United Kingdom of Ishiguro’s emigrated home
or even the remembered or imagined Japan of his ancestral homeland in the
early novels – to its various points of reception traverses into what Damrosch
calls an ‘elliptical space’ where multiple possible meanings may be derived (284).
Such traversing may prove positive for literature’s more kaleidoscopic features
rather than dilute or undermine a writer’s identity, work, or national affiliation.
Damrosch’s point about the inevitable but essentially provocative distortions of
modes of circulation offers a working reality of world literature and a truth about
Ishiguro’s fiction. Rebecca Walkowitz discusses these dynamics of expression,
transmission and circulation in her characterization of Ishiguro’s world fiction as
‘comparison literature’, an apt term she coins that expresses the new ‘relationship
between the writing of world literature and the reading protocols we bring to those
texts’ (221). Essays on Never Let Me Go, perhaps more so than the consistently
cogent yet broad topics of criticism of the previous novels, express most vividly
the continuing intellectual, aesthetic and emotional appeal of Ishiguro’s writing.
Olga Dzhumaylo’s essay analyzes what she calls a ‘hidden plot’ in the novel, and
she challenges the general assumption that the novel occasions a reconsideration
of ethical limits. She analyzes the textual coherence and thematic cohesion in
the novel through various leitmotifs, a strategy that she argues also applies to
consideration of the earlier novels. The complex yet fragile human relationships
in the novel are aligned with the personal collections of things, pieces of garbage,
broken objects and lost memories. Liani Lochner presents Kathy H.’s narrative
as a result of being caught up in the literary work as performance, and she
examines a ‘shared precariousness of life as a foundation for ethics’ to dramatize
a vulnerability that readers receive from Kathy’s interpellated narrative. Lochner
identifies Judith Butler’s Frames of War as a starting point for an examination of
the ethics of biotechnology in Ishiguro’s novel.
Duru Güngör also discusses the sixth novel by returning first to Ishiguro’s
early novels to trace his stylistic patterns in narrative that she identifies as the way
time and a ‘threefold “I”’ creates the temporal texture of the particular landscapes
in Ishiguro’s fiction. In Never Let Me Go, Güngör argues for an ‘inaccessible
“I”’ since all of the past and present events recounted by Kathy are memory
 Introduction 7

fragments that collectively reveal a strictly interior landscape. Meanwhile, the

exterior landscapes resonate in Chu-chueh Cheng’s essay, ‘Cosmos of Similitude’,
an analysis of Ishiguro’s 2009 collection of short stories Nocturnes, when she
characterizes Ishiguro’s art similarly, but as a set of ‘Lego bricks’ where ‘each of
the five stories is an independent unit and yet they form a longer narrative when
snapped together’. Cheng explores how the unfamiliar becomes familiar, and how
the other loses its otherness and melts into globally familiar scenes and images via
English language and American pop culture. Of that collection, Cynthia Wong also
notes in her essay, ‘Oppositional Narratives,’ that the stories collectively ‘express
a continuity of Ishiguro’s innovative narrative style’ across all of the fiction to
date, in spite of the great variety of subject matters and modes of representation.
Both Cheng and Wong highlight the unique achievement of each work singularly
and also in relation to a vaster literary canvas-in-progress.
Readers of Ishiguro’s works continue to discover new ways of perceiving
significance, and the literary critics assembled for this collection reflect the
continuing intellectual investment of scholars interpreting Ishiguro’s works. These
critics join an international community of Ishiguro scholars who have enlightened
readers and offered scintillating topics for discussion and debate for nearly three
decades. These cultural and textual critics come from many parts of the globe and
represent five continents: the authors range from young literary scholars at the
beginning of their careers to well-published academic intellectuals, all of whom
bring their broad intellectual perspectives and many combined years of insightful
publications to focus on Ishiguro’s works. These rich considerations of Ishiguro’s
work attest to his stature as a world author who continues to fascinate by writing
some of the best literature of his generation and provoking scintillating discussions
about his art.

Works Cited

Adelman, G. ‘Doubles on the Rocks: Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled’. Critique 42.2

(Winter 2001): 166–79. Print.
Atwood, Margaret. ‘Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro’. In Other Worlds: SF
and the Human Imagination. New York: Anchor, 2011. 168–73. Print.
Bain, Alexander M. ‘International Settlements: Ishiguro, Shanghai,
Humanitarianism’. Novel 40.3 (2007): 240–64. Print.
Cunningham H.C. ‘The Dickens Connection in Kazuo Ishiguro’s When We Were
Orphans’. Notes on Contemporary Literature 34.5 (2004): 4–6. Print.
Damrosch, David. What is World Literature? Princeton and Oxford: Princeton
University Press, 2003. Print.
Doring, Tobias. ‘Sherlock Holmes – He Dead: Disenchanting the English Detective
in Kazuo Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans’. Postcolonial Postmortems:
Crime Fictions from a Transcultural Perspective. Ed. Christine Matzke and
Susanne Muhleisen. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006. 59–86. Print.
8 Kazuo Ishiguro in a Global Context / Wong and Yıldız

Doyle, Waddick. ‘Being an Other to Oneself: First Person Narration in Kazuo

Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day’. L’Altérité dans la littérature et la culture
du monde anglophone. Ed. E Labbe. Le Mans: Univ. du Maine, 1993. 70–76.
Print.
Groes, Sebastian and Barry Lewis. ‘Introduction: “It’s good manners, really” –
Kazuo Ishiguro and the Ethics of Empathy’. Kazuo Ishiguro: New Critical
Visions of the Novels. London: Palgrave, 2011. 1–10. Print.
Guth, Deborah. ‘Submerged Narratives in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the
Day’. Forum for Modern Language Studies 35.2 (1999): 126–37. Print.
Ishiguro, Kazuo. ‘A Conversation about Life and Art’. Interview by Cynthia F.
Wong and Grace Crummett. Conversations with Kazuo Ishiguro. Ed. Brian W.
Shaffer and Cynthia F. Wong. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi,
2008. 204–20.
———. A Pale View of Hills. New York: Vintage, 1982. Print.
———. An Artist of the Floating World. New York: Vintage, 1986. Print.
———. ‘An Interview with Kazuo Ishiguro’. By Brian W. Shaffer. Conversations
with Kazuo Ishiguro. Ed. Brian W. Shaffer and Cynthia F. Wong. Jackson, MS:
UP of Mississippi, 2008. 161–73. Print.
———. ‘“I’m Sorry I Can’t Say More”: An Interview with Kazuo Ishiguro’. By
Sean Matthews. Kazuo Ishiguro. Ed. Sean Matthews and Sebastian Groes.
London: Continuum, 2009. 114–25. Print.
———. ‘An Interview with Kazuo Ishiguro, 1990’. By Allan Vorda and Kim
Herzinger. Conversations with Kazuo Ishiguro. Ed. Brian W. Shaffer and
Cynthia F. Wong. Jackson, MS.: UP of Mississippi, 2008. 66–88. Print.
———. Never Let Me Go. New York: Vintage, 2005. Print.
———. Nocturnes. New York: Knopf, 2009. Print.
———. ‘The Novelist in Today’s World: A Conversation’. By Kazuo Ishiguro and
Kenzaburo Ōe. Conversations with Kazuo Ishiguro. Ed. Brian W. Shaffer and
Cynthia F. Wong. Jackson, MS: UP of Mississippi. 52–65. Print.
———. The Remains of the Day. New York: Vintage, 1989. Print.
———. The Unconsoled. New York: Vintage, 1995. Print.
———. When We Were Orphans. New York: Vintage, 2001. Print.
Jarvis, Tim. ‘“Into Ever Stranger Territories”: Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled
and Minor Literature’. Kazuo Ishiguro: New Critical Visions of the Novels.
Ed. S. Groes and B. Lewis. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. 157–70. Print.
Lewis, Barry. Kazuo Ishiguro: Contemporary World Writers. Manchester:
Manchester UP, 2000. Print
Murakami, Haruki. ‘On Having a Contemporary Like Kazuo Ishiguro.’ Trans.
T. Goossen. Kazuo Ishiguro: Contemporary Critical Perspectives. Ed. S.
Matthews and S. Groes. London: Continuum, 2009. vii–viii. Print.
Pégon, Claire. ‘How to Have Done With Words: Virtuoso Performance in Kazuo
Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled’. Etudes Britanniques Contemporaines, 27 (2004):
83–95. Print.
 Introduction 9

Robbins, Bruce. ‘Very Busy Just Now: Globalisation and Harriedness in Ishiguro’s
The Unconsoled’. Comparative Literature 53.4 (Autumn 2001): 426–42. Print.
Robinson, Richard. ‘Nowhere, in Particular: Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled
and Central Europe’. Critical Quarterly 48.4 (Winter 2006): 107–30. Print.
Scanlan, Margaret. ‘Mistaken Identities: First Person Narration in Kazuo Ishiguro’.
Journal of Narrative and Life History 3.2/3: 139–54. Print.
Shibata Motoyuki and Motoko Sugano. ‘Strange Reads: Kazuo Ishiguro’s A Pale
View of Hills and An Artist of the Floating World in Japan’. Kazuo Ishiguro:
Contemporary Critical Perspectives. Ed. S. Groes and B. Lewis. London:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. 20–31. Print.
Spark, Gordon. ‘The Mysterious Case of the Disappearing Empire: History and the
Golden-Age Detective Genre in Kazuo Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans’.
Sub/versions: Cultural Status, Genre and Critique. Ed. Pauline MacPherson,
Christopher Murray, Gordon Spark and Kevin Corstorphine. Newcastle upon
Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2008. 124–34. Print.
Walkowitz, Rebecca. ‘Unimaginable Largeness: Kazuo Ishiguro, Translation, and
the New World Literature’, Novel 40.3 (Summer 2007): 216–39. Print.
Wall, Kathleen. ‘The Remains of the Day and its Challenges to Theories of
Unreliable Narration’. Journal of Narrative Technique 24.1 (1994): 18–42.
Print.
Weiss, Timothy. ‘Where is Place? Locale in Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans’.
Anglophone Cultures in Southeast Asia: Appropriations, Continuities,
Contexts. Ed. Rudiger Ahrens, David Parker, Klaus Stierstorfer and Kow-kan
Tam. Heidelberg: Universitatverlage, 2003. 271–94. Print.
Wong, Cynthia F. ‘Seizing Comprehension: The Unconsoled’. Kazuo Ishiguro:
Writers and Their Work. 2000. Tavistock: Northcote House, 2005. 2nd Edition.
66–80. Print.
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 Chapter 1
Kazuo Ishiguro and ‘Imagining Japan’
Romit Dasgupta, The University of Western Australia, Australia

I begin this essay with a personal anecdote. While flicking through the December
2011 issue of Skylife, the Turkish Airlines in-flight magazine, on the way to the
conference on Kazuo Ishiguro at the Middle East Technical University in Ankara,
I came across an article featuring various holiday destinations around the world,
highlighting writers supposedly ‘representative’ of each of the locales. Japan was
among the destinations featured. Not surprisingly, the entry reinforced many of
the popular Orientalist and exoticised stereotypes of Japan – cherry blossoms,
bonsai, haiku, Mount Fuji and other associations along the same lines. The
‘representative’ writers included the renowned seventeenth century haiku poet,
Matsuo Bashō; icons of twentieth-century Japanese literature, Nobel Laureates
Yasunari Kawabata and Kenzaburō Ōe; the globally popular contemporary writer
Haruki Murakami; and Kazuo Ishiguro (Uslu 128).1 This to me was intriguing
– that a person who, other than the first five years of his life, had never lived in
Japan, nor spent extensive periods of time there, nor spoke the language, could be
framed as an embodiment of ‘Japanese’-ness. Moreover, given that I was on my
way to a conference on British novelists, I could not help but wonder whether, had
Britain also been among the destinations featured in the article, Ishiguro would
have been mentioned as a ‘representative’ British writer.
This essay is a reflection not so much on Kazuo Ishiguro’s specific texts, but
more on Ishiguro as a writer and as an individual situated between cultures. The
focus that I adopt is from the position of someone who is situated within Japanese
studies and cultural studies. Over the course of his career, Ishiguro has been
variously regarded as a British writer, a postcolonial writer, as what Australian
literary and linguistics scholar Mary Besemeres refers to as a ‘language migrant
writer’ (10), and even, as the opening to this chapter illustrates, a Japanese writer.
Yet, at the same time, Ishiguro does not fit neatly within any of these categories,
something that no doubt has contributed to the public fascination with him, both
as a writer and as an individual. Ishiguro’s relationship with Japan is particularly
interesting, in that over the course of his career as a writer, he has gone from

1
For the sake of consistency in this essay I adopt a Western name order for all
names. This applies to Japanese names too, where rather than the common family-name/
personal-name I use a personal-name/family-name order – ‘Yukio Mishima’ rather than
‘Mishima Yukio’, for instance. I use macrons to indicate the use of extended vowel sounds
in Japanese.
12 Kazuo Ishiguro in a Global Context / Dasgupta

close, deliberate engagement in his texts to a seemingly complete disassociation

and distancing in his later works from anything to do with Japan, or his own
subjectivity as a person of Japanese heritage living in the West – something that
has attracted criticisms of ‘whitefacing’ (Ma). And yet, Japan as a textual, or even
sub-textual, reference continues to be an undercurrent in some of his later works
too. Moreover, whereas in the West, Ishiguro’s Japanese connection is frequently
underscored, his reception in Japan itself has been more ambivalent, with readers
and critics not quite sure how exactly to pigeon-hole him. This was particularly
the case in the early years of his career (Shibata and Sugano; Shōnaka). Clearly,
Ishiguro was not a ‘Japanese’ writer. Yet, as someone who was born in Japan, and
spent his early-childhood in that country, he could not be put in the same category
as second- or third-generation diasporic nikkei writers like Japanese-North
Americans Cynthia Kadohata, Joy Kogawa or John Okada. Thus, the springboard
for the discussion in this chapter is Ishiguro’s relationship with notions of – an
often imagined – ‘Japan’ and ‘Japanese-ness’, and his positioning as a writer who
negotiates variously between ‘Japan’ and ‘The West’ (specifically, Britain).
In considering Ishiguro, I draw upon a theoretical framework suggested by
Polish-Australian linguist and literary/cultural theorist Mary Besemeres in her
2002 monograph, Translating One’s Self: Language and Selfhood in Cross-
Cultural Autobiography, of ‘self translation’ by ‘language migrant’ writers. These
are writers who are born into a particular language, but, at varying points in their
lives, ‘migrate’ into another language, which becomes the primary language
through which they express themselves in writing. Despite what Besemeres
refers to as the ‘natural language’ being subsumed by the seemingly dominant
language into which the writer has migrated, the former continues to have an
influence on the shaping of the ‘self’ (of the writer, of the individual). In opening
her discussion, Besemeres draws upon Polish-Canadian journalist and writer Eva
Hoffman’s 1989 autobiography Lost in Translation, an account of her family’s
migration from Poland to Canada when she was a teenager. Besemeres observes
that ‘the title … summons the potential loss of self, of key aspects of what a
person has been, in the course of migrating between languages’ (9). Further on she
comments that this ‘experience of migrants into a new language attests doubly to
the shaping effect of natural language on self: both in the sense of a loss of self
undergone with the loss of the native language, and in the sense of an enforced
gain of self in living with the new language’ (10). It is these often nuanced or
even un-articulated movements between languages (and, in a sense, between
selves) that Besemeres unpacks in her work. The ‘language migrant’ writers she
discusses – Eva Hoffman, Vladimir Nabokov, Maxine Hong Kingston and Kazuo
Ishiguro, among others – are all writers who migrated from non-English speaking
backgrounds into English. However, I want to consider Ishiguro in relation to
other language-migrant writers who engage with Japan, in particular the Japanese-
German poet and writer Yōko Tawada, who writes in both languages. I argue that
such language-migrant writers can work to disrupt comfortable assumptions about
identities of self, nation, language and even race/ethnicity.
 Kazuo Ishiguro and ‘Imagining Japan’ 13

Ishiguro and Japan

Before unpacking the above-mentioned notion of Ishiguro as a ‘language migrant’

writer, it will be useful to briefly consider the relationship between Ishiguro, the
writer and the individual, and Japan and ‘Japanese-ness.’ Many writers – both
academic and mainstream – have commented on Ishiguro’s complex, and indeed,
complicated relationship with Japan (King 206–8; Wong 1–4). In particular,
Ishiguro’s connection to Japan was repeatedly highlighted in reviews and essays
in the years following his early works, in particular A Pale View of the Hills and
An Artist of the Floating World, two texts in which Japan and articulations of
‘Japanese-ness’ were integral to the narratives. As Bruce King, in his essay on
a selection of diasporic British writers, notes: ‘his [Ishiguro’s] instincts are for
the nuanced, the understated, elegant but significant gesture, similar to the deft
brushwork of Japanese paintings … [and] his novels require us to understand
by indiscretion, by analogy with the way Japanese conversations move politely
around the matter at issue’ (207). There is something suggestive of a deliberately
Orientalist undercurrent in this observation. Significantly, King was writing in the
1990s, before Ishiguro had moved away from Japanese themes in his works, and
in this regard was not, at the time, exceptional in reading into these seemingly
‘exotic Oriental’ influences in Ishiguro (Cheng). For instance, Takayuki Shōnaka,
in his work on Ishiguro, talks about how these two early works fed into and, in turn,
reinforced existing British stereotypes of an ‘exotic’ Japan. This was manifested,
for instance, in the cover of early editions of An Artist of the Floating World,
with deliberately exoticised, but irrelevant (to the plot) images used (Shōnaka 70,
71; see also Cheng). Even with Remains of the Day, a text that has no obvious
relationship to Japan and, if anything, encapsulates the essence of a particular
imagining of ‘English-ness,’ commentators continued to connect Ishiguro’s
Japanese heritage with aspects of the work. For instance, in his discussion of
Ishiguro and Japan, Shōnaka refers to a review in Japan’s Yomiuri Shimbun
newspaper, where the reviewer mentions being told by a British friend that the
book was reminiscent of a Japanese novel translated into English (Shōnaka 68,
69; also Rothfork; Wong 2, 3).
Ishiguro himself expressed irritation at this packaging of him as an exotic
‘other’ through which readers could access some otherwise unfathomable
‘essence’ of Japanese culture and sensibility. As Cynthia Wong observed, ‘[I]f
early reviewers admire Japanese attributes … they also peg Ishiguro as a foreign
writer who just happens to write in the English language. Having lived in Britain
since the age of five … such perceptions are obviously annoying’ (Wong 8; also
Ishiguro and Ōe 113). Significantly, the reception of Ishiguro’s early works in
Japan itself was much more complex and, indeed, ambivalent, than was the case
in the Anglophone world. On the one hand, as the noted Japanese writer and Nobel
Laureate Kenzaburō Ōe observed in a conversation with Ishiguro during the latter’s
first visit back to Japan in thirty years, Ishiguro was depicted as ‘a very quiet and
peaceful author, and, therefore, a very Japanese author’ (Ishiguro and Ōe 115).
14 Kazuo Ishiguro in a Global Context / Dasgupta

This, as Ōe highlights, fed into collective national ‘self-orientalizing’ stereotypes

that, while highlighting attributes like ‘tranquillity’ and ‘harmony’, conveniently
side-stepped other less palatable aspects of Japanese culture and history such as its
militaristic past (114, 115).
On the other hand, despite the media interest surrounding the debut of a writer
with a Japanese surname receiving acclaim in the West, there was also a degree of
uncertainty, and even suspicion, about Ishiguro. Indeed, at the beginning, despite
his growing reputation in the West, Ishiguro remained relatively unknown in Japan
(Shōnaka 178).2 As someone born in Japan, he was clearly not a second- or third-
generation diasporic writer, along the lines of Japanese-North Americans Cynthia
Kadohata or John Okada. He was someone who, after the age of five, had never
lived in Japan nor had proficiency in the language. As Shōnaka notes, Ishiguro’s
entry into Japanese culture and literature was through English translations of
iconic Japanese writers like Yasunari Kawabata or Yukio Mishima, who acted as
‘gatekeepers’ to knowledge about Japan in the West, but were hardly representative
of contemporary socio-cultural reality (Shōnaka 40, 41). Indeed, as Shōnaka
goes on to observe, Ishiguro claimed in an interview that he found Kawabata’s
classic Snow Country (Yukiguni) to be ‘excessively poetic and difficult to grasp’
(41; my translation). As Ishiguro himself had admitted, the Japan he was writing
about in those early texts was very much shaped by his ‘own imaginary Japan’
(Ishiguro and Ōe 110), one that, in many regards, remained frozen in his childhood
memories of the place. The English translations he read, as well as the films of
the legendary director Yasujiro Ozu that Ishiguro watched, added another layer
to this imagined Japan (Matthews and Groes 5; Shibata and Sugano 25). Thus,
while early commentators in the West may have been over-accentuating Ishiguro’s
Japanese-ness, early commentators and critics in Japan did the opposite, which was
to zoom in on his lack of ‘insider’ knowledge as a flaw (Shōnaka 68, 69). Many
of the criticisms centred around Ishiguro’s imagined constructions of Japanese
expressions and everyday socio-linguistic practices, and the difficulties involved
in (so to speak) ‘back-translating’ into a language Japanese readers would be able
to recognize and feel comfortable with (see Shibata and Sugano; Shōnaka 58–74).
Indeed, as Shibata and Sugano point out, it was only after the success of Remains
of the Day that Ishiguro’s reputation in Japan started to become established, to the
point where his earlier Japan-connected works also started being reappraised (31;
also Shōnaka 189, 190).

2
As Shōnaka points out, the first Japanese translation of an Ishiguro text was the
1980 short-story ‘A Family Supper,’ which was published, using the title ‘Yūge’ (‘Evening
Meal’) in the February 1982 issue of the magazine Subaru (Shōnaka 177). The first book-
length translation (of A Pale View of the Hills) was published, under the title of Onnatachi
no tōi natsu (roughly, ‘The Women’s Distant Summer’) at the end of 1984, more than
two years after the original’s publication in English (178). Shōnaka provides a very useful
bibliography of Japanese language translations of Ishiguro’s works, as well as other
resources (academic and mainstream) about him (258–76).
 Kazuo Ishiguro and ‘Imagining Japan’ 15

Possibly in reaction to the over-reading of ‘Japanese-ness’ into his earlier

works in the West, Ishiguro, in his subsequent works (with the possible exception
of When We Were Orphans), seemed to move away from anything to do with
Japan, or even his own subject-position as a person of Japanese/East Asian
heritage living in Britain. This opened him up to the criticism of a deliberate,
apolitical evasion of the everyday realities of being a non-white immigrant
person in contemporary Britain. Sheng-mei Ma’s 1999 essay represents this
criticism of Ishiguro’s deliberate shift, a strategy Ma likens to a ‘whitefacing’
desire for ‘postethnicity’. As Ma observes in relation to Ishiguro’s fourth novel,
set in a seemingly un-identifiable anywhere/everywhere Central European city:
‘An ethnic writer’s persistent desire for postethnicity is eventually realized in
Unconsoled, cast, ironically, as a dream, one which emanates minority anxiety
because it pretends to be the opposite – the majority. The very form … suggests
that postethnicity is a wish-fulfillment and that the deracinated dreamscape a
reaction against Orientalist readings of his “Japanese’ novels”’ (Ma 73).3 Ma
chastises Ishiguro for not recognizing his position as Anglo-Japanese, but instead
vacillating between Japanese and English characters in his works (71). Indeed,
his ‘white-facing’ could at one level be seen as both potentially subversive of
hegemonic white power structures, reversing the longstanding stereotypical
depictions of East Asian characters (often played by white actors) like Fu Manchu
or Madame Butterfly in Anglo-American popular culture, and as a reaction to the
earlier Orientalist constructions of himself and his works by critics (Ma 79, 80).
However, as Ma points out, ‘to defy Orientalist characteristics imposed on him,
Ishiguro passes as white. … But the multi-directional passing does not betoken an
egalitarian society; rather it reflects how slanted the socio-economic relationship
is’ (80). He stresses that ‘passing for minorities has historically meant a precarious
passage into a semblance of power’ (80). Consequently, he concludes that as a
consequence of Ishiguro’s shift ‘from the intimation of minority [Anglo-Japanese]
subjectivity’ apparent in A Pale View, the ‘landscape has grown unrecognizable,
depressingly dark’ (Ma 86).
However, I would suggest that such a reading of Ishiguro’s engagements with
Japan, ‘Japanese-ness’ and for that matter, Anglo-Japanese-ness, is overly harsh
and one dimensional. First, ‘Japan’ as a narrative current does not necessarily
get erased from his post-Artist of the Floating World works. I am not just
referring to the supposed ‘Japanese’ sensibilities noticed by commentators in
works like Remains of the Day that I referred to above. Rather, what I have
in mind is the fleeting, seemingly accidental, but nevertheless very deliberate,
insertion of references to Japan in some of his later works. For instance, when
Ryder, the narrator of The Unconsoled, comes down to the lobby of his hotel in
the anonymous European city where the book is set, he comes across ‘several
Japanese people … greeting each other with much jollity’ (Ishiguro, Unconsoled

3
Although Ma, whose essay pre-dated Never Let Me Go, does not make any reference
to it, one could possibly conceive of extending the postethnic into posthuman, in that novel.
16 Kazuo Ishiguro in a Global Context / Dasgupta

19). There seems to be no obvious reason why the presence of these Japanese
(presumably) tourists in the lobby deserve mention; there is no relationship
whatsoever to the narrative, nor to some of the other things Ryder notices when
entering the lobby in that scene. Furthermore, one cannot help but speculate why
Ishiguro chose Japanese, rather than (say) British, American, German, Chinese or
any other nationality that may have stood out in that particular setting. Similarly,
in the short story ‘Come Rain or Come Shine’ in the 2009 anthology Nocturnes,
the narrator, a mid-forties ESL (English As a Second Language) teacher based
in Spain, mentions making plans to move to Japan in the late-1980s because
Japan then was the place to go to earn a good income (Ishiguro, Nocturnes 40).
At one level, such apparently random references to Japan may be seen as part
of the ‘post-ethnification’ process that Ma discusses. After all, in both instances,
it is white men whose voices Ishiguro references Japan through. However, at
another level, we could regard this as an expression (no matter how trivial) of the
process of journeying between two cultures that language migrant writers, like
Ishiguro, engage with. The two instances mentioned here resonate with Mary
Besemeres’s reflection in relation to Ono, the Japanese narrator of An Artist
of the Floating World, through whose voice (the language-migrant) Ishiguro
speaks: ‘Ono appears … to share the floor with a meta-narrator who is aware
of other (non-Japanese) cultural expectations where Ono ostensibly is not. In
accommodating these two perspectives, the narrator’s voice is that of a bicultural
being, even while the character himself is not defined as such’ (Besemeres 248).
In the case of the two instances referred to above, a mirror process may be at
work, whereby a bicultural, ‘language-migrant’ voice (Ishiguro’s) is speaking
through, and alongside, monocultural narrators.
If anything, rather than a ‘white-facing’ device, Ishiguro’s engagements with
differing voices and stand-points has given his writing an added dimension,
one which allowed him to become the truly global – or ‘international’ (Cheng)
– writer he is generally recognized as today. Rebecca Walkowitz notes that not
only are Ishiguro’s works translated into numerous languages, they are ‘written
for translation’ (Walkowitz 219, original italics). As she elaborates ‘[in many
ways], Ishiguro has been writing for translation all along … he has described
his effort, throughout his career, to create novels that appear to be adapted from
another tongue’ (219). This may not have been possible had he been writing from
the subjectivity of a purely Japanese, British, or Anglo-Japanese writer – along
the lines, for instance, of a South Asian-British writer like Hanif Kureishi. This
is something Cheng alludes to in her reflection that ‘to define Ishiguro as an
international writer or a world writer … encourages readers to view his Japanese
ancestry as one force among others enriching his composition and thereby to
appraise him within a much broader spectrum of contemporary writers.’ With this
in mind, it would be useful at this point, to return to Besemeres’s framework of
‘self translation’ by ‘language migrant’ writers, and consider Ishiguro, and other
‘language migrant’ writers who engage with Japan, in relation to it.
 Kazuo Ishiguro and ‘Imagining Japan’ 17

Ishiguro and ‘Language Migrant’ Writers

In Translating One’s Self, Mary Besemeres draws upon the concept of ‘self-
translation’ to look at the writings of writers who, rather than being brought up
bilingual or multilingual, are ‘language migrants’ who move from a primary
language that they are born into a new language which becomes the medium
(often, the only one) for creative expression. This process of migration may entail
a loss, but there may also be considerable agency at work. As Besemeres observes:
‘[If] migration into a new language requires that a person to some degree recreate
themselves, then self must come into being in the first place in an active relation
to language’ (10).4 While the dynamics are different from being born bilingual
or from ‘code switching’ between languages, Besemeres suggests that ‘one
way in which there can be movement between the different ‘selves’ a person is
capable of being in speaking different languages is that each language projects a
range of psychological attributes’ (20).5 Indeed, as one of the authors Besemeres
discusses, the Polish-Canadian writer and journalist Eva Hoffman and author of
Lost in Translation, a memoir of her ‘language migration’ from Poland/Polish
to Canada/English, observed in a conversation with Australian cultural theorist
Mary Zournazi, this journeying between languages is even an embodied process
at work: ‘I felt very strongly that the body was somehow styled differently and
that I was required to move differently … I mean you literally find yourself in
a foreign body and if you translate yourself into this different style you have
translated yourself into a different personality’ (Zournazi 22). While these journeys
between languages, between bodies, between selves may involve senses of loss
and anxiety, they can also be a source of empowerment as the preexisting first
‘natural’ language informs and strengthens the writing in the language they have
moved into. Eva Hoffman suggests this when she notes that ‘if translation doesn’t
break you it can enrich you very much … [one] adds a whole new perspective
on the world, a whole new vision … a whole new internal world’ (Zournazi 23).
Moreover, some of these residual influences cannot always be articulated verbally
in the language the writer has moved into, but nevertheless continue to be at
play under the surface. Thus, for Hoffman, the Polish cultural-linguistic notion
of teşknota, loosely translated in English as ‘nostalgia’ continued to be a private
shaping influence in her life despite appearing to shift seamlessly into her new
English-language Canadian self (Besemeres 46, 47). Moreover, whereas in the
Polish cultural-linguistic world teşknota was a feeling with positive connotations,
its rough equivalent in the English speaking Anglo-North American context

4
Besemeres distinguishes this ‘self’ from the Derridian notion of the self as ‘written’
as ‘text.’ Rather, in her deployment, there is ‘more room for agency, since the “self” is the
struggling agent as well as the intractable object of the translation … both the translator and
the translated’ (Besemeres 12).
5
In a similar vein, the Japanese-American writer Kyōko Mori talks about ‘changing
[mental] stations’ from English to Japanese and wanting to stay in the indeterminate place
between the two, where the ‘static’ is (Besemeres 20).
18 Kazuo Ishiguro in a Global Context / Dasgupta

was regarded as ‘a bit unseemly’ an admission to ‘a shameful weakness’ (47).

This is something that applies in Ishiguro’s case, too. In a 2001 interview with
Brian Shaffer, Ishiguro reflected on how while ‘nostalgia’ in the contemporary
(Western) world is regarded as somewhat dysfunctional and escapist, to him it was
a powerful and positive emotional current to tap into (Shaffer and Ishiguro 6, 7).
As he stressed in that interview, ‘in my books, particularly the more recent ones,
I feel that the kind of nostalgia I’m trying to get at could actually be a positive
thing in that it’s a kind of emotional equivalent to idealism’ (7). Significantly, not
unlike teşknota, the (rough) equivalent to ‘nostalgia’ in Japanese, natsukashisa (or,
natsukashii, as an adjective), has far more positive (albeit bitter-sweet) linguistic/
cultural associations.
For Ishiguro, this residual ‘nostalgia’/natsukashisa that has informed his
creativity is twofold. First, as he himself has admitted, being uprooted at the age
of five and losing the close emotional bonds he had with his grandparents was
associated with a sense of loss. However, at the same time this loss fed into his
creativity as a writer – the creative process, as he stressed in an interview with
Maya Jaggi, had ‘never been about anger or violence, as … with some people
… [rather] it’s more to do with regret or melancholy’ (Nasta 166). Significantly,
as Shōnaka suggests, the imprints of this regret and melancholy arising from his
childhood separation, informs not only Ishiguro’s early works, but also his later
ones, in particular When We Were Orphans (Shōnaka 210). Second, his ‘imaginary’
Japan was a powerful nostalgic current, in particular, in his early works. More than
nostalgia associated with the country as a whole, however, it was associations with
a particular place – the city of Nagasaki – that informed Ishiguro’s nostalgia.6 As
Shōnaka, in his chapter on Ishiguro and Nagasaki, notes: despite leaving Nagasaki
at the age of five, Ishiguro retained powerful memories of specific places (roads,
schools, houses) of Nagasaki which went on to inform his texts; in fact when
Ishiguro returned to Nagasaki in 1989, after an absence of close to thirty years,
he talked about how the memories he had of such details as the road leading from

6
While it is outside the scope of the present essay to discuss the influence of the city
on Ishiguro and his work, it should be noted that Nagasaki has a particular significance
within Japan, which distinguishes it from other cities. First, although today Christians
account for only a small proportion of the total Japanese population, Nagasaki, and the
surrounding region, has had a long association with Christianity, first introduced by
Portuguese missionaries (including Francis Xavier) in the sixteenth century. Indeed, the
Shimabara region, not far from Nagasaki, was home to the ‘Hidden Christians’ (kakure
Kirishitan), coverts who maintained their faith in secret over the two centuries (from the
seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth) that Christianity was officially banned in Japan. Second,
Nagasaki was the only major point of contact between the Japanese and foreign (Dutch
and Chinese) traders over the years that Japan officially cut-off contact with the outside
world, from the seventeenth until the mid-nineteenth century. Hence, Nagasaki provided an
important window to the outside world, as well as a conduit for knowledge and technology
entering Japan. Finally, Nagasaki was the second city, after Hiroshima that had an atomic
bomb dropped on it in the closing days of the Second World War.
 Kazuo Ishiguro and ‘Imagining Japan’ 19

their family home (no longer standing) to his kindergarten matched the actual
reality of the place (219, 220).
In considering Ishiguro as a ‘language migrant’ writer, Besemeres draws
attention to how such psycho-cultural-linguistic residues from the primary
language (Japanese, in this instance) informed Ishiguro’s works, specifically An
Artist of the Floating World. These residues include concepts and notions like
aimai (roughly, ‘ambiguity’), the role of silence conveying more than articulated
expression, haji (‘shame’), omote/ura (outward [appearance]/inner [intention]) and
the somewhat related tatemae/hone (241–70). Importantly, Besemeres cautions
that, while there may be crossovers with Freudian concepts like the conscious
and unconscious selves, in regarding these concepts we should not consider
them simply as Japanese (psycho-cultural) equivalents. Rather, as she notes with
reference to aimai, for instance:

Ethno-psychological literature abounds with … comments about the central

significance of the “nonverbal” in Japanese communication. Claims made
about a culture as a whole of course merit a cautious response, given the
complexity and heterogeneity of culture. But alongside the danger of
oversimplification is the danger of ignoring the voices of those with bicultural
experience, who are uniquely placed to comment on the reality of cultural
differences. (Besemeres 251)

With this in mind, it is worth reflecting on the point Besemeres makes in the
conclusion to her discussion of Ishiguro’s An Artist of the Floating World:

The “floating world” metaphor … takes in not only the instability of Ono’s
social standing and of the ethos he espoused, … but also the linguistic and
cultural terrain of the novel, which is suspended between Japanese and English
cultural norms … Ono is both a Japanese character and an English narrator,
his feelings, thoughts and convictions being conveyed to us through an English
that is “inflected” in Eva Hoffman’s sense with Ishiguro’s native language. The
author’s consciousness spans these two distinct cultural worlds, translating the
perspective of a Japanese ‘self’ into the parameters of an English-speaking
presumed reader, and creating a unique bicultural and bilingual narrative.
(Besemeres 274)

‘Language Migrant’ Writers and Japan

As mentioned previously, the ‘language migrant’ writers whose ‘self-translation’

processes Besemeres discusses, are, like Ishiguro, writers who moved from a non-
English primary language into English. It would, however, also be interesting
to briefly consider Ishiguro not only in relation to ‘language migrant’ writers
writing in English, but also to ‘language migrant’ writers who engage with
Japan in some form. Unlike Ishiguro (and the nikkei Japanese-American authors
referred to earlier) the writers I have in mind all write in Japanese (and in the
case of one particular writer I discuss below, in another language, too). However,
20 Kazuo Ishiguro in a Global Context / Dasgupta

like Ishiguro, they are situated in the fault lines between Japanese and another
language. I am not thinking so much of zainchi Korean-Japanese writers (like
the prestigious Akutagawa Prize winning Miri Yu) who in recent decades have
drawn attention as part of a growing awareness of internal diversity within
Japanese society. Such second, third or fourth generation zainichi writers were
born in Japan, and hence write in Japanese as their first language. In this regard,
rather than being ‘language migrants’ they are closer to the second/third/fourth-
generation nikkei Japanese-American writers I referred to earlier. Rather, when
considered through Besemeres’s framework, Ishiguro has more in common with
writers like the Chinese-Japanese writer Yi Yang, or the Iranian-Japanese writer,
Shirin Nezammafi. Both were born elsewhere, and only moved to Japan later in
life. However, both write in Japanese and have received considerable acclaim for
their works – Yang won Japan’s top literary award, the Akutagawa Prize in 2008
for her Toki ga nijimu asa (‘The Morning When Time Blurs’); and Nezammafi, an
engineer by training and profession, who moved to Japan as a university student
– and who received considerable acclaim for her debut novellas, Salam and Shiroi
kami (‘White Paper’) – won the competitive Bungeishunjū Award for new writers
in 2009, and was also short-listed for the Akutagawa Prize.
While it would be interesting to consider Ishiguro in relation to Yang or
Nezammafi, the writer who is of particular interest to me in the present context
is the poet and writer Yōko Tawada. Tawada was born in Japan, but moved to
Germany for her postgraduate studies, and has lived there since. Unlike the other
‘language migrant’ writers, Tawada writes in both her primary language (Japanese)
and German, the language she ‘migrated’ into. She has received considerable
critical acclaim, and has won various Japanese and German literary awards, for her
creative efforts in both languages. Some of her works (for example, Where Europe
Begins, Facing the Bridge, The Bridegroom Was a Dog) have also been translated
into English. Tawada’s writings have a lyrical, almost dream-like and hypnotic
quality. At the same time, her writing dislocates seemingly fixed assumptions
about identity articulated through language, culture, personal subjectivity, nation,
race, and ethnicity. As Doug Slaymaker observes:

[M]any of her essays articulate experience in the space between those two
languages [Japanese and German] (and by extension, cultures). Tawada’s tales
are organized by migration and traveling, by language and loss, cultural practice
and memory; the resulting gaps, gullies, and the self-serving misrememberings
give her work their landscape, a terrain that extends beyond national boundaries
in the face of globalizing cultures. (Slaymaker, ‘Writing in the Ravine’ 45)

At the same time, Slaymaker points out that:

Tawada does not write of immigrants or migrants, of the abject desperation of

refugees and runaways. She does write, however, of a contemporary malaise,
of living in more than one language, with identities in more than one cultural
tradition, of subjectivities defined by overlapping and often contradictory
linguistic webs. (Slaymaker, ‘Yōko Tawada’ 3)
 Kazuo Ishiguro and ‘Imagining Japan’ 21

These linguistic webs, ‘language as an enveloping web, full of holes,

containing and constricting’ (Slaymaker, ‘Writing in the Ravine’, 47), constantly
recur through her works. Yet, she also questions the assumption that there must
be ‘a unity between a language … and identity’ (49). For instance, in the story ‘In
Front of Trang Tien Bridge’, the protagonist, Kazuko, a Japanese woman living
in Europe, travels to Vietnam, a trip that seems to both reinforce and disrupt her
sense of ‘Japanese-ness.’ Not only do the lines between Vietnamese and Japanese
blur, the binaries between Japanese/East Asian and English/Caucasian are also
played with. Kazuko meets James, a blond-haired, green-eyed young American
man who, right from their first encounter, speaks to her only in Japanese, without
any sense that there is something out of the ordinary about it. At one point in the
story, Kazuko asks James about this:

He picked up each bean one by one as if he had used chopsticks his entire life.
“How come you speak Japanese?” The words were out before she could stop
them. … “Because I’m Japanese,” he answered gravely. “And how did that
happen?” she countered, a bit put out, but James … calmly threw the query back
at her. “What about you? How did you become Japanese?” (Tawada 91)

Conclusion

Constraints on length prevent me from exploring Tawada’s works in more detail

in the present discussion, but there is something suggestive of Ishiguro in the way
that both engage with, and transcend, Japan (specifically ‘imaginings’ of Japan)
in their writing. In this regard, both Ishiguro and Tawada may be conceived of
as not just Japanese/British/German/postcolonial/diasporic writers, but rather
as ‘international’ or ‘global’ writers (Cheng; Walkowitz). Indeed, as Rebecca
Walkowitz comments, ‘Ishiguro forces categories such as “nation, culture, and
English” to operate comparatively … [and] challenges us to see that a new
conception of “global culture” if it is to be something other than an enlargement
of national culture, will require a new idea of literature itself’ (219). If we replace
‘English’ with ‘German’ or ‘Japanese’ this observation would just as easily apply
to Tawada and other language migrant writers.

Works Cited

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1998. 17–26. Print.
22 Kazuo Ishiguro in a Global Context / Dasgupta

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Voices from Everywhere. Ed. Doug Slaymaker. Lanham: Lexington Books,
2007. 1–11. Print.
Tawada, Yōko. ‘In Front of Trang Tien Bridge’. Facing the Bridge. Trans. Margaret
Mitsutani. New York: New Directions, 2007. 49–105. Print.
Uslu, Melih. ‘Bu Kış Nereye Gitmeli Ne Okumalı/Where to Go and What to Read
this Winter.’ Skylife (December 2011): 122–9. Print.
Walkowitz, Rebecca L. ‘Unimaginable Largeness: Kazuo Ishiguro, Translation,
and the New World Literature’. Novel 40.3 (2007): 216–39. JSTOR. Web. 2
April 2013.
Wong, Cynthia F. Kazuo Ishiguro. Tavistock: Northcote House, 2000. Print.
Zournazi, Mary. Foreign Dialogues: Memories, Translations, Conversations.
Pluto Press: Annadale, NSW, 1998. Print.
 Chapter 2
Reworking Myths:
Stereotypes and Genre Conventions
in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Work
Stefanie Fricke, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich, Germany

In one of his earliest short stories, ‘A Family Supper’ (1983), Kazuo Ishiguro has
a Japanese first-person narrator recount an evening with his father and sister. By
giving numerous hints – for example the narrator’s mother’s possible suicide by
eating fugu fish (439), and the father’s business partner’s sepukku after the collapse
of the firm (435) – Ishiguro leads the readers to suspect that the father, a man ‘proud
of the pure samurai blood that ran in the family’ (435), plans something sinister
when he serves fish for supper. Tension is carefully built up, only to evaporate at
the end when the father declares that his partner’s suicide was a mistake (442). ‘A
Family Supper’ is an early example of how Ishiguro refers to stereotypes to create
reader expectations that are ultimately subverted. The author explains:

[The British] seem to think the Japanese are dying to kill themselves … I suppose
in that story I was consciously playing on the expectations of a Western reader.
You can trip the reader up by giving out a few omens. Once I set the expectation
about the fugu fish up I found I could use that tension and that sense of darkness
for my own purposes. (Sexton 30)

Similarly, in many of his works Ishiguro uses not only stereotypes, but also specific
genres (understood as ‘a set of constitutive conventions and codes … shared by a
kind of implicit contract between writer and reader’ [Abrams and Harpham 149]),
to create and often subvert reader expectations. The reasons for his engagement
with stereotypes and genres are however not purely artistic, for according to him
‘it is one of the important jobs of the novelist to actually tackle and rework myths’
(Vorda and Herzinger 74).
By looking at A Pale View of Hills, An Artist of the Floating World, The
Remains of the Day, When We Were Orphans and Never Let Me Go, this essay
will demonstrate that the reworking of popular myths, stereotypes and genre
conventions is a crucial part of Ishiguro’s oeuvre as a whole,1 and of his self-image
as a writer addressing a global audience.

1
See also Cheng, Chapter 3 for an analysis of some of the stereotypes employed in
Ishiguro’s novels.
24 Kazuo Ishiguro in a Global Context / Fricke

Imagining Japan

Sepukku also plays a role in Ishiguro’s first two novels, A Pale View of Hills and
An Artist of the Floating World, but here the use of the motif is more complex than
in the short story. In An Artist of the Floating World, sepukku is set up as a means
of atonement for one’s involvement in Japan’s war efforts. As the narrator Ono is
told by an acquaintance, the President of his company committed suicide as ‘an
apology on behalf of us all to the families of those killed in the war’ (55). The way
the suicide was executed, however, shows that there is a discrepancy between the
cliché of a noble samurai bravely slashing his stomach, and reality, presented with
subtle irony by Ishiguro: ‘He was found gassed. But it seems he tried hara-kiri
first, for there were minor scratches around his stomach’ (55). Moreover, Ono is
not impressed at all, but comments: ‘that seems rather extreme’ (55). While his
children appear worried that Ono might also commit sepukku, he himself denies
ever thinking about it (154f., 192).
The issue of suicide confronts Ono with fundamental questions about himself
and is thereby also tied to the novel’s complex use of unreliability: If – as he
claims – he really was ‘a man of some influence, who used that influence towards
a disastrous end’ (192), he has to come to terms with this guilt one way or another,
and the idea of sepukku is not so far-fetched. If, on the other hand, Ono is deceiving
himself not only about his guilt, but also about the real importance of his work and
the social status it brought him, then it would indeed be absurd for him to commit
suicide.
In A Pale View of Hills, Keiko, the daughter of the narrator Etsuko, commits
suicide shortly before the narrative begins. Etsuko comments on how the English
drew on a national stereotype in reports of her death:

Keiko … was pure Japanese, and more than one newspaper was quick to pick up
on this fact. The English are fond of their idea that our race has an instinct for
suicide, as if further explanations are unnecessary; for that was all they reported,
that she was Japanese and that she had hung herself in her room. (10)

For her mother and Ishiguro, however, further explanations are necessary, and
consequently Etsuko revisits her memories of what happened years ago in
Nagasaki to come to terms with her feelings of guilt. As it turns out, Etsuko had
left Japan and her husband to follow an English journalist to England, and the
removal from her father and culture apparently traumatized Keiko so deeply that
she finally committed suicide.
Dead children and images of ropes and hanging haunt the story (47, 54, 73f.,
83f., 95f., 100, 173), emphasizing the motifs of child-neglect and death. Suicide is
moreover implied by allusions to the popular Western figure of Madame Butterfly,2

2
For the development and the different versions of the Butterfly story see van Rij.
For a detailed discussion of A Pale View of Hill’s connections to Madame Butterfly see
Cheng, 175–86.
 Reworking Myths 25

whose story is also set in Nagasaki and recounts the ill-fated relationship of a
young Japanese girl with an American naval officer. Both Etsuko and her double
Sachiko are reminiscent of this figure who, in the most famous adaptation of this
story, the opera Madame Butterfly by Giacomo Puccini (1904), finally commits
suicide with her father’s hara-kiri knife.
As in the various Butterfly stories, Sachiko, who like Butterfly comes from
a once-wealthy family but is now impoverished, has a troubled affair with an
American lover called Frank. Not only is his first name reminiscent of Butterfly’s
Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton, but his white car also recalls Pinkerton’s white ship
that Butterfly is waiting for (12). Sachiko’s character, however, is very different
from that of the lovesick and naive young girl portrayed in the western texts,3 and
consequently suicide is never an option. Like Sachiko, Etsuko also enters into a
relationship with a westerner, and they – like Butterfly and her American lover –
have a child together. In contrast to Butterfly, she actually leaves Japan, but it is
exactly the fulfilment of Butterfly’s/Sachiko’s/Etsuko’s dream to start a new life in
the West that ultimately brings about the suicide of Etsuko’s first daughter.
In contrast to the western Butterfly texts, Ishiguro has the woman tell her own
story. Both Frank and Etsuko’s husband are shadowy minor characters, and agency
here seems to rest very much with Sachiko and Etsuko. As Chu-chueh Cheng
stresses, the latter’s self-presentation as a traditional, submissive Japanese woman
is furthered by her connection to Butterfly (92). In reality, however, Etsuko’s story
– as well as the fact that she left her husband – hints at a very different woman.
These intertextual echoes also show that Ishiguro’s novels do not necessarily
give a realistic depiction of Japan, but play with Western images and fantasies:
‘I am not essentially concerned with a realist purpose in writing. I just invent a
Japan which serves my needs’ (Mason, ‘Interview’ 8f.). Ishiguro, who stresses
the importance of filmic images of Japan for his work (see Mason, ‘Inspiring
Images’), creates ‘Japan’ out of certain evocative set-pieces, the descriptions of
houses, streets, gardens and pleasure quarters, and the presentation of dialogue
which is characterized by politeness, hierarchical structures and gender roles.
The narrator’s English seems slightly off, a ‘translationese’ (Mason, ‘Interview’
13) in which Japanese terms like ‘sensei,’ ‘tatami’ and the suffix ‘-san’ create
further authenticity, making the setting at once exotic and familiar from other
representations of Japan.
While Ishiguro uses these set-pieces, he also subtly hints at the clichéd nature
of his depiction, and of constructions of ‘Japan’ in general. Remembering his early
employment at a firm where ‘Japanese’ paintings for Western consumers were
produced, Ono states:

3
Sachiko’s realistic approach to her relationship is more reminiscent of the origin of
the Butterfly story, the novel Madame Chrysanthème (1887) by Pierre Loti, in which the
Japanese girl does not fall in love and is keen on the money she gets from her European
lover.
26 Kazuo Ishiguro in a Global Context / Fricke

We were also quite aware that the essential point about the sort of thing we were
commissioned to paint – geishas, cherry trees, swimming carps, temples – was
that they look ‘Japanese’ to the foreigners to whom they were shipped out, and
all finer points of style were quite likely to go unnoticed. (69)

Hanging on in Quiet Desperation Is the English Way4

After creating an imaginary Japan in his first two novels, Ishiguro employed well-
known cultural myths – the butler, the gentleman and lord, the country house – to
construct ‘England’ in The Remains of the Day:

There is kind of an international myth about the English butler and English
country life that is one that has been fed all around the world … It’s the butler as
stereotype from plays, books and movies, and it’s that stereotype, the myth that
I’m able, then, to tap into and manipulate. (Shaikh)

Stevens can certainly be called the embodiment of the English butler: loyal,
discreet and utterly professional. His voice, that curiously stilted ‘butler-speak’
in which he not only talks but also thinks, shows us a man obsessed with service
and with becoming a ‘great’ butler (29). According to him, great butlers ‘inhabit
their professional role and inhabit it to the utmost’ (42f.). For Stevens (whose first
name we never learn, but who is addressed throughout by his surname which is
also his designation as a servant) this ultimately means complete self-renunciation
in favour of service to his lord. As Ishiguro stresses, however, Stevens’s ideology
is not only the reason for his repression, but also a justification for not facing his
emotions:

That stereotypical figure of the English butler … I thought would serve well as
some kind of emblem of this terrible fear of the emotional in one’s self, and the
tendency to equate having feelings with weakness. And this terrible struggle to
deny that emotional side that can love and that can suffer. (Kelman 46)

Stevens stands in the tradition of butler(-like) figures such as Hudson from Upstairs,
Downstairs and P. G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves. But whereas many literary servants,
and Jeeves in particular, are portrayed as cleverer than their masters, whom they
often skilfully manipulate, Stevens is convinced of his lord’s superiority.
Like Stevens, Lord Darlington also embodies an English stereotype, the ‘classic
English gentleman. Decent, honest, well-meaning’ (102).5 According to Stevens,
Darlington felt that the treaty of Versailles was unfair and ‘un-English’ (71), and
consequently tried to ‘see an end to injustice and suffering’ (74). These honorable
motives, however, ultimately made him participate in appeasement policy. Even

4
Pink Floyd, ‘Time.’
5
For a detailed discussion of the figure of the gentleman in Remains of the Day see
Berberich 2007.
 Reworking Myths 27

though Stevens keeps defending his master (61, 125f.), Darlington’s behavior,
especially his sacking of two Jewish maids (147–9) and his admiration for ‘strong
leadership’ in Germany and Italy (198f.), increasingly jars with the readers.
Darlington represents a political class estranged from the modern world and stuck
in the values and privileges of a bygone era. As Stevens stresses, there were many
other English aristocrats who had similar sympathies for the Nazis (136f.). The
hollowness of the ideal of the English ‘gentleman’ is further highlighted by the
fact that Stevens – simply due to his stilted language and the handed-down clothes
he wears – is mistaken for one on several occasions (26, 119, 163, 182–5, 208).
Whereas Lord Darlington is found guilty by actively engaging in politics,
Stevens is guilty because he did not. Even though he knew perfectly well what
was going on at Darlington Hall (74), he never said or did anything against it, for
to question his employer would have been against his ideology of service (222).
According to Stevens:

[T]he likes of you and I will never be in a position to comprehend the great
affairs of today’s world, and our best course will always be to put our trust in an
employer we judge to be wise and honourable, and to devote our energies to the
task of serving him to the best of our ability. (201)

This hints at the metaphorical dimension of Ishiguro’s novel, for according to the
author:

The butler is a good metaphor for the relationship of very ordinary, small people
to power. Most of us aren’t given governments to run or coup d’etats to lead. We
have to offer up the little services we have perfected to … causes, to employers,
to organizations and hope for the best – that we approve of the way it gets used.
(Swift 37)

Ishiguro subverts the stereotypes of butler and gentleman to show the dark sides of
the ideas they stand for. This is further enhanced by his use of the genre of country
house fiction,6 which usually expresses conservative and nostalgic sentiments.
Typical for this genre, Darlington Hall embodies ‘Englishness’, tradition and
harmonious relations between the social classes. Stevens’s nostalgic memories
of the glorious past are however contrasted with the present in which Darlington
Hall has very much lost its lustre7 – just like Lord Darlington himself, who came
to be seen as a traitor after the war. When Darlington died, the house was sold to
an American, and large parts of the house are now under wraps (6f.). This is by no
means exceptional, as Stevens sees on his journey when he comes upon another
house that suffers a similar fate (118f.).

6
For the genre of country house fiction see Kelsall. For a detailed discussion of
different genres found in Remains, see Ekelund.
7
For a similar symbolic use of the country house see Rose Tremain’s Sadler’s
Birthday (1976).
28 Kazuo Ishiguro in a Global Context / Fricke

It is, of course, highly symbolic that Darlington Hall is bought by an American,

a fate that it seems to share with other houses (123). The country house here serves
as symbol for Britain, and it is no coincidence that the present of the novel is
set in the summer of 1956, the time of the Suez crisis which showed the decline
of the British Empire and the growing influence of the US. With the economic
crisis after the war, only the Americans have enough financial resources to buy
up English country houses, thereby metaphorically stepping into the shoes of the
English aristocracy.
Stevens identifies with Darlington Hall, the smooth running of which gives
his life purpose. It is, however, also a prison – as his new master comments: ‘You
fellows, you’re always locked up in these big houses’ (4), and both the attic room
inhabited by Stevens’s father and his own pantry are likened to prison cells (64,
165). Stevens’s trip to the West Country is the first time he has left the house in
years, and the distance from Darlington House gives him the chance to re-evaluate
the past. The journey is also, although he never admits it, a quest to ‘save’ Miss
Kenton from her failed marriage and win her for himself.
Ishiguro employs the forms of the travelogue and the quest-romance,8 but
subverts both of them. Stevens’s quest for Miss Kenton fails miserably, and while
Stevens narrates his travels and the sights and people he encounters, the greatest
part of his narrative is taken up by his memories. In his mind he never really leaves
Darlington Hall. As the end of the novel indicates, Stevens will ultimately return
to it, repress the realisation that his life was wasted on wrong ideologies, and go
on to serve his new master as best as he can.
By tapping into the cultural myths of the English butler, gentleman and the
English country house, Ishiguro also touches upon ideas of ‘Englishness’ in
general, especially the idealized and nostalgic myth of rural England run by
a benign aristocracy. The setting of the novel – Darlington Hall as well as the
landscape Stevens traverses on his journey – is reminiscent of images of ‘merry
England’. Stevens himself ruminates on Englishness and the English landscape,
stressing its ‘greatness’ and stating that it is ‘the very lack of obvious drama or
spectacle that sets the beauty of our land apart. What is pertinent is the calmness of
that beauty, its sense of restraint’ (28f). He immediately links this to his thoughts
on what constitutes a ‘great’ butler (29), later claiming that only the English are
able to be ‘great’ butlers because only they are capable of ‘emotional restraint’ and
therefore ‘dignity’ (43).
By connecting Stevens’s misguided professional ideology to his notions of
Englishness, Ishiguro draws attention to the darker sides of this construct:

What I’m trying to do there … is to actually rework a particular myth about

a certain kind of mythical England … The mythical landscape of this sort of
England, to a large degree, is harmless nostalgia for a time that didn’t exist.
The other side of this, however, is that it is used as a political tool … This can
be brought out by the left or right, but usually it is the political right who say

8
For a discussion of The Remains of the Day as a quest-romance see Kremkau.
 Reworking Myths 29

England was this beautiful place before the trade unions tried to make it more
egalitarian or before the immigrants started to come or before the promiscuous
age of the ’60s came and ruined everything. (Vorda and Herzinger 74)

Written in the 1980s, at the height of the Thatcher-Tory-government, The Remains

of the Day not only critically comments on the 1920s/30s and 1950s, but also
on the 1980s’ political exploitation of nostalgia.9 By using myths of Englishness
in this ‘super-English novel’ (Vorda and Herzinger 73), Ishiguro ‘demolishes the
value system of the whole upstairs-downstairs world’ (Rushdie).

Rooting Out Evil

Notions of England and Englishness also pervade When We Were Orphans. Again,
England is not so much a real country, but has a mythical, ‘literary’ quality. From
the novel: ‘“England is a splendid country,” Colonel Hasegawa was saying. “Calm,
dignified. Beautiful green fields. I still dream of it. And your literature. Dickens,
Thackeray. Wuthering Heights. I am especially fond of your Dickens”’ (324).
The implied references to the orphaned protagonists in Wuthering Heights and
Dickens’s texts as well as to Thackeray’s satirical style point to the ‘literariness’
of the world Ishiguro portrays in his novel. Similarly, Banks’s life in London
again echoes P.G. Wodehouse (20f, 77), and his relationship with Sarah and the
final twist regarding the origins of his wealth are reminiscent of Dickens’s Great
Expectations.10 The fate of Banks’s mother as concubine to a Chinese warlord
(343–5) evokes Orientalist fantasies.11 Within the story, the protagonist’s image
of England is also shaped by literature. Christopher Banks grows up in Shanghai
and consequently has only a dim idea of England derived from reading books
like Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe and Sir
Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories (62, 127).
As a child, Banks is worried that he is not ‘enough English’ (90f.).
Consequently, he tries to study and emulate the Englishman around him (62, 91),
a practice he continues when he has to move to England and enters a boarding
school (8). Nevertheless, later Banks states that ‘All these years I’ve lived in
England, I’ve never really felt at home there’ (301). This emotional estrangement
from England is contrasted with Banks’s outward appearance as a typical young,
well-off Englishman: He is sent to public school, later attends Cambridge, enters
society and is part of one of the fashionable London ‘sets’ (21). In becoming a
detective, he also establishes himself as a pillar of English society. It seems that
‘Englishness’ is a mask that can be acquired given enough effort and money. As it
turns out, however, all this Englishness was purchased with funds provided by the
Chinese warlord who kidnapped Banks’s mother, money which ultimately derives
from the opium trade and is bought by his mother’s sexual submission (343f, 346).

9
See Samuel for Thatcher’s use of Victorian values.
10
For a more detailed comparison see Cunningham.
11
Of course, Shanghai as portrayed in this novel is also a construct (cf. Shaikh).
30 Kazuo Ishiguro in a Global Context / Fricke

This revelation turns Banks into a symbol for an England that profited from the
opium trade (339), and emphasises the fact that England and the idea of Englishness
were created on the basis of often immoral economic and political ventures. The
Japanese Colonel who refers to the classics of English literature also stresses the
connection between ruthless cruelty and ‘greatness’ when he comments on the
carnage caused by the Japanese invasion of China: ‘But if Japan is to become a
great nation, like yours, Mr Banks, it is necessary. Just as it once was for England’
(326). Banks has nothing to reply to that.
Among the literary connections of the novel, the detective story is the most
important. Ishiguro especially refers back to early forms of the genre, ranging from
Conan Doyle to the so-called Golden Age of Detective Fiction in the 1920s and
1930s. According to him, he was particularly interested in the latter’s treatment
of ‘evil’:

The evil is always very clear and easy to identify; you just don’t know who the
bad person is, and that’s the mystery. So the detective unmasks this one element
and everything goes back to being beautiful again. … So part of my reason
for being attracted to the whole detective thing was to say, ‘Well, let’s look
at someone who believes that everything that’s gone bad in the world, in his
personal world as well as the larger world, comes from an evil criminal element
that needs to be unmasked. Let’s bring him into the chaos of the twentieth
century and the brink of another world war’. (Hogan 159)

Banks carefully fashions himself as the perfect detective in the vein of Sherlock
Holmes, thereby again attempting to reaffirm his Englishness: he owns a magnifying
glass manufactured in 1887, the year the figure of Holmes first appeared in print;
he lives in a flat furnished ‘in a tasteful manner that evoked an unhurried Victorian
past’ (3); and he aspires to become a ‘private consultant’ (18), again reminiscent
of Holmes’s ‘unofficial consulting detective’ (Doyle 90).12
While Banks presents himself as a capable and celebrated detective, the
narration itself does not meet the readers’ expectations: as Hélène Machinal notes,
‘In classic detective fiction, form and convention preclude any direct access to the
detective’s thoughts, his hunches or intimations of a solution to the mystery. First-
person narrative might spoil the suspense’ (83).13 Here, however, we are stuck
inside the detective’s mind – a mind that seems to betray a surprising lack of
insight. Moreover, the readers learn hardly anything about Banks’s cases. They are
tantalizingly mentioned in passing, while the focus of the narrative is on Banks’s
memories, his life in London and the social standing of detectives in general. For
in Banks’s world – or in his perception of the world – detectives are celebrities
who bravely fight against evil (18f., 24, 35). Ishiguro’s absurd exaggeration of
stereotypes of crime fiction is most obvious in Banks’s conviction that the centre
of evil and thus the centre of the crisis that threatens the whole world lies in

12
For a detailed comparison with Conan Doyle’s Holmes stories see Döring.
13
See also Rowland for Golden Age detective fiction.
 Reworking Myths 31

Shanghai, and that by solving the case of his parents’ disappearance he could also
somehow stop the war and save the world (161–4, 172, 192, 250).
While searching for his parents, Banks enters the combat zone between
Chinese and Japanese. Faced with the real horrors of war, he still sticks to his role
as detective, clings to it to cope with what is going on around him. In a memorable
scene he takes out his magnifying glass to examine the arm stump of a dead
woman, promising her surviving little daughter: ‘“I swear to you, whoever did
all this, whoever did this ghastly thing, they won’t escape justice. You may not
know who I am, but as it happens, I’m … well, I’m just the person you want. I’ll
see to it they don’t get away”’ (319). At the end, it turns out that Uncle Philip,
an Englishman and not a sinister Chinese, is the ‘villain’ of the novel. Banks
indeed solves the crime and – typical for crime fiction – faces Uncle Philip who
tells him what happened all those years ago (333–48). This however proves to
be an anticlimax, for Banks learns that – far from being kidnapped for heroically
opposing the opium trade – his father only ran off with his mistress and died long
ago (336). Years later, when Banks finally finds his mother again, she is mentally
deranged and unable to recognize him (353–9). While classic detective fiction
celebrates a return to order and harmony, here in the face of twentieth-century
history no order can be restored.
At least, the truth about his parents’ disappearance finally gives Banks the
strength to let go of his childhood (325). For When We Were Orphans is also an
unusual Bildungsroman, one in which the protagonist does not really grow up.
According to Ishiguro, he wanted to depict nostalgia for the protective ‘bubble’ of
childhood we all inhabit, and show what happens if you have to leave this bubble
too soon (Wong 183f). When Banks loses his parents, his whole world collapses
around him (176). Deeply traumatized, he clings to his childhood fantasies of
saving them, believing that his parents are still being held captive somewhere
in Shanghai (140, 273f). When he enters the war-zone in search for them, he re-
enacts the rescue-fantasies he thought up with his childhood friend Akira all those
years ago (127; 130-133). Banks is so stuck in the past that when he meets a
Japanese soldier he believes he has found Akira again (293), and that ‘He’s going
to help me. Help me to solve the case’ (295).
As becomes increasingly clear, Banks’s clichéd detective-persona is just a
mask behind which a lost boy hides. He obsessively believes that he can heal the
pain of his loss and resume his happy childhood if he could just solve the case.
When this happens, however, Banks has to realize that a return to his childhood-
Eden is impossible.

A Kind of Golden Time

Childhood also haunts Never Let Me Go, in which Ishiguro again takes up a very
English institution and genre, the boarding school and school story. Established
in the nineteenth century, the school story traditionally chronicles life at English
32 Kazuo Ishiguro in a Global Context / Fricke

boarding schools.14 Accordingly, large parts of Ishiguro’s novel are taken up with
memories of everyday school life at Hailsham and the relationship the narrator
Kathy H. had with her fellow pupils and teachers. Groups are formed, hierarchies
established, children are mobbed. In many ways, life at Hailsham seems idyllic –
and it certainly was so for the narrator, whose memories (and consequently the text
as a whole) are overshadowed by the school.
The nostalgia infused into the description of Hailsham by Kathy’s memories
(and furthered by the readers’ expectations of the genre) is however undercut by
strange and jarring elements. Ishiguro ingeniously employs the conventions of the
school story to turn the cosy, nostalgic environment this genre usually presents
against itself, and to slowly build up a world which seems quite ordinary, even a
bit boring at first, but gets more and more harrowing.
As in the school story, parents make no appearance in Never Let Me Go. Here,
however, they are not just absent, but they do not exist at all since the children
are clones. Their teachers, ambivalently called ‘guardians’, are the closest they
will ever get to parents. The tight relationships between the children – a typical
feature of the genre – here results from the fact that they have been in each other’s
company all their lives (4). Since clones are infertile, their fellow-pupils are the
only family they will ever have.
This tightly knit community, however, leaves little space for privacy (82).
Dorm rooms are kept open except when the pupils sleep (65), and it is hard to
talk without being overheard or watched by others (20–24, 28). The feeling of
constantly being observed can be a feature of an ordinary school story (Grenby
99f), but in combination with this dystopian setting it acquires a more sinister
dimension.
As in the tradition of the genre, the school seems a self-contained society cut
off from the world outside (31, 60f) – but here the pupils really are apart, kept out
of sight in a society that only uses them for their body parts. Also, pride in their
school is instilled into the children, who are told that they are ‘all very special,
being Hailsham students’ (39). But while they indeed are privileged within the
clone community, in the wider context their being raised at Hailsham does not
matter at all.
In interviews, Ishiguro again linked Hailsham to the protective ‘bubble’ of
childhood (Bates 199). When Kathy voices surprise at finding out that some
people think clones do not have a soul, she is told by the former head guardian:
‘“It’s touching, Kathy, to see you so taken aback. It demonstrates, in a way, that
we did our job well. … You Hailsham students, even after you’ve been out in the
world like this, you still don’t know the half of it”’ (238). As the guardian stresses,
the sheltered childhood of Kathy and her friends was only possible by keeping
information from them:

14
For the school story see Musgrave and Grenby.
 Reworking Myths 33

“You see, we were able to give you something, something which even now
no one will ever take from you, and we were able to do that principally by
sheltering you. … Very well, sometimes that meant we kept things from you,
lied to you. … But we sheltered you during those years, and we gave you your
childhoods. … You wouldn’t be who you are today if we’d not protected you.
You wouldn’t have become absorbed in your lessons, you wouldn’t have lost
yourselves in your art and your writing. Why should you have done, knowing
what lay in store for each of you?” (245)

Information on their future is given to the children in careful doses – they are
‘told and not told’ (73) at the same time (27, 63, 75). Hailsham also never directly
challenged the system and, on the contrary, one might argue that it stabilized it by
giving it a more ‘humane’ appearance and instilling society’s values and ideology
into the clones. Here, Ishiguro again works within the frame of traditional school
stories, in which authority (and implicitly the class system) is not questioned,
and which ‘tend to focus on socialisation: characters learn how to integrate
successfully into a community and to reconcile the demands of self and society’
(Grenby 113).
The aim of those who ran Hailsham was not to free the clones, but to give them
at least a good childhood and education. As the head guardian tells Kathy: ‘Look
at you both now! You’ve had good lives, you’re educated and cultured’ (238).
Hailsham embodies classical humanist ideals, but at the end those cannot save the
clones, and Tommy’s hope that the art they produced might at least buy him and
Kathy some time together is shattered.
Apart from the school story, the closest genre ties15 of Never Let Me Go are
with dystopian fiction.16 Again, Ishiguro uses some of the genre’s characteristics,
such as employing euphemistic language (‘donors’, ‘to complete’ etc.) to express
the control and distortion of reality. The scene where Kathy and Tommy confront
Miss Emily and Madame is also a stock ingredient of many dystopian texts: The
protagonist finally talks to a representative of the system and gets new insights
into how the dystopian society works. Just as with Ishiguro’s appropriation of the
school story, however, it is more interesting how he subverts the characteristics of
the genre.
The usual behaviour for a protagonist in a dystopian text would be to slowly
come to realise how unjust the system is, then rebel against it. In Ishiguro’s novel,
however, none of the clones ever revolt. They dream of ordinary lives, ordinary
jobs, but do nothing to break out of their assigned role. The most we see are
Tommy’s outbursts of anger (252) and his and Kathy’s attempt to get a deferral,
but even this is made within the system’s rules, and when they learn that there is
no such thing, they resign to their fates. This is all the more surprising since – in

15
Never Let Me Go also belongs to the genres of alternative history, science fiction
and Bildungsroman.
16
This is also discussed in Toker and Chertoff. For the genre of dystopia see Kumar.
34 Kazuo Ishiguro in a Global Context / Fricke

contrast to traditional dystopias – there seems to be hardly any surveillance as

soon as the clones leave Hailsham.
The clones’ passive acceptance shows that Ishiguro’s dystopian vision is more
subtle and complex than that of most similar texts. It also again draws attention to
the ambivalence of Hailsham and its complicity in the system. The education the
clones received there may have been a good one, but it obviously does not make
them question their position in society.
The complexity of Ishiguro’s depiction is also furthered by his treatment of
art and love. Usually in dystopias, creativity and ‘real’ art (as opposed to popular
entertainment which is used to sedate the masses) is banned by the government
because it is perceived as potentially subversive. Here, however, it seems that art
and creativity are not seen as dangerous at all, but are part of the system, a means
to keep the clones occupied and quiet.
Similarly, love and sexuality are often subversive in dystopian texts. For the
clones, however, there are no restrictions on personal relationships and sexuality
is encouraged and may even be used by the system. As Kathy notes, in their
school lessons sexual education was often linked to talk about their future
donations (75f). For Kathy and Tommy their love is positive, but it comes too
late, and it does not conquer all. The hope that their love together with their art
might buy them more time turns out to be merely a rumour that gives the clones
something ‘to dream about, a little fantasy’ (235f). It is just another thing to keep
them quiet.
At the end of the novel, all of Kathy’s friends have already died and she is
about to begin ‘donating’ herself. Hailsham has closed, and while Kathy – who
does not know its exact location – thinks time and again that she has found it on
her trips around the country (5f), grail-like, it ever eludes her. Nevertheless, it is
always in her thoughts. Similar to Christopher Banks, Kathy can never really leave
her childhood behind, and its mundane events take on a large significance. Here,
however, this is because Kathy simply has no future. Her memories are all that is
left to her: ‘It’s like with my memories of Tommy and of Ruth. Once I’m able to
have a quieter life, in whichever centre they send me to, I’ll have Hailsham with
me, safely in my head, and that’ll be something no one can take away’ (262).

Writing for Norwegians

Michael Wood has stated about A Pale View of Hills that, ‘The way out of
stereotype, if there is one, may lead through stereotype’ (177). As this essay has
shown, Kazuo Ishiguro skilfully evokes, manipulates and ultimately subverts
stereotypes, myths and generic conventions to create stories with a metaphorical
quality which ultimately reveal some deeper and universal truths. As Ishiguro
stresses in several interviews, he also feels the pressure to be international as a
writer, which makes it necessary for him to think about his global audience and
what they will – and will not – understand:
 Reworking Myths 35

[A]fter you have … sat in a hotel room in Norway talking about your work – you
come home and you start to go back to work, on what you are writing. And you
can’t help every now and again remembering these Norwegians and you stop
and you think: ‘I can’t write that, because the Norwegians wouldn’t understand.’
(Gallix 145)

Readily apparent and globally known stereotypes and genre conventions not only
further the metaphorical and universal qualities of Ishiguro’s stories, but also
help him to build a connection with an international audience, making it easy for
readers to enter his worlds which might seem familiar and simple at first, but turn
out to be far more complex than expected.

Works Cited

Abrams, M.H. and Geoffrey Galt Harpham. ‘Genres’. A Glossary of Literary

Terms. 10th ed., Internat. ed. Boston, MA: Wadsworth Cengage Learning,
2012. 148–50. Print.
Bates, Karen Grigsby. ‘Interview with Kazuo Ishiguro, 2005’. Conversations with
Kazuo Ishiguro. Ed. Brian W. Shaffer and Cynthia F. Wong. Jackson, MS: UP
of Mississippi, 2008. 199–203. Print.
Berberich, Christine. The Image of the English Gentleman in Twentieth-Century
Literature: Englishness and Nostalgia. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007. Print.
Cheng, Chu-chueh. The Margin Without Centre: Kazuo Ishiguro. Oxford: Peter
Lang, 2010. Print.
Cunningham, Henry Carrington. ‘The Dickens Connection in Kazuo Ishiguro’s
When We Were Orphans’. Notes on Contemporary Literature 34.5 (2004): 4–6.
Print.
Döring, Tobias. ‘Sherlock Holmes – He Dead: Disenchanting the English Detective
in Kazuo Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans’. Postcolonial Postmortems:
Crime Fiction from a Transcultural Perspective. Ed. Christine Matzke and
Susanne Mühleisen. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006. 59–86. Print.
Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan. The Sign of the Four. The Penguin Complete Sherlock
Holmes. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984. 87–158. Print.
Ekelund, Bo G. ‘Misrecognizing History: Complicitous Genres in Kazuo Ishiguro’s
The Remains of the Day’. International Fiction Review 32.1–2 (2005): 70–90.
Print.
Gallix, François. ‘Kazuo Ishiguro: The Sorbonne Lecture, 1999’. Conversations
with Kazuo Ishiguro. Ed. Brian W. Shaffer and Cynthia F. Wong. Jackson, MS:
UP of Mississippi, 2008. 135–55. Print.
Grenby, Matthew O. Children’s Literature. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2008. Print.
Hogan, Ron. ‘Kazuo Ishiguro, 2000’. Conversations with Kazuo Ishiguro. Ed.
Brian W. Shaffer and Cynthia F. Wong. Jackson, MS: UP of Mississippi, 2008.
156–60. Print.
36 Kazuo Ishiguro in a Global Context / Fricke

Ishiguro, Kazuo. An Artist of the Floating World. London: Faber and Faber, 1987.
Print.
———. ‘A Family Supper.’ The Penguin Book of Modern British Short Stories.
Ed. Malcolm Bradbury. London: Penguin, 1988. 434–42. Print.
———. Never Let Me Go. London: Faber and Faber, 2005. Print.
———. A Pale View of Hills. New York: Vintage International, 1990. Print.
———. The Remains of the Day. London: Faber and Faber, 1993. Print.
———. When We Were Orphans. London: Faber and Faber, 2000. Print.
Kelman, Suanne. ‘Ishiguro in Toronto, 1989’. Conversations with Kazuo Ishiguro.
Ed. Brian W. Shaffer and Cynthia F. Wong. Jackson, MS: UP of Mississippi,
2008. 42–51. Print.
Kelsall, Malcolm Miles. The Great Good Place: The Country House and English
Literature. New York: Columbia UP, 1993. Print.
Kremkau, Simone. Vergangenheit, Erinnerung und Nostalgie im englischen
Roman nach 1945. Göttingen: Cuvillier, 2003. Print.
Kumar, Krishan. Utopia and Anti-Utopia in Modern Times. Oxford: Blackwell,
1987. Print.
Machinal, Hélène. ‘When We Were Orphans: Narration and Detection in the Case
of Christopher Banks’. Kazuo Ishiguro: Contemporary Critical Perspectives.
Ed. Sean Matthews and Sebastian Groes. London: Continuum, 2009. 79–90.
Print.
Mason, Gregory. ‘Inspiring Images: The Influence of Japanese Cinema on the
Writings of Kazuo Ishiguro’. East-West Film Journal 3.2 (1989): 39–52. Print.
———. ‘An Interview with Kazuo Ishiguro, 1986’. Conversations with Kazuo
Ishiguro. Ed. Brian W. Shaffer and Cynthia F. Wong. Jackson, MS: UP of
Mississippi, 2008. 3–14. Print.
Musgrave, P.W. From Brown to Bunter: The Life and Death of the School Story.
London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985. Print.
Pink Floyd. ‘Time’. The Dark Side of the Moon. EMI, 2011.
van Rij, Jan. Madame Butterfly: Japonisme, Puccini, & the Search for the real
Cho-Cho-San. Berkeley, CA: Stone Bridge Press, 2001. Print.
Rowland, Susan. ‘The “Classical” Model of the Golden Age’. A Companion to
Crime Fiction. Ed. Charles J. Rzepka and Lee Horsley. Chichester: Wiley-
Blackwell, 2010. 117–27. Print.
Rushdie, Salman. ‘Rereading The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro.’
The Guardian Online (17 Aug. 2012). Web. 12 January 2013. <http://www.
guardian.co.uk/books/2012/aug/17/rereading-remains-day-salman-rushdie>.
Samuel, Raphael. ‘Mrs Thatcher and Victorian Values’. Theatres of Memory
Volume 2: Island Stories: Unravelling Britain. Ed. Raphael Samuel and Alison
Light. London: Verso, 1998: 330–48. Print.
Sexton, David. ‘Interview: David Sexton Meets Kazuo Ishiguro, 1987’.
Conversations with Kazuo Ishiguro. Ed. Brian W. Shaffer and Cynthia F.
Wong. Jackson, MS: UP of Mississippi, 2008. 27–34. Print.
 Reworking Myths 37

Shaikh, Nermeen. ‘Kazuo Ishiguro’s Interior Worlds: Interview’. Asia Society.

Web. 2 January 2013. <http://asiasociety.org/arts/literature/kazuo-ishiguros-
interior-worlds>.
Swift, Graham. ‘Shorts: Kazuo Ishiguro, 1989’. Conversations with Kazuo
Ishiguro. Ed. Brian W. Shaffer and Cynthia F. Wong. Jackson, MS: UP of
Mississippi, 2008. 35–41. Print.
Toker, Leona, and Daniel Chertoff. ‘Reader Response and the Recycling of Topoi
in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go’. Partial Answers: Journal of Literature
and the History of Ideas 6.1 (2008): 163–80. Print.
Vorda, Allan and Herzinger, Kim. ‘An Interview with Kazuo Ishiguro, 1990’.
Conversations with Kazuo Ishiguro. Ed. Brian W. Shaffer and Cynthia F.
Wong. Jackson, MS: UP of Mississippi, 2008. 66–88. Print.
Wong, Cynthia F. ‘Like Idealism Is to the Intellect: An Interview with Kazuo
Ishiguro, 2001.’ Conversations with Kazuo Ishiguro. Ed. Brian W. Shaffer and
Cynthia F. Wong. Jackson, MS: UP of Mississippi, 2008. 174–88. Print.
Wood, Michael. Children of Silence: On Contemporary Fiction. New York:
Columbia UP, 1998. Print.
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 Chapter 3
Memory, Nostalgia and Recognition in
Ishiguro’s Work
Yugin Teo, Sussex University, United Kingdom

The field of memory studies has attracted much interest from various branches
of the humanities and social sciences internationally since the early 1990s, and
research in this field continues to expand across the disciplines.1 Memory is one
of the most important elements in Kazuo Ishiguro’s work. It appears as a hallmark
in his fiction and a theme that he constantly returns to examine. The significance
of memory in Ishiguro’s novels has often been noted by critics and academics, but
there has been surprisingly little published about this aspect of his work.
French philosopher Paul Ricoeur (1913–2005) had been preoccupied with the
themes of memory and recognition in his later published works Memory, History,
Forgetting and The Course of Recognition. Ricoeur’s interests were wide-ranging,
and his writings moved beyond the area of philosophical enquiry to include
literary criticism, psychoanalysis, linguistics and theology. Ricoeur’s theoretical
concerns with memory, as well as history, testimony and recognition form an ideal
framework with which to examine Ishiguro’s novels.

Recognition and Memory

The protagonists in Ishiguro’s first three novels experience moments of profound

revelation during climactic episodes. These moments reconnect the protagonists
with their forgotten past and their relationships with other characters, revealing
deeply hidden or deceptive elements from within their recollections. Their
unreliable narration is indicative of a past that is hidden below the surface until a
moment of revelation occurs. These moments generate a renewed understanding
of their individual identities and have further implications for the relationships
they have with those around them. Ricoeur describes these profound moments of
realisation through memory as recognition.

1
In Theories of Memory, Michael Rossington and Anne Whitehead discuss the
different factors for the ‘memory boom’ that took place in the 1990s (5). In her introduction
to Memory and Methodology, Susannah Radstone suggests that the ‘contemporary
explosion’ of scholarly work on memory is part of a more general cultural fascination with
memory (1).
40 Kazuo Ishiguro in a Global Context / Teo

Ricoeur, in The Course of Recognition, describes the concept of the ‘Capable

Human Being’ that highlights a human being’s ability to speak, act, narrate and be
accountable for his or her actions. When a person encounters a text and feels that
they recognise themselves in one of the characters, they are appropriating the text
for themselves in a manner described by Ricoeur as learning to ‘narrate oneself’
(99–101). Learning to narrate oneself points to an unconventional technique of
narrating; in this case, it is through identification with a character in the text. This
allows readers to experience a sense of recognition as they see something in the
characters that they recognise in themselves. Characters also experience a similar
sense of self-recognition. Once they learn of other ways of narrating their own
stories, often through a forgotten memory trace that challenges their perception of
themselves, they then experience a moment when they witness a different version
of themselves, but a version that they still recognise.
Etsuko, the protagonist in A Pale View of Hills, experiences such a moment
of recognition when the line between her seemingly innocent recollections
of a particular time in Nagasaki in the distant past and her present inner self-
examination is blurred in a flashback sequence. In attempting to convince the
young Mariko that she will eventually like moving to Kobe and learn to accept
her mother’s lover as her new father, she performs an unexpected turn of phrase.
Etsuko promises Mariko that if she did not like it over there, ‘we’ could always
come back (173). Etsuko no longer addresses Mariko as just ‘you,’ but includes
herself in the address with ‘we’. The characters of both Etsuko and Sachiko
(Mariko’s real mother) appear to have merged inexplicably. It is now unclear
who the person speaking to Mariko is, or to whom Etsuko is speaking (Mariko,
or her own daughter Keiko several years later in the future). In this instance at
least, Etsuko appropriates the character of Sachiko as a mask to confront her own
history, utilising Sachiko’s past to help her analyse the decisions she made many
years ago. In the novel’s present time in England, Etsuko confesses to her other
daughter Niki that she had known all along that Keiko would not be happy in
England and, despite that fact, she insisted on the move away from Japan (175–6).
Etsuko may now regret that decision, or at least regret her disregard for Keiko’s
feelings and emotional needs at the time. Through experiencing this momentary
revelation, Etsuko’s short but emotionally intense journey to her past allows her
to come to some sense of recognition of her repressed feelings of guilt concerning
Keiko’s unhappiness and her eventual suicide.
The experience of recognition occurs retrospectively in The Remains of the Day
at the end of the novel. At the pier in Weymouth, Stevens reflects on an episode of
emotional release that had taken place a few moments before. His feelings of regret
and disappointment rise to the surface while in mid-conversation with a retired
butler whom he had met on the pier (255). Stevens recounts the narrative of his life
to his new acquaintance, and through the act of telling, the emotional release takes
place. This represents the culmination of his recollections of missed opportunities
in making his feelings known to Miss Kenton. One of these recollections, surfacing
two days earlier whilst Stevens was sitting in the dining room of the Rose Garden
 Memory, Nostalgia and Recognition in Ishiguro’s Work 41

Hotel in Little Compton (222), describes a secret meeting between the British
Prime Minister and the German Ambassador Herr Ribbentrop that took place at
Darlington Hall before war broke out with Germany. Miss Kenton had announced
to Stevens her impending marriage and subsequent resignation from Darlington
Hall. Having been unable to elicit an emotional response from Stevens, Miss
Kenton returned to her room. On his way back down the corridor, Stevens noticed
light coming through the edges of Miss Kenton’s door. It was at this moment
that Stevens stopped in front of Miss Kenton’s door, standing in indecision as to
whether to make contact with her (137). He was convinced at that moment that he
would find her crying were he to enter. This isolated moment in time, compounded
by the feelings rising within him at the time and the effect of the dim lighting in the
corridor, had since then become ‘persistently lodged’ in Stevens’s memory (237).
When recalling this episode, Stevens believed that in reality the incident lasted
no more than a few seconds, but did at the time feel it to be much longer. In this
memory sequence, Stevens is caught unawares, as often happens in the novel, with
memories and emotions that are not immediately recognisable as his own, but that
are somehow strangely familiar.
In the third volume of Time and Narrative, Ricoeur describes an important
element in the workings of tradition, one that ‘signifies that the temporal distance
separating us from the past is not a dead interval but a transmission that is
generative of meaning’ (221). The absent space within the narrative of any given
text is indicative of this temporal distance; it is not an empty space, but one that is
imbued with meaning through events in the past that have taken place and that are
still in communication with events in the present. This points to the occurrence of
an active and constant transmission of meaning in the gap between the past and
the present. As a forgotten memory returns to one of Ishiguro’s protagonists at a
pivotal moment, meaning generated from that return eventually leads to a degree
of self-recognition for that character later on. The sense of recognition experienced
by these protagonists, however, does not necessarily result in a changed outcome
to their outlook on life. Ricoeur suggests that for recognition to be fully beneficial
to an individual, it needs to be mutually experienced with others, and the next
section examines this act of mutual recognition.

Mutual Recognition Among Characters

In Never Let Me Go, Ruth uses deception to keep Tommy away from Kathy during
their time in Hailsham and in The Cottages. As Ruth nears the end of her life
following her second organ donation, she convinces Kathy and Tommy to go on
an outing with her to see a boat on a beach that people had been talking about.
In the car on the way back from seeing the boat, Ruth atones for her past sins by
confessing to Kathy and Tommy her past attempts at keeping them apart, and with
some information she had obtained beforehand, offers them a rare opportunity to
finally be together before their foreshortened lives come to an end. Ruth had been
42 Kazuo Ishiguro in a Global Context / Teo

harbouring her guilt in keeping Kathy and Tommy apart for all these years, and so
deep is her regret that she does not expect Kathy to ever forgive her (212). This
poignant scene depicts the three school friends being reunited after being apart
for a number of years, and it would turn out to be their only time together. Ruth
would complete on her next organ donation, and Tommy and Kathy would embark
on their quest for a deferral from their mandatory organ donations. This scene
becomes a point of mutual recognition for both Kathy and Tommy of their deep
feelings for each other and the slim possibility of a future together. It is also a point
where Ruth publicly recognizes her culpability in keeping the two apart during
their best years. In vocalizing her misdeed, she demonstrates the ability to speak
and the ability to give an account of her fault that Ricoeur posited as elements of
the capable human being. Ruth blurs the boundaries between human and clone
through her actions in this scene.
Mutual recognition is an act that involves community, and it highlights what
Ricoeur describes as the passive form of recognition – the desire to receive
recognition or be recognized (Course of Recognition 19). The clones in Never Let
Me Go largely accept their fates and foreshortened lifespans, but this does not –
and cannot – detract from their desire to be recognized as human.
Their affirmation of each other’s lives through the stories they tell constitute
a mutual or collective recognition of each other, emphasising the importance of
being able to narrate beyond themselves. In Memory, History, Forgetting, Ricoeur
speaks of a type of debt that is not limited to the concept of guilt. It is a debt
we each have ‘to those who have gone before us for part of what we are’ (89).
Concerning the duty of memory, he argues that it ‘is not restricted to preserving
the material trace … but maintains the feeling of being obligated with respect to
these others, of whom we shall later say, not that they are no more, but that they
were’ (89). As individuals we are all inextricably linked to one another through
our influences on each other, and fulfilling the duty to remember those whose lives
have influenced us is to acknowledge that interconnectedness of our lives, the fact
that we all exist and our existence depends on those who have gone on before us in
time. The public might wish to forget and deny the existence of the clones in Never
Let Me Go, but their expired lives bear testimony through the collective memories
of the clones who are alive of the horrific nature of their short existence in service
to humankind. The narrative represents Kathy’s attempts, in John Mullan’s words,
to ‘make a story of herself and others who might be like her’ (113). Even the
organs inherited by the humans for their very preservation also bear traces of the
clones’ existence. In Memory, History, Forgetting, Ricoeur reiterates memory’s
importance:

History can expand, complete, correct, even refute the testimony of memory
regarding the past; it cannot abolish it. Why? Because, it seemed to us, memory
remains the guardian of the ultimate dialectic constitutive of the pastness of the
past … which designates its original and, in this sense, indestructible character.
That something did actually happen … In this regard, events like the Holocaust
and the great crimes of the twentieth century … stand in the name of all the
 Memory, Nostalgia and Recognition in Ishiguro’s Work 43

events that have left their traumatic imprint on hearts and bodies: they protest
that they were and as such they demand being said, recounted, understood. This
protestation, which nourishes attestation, is part of belief: it can be contested but
not refuted. (498)

Regardless of how much distance is placed between the collective consciousness

and events like ‘the great crimes of the twentieth century,’ there will always be the
attestation that ‘something did actually happen’. Memory may be challenged but it
cannot be eradicated – such is the nature of testimony that is passed down through
the generations and haunts the collective consciousness. The issue of testimony
brings us back to one of the abilities of the capable human being, and that is the
ability to be accountable for one’s actions. The duty of accountability is rooted
in the concept of testimony, an oral tradition of bearing witness that is eventually
preserved in document form (316).
The world of Hailsham, the boarding school environment that the clones leave
behind, represents the tranquillity and innocence of their youth. Throughout the
novel the narrative is tinted with memories of Hailsham; these memories do not
stem from Kathy alone, as there is a sense that the memories of all of Hailsham’s
former students linger in the narrative. These memories of Hailsham serve as a
bond between the school and its former students; a memory of a happier life and
a more privileged upbringing than most other clones have experienced. During
her time as a carer, Kathy chances upon a former Hailsham schoolmate named
Laura in a car park at a service station. Laura eventually brings up Hailsham
during the encounter, saying how strange it all is that Hailsham is closing down.
Kathy’s narration here describes how the mention of Hailsham brings the two of
them close again, and they embrace each other in a spontaneous act of ‘affirming
Hailsham,’ testifying to its continued existence in both their memories (Never Let
Me Go 193). The most important thing for all the former Hailsham students is that
Hailsham remains with them in the form of memories, both individual and shared
memories. In many ways, reaffirming shared memories is more real to the parties
involved than the continued existence of the actual object, for it is the shared
memories that bind them to that object and they affirm their identities through
their allegiance to it.
The marginalised orphans and the clones in both When We Were Orphans and
Never Let Me Go bear witness to each other through affirmation. They hold on
to their memories as they search for missing parents and possibles. The clones’
existence in Never Let Me Go forms part of the collective consciousness of the
world they live in, and the uniqueness of their identities creates shared memories
among them. The foreshortened lives of the clones force them to cling to their
shared memories of their growing up years and the friendships they made along
the way. It is only in the witness and testimony of subsequent generations of clones
that their lives will be remembered. In The Unconsoled, the city’s inhabitants
desire for their stories to be remembered and passed on to others by Ryder.
Ryder’s memories are somehow entwined with the collective memories of the
44 Kazuo Ishiguro in a Global Context / Teo

city’s inhabitants. The people desire that he be the witness and to offer testimony
of their lives as they mourn the decline of their musical culture.

Nostalgia, Mourning and Utopia

Nostalgia is often maligned as a concept and Ishiguro’s writing deals with

nostalgia positively, utilising it as a tool to describe a longing for a better world,
and as a way of narrating what has been irrevocably lost. In an interview given
when When We Were Orphans was published, Ishiguro stated that nostalgia, in
its purest form, ‘is to the emotions what idealism is to the intellect’, that it is a
way of ‘longing for a better world’ (‘A Conversation’). The novel forms a link to
the Golden Age of English detective fiction from the 1920s and 1930s written by
writers such as Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers. This is a genre that is often
vilified for its genteel traditions and its associations with social hierarchy, as well
as its shallow portrayal of its characters. Ishiguro took an interest in this genre of
writing because of what it meant in the context of British history. This was a genre
suffused with feelings of poignancy for a time of social order and idealism that
was no longer seen as real or possible after the First World War:

The point is, those detective stories were devoured by a generation who know
only too well the real nature of suffering and mayhem in the modern world. …
The “Golden Age” detective novels, if you look at them in a certain way, are
filled with a pining for a world of order and justice that people had once believed
in, but which they now know full well is unattainable. … It’s escapism, but
escapism of a particularly poignant kind. (Ishiguro, ‘A Conversation’)

It is indicative of a desire to return to a sense of the pastoral, following on from

experiences of the First World War. This sense of nostalgia for a time that is lost
forever is also evidenced in Ishiguro’s earlier novels, An Artist of the Floating
World and The Remains of the Day. Both Masuji Ono and Stevens experience a
yearning for an era when they were at the height of their careers and when they
were still in the company of their loved ones. For these protagonists, feelings of
nostalgia are often linked to a profound sense of mourning the past.
In his essay, Mourning and Melancholia, Freud described mourning as a
‘reaction to the real loss of a loved object’ (259). During this reaction phase, ‘reality-
testing’ proves that ‘the loved object no longer exists,’ but the libidinal attachment
to the object is so intense that there is a strong opposition to the demands of reality
to break off all attachments with the object (253). Freud claims that the ‘respect
for reality’ usually wins over the urge to cling on to the object, and this process is
called the work of mourning. The process, however, is a long and very painful one
where great quantities of time and cathectic (emotional) energy are spent as the
‘existence of the lost object is psychically prolonged,’ and where ‘memories and
expectations in which the libido is bound to the object’ are brought up (253). The
sense of loss related to these ‘loved objects’ triggers the resurfacing of memories
 Memory, Nostalgia and Recognition in Ishiguro’s Work 45

tied to the objects as a source of solace and reminiscence, thereby allowing for
the prolonged existence of these objects in the mind of the remembering subject.
Pam Cook, in Screening the Past, describes nostalgia as ‘a state of longing
for something that is known to be irretrievable, but is sought anyway’ (3). Cook
contends that rather than being associated with regression and sentimentality,
nostalgia can be a means of coming to terms with the past. Utilising Cook’s
analysis, we observe that nostalgia functions as an aid within the framework
of Freud’s work of mourning. Nostalgia allows for an emotional outlet where
the psychical prolonging of the lost object through memories may take place,
whilst simultaneously acknowledging that the object is gone forever. John J. Su
contributes a further dimension to nostalgia by suggesting its provision as a mode
for ‘imagining more fully what has been and continues to be absent,’ (9) and
in bringing a clearer focus to what our needs really are (175). In understanding
that nostalgia is intricately linked with the process of mourning, it becomes a
longing for a world that stems from a time of childhood innocence, a time that
is irrevocably lost. It is also, however, a way of longing for a better world than
the one at present, implying a strong utopian thrust in Ishiguro’s writing. This is
particularly relevant in When We Were Orphans, in the world of the grown-up
child’s mind of Christopher Banks.
For Ishiguro, nostalgia connects us to our childhood innocence when we
believed the world to be ‘a better, a nicer place’ than it turned out to be when
we grew up (Ishiguro, ‘An Interview With’ 166).2 Nostalgia is intertwined with
memory and fantasy, where we remember a time when the outlook on life was
much simpler and more innocent, harking back to childhood and to the days when
we believed that everything that had gone wrong could be fully restored to the way
it was before. The imperative behind Banks’s quest to find his missing parents in
Shanghai is a child’s longing for things to be returned to the way they were. These
poignant longings for a better world are often traced back to something that went
wrong or had been left unresolved in the past, creating the imperative later on to
set things right. These concepts are much in evidence in Ishiguro’s short story
collection Nocturnes, with particular resonance found in the stories ‘Come Rain
or Come Shine,’ ‘Crooner’ and ‘Malvern Hills.’

A Profound Forgetting

In The Unconsoled, the unnamed European city is suffering under the burden of
unresolved internal conflicts, and the lives of its inhabitants represent various
cycles of unforgiveness. The novel’s narrative constitutes the working-through
of a process that seeks to end the cycles of retribution and regret that affect
the characters. According to Freud, repetition is an act of resistance against

2
In another interview, this time for his publishers, Ishiguro used the phrase ‘much
kinder place’ to describe how the world is viewed from a childhood perspective when
describing the theme of nostalgia in When We Were Orphans (Ishiguro, ‘A Conversation’).
46 Kazuo Ishiguro in a Global Context / Teo

remembering, and in order to overcome these resistances, the subject must learn
to ‘work through’ it, and continue in defiance of it (‘Remembering, Repeating
and Working-Through’ 150–55). In the case of The Unconsoled, however, we
never really reach a point at the end of the novel where the cycle of unforgiveness
is broken. The inhabitants’ fraught relationship with their own cultural history
prevents them from leaving the past behind and moving forward.
Rather than attempting to forget by deliberately effacing all traces of the past,
Ricoeur suggests another form of forgetting that does not require work on our
part that he designates as ‘the reserve of forgetting’ (Memory, History, Forgetting
428). The reserve of forgetting recognizes ‘the unperceived character of the
perseverance of memories’, and how the act of forgetting indicates ‘their removal
from the vigilance of consciousness’ (440). The reserve of forgetting describes
the pervasive nature of memories. A happy (or peaceful) memory that speaks
of the past without anger results in a reconciliation that does not deny the past
nor is resentful of it, allowing the memories to persevere in the unconscious in a
carefree manner away from immediate perception. Ricoeur describes the reserve
of forgetting as an idle kind of forgetting that is not a work (504–5). It allows
for memories to linger and to never fade into oblivion. The desire for a peaceful
memory forms the intangible link between Christopher Banks, Jennifer, and Sarah
Hemmings in When We Were Orphans as they seek out their hidden pasts and
‘the shadows of vanished parents’ (313), longing for ‘something that will just be
there, always, like tomorrow’s sky’ (213). This is how the clones in Never Let Me
Go reaffirm, both individually and collectively, the memories of the people and
the places that mean everything to them. Their memorialisation of Hailsham and
of their times together is achieved through a reserve of forgetting, leading to a
sense of a carefree and peaceful memory. The concept of a carefree and peaceful
memory relates to the earlier point on the utopian impulse in Ishiguro’s novels. The
characters’ collective longing for a better, kinder world leads to the preservation of
memories of childhood and of the times that have been lost forever.
Ishiguro’s characters experience a sense of mutual recognition, nostalgia and
a profound forgetting through the act of narrating their stories, allowing for the
opportunity of reconciliation and forgiveness.3 The work of memory and forgetting
demonstrated in Ishiguro’s writing is altogether unique, profound and cathartic.
It is a work that is ethical and compassionate to his characters, and one that is
inherently distinctive among his contemporaries.

3
It is worth noting that Ishiguro’s characters rarely experience a complete sense of
reconciliation with the past. Ishiguro’s reluctance for fully resolved endings to his novels
and short stories demonstrates his belief that it is never possible to truly understand one’s
place in history and time retrospectively (Ishiguro, ‘Kazuo Ishiguro’).
 Memory, Nostalgia and Recognition in Ishiguro’s Work 47

Works Cited

Cook, Pam. Screening the Past: Memory and Nostalgia in Cinema. London and
New York: Routledge, 2005. Print.
Freud, Sigmund. ‘Mourning and Melancholia’. 1917. On Metapsychology: The
Theory of Psychoanalysis. Trans. James Strachey. Ed. Angela Richards. 1984.
London: Penguin, 1991. 245–68. Print.
———. ‘Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through (Further
Recommendations on the Technique of Psycho-Analysis II)’. 1914. The
Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud
Volume XII: The Case of Schreber, Papers on Technique and Other Works.
Trans. and ed. James Strachey. London: Hogarth, 1958. 145–56. Print.
Ishiguro, Kazuo. ‘A Conversation with Kazuo Ishiguro about his new novel When
We Were Orphans’. Interview by Knopf Publishing in September 2000. Author
Q&A. Web. 24 February 2012.
———. A Pale View of Hills. 1982. London: Faber, 1991. Print.
———. An Artist of the Floating World. 1986. London: Faber, 1987. Print.
———. ‘An Interview with Kazuo Ishiguro’. Interview by Brian W. Shaffer in
2001. Conversations with Kazuo Ishiguro. Ed. Brian W. Shaffer and Cynthia F.
Wong. Jackson, MS: UP of Mississippi, 2008. 161–73. Print.
———. ‘Kazuo Ishiguro’. Interview by Sue Lawley. Desert Island Discs. BBC
Radio 4, London. 17 February 2002. Radio. Web. 6 March 2012.
———. Never Let Me Go. London: Faber, 2005. Print.
———. Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall. London: Faber, 2009.
Print.
———. The Remains of the Day. 1989. London: Faber, 1990. Print.
———. The Unconsoled. 1995. London: Faber, 1996. Print.
———. When We Were Orphans. 2000. London: Faber, 2001. Print.
Mullan, John. ‘On First Reading Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go’. Kazuo
Ishiguro: Contemporary Critical Perspectives. Ed. Sean Matthews and
Sebastian Groes. London and New York: Continuum, 2009. 104–13. Print.
Radstone, Susannah, ed. Memory and Methodology. Oxford and New York: Berg,
2000. Print.
Ricoeur, Paul. Memory, History, Forgetting. Trans. Kathleen Blamey and David
Pellauer. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2004. Print.
———. The Course of Recognition. Trans. David Pellauer. Cambridge, MA and
London: Harvard UP, 2005. Print.
———. Time and Narrative. Trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer. Vol. 3.
1988. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1990. Print.
Rossington, Michael and Anne Whitehead, eds. Theories of Memory: A Reader.
Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2007. Print.
Su, John J. Ethics and Nostalgia in the Contemporary Novel. Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 2005. Print.
This page has been left blank intentionally
 Chapter 4
‘You Never Know Who You’re Addressing’:
A Study of the Inscribed ‘You’ in
The Remains of the Day
Elif Öztabak-Avcı, Middle East Technical University, Turkey

As Rebecca L. Walkowitz points out in ‘Unimaginable Largeness’, Kazuo

Ishiguro’s novels ‘ask to be read across several national and political scenes’ (223)
and yet, the external narratees addressed by the narrators in many of these novels
demanding a global readership are peculiarly local in terms of their geographical
and political locations. The aim of this paper is to point out and explore this
remarkable discrepancy in Ishiguro’s novels between the implied reader and the
external narratee by focusing specifically on The Remains of the Day (1988).
Although it has been noted that Ishiguro’s novel deconstructs the empiricist-
idealist notion of ‘I,’ his employment of ‘you’ has not received as much attention.
In The Remains of the Day, however, he undermines the notion of a unitary subject
and thereby hegemonic narratives of national identities by also foregrounding
the lack of correspondence between the inscribed ‘you’ in the narrative and the
implied reader.
What Ishiguro states in an interview in relation to Ono, the narrator of An
Artist of the Floating World, holds true for The Remains of the Day, in that both
novels explore a ‘parochial perspective’ (1989: 341) through the employment of
an unreliable narrator who attempts to come to terms with his past. In her essay
“‘We’re like Butlers”’, Rebecca Suter complicates the discussion of the unreliable
narrator from The Remains of the Day, the butler Stevens, by connecting it to
Ishiguro’s treatment of the unitary subject. According to Suter, Ishiguro’s novel
emphasizes ‘the idea that the narrator, as a subject, is not the unitary and coherent
entity Western tradition would have him be’ (248). Perhaps, it would be an
overgeneralization to put it as ‘Western tradition’ articulating such wholeness,
because there are examples of ‘split subjects’ in Western literature as early as the
Renaissance and onwards (Belsey 85–102); yet, it could be held that Ishiguro’s
novel wrestles with a commitment to the notion of the unitary subject, which is
characterized by Catherine Belsey as a belief in the total correspondence between
‘the subject of the enunciation and the subject of the énoncé’ (85). This concept
helps to explain how Stevens’s ability to narrate truthfully is a complicated process.
In The Remains of the Day, Ishiguro unravels the hegemonic narrative of
‘Englishness’ by employing the figure of the unflappable English butler as an
unreliable narrator. Remarkably, the novel not only deconstructs the master
50 Kazuo Ishiguro in a Global Context / Öztabak-Avcı

narrative of ‘Englishness’, but also the empiricist-idealist notion of the subject,

which is assumed by this narrative. In Englishness and National Culture, Anthony
Easthope highlights the fundamental role of empiricism in the formation of
‘Englishness’. Examining the key texts of the English empiricist philosophy,
Easthope demonstrates that they are characterized by ‘the ideal of transparency’,
which depends on the primacy, in Bacon’s words, of ‘matter’ over ‘words’.
According to Bacon, ‘knowledge of reality … can be directly available to the
knowing subject because “the truth of being and truth of knowing are one’” (64).
Language (or ‘words’) does not play any role in the subject’s relationship with
‘reality’ in that it simply ‘mirrors reality’ (68). Therefore, ‘it is in the interest of
… [an empiricist-idealist] ideology above all to suppress the role of language in
the construction of the subject, and to present the individual as a free, unified,
autonomous subjectivity’ (Belsey 67). Foregrounding the role of language disrupts
the empiricist imagining of the world, through which, specifically in the case
of England, ‘the English subject is envisaged not as the effect of a process of
construction but as always already merely there as the subject of or for knowledge/
experience’ (Easthope 89).
In The Remains of the Day the figure of the butler, who ‘trades on characteristics
that are thought to be typically English, such as discretion, calmness and a respect
for hierarchy’ (Cox 137), fails to function as ‘the subject of or for knowledge/
experience’ because he continuously undermines his narrative and his self.
Stevens’s account of his days in Darlington Hall begins right after his departure
from the house:

[E]ventually the surroundings grew unrecognizable and I knew I had gone

beyond all previous boundaries. I have heard people describe the moment, when
setting sail in a ship, when one finally loses sight of the land. I imagine the
experience of unease mixed with exhilaration often described in connection with
this moment is very similar to what I felt. (24)

This is the first time, at the end of his three decades of service, that Stevens has
left Darlington Hall for a brief trip. Interestingly, the image of a ship and sailing
emerge as forces that disrupt the stability of ‘land’: moving away from the country
house, which Stevens likens to sailing away from the land, seems to facilitate the
surfacing of his doubts about his previous employer, Lord Darlington, as a ‘great’
man and himself as a ‘great’ butler. On the second day of his trip, Stevens shares
with the reader, for the first time, what he thinks about Lord Darlington:

A great deal of nonsense has been spoken and written in recent years concerning
his lordship and the prominent role he came to play in great affairs … Whatever
may be said about his lordship these days – and the great majority of it is, as I
say, utter nonsense – I can declare that he was a truly good man at heart … and I
am today proud to have given my best years of service to. (61)

He does not disclose yet what he means by ‘a great deal of nonsense’ but these
remarks may initiate doubt in the reader regarding Stevens’s reliability about his
 ‘You Never Know Who You’re Addressing’ 51

previous employer because he avoids being more specific about the ‘nonsense’ and
quickly closes the subject without leaving any room for doubt. The next instance
that can cast suspicion on his reliability occurs when he mentions in passing, on
the same day, Lord Darlington’s trips to Berlin towards the end of 1920: ‘A heavy
air of preoccupation hung over him for days after his return, and I recall once, in
reply to my inquiring how he had enjoyed his trip, his remarking: “Disturbing,
Stevens. Deeply disturbing. It does us a great discredit to treat a defeated foe like
this”’ (71). Stevens does not comment on the significance of this incident at all. Its
connection with his previous reference to his lordship’s ‘prominent role … in great
affairs’ can easily be established. And his silence about Lord Darlington’s remarks
about the relationship between Germany and Britain following World War I are
enough to fuel doubts on the part of the reader about the reliability of Stevens’s
portrayal of his previous master.
Stevens soon provides some further clues about Lord Darlington’s political
involvement in Germany’s affairs. He gives an account of some of his lordship’s
‘heartfelt words’ that he overhears, for instance, ‘in the near-empty banqueting
hall’: ‘“I fought that war to preserve justice in this world. As far as I understood,
I wasn’t taking part in a vendetta against the German race”’ says Lord Darlington
(73). What he means by the ‘vendetta’ is the Treaty of Versailles (1919), as a result
of which Germany had to accept sole responsibility for causing the war and pay
reparations to the Allied Powers (Hunt et al. 817). Soon, it becomes clear that Lord
Darlington organized a conference under the roof of Darlington Hall where ‘the
harshest terms of the Versailles treaty could be revised’ (75). These disclosures
undermine altogether Stevens’s previous denial of his lordship’s ‘prominent
role … in great affairs.’ What follows this piece of information are Stevens’s
memories revealing, on day three of his trip, the dismissal of the Jewish maids
from Darlington Hall (146). Since the butler had earlier denied the rumors about
Lord Darlington’s anti-Semitism, this becomes a reversal that delegitimizes his
own story/self. Holding that ‘the allegations that his lordship never allowed Jewish
people to enter the house or any Jewish staff to be employed is utterly unfounded
– except, perhaps, in respect to one very minor episode in the thirties which has
been blown up out of all proportion,’ he reveals a couple of pages later that Lord
Darlington asked him to ‘let them [the Jewish maids] go’ because ‘it’s for the good
of this house’ (146–7). Stevens’s failure to maintain the image of Lord Darlington
as ‘a truly good man’ is directly related to his efforts to keep safe the edifice of
Self he has constructed through his master: ‘A “great” butler can only be, surely,
one who can point to his years of service and say that he has applied his talents
to serving a great gentleman – and through the latter, to serving humanity’ (117).
Yet, the whole novel is an attestation to how Stevens cannot ‘be,’ in that the
‘I’ as he thinks of himself does not correspond to the ‘I’ that speaks. The idealized
image of the Self is dismantled by the ‘I’ that narrates. He fails to render in a
transparent manner both his narrative and his subjectivity. His vision of the world
and of himself emerge as socially-situated constructs open to transformation,
which is remarkably not in keeping with the kind of fictional world the novel
52 Kazuo Ishiguro in a Global Context / Öztabak-Avcı

appears to imitate. In Kazuo Ishiguro (2010) Wai-chew Sim analyses the ‘hill-top
deliberations’ (51) made by Stevens on day one of his trip such as the one below:

For it is true, when I stood on that high ledge this morning and viewed the land
before me, I distinctly felt that rare, yet unmistakable feeling – the feeling that
one is in the presence of greatness. We call this land of ours Great Britain, and
there may be those who believe this a somewhat immodest practice. Yet I would
venture that the landscape of our country alone would justify the use of this lofty
adjective. (28)

Sim juxtaposes this passage with Stevens’s remarks uttered just a while later
about ‘butlers [who] only truly exist in England’ (43) because, Stevens believes,
they are characterized by ‘greatness’ like the landscape itself. According to
Sim, these passages can be considered ‘the performance-cum-examination of a
discourse of English pastoralism – a ‘Garden of Eden’ in Ishiguro’s words – in
which elements of the countryside and the stately home milieu are reconfigured as
floating metaphors for a certain kind of fundamental Englishness’ (51). Ishiguro
himself too considers The Remains of the Day a ‘re-working’ of a certain mythical
representation of England as a place consisting of sleepy, beautiful villages with
very polite people and butlers and people taking tea on the lawn’ (1993: 14).
Despite all his efforts, Stevens, a ‘protagonist who exudes Victorian qualities’
(Sim 49), fails to perform like his fictional predecessors that appeared in the British
estate novel (Su, 2002) or in the kind of fiction produced by P.G. Wodehouse
(Ishiguro, 1993:14). Or, to put it in terms provided by Edward Said in Culture and
Imperialism, Ishiguro’s novel performs the failure of establishing a ‘consolidated
vision’ of empire which is ‘premised on the recording, ordering, observing powers
of the central authorizing subject, or ego’ (79) – a subject position nurtured by the
classic realist novel (12).
England of the 1980s was characterized by nostalgia for and attempts to
revive the ‘great’ values of the Victorian period. In ‘Englishness/Englishnesses
in Contemporary Fiction,’ Silvia Mergenthal discusses, for instance, Thatcher’s
nationalism, ‘Europhobia’ and her evocation of ‘Victorian values’ as some of the
major reasons for a ‘renewed interest [in fiction] in “Englishness” over the eighties’
(50). Located within this social context, The Remains of the Day (1988) emerges
clearly as a text attempting to deconstruct the master narrative of ‘Englishness’
which resurfaced in England at the times in which it was written. Remarkably,
Ishiguro’s novel does not only unravel the ‘authorizing’ of the ‘I’ to this end, but
also the exclusionary ‘you’ characterizing the kind of fiction it appears to imitate.
In The Remains of the Day, the lack of correspondence between the ‘I’ is paralleled
with the discrepancy between the ‘you’ addressed explicitly and frequently by the
narrator Stevens and the implied reader.
Ishiguro’s address of ‘you’ in the novel has been discussed in various terms, such
as the narrator’s attempt to cultivate sympathy on the part of the audience (Wong
2000; Tamaya 1992); an indication of the narrator’s membership in a professional
community of butlers (Westerman 2004) or in a much larger social group, ‘a class,’
 ‘You Never Know Who You’re Addressing’ 53

whose ‘labor is largely … based in knowledge-work and hence “immaterial’”

(Fluet 267); as well as a signal for the unreliable narrator’s ‘defensiveness’ (Wall
1994). I think the discussion on Stevens’s addressee needs to be articulated in
yet another scholarly conversation about the tension in Ishiguro’s many novels
between the ‘local’ and the ‘global’, so that the connections between the explicit
and frequent employment of ‘you’ in The Remains of the Day and Ishiguro’s effort
to take issue with ‘parochial’ and nationalist perspectives can be explored.
Ishiguro has often indicated that he writes in an international way. As
Motoyuki Shibata and Motoko Sugano point out, ‘Ishiguro is clearly unusually
aware, even at the point of writing, of his work’s transposition into other languages
and frames of reference’ (20). Similarly, Rebecca L. Walkowitz groups Ishiguro’s
novels together with some other ‘contemporary novels [that] trump an ignoble
“translatability” not by resisting translation but by demanding it. They ask to be
read across several national and political scenes’ (2007: 223). Walkowitz also
draws attention to ‘Ishiguro’s narrative styles [which] evoke national attributes,
whose recognition among readers tend to situate his texts within particular cultural
traditions’ (2001: 1049). In his interview with the author, Sean Matthews indicates
that Ishiguro’s fiction is characterized by this remarkable co-existence of national
and international frames of reference. Matthews addresses the author:

There is … a tension in your work between, on the one hand, universality – your
stories travel well, they can be read anywhere, in Norway and in Japan – and, on
the other hand, specificity – they take place In very particular historical moments,
such as during the Suez crisis, and in precise places, such as in Nagasaki. (118)

The way in which ‘you’ – the subject addressed or imagined by the narrator –
functions in the novel can also be studied in terms of this tension because there is
an interesting discrepancy in The Remains of the Day between the novel’s universal
scope (i.e., the implied readership is an international one), and the external narratee
who is particularly delimited in terms of his or her national and political locations.
The ‘you’ in The Remains of the Day is used as a tool that contributes
significantly to the creation of this tension between the national and the
international. Or to put it in Walkowitz’s terms, it is one of Ishiguro’s ‘strategies of
description and narration [which] seem to imitate the characteristics of the place
and people represented’ (2001: 1049). ‘You’ is a device employed to ‘imitate’ on
purpose the ‘parochial’ and exclusionary form of narrative address characterizing
many classic realist novels produced in the West over the colonial era in order
to disrupt it. As Walkowitz expresses it: ‘Ishiguro’s novels generate what
Bhabha calls “hesitant” knowledge, which is neither homogeneous nor absolute:
Ishiguro’s aberrant grammar resists political and cultural norms by reproducing
a normalizing rhetoric … excessively and inappropriately’ (2001: 1055). In The
Remains of the Day, ‘you’ is used ‘excessively and inappropriately’ and thereby
contributes to the creation of a political and geographical discrepancy between the
implied reader and the external narratee, which, as a consequence, disrupts the
rhetoric that Stevens attempts to reproduce in the novel.
54 Kazuo Ishiguro in a Global Context / Öztabak-Avcı

Ishiguro’s response to an interview question about the addressee of the narrator,

Ono, in An Artist of the Floating World can also be applied to the effect he aims to
create in his next novel:

The reader I intended obviously isn’t the ‘you’ that Ono refers to. Ono in his
narrative assumes that anybody reading it must live in the city and must be
aware of its landmarks. I used that device mainly to create a world. I thought it
helped strengthen this mental landscape mapped out entirely by what Ono was
conscious of, and nothing else. And whether the reader registers it consciously or
not, it cannot help but create the effect of actually eavesdropping on Ono being
intimate with somebody in his own town. To a large extent, the reason for Ono’s
downfall was that he lacked a perspective to see beyond his own environment
and to stand outside the actual values of his time. So the question of this parochial
perspective was quite central to the book, and I tried to build that into the whole
narrative. At the same time, I’m suggesting that Ono is fairly normal; most of
us have similar parochial visions. So the book is largely about the inability of
normal human beings to see beyond their immediate surroundings, and because
of this, one is at the mercy of what this world immediately around one proclaims
itself to be. (1989: 341)

Ishiguro’s remarks are quite reminiscent of what a retired footman whom Stevens
meets towards the end of the novel on the pier in Weymouth tells him. When
Stevens lets the old man know that he too has been working as a manservant in
one of those ‘big houses’ before the latter begins to explain how hard the job is,
the old footman laughs and says: ‘“Good job you told me when you did before I
made a right fool of myself. Just shows you never know who you’re addressing
when you start talking to a stranger”’ (242). The addressee imagined by Stevens
as someone very much like himself in terms of national identity and worldview
is ‘inappropriate,’ which, therefore, foregrounds his parochial perspective and
renders him at the mercy of the world.
From the outset, Stevens directly addresses a narratee whom, he assumes, is
English and agrees with him on his commentaries on what it means to be English.
‘As you might all expect, I did not take Mr. Farraday’s suggestion [about lending his
Ford to Stevens so that he can take a trip] at all seriously that afternoon, regarding
it as just another instance of an American gentleman’s unfamiliarity with what was
and what was not commonly done in England’, says Stevens in his first address
to the narratee (4). Attempting to take the narratee on his side at once, Stevens
points to his/their difference from his new employer, the ‘American gentleman,’
who is not familiar, unlike himself and the narratee, with what is and what is
not considered appropriate in England. The common ground on which Stevens
imagines himself to be standing together with the narratee rests on exclusion from
the beginning.
His initial address to the narratee is followed by many others that similarly
attempt to interpellate the narratee as an English subject. Again in relation to Mr.
Farraday, for instance, briefly after the remarks above, Stevens mentions their first
interview by excluding the American from the community he imagines to share
 ‘You Never Know Who You’re Addressing’ 55

with the narratee: ‘I came to have my first business meeting with Mr. Farraday
during the short preliminary visit he made to our shores in the spring of last year’
(6). Not very happy with his American employer’s request that the number of the
servants to be employed in Darlington Hall should now not be more than four,
Stevens assumes a similar feeling of discontent on the part of the narratee: ‘Now
naturally, like many of us, I have a reluctance to change too much of the old
ways’, he says, recalling ‘a time when I had had a staff of seventeen under me,
and knowing how not so long ago a staff of twenty-eight had been employed here
at Darlington Hall’ (7). The Remains of the Day represents a country house not
only at a time period when the British Empire is still at its peak but also during
its eclipse, one manifestation of which is the radical decline in the number of the
servants working in Darlington Hall. The purchase of this great English house by
an American during the post-war years, and its decline as one of the grand estates,
mirrors the replacement of Britain by the US as an ascendant imperial power and
Britain’s loss of its colonies. As John J. Su points out, ‘at a time when even larger
sections of Darlington Hall are being closed off and dust-sheeted, Great Britain
finds itself shedding its colonies’ (563). In this respect, the reluctance that Stevens
expresses for changing ‘the old ways’, such as the number of the servicing staff
in country houses like Darlington Hall, is rather indicative of his nostalgia for the
imperial past, which he assumes is shared by the narratee.
Drawing on Gérard Genette and Gerald Prince, Robyn R. Warhol holds that
if a narrator ‘provides so much information about the narratee … the addressee
becomes, as Prince says, “as clearly defined as any character.” [This] necessarily
places a distance between the actual reader and the inscribed “you” in the text.
Such a narrator I call [a] distancing [one]’ (29). In this respect, Stevens can be
considered a ‘distancing’ narrator despite, or, rather, because of his attempts to take
the reader on his side, since what adds dramatically to the creation of a distancing
effect between the narratee and the implied reader is the novel’s mimicry of the
exclusion of a group of audience – the audience who is not addressed particularly
in the realist Western novel produced during the late colonial era. In Culture and
Imperialism, Said writes:

Western writers until the middle of the twentieth century, whether Dickens and
Austen, Flaubert or Camus, wrote with an exclusively Western audience in
mind, even when they wrote of characters, places or situations that referred to,
made use of, overseas territories held by Europeans. But just because Austen
referred to Antigua in Mansfield Park or to realms visited by the British navy
in Persuasion without any thought of possible responses by the Caribbean or
Indian natives resident, there is no reason for us to do the same. (66)

The direct addresses of a narrator, such as the butler Stevens, whose present
textual time is 1956, to an external audience (who reads, however, these remarks
from 1988 onwards) emerge as a very powerful strategy to distance Stevens from
the novel’s implied international readers. There is a huge lack of correspondence
between the inscribed ‘you’ in the narrative and the implied reader of the novel
56 Kazuo Ishiguro in a Global Context / Öztabak-Avcı

consisting of an audience diverse in terms of national and racial belongings.

Stevens’s assumptions about the approval of his addressee regarding his Lordship’s
and his own commitments to a ‘civilized world’ are destined to be thwarted by
readers in and outside Britain who know that this rather meant a pretext for the
Western hegemony over, and exploitation of, the colonized. On day one of his trip
in Salisbury, Stevens compares the ‘calmness’ and the ‘sense of restraint’ of the
English landscape with ‘the sorts of sights offered in such places as Africa and
America,’ which, he is sure, ‘though undoubtedly very exciting, would … strike
the objective viewer as inferior on account of their unseemly demonstrativeness’
(29). As Sim indicates regarding Stevens’ reflections, ‘it is possible to argue that
these terms signify in an exclusionary fashion the Afro-Caribbean immigrants
who came to work [in the late 1940s] in the London transport sector and help
set up the National Health Service’ (51). Yet, such a vision that Stevens names
‘objective’ emerges rather as a parochial and exclusionary vision precisely because
the narrator ‘think[s] we speak most intimately and indigenously “between
ourselves”’ (Bhabha 4). Therefore, it can be held that in The Remains of the
Day, the ‘consolidated vision’ of empire, which rests on the notion of transparent
subjectivity, is sabotaged both in connection with the narrator and the narratee: in
the novel there is neither a correspondence between Stevens’s ‘I’ nor between the
inscribed ‘you’ and the actual ‘you.’
There is one more point, however, that needs to be considered in the analysis of
the textual functions of Stevens’s addresses to the narratee and that is whether or
not the ‘you’ remains fixed within the national and political boundaries set by the
narrator at the beginning of the novel. In her narratological study on the challenges
of The Remains of the Day to theories of unreliable narration, Kathleen Wall holds
that ‘our theories of unreliability need to distinguish between narrators who cling
stubbornly or benightedly or helplessly to their interpretations … and those who,
like Stevens … seek a continual, though perhaps unsuccessful, evaluation of their
constructions’ (37). Stevens does gain an insight into Lord Darlington’s ‘mistakes’
and his own ‘role in the machinery’ at the end of the novel and yields to the painful
truth: ‘“You see, I trusted. I trusted in his lordship’s wisdom. All those years I
served him, I trusted I was doing something worthwhile. I can’t even say I made
my own mistakes. Really – one has to ask oneself – what dignity is there in that?”’
(243). According to Wall, the change in Stevens’s perception shows that ‘the ironic
distance between implied author and narrator in a given work is not necessarily
consistent or monolithic’ (37). A corollary to this is the change in the distance
between the implied reader and the narratee in that by the end of the novel the
‘you’ addressed by Stevens becomes larger, or more inclusive. His final direct
address to the narratee on the pier at the end of the day is telling of this change:

After all, what can we ever gain in forever looking back and blaming ourselves
if our lives have not turned out quite as we might have wished? The hard reality
is, surely, that for the likes of you and I, there is little choice other than to leave
our fate, ultimately, in the hands of those great gentlemen at the hub of this
world who employ our services. (244)
 ‘You Never Know Who You’re Addressing’ 57

The ‘we’ in this passage is not limited to a community strictly defined by a national
identity. On the contrary, it is a passage in which the symbolic status of being a
butler comes to the fore. As Ishiguro himself explicitly puts into words, ‘to some
extent we are all in some sense butlers. We don’t stand outside of our milieu and
evaluate it. We don’t say, “Wait, we’re going to do it this way instead.” We take
our orders, we do our jobs, we accept our place in the hierarchy, and hope that our
loyalty is used well, just like this butler guy’ (1989: 115). The ‘we’ imagined by
Stevens in the passage above as well as the ‘we’ Ishiguro refers to is a universal ‘we’
that includes us all who one way or another trust and serve, without questioning
much, the authority. It should also be added that the enlargement of the narratee
in The Remains of the Day appears to be contributing to a major difference in
the portrayals of Stevens and the narrators of Ishiguro’s earlier novels: Etsuko
and Ono. Although all these narrators are quite similar in terms of their efforts to
conceal and or distort what has happened in the past, the gaps in their memory as
well as their direct and frequent appeals to external narratees: ‘Stevens’s role as
narrator is more perplexing than that of either Etsuko’s or Ono’s, whose composure
remained fairly constant throughout their tales, despite overwhelming evidence
against the inadequacy of their life choices. Readers of those two novels sensed
deep sadness in the former and regret in the latter’ (Wong 62).
The narrator of The Remains of the Day fails to maintain his ‘composure,’
which is reflected in the narration of the text not only in terms of the distance
between the implied author and the narrator but also between the implied reader
and the narratee. In Althuserrian terms, Stevens fails to interpellate at times when
he imagines ‘I’ and ‘you’ from a hegemonic and exclusionary perspective. The
distance between the narrator and the implied reader does not remain unchanged,
however, since Stevens’s appeal to his audience becomes much more inclusive by
the end of the novel.

Works Cited

Althusser, Louis. ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’. Lenin and

Philosophy, and Other Essays. Trans. Ben Brewster. London: New Left Books,
1971. 127–88. Print.
Belsey, Catherine. Critical Practice. London: Methuen, 1980. Print.
Bhabha, Homi K. Introduction. Nation and Narration. Ed. Homi K. Bhabha.
London: Routledge, 1990. 1–7. Print.
Cox, Rosie. ‘The Role of Ethnicity in Shaping the Domestic Employment Sector
in Britain’. Gender, Migration, and Domestic Service. Ed. Janet Henshall
Momsen. London: Routledge, 1999. 134–47. Print.
Easthope, Anthony. Englishness and National Culture. London: Routledge, 1999.
Print.
Fluet, Lisa. ‘Immaterial Labors: Ishiguro, Class and Affect’. Novel: A Forum on
Fiction 40 (2007). 265–88. Print.
58 Kazuo Ishiguro in a Global Context / Öztabak-Avcı

Hunt, Lynn et al. The Making of the West: Peoples and Cultures, A Concise History.
Volume II: Since 1340. Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2006. Print.
Ishiguro, Kazuo. The Remains of the Day. New York: Vintage, 1988. Print.
———. Interview. With Gregory Mason. Contemporary Literature 30 (1989).
335–47. Print.
———. Interview. With Allan Vorda and Kim Herzinger. Face to Face: Interviews
with Contemporary Novelists. Ed. Allan Vorda. Houston, TX: Rice UP. 1–36.
Print.
Matthews, Sean. ‘“I’m Sorry I Can’t Say More”: An Interview with Kazuo
Ishiguro’. Contemporary Critical Perspectives: Kazuo Ishiguro. Ed. Sean
Matthews and Sebastian Groes. London: Continuum, 2009. 114–25. Print.
Mergenthal, Silvia. ‘Englishness/Englishnesses in Contemporary Fiction’. Unity
in Diversity Revisited: British Literature and Culture in the 1990s. Ed. Barbara
Korte and Klaus Peter Muller. Tubingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 1998. Print.
Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Knopf, 1993. Print.
Shibata, Motoyuki and Motoko Sugano. ‘A Pale View of Hills and An Artist of
the Floating World in Japan’. Contemporary Critical Perspectives: Kazuo
Ishiguro. Ed. Sean Matthews and Sebastian Groes. London: Continuum, 2009.
20–31. Print.
Sim, Wai-chew. Kazuo Ishiguro. London: Routledge, 2010. Print.
Su, John J. ‘Refiguring National Character: The Remains of the British Estate
Novel’. Modern Fiction Studies 48 (2002): 552–80. Print.
Suter, Rebecca. ‘“We’re Like Butlers”: Interculturality, Memory and Responsibility
in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day’. Q/W/E/R/T/Y 10 (1999): 241–
50. Print.
Tamaya, Meera. ‘Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day: The Empire Strikes Back’.
Modern Language Studies 22 (1992): 45–56. Print.
Walkowitz, Rebecca L. ‘Ishiguro’s Floating Worlds’. ELH 68 (2001): 1049–76.
Print.
———. (2007) ‘Unimaginable Largeness: Kazuo Ishiguro, Translation, and the
New World Literature’. Novel: A Forum on Fiction 40.3 (2007): 216–39. Print.
Wall, Kathleen. ‘The Remains of the Day and Its Challenges to Theories of
Unreliable Narration’. Journal of Narrative Technique 24 (1994): 18–42. Print.
Warhol, Robyn R. Gendered Interventions: Narrative Discourse in the Victorian
Novel. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1989. Print.
Westermann, Molly. ‘“Is the Butler Home?”: Narrative and the Split Subject in
The Remains of the Day’. Mosaic 37 (3). 2004. 157–70. Print.
Wong, Cynthia F. Kazuo Ishiguro. Devon: Northcote House Publishers Ltd., 2000.
Print.
 Chapter 5
Ishiguro and Heidegger:
The Worlds of Art
Fiona Tomkinson, Yeditepe University, Turkey

Only image formed keeps the vision

Yet image formed rests in the poem
Heidegger, ‘The Thinker as Poet,’ Poetry, Language, Thought, 7

Only one of Ishiguro’s novels, An Artist of the Floating World, is primarily

concerned with the theme of visual art and its practitioners. However, the
question of the work of art and the world which the artwork creates are abiding
preoccupations in the novels of Ishiguro. I shall argue here that the questions which
Ishiguro puts forward implicitly through the medium of narrative correspond very
closely to Heidegger’s meditations on the nature of the artwork in his later period.
The epigraph from ‘The Thinker as Poet’ implicitly raises the question of whether
the artwork truly resides in the mind of the artist or in his external creation, and
suggests also that the answer is in both. Vision and poem each depend on the other.
In ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, the nature of the artwork is explored from a
number of perspectives: the main issues in question being the co-foundational
relationship between the art and the artist, each of which creates the other; the
question of the ‘thingly’ character of the work of art, which cannot escape its
character as equipment and as such is necessarily related to a world; the possibility
of an artwork surviving the world in which it originated; and the conflict between
‘world’ and ‘earth’ which Heidegger sees as an integral part of the artwork.

Art Work in Ishiguro’s Novels

I shall not here attempt to relate every aspect of this very rich essay to Ishiguro’s
work, but I shall endeavour to demonstrate that some of its main issues are central
to Ishiguro’s novels, in which characters are defined and created by their artworks
just as much as they create them; in which the nature of things is never simple and
unproblematic but is always related to a world by a web of connections; and in
which we are also given the sense of an earth which underlies, and is in a sense
opposed to, the elaborately constructed worlds which the author creates.
Ishiguro’s novels also bring out into the open a political aspect of the world
of art of which Heidegger, with his dark past of collaboration with Nazism, was
notoriously in denial: the way in which artworks can be implicated in the political
60 Kazuo Ishiguro in a Global Context / Tomkinson

world of a totalitarian ideology. Nevertheless, the muted consolation that he offers

for this is also to be found in the Heideggerian dialectic between world and earth.
Ishiguro’s preoccupations concerning art reach a disturbing climax in the
dystopian vision of Never Let Me Go, where the cloned and doomed children of
Hailsham are encouraged, as part of the very best liberal education, to develop
their artistic potential and even to trade artworks through a tokens system and to
amass their own collections of their fellow-students’ artistic work. These students
also competed for the special privilege of contributing to what was known as
‘Madame’s collection’ and came to believe that this system of competition is
designed to give them a chance of delaying their fate as organ donors for a couple
of years, if it should be the case that they truly fell in love. According to the logic
of this delusion, genuine love will be proved by the compatibility of soul which a
couple possessed, and this will be demonstrated by the preserved artworks of their
childhood. Little do the clones suspect that this production of artworks is not an
opportunity for them to demonstrate the true individual nature of their souls, but
is simply part of a scientific experiment designed to prove that they had souls at
all, and thus merited a reasonably happy childhood rather than the cruel treatment
which was the norm on the donation programme outside Hailsham. Yet even after
the true horror of their fate has been revealed to them, they continue to create
artworks, to muse on the nature of art and poetry, and to regret their incomplete
works. Kathy H. even dreams that her last days as a donor may give her the chance
to finish writing her graduation essay on the Victorian novel.
The dystopian nightmare of Hailsham and the sense of poignant futility
which pervades the lives of its inmates in their desires to become artists can be
taken as an allegory for modern questions and anxieties concerning the nature
and the relevance of the artwork. Shameem Black’s article ‘Ishiguro’s Inhuman
Aesthetics’ emphasises the shocking and radical disjunction between what she
calls Romantic and Victorian notions of art as empathy and the way in which art
functions within the precincts of Hailsham, and sees Ishiguro himself as rejecting
all such comforting notions concerning the artwork. One can, however, go further
and take Never Let Me Go as a key to interpreting the rest of Ishiguro’s work.
Looking back at the other novels of Ishiguro from the perspective of Never Let Me
Go, we find a sequence of unreliable and deluded narrators moving against dark
ideological backgrounds, all in their turn preoccupied with works and worlds of
art and with the attendant themes of imagination and mimesis. Again and again
the same disturbing questions are raised: What is the connection between the work
of art and the artist’s soul? What is the connection between art and ideology?
Can the artwork have its value even when it has been perverted for ends which
the artist did not foresee, or when the artist was himself in the grip of dangerous
and mistaken political beliefs? Can the artwork provide a kind of remission from
mortality through its ability to capture the transient moment? For most of these
questions there is no clear answer, nor are we given a clear statement on the nature
of the artwork. We remain in the framework of an aporetic Platonic dialogue where
we can no more define what a great work of art is than Stevens at the beginning of
 Ishiguro and Heidegger 61

The Remains of the Day can confidently define what a great butler is (though he is
nevertheless confident of recognising one).
However, Ishiguro’s novels do far more than raise a series of unanswerable
abstract questions. Rather, he creates in each of his novels a world of art which
through its very existence interrogates the nature of the artwork itself. Although I
hope to demonstrate that the nature of this interrogation is very close to that made
by Heidegger, my aim is not to present Ishiguro as a Heideggerian, but rather
to show how his main preoccupations can be unveiled by presenting Ishiguro’s
portrayal of the riddle of art through Heidegger’s.
Heidegger’s essay opens by raising the question of the relation between artist,
work and art itself:

Origin here means that from and by which something is what it is and as it
is. What something is, as it is, we call its essence or nature. The question
concerning the origin of the work of art asks about the source of its nature. On
the usual view, the work arises out of and by means of the activity of the artist.
But by what and whence is the artist what he is? By the work; for to say that the
work does credit to the master means that it is the work which first lets the artist
emerge as the master of his art. The artist is the origin of his work. The work
is the origin of the artist. Neither is without the other. Nevertheless, neither is
the sole support of the other. In themselves and in their interrelations artist and
work are each of them by virtue of a third thing which is prior to both, namely
that which also gives artist and work of art their names – art. (‘The Origin of the
Work of Art’, Poetry, Language, Thought, 17)

Artist and artwork are equiprimordial: the work of art creates the artist just as
much as the artist creates the artwork. On one level, this is a trivial fact. Yet at
the same time, this being the case, it is small wonder if the artist feels everything
to be at stake in the verdict passed upon his works by his contemporaries or by
history, or in the definition of the elusive third element in Heidegger’s definition
– art itself.
The most obvious example of the mutually defining nature of artist and
artwork in Ishiguro is the narrative in An Artist of the Floating World, in which
an aging artist comes to terms with the fact that the use of his art in the service of
a now discredited militarism has led to the destruction of his reputation and even
threatened to stand in the way of his daughter’s marriage prospects. However,
Ishiguro’s accounts of the young artist being influenced and defined by judgements
on his or her work are perhaps of even greater significance, since he shows how
for the vulnerable child artist, his or her entire identity and existential validity can
seem to be at stake in the way their cherished artworks are judged. Certainly the
question of the child artist and his or her development – or, more often, arrested
development – is a recurrent theme in Ishiguro, and may lead us to suspect that
every mature artist contains traces of the child ready to be crushed by any contempt
of his or her efforts.
In Ishiguro’s first novel, A Pale View of Hills, there is a brief scene which
first raises this question. The narrator, Etsuko, has gone in the company of her
62 Kazuo Ishiguro in a Global Context / Tomkinson

friend Sachiko and Sachiko’s daughter Mariko on a cable-car ride above post-war
Nagasaki to a viewpoint from which she experiences the ‘pale view of hills’ of
the title. On the trip Sachiko, despite her general neglect of her daughter, speaks
of trying to secure her a future in the United States where she can ‘study painting
at college and become an artist’ (170) and Mariko, who has brought along her
sketch pad and crayons, displays signs of early promise. When commended by
an American lady for her drawing of a butterfly which ‘must have been very hard
to draw … It couldn’t have stayed still for very long’, Mariko simply replies: ‘I
remembered it … I saw one earlier on’ (114).
This seemingly trivial incident is deeply resonant. Firstly, as is well known,
the butterfly has deep and multivalent symbolic significance in Japanese culture.
It is associated with young girls and their emergence into life, with the flitting
of memories and is, above all, the personification of the souls of the living and
of the dead. The emergence of the butterfly from the chrysalis signifies both the
escape of the body from the soul after death, the transformation of an individual
within life and the acceptance of the joyous nature of change. It is also linked to
the sceptical tradition in Eastern Philosophy through the famous dream of the
Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi in which he imagines himself to be a butterfly and
then wonders if he is a man who dreamed that he is a butterfly or a butterfly now
dreaming that he is a man. Secondly, it is also a traditional subject for Japanese
art: we may think especially of the eighteenth-century school of Maruyama Okyo,
of the ukiyo-e woodblocks of the Edo period created by artists such as Katshshika
Hokusai, or of the origami butterflies of Ihara Saikaku’s short poem of 1680:
Rosei-ga yume-no cho-wa orisue (‘The butterflies in Rosei’s dream would be
origami’ – like the models of male and female butterflies used to wrap sake bottles
at a wedding ceremony.) Mariko’s choice of subject for her drawing thus places
her not simply in contact with a natural object, but with a whole world of art and
its cultural ramifications.
Nevertheless, her connection with a certain real and remembered butterfly is
emphasised. She has already, it seems, perfected the skill of photographic memory
that Masuji Ono in An Artist of the Floating World claimed he owed to being
excluded as a child from the formal reception room of the house and only being
able to catch glimpses of its goings on through the door. The woman remarks:
‘How clever your daughter is. I think it very commendable for a child to use her
memory and imagination. So many children at this age are still copying out of
books’ (114). This careless collapsing of the categories of memory and imagination
is, however, somewhat ironic, given the extent to which Ishiguro’s narratives, with
their unreliable narrators, invite us to question the relationship between the two.
After this brief raising of the issues of mimesis and artworld to be developed
in subsequent novels, the question of the relation between artist and artwork
comes to the fore. The seemingly harmless little episode of the butterfly drawing
turns nasty when the Japanese lady’s spoilt and conceited little boy criticises the
use of perspective in another drawing of Mariko’s, perhaps applying the rules of
Renaissance western painting to a work in a different genre: ‘“Those ships are
 Ishiguro and Heidegger 63

too big,” he said. “If that’s supposed to be a tree, then the ships would be much
smaller.” The mother considered this for a moment. “Well, perhaps,” she said. But
it’s a lovely little drawing all the same. Don’t you think so, Akira?”’ (114–15).
Akira not only violates social norms by rejecting the offered opportunity to
show politeness, but insists on imposing his own view of the artwork, insisting
that ‘The ships are far too big’ (115). A sophisticated rejection of this view
might have hinged on the fact that art need not always be strictly mimetic and
that traditional Japanese art does not follow the rules of Western perspective, but
Akira’s mother endorses her son’s views, even as she apologises for his rudeness,
through appealing to the superior quality of the education he has received:

The woman gave a laugh. ‘You must excuse Akira’, she said to Sachiko. ‘But
you see, he has quite a distinguished tutor for his drawing, and so he’s obviously
so much more discerning about these things than most children his age. Does
your daughter have a tutor for her drawing?’ (115)

This is, of course, an excruciating social moment, since we know in fact that Sachiko
is so far from providing such middle-class luxuries that she is not even sending
her daughter to school and is leaving her at home unsupervised. The artwork has
taken its place within the network of a social world and one of social snobberies
at that. Yet this does not make the power of the world trivial or negligible. It is as
if Mariko’s butterfly is suddenly caught in a spider’s web. Heidegger’s thoughts
on the artwork as a conflict between world and earth can give us a sense of what
is at stake here:

In the strife the unity of world and earth is won. As a world opens itself, it
submits to the decision of an historical humanity the question of victory and
defeat, blessing and curse, mastery and slavery. The dawning world brings
out what is as yet undecided and measureless, and thus discloses the hidden
necessity of measure and decisiveness. (‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, Poetry,
Language, Thought, 63)

Yet the presence of this artworld does not dilute but rather reinforces the sense of
the artist’s all being at stake in the artwork. It is no surprise that the unpleasantness
between Akira and Mariko escalates to the point where Mariko accidentally – or
on purpose – treads on his fingers as they climb a tree and he accuses her of
attempted murder. We never know whether Mariko was really guilty of this, but
we suspect that she may have felt such an existential threat in the criticism of her
artwork as to lead her to retaliate in this drastic fashion. Just as Zhuangzi was not
sure whether he had dreamed or was dreamed of by the butterfly, so Mariko may
have been unsure as to whether she created the butterfly and the other artworks or
whether they had created her.
The incident resonates further in the context of Ishiguro’s accounts of child
artists in the later novels. We might think of Tommy’s despair at Hailsham when
his artwork is derided by his classmates following the unlucky incident when a
64 Kazuo Ishiguro in a Global Context / Tomkinson

deliberately childish painting of an elephant standing in long grass is subjected

to condescending praise by the art teacher. As a result he is not only tormented
and ostracised by his fellows, but he loses all self-confidence as an artist and as a
human being. Ironically, he is saved from early despair by conversation with the
semi-dissident guardian, Miss Lucy, who, probably prompted by the feeling that
all the children’s aspirations are in any case pointless, tells him not to worry about
his development as an artist. However, she also predicts the late flowering of his
art – which will indeed later occur with his production, as a donor, of sketches of
vulnerable miniature animals; perhaps with a hidden link to the world of Japanese
art (and thus the ‘Japanese’ novels of his creator) through their resemblance to
the miniature animals which often feature in the Japanese tradition of netsuke,
an artform of sculptured toggles dating from the seventeenth-century, with which
Ishiguro would doubtless have been familiar.
One can place in the same category one of the formative moments in Masuji
Ono’s life when his father orders him to bring him his portfolio of paintings and
examines them closely actually praising the mimetic accuracy of one of them in a
manner not dissimilar to the way Mariko’s childish effort was praised: ‘Once, he
held one painting close to the candle flame, saying: “This is the path leading down
from Nishiyama hill, is it not? Certainly you’ve caught the likeness very well.
That’s just how it looks coming down the hill. Very skilful”’ (Artist 43).
Masuji Ono’s father then proceeds to burn all the paintings, not because he
objects to either form or content but because he does not want his son to adopt
the wastrel lifestyle of the artist and to live in poverty and squalor, and because
he fears the prophecy of a wandering holy man that his son has a weak side
which will need to be kept in check. Again we have the swift transition from
the understanding of the artwork in terms of mimesis, and its entanglement in a
web of social assumptions and cultural beliefs – perhaps in the web of fate itself.
Masuji Ono tells his mother that all that his father has succeeded in kindling is
his ambition, but the nature of his reaction against his father is seemingly deeper
and more complex. When towards the end of the novel he says that he is disturbed
by the smell of burning as it recalls the recent bombings, one wonders whether it
might bring back memories of this childhood trauma.
Masuji Ono’s relationship with his grandson can be seen as a continued
reaction to his own father. He encourages him in his drawing (though he cannot
resist interfering in it) and even his childish miming, which he recognises as an
artform rather than mere play. However, he was horrified to discover that his
grandson’s imaginary horse-riding imitates not a Japanese lord or samurai, but the
Lone Ranger, and worse still that his own son-in-law thinks that individualistic
American heroes are the best for children to emulate nowadays. Again, the mimetic
act cannot be detached from a whole world of cultural ramifications. These cannot
be escaped even when the grandfather gives into the boy’s taste by taking him
to see a horror movie where he is so scared that he hides behind his mackintosh
for all the scenes in which the monster appears. Terrified by confrontation with
the very thing which he had enjoyed imagining, the young boy is a parody of
 Ishiguro and Heidegger 65

his grandfather’s initial tactics of avoiding confrontation with his own political
error, but his deracination from his cultural roots in Japanese history and myth also
symbolise the orphaned nature of his grandfather’s artworks, detached from the
world of confident nationalism in which they had flourished.
This fate of the artwork deprived of the world in which it originated is also a
major theme in Heidegger’s essay:

The Aegina sculptures in the Munich collection, Sophocles’ Antigone in the best
critical edition, are, as the works they are, torn out of their own native sphere.
However their quality and power of impression, however good their state of
preservation, however certain their interpretation, placing them in a collection
which has withdrawn them from their own world. But even when we make an
effort to cancel or avoid such displacement of works – when, for instance, we
visit a temple in Paestum at its own site or the Bamberg cathedral in its own
square – the world of the work that stands there has perished.

World-withdrawal and world-decay can never be undone.

(‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, Poetry, Language, Thought, 41)

It is just this world-withdrawal and world-decay of the world of the artwork that
we experience in the destruction of Hailsham and of the floating world of the
pleasure quarter in which Japanese artists flourished before the war. Art works
surviving from these wrecks are deracinated survivals, be they Masuji’s paintings
or the recording of ‘Never Let Me Go’ which Tommy finds in a music shop after
leaving Hailsham.
The theme of art as both world-creating and suffering the pangs of world
withdrawal and world-decay is also present even in the novels least connected
with the visual arts. In The Unconsoled and Nocturnes, music is the main artform
considered and the poignancy of the narratives often comes from the way in
which performers and listeners endeavour to make it function as a bridge or a
shared world between human beings, but this bridge emphasises the gulf of
separation even more than the transient connection. The dream-like narrative of
The Unconsoled in which the pianist Ryder arrives in a city he cannot identify to
perform a concert which he cannot remember having agreed to give can be taken
as an extended metaphor for the failure to connect which is presented through
cruelly realistic sketches in Nocturnes, as when Tony Gardner, the ageing star
in ‘Crooner’, performs a last serenade for the wife he is about to cast off for a
younger woman; or when Ray, the TEFL-teaching failure of ‘Come Rain Come
Shine’, indulges in a last dance to American Broadway music with the wife of
his best friend, despite pretending, at the request of her husband, to destroy their
shared world by claiming falsely to have lost his taste for that kind of song. The
artwork is here once more a plea to ‘never let me go’ at the very moment when
such letting go is sadly imminent.
If we also look at The Remains of the Day and When We Were Orphans through
the lens of Never Let Me Go, one is struck by the extent to which Darlington Hall
66 Kazuo Ishiguro in a Global Context / Tomkinson

and the Foreign Settlement of Shanghai are indeed already Hailsham, the Utopia
which reveals itself as a concentration camp in disguise before vanishing forever.
Both Darlington Hall and the Settlement are loci of unbearable nostalgia despite
the dark and darkly understood forces which lie concealed within them. But what
is the role of the artwork in these novels? The short answer is that Christopher
Banks and Mr Stevens find art in the professions of detective and butler and in
a way which again emphasises the equiprimordial nature of art and artist. For
Stevens the perfectly ordered country mansion and for Banks the portfolio of
solved cases are indeed works of art, but so is the creation of the persona of a
great butler or of a great detective. Banks and Stephens, just as much as Masuji
Ono and Kathy H., suffer the pangs of world-withdrawal and world-decay when
Banks discovers that his dream of finding his lost parents is built upon an illusion
and when Stephens is confronted with the disgrace and destruction of the old order
at Darlington Hall and with the Hall’s survival into the new age as something
resembling the Greek temple or medieval cathedral which has survived the world
order to which it belonged.
The common fate of the artworks in the Ishiguro novel is, then, to be part
of a world which is destroyed after proving itself to be false. What then are we
left with? How do the protagonists survive the loss of their illusions and of their
world? What is left when a world, floating or otherwise, vanishes, obliterated from
the landscape like the lost Hailsham or the old pleasure quarter on the other side
of the Bridge of Hesitation? To take again some inspiration from the Heidegger of
‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, we can say that we are left with the earth:

That into which the work sets itself back and which it causes to come forth in
this setting back of itself we called the earth. Earth is that which comes forth and
shelters. Earth, self-dependent, is effortless and untiring. Upon the earth and in
it, historical man grounds his dwelling in the world. In setting up a world, the
earth sets forth the earth. This setting forth must be thought here in the strict
sense of the word. The work moves the earth itself into the Open of a world and
keeps it there. The work lets the earth be an earth. (‘The Origin of the Work of
Art’, Poetry, Language, Thought, 46)

Earth, as opposed to world, is the natural basis underlying all human superstructures,
and it comes to be seen as possessing the same consolations as the artwork, however
transient our own possession of it may be. As such it appears again and again in
Ishiguro’s novels, particularly as they draw to a close. In A Pale View of Hills, it
is the quiet English village in which Etsuko lives out her days after the death of
her second husband. In Never Let Me Go, it is the ‘horizon across the field’ in
Norfolk where Kathy H. pauses after her loss of Tommy (282) to look at ‘those
flat fields of nothing and the huge grey skies’(281) and to imagine that she has
reached the magical place where all lost things can be returned; in The Remains
of the Day, it is the English landscape which emerges in its unobtrusive glory in
the course of Stevens’ motoring to the West Country leading him to speculate
that ‘What is pertinent is the calmness of that beauty, its sense of restraint. It is
 Ishiguro and Heidegger 67

as though the land knows of its own beauty, its own greatness, and feels no need
to shout about it’ (29); in An Artist of the Floating World it is the retired artist’s
return to his garden and carp pond, and to the painting of plants and flowers; in
The Unconsoled, the final consolation of a breakfast buffet on a tram; in When We
Were Orphans, it is perhaps the realisation of Banks’s might-have-been, Sarah
Hemmings (and to some degree shared by Banks himself), that true love is not
necessarily a mission in life which requires the acquisition of a so-called great
man who produces lasting works, but can be for someone who is simply always
there, ‘like tomorrow’s sky’ (13). In all of these final tableaux we have a sense of
the earth as Heidegger describes it, as something which can be revealed, but never
analysed or penetrated:

Colour shines and wants only to shine. When we analyse it in rational terms
by measuring its wavelengths it is gone. … Earth thus shatters every attempt
to penetrate into it. It causes every merely calculating opportunity upon it to
turn into a destruction. The earth appears openly cleared as itself only when
it is perceived and preserved as that which is by nature undisclosable, that
which shrinks from every disclosure and constantly keeps itself closed up. All
things of earth, and the earth itself as a whole flow together into a reciprocal
accord. But this confluence is not a blurring of their outlines. … in each of these
self-secluding things there is the same not-knowing-of-one-another. The earth
is essentially self-secluding. To set forth the earth means to bring it into the
Open of the self-secluding. (‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, Poetry, Language,
Thought, 47)

The Heideggerian reading of Ishiguro which I have proposed sheds light on one
of the major preoccupations of his novels and perhaps even shows us what is
ultimately at stake in his oeuvre. To show what is at stake is not, however, to solve
the question of the work of art; as Heidegger himself says of his own reflections
on art in the epilogue to his essay: ‘They are far from claiming to solve the riddle.
The task is to see the riddle’ (‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, Poetry, Language,
Thought, 79). In Ishiguro, the protagonists’ bitter quest for truth tends to dissolve,
after the dissolution of their constructed worlds, in a final moment of earthly not
worldly beauty, but in all these endings the question of the work of art and its role
in the world is not so much abandoned as framed.

Works Cited

Black, Shameem. ‘Ishiguro’s Inhuman Aesthetics’. MFS Modern Fiction Studies

55.4 (Winter 2009): 685–707. Print.
Hatori, Koshiro. ‘History of Origami’. Web. <http://origami.ousaan.com/library/
historye.html>.
Heidegger, Martin. ‘The Thinker as Poet’. Poetry, Language, Thought. Trans.
Albert Hofstadter. New York: Harper and Row, 1975. 1–14. Print.
———. ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’. Poetry, Language, Thought. Trans.
Albert Hofstadter. New York: Harper and Row, 1975. 15–87. Print.
68 Kazuo Ishiguro in a Global Context / Tomkinson

Ishiguro, Kazuo. An Artist of the Floating World. London: Faber and Faber, 2005.
Print.
———. The Remains of the Day. London: Faber and Faber, 2005. Print.
———. The Unconsoled. London: Faber and Faber, 2005. Print.
———. When We Were Orphans. London: Faber and Faber, 2005. Print.
———. Never Let Me Go. London: Faber and Faber, 2006. Print.
———. A Pale View of Hills. London: Faber and Faber, 2009. Print.
———. Nocturnes. Five Stories of Music and Nightfall. London: Faber and Faber,
2009. Print.
truefaith7. ‘The Art of the Japanese Butterfly’. Web. <http://truefaith7.hubpages.
com/hub/japanese-butterfly-art>.
 Chapter 6
The Unconsoled:
Piano Virtuoso Lost in Vienna
Clare Brandabur, Fatih University, Istanbul

This labyrinthine novel offers three possible vantage points from which it might
be explicated: the musical, the psychological and the historical. However, to find
the key to any one of these threads, we must know the name of the ‘unnamed
city’ or at least adopt a conjecture based on its architecture, its preoccupation
with music, and its people. For it is the city whose history will ultimately be the
key to the labyrinth. Until I read Richard Robinson’s brilliant essay, ‘Nowhere in
Particular,’ I had concluded that the city can only be Vienna. The novel’s form is
dreamlike, and Freud wrote On the Interpretation of Dreams in Vienna. I became
convinced by Robinson’s compelling discussion that Ishiguro ‘inherits (and thus
does not have to spell out) that abolition of the boundary between the public
and private which is totalitarian and thus prophetic in Kafka,’ a formulation that
Robinson traces to Milan Kundera’s The Art of the Novel (Robinson 126). The
concept of a Central Europe that had been divided and redivided by wars and
treaties is traced by Robinson through many texts in which it figures as a maze, a
labyrinth so complex that ‘it was possible in the twentieth century to have lived
in Austria, Poland, the Soviet Union, and Ukraine—while not moving an inch’
(Robinson 113). Therefore, of the several ways of viewing the Central Europe
of The Unconsoled offered by Robinson’s analysis, I come down on the side of
viewing the ‘citizens of the unnamed city as more complicit, guiltily repressing a
mitteleuropaisch history for which they themselves feel accountable’ (Robinson
127). To do so, I will leave aside the similarity of this novel to Kafka’s Castle in
Prague and focus on the coherence to be gained by supposing that the unnamed
city might in many ways be Vienna.
It might have been Vienna to which the amnesiac protagonist, Ryder, was
invited for this important musical occasion because he is ‘one of the most
gifted [pianists] presently at work anywhere in the world’ (TU 187). It may be
significant that Ryder seems to suffer from either amnesia or Asperger Syndrome,
a condition related to autism, which he may have shared with Glenn Gould, whom
many regarded as the world’s most gifted pianist. Furthermore, Gould’s life-time
recording achievement virtually recapitulates Viennese musical history, though
he himself performed there only once at the Vienna Festival in 1957. Since Gould
sought to trace out the commonalities between Bach and such ‘rational’ composers
as Schoenberg, it is not completely fanciful to say that Gould undertook the task
70 Kazuo Ishiguro in a Global Context / Brandabur

of reconciliation assigned to Ryder, his fictional counterpart in The Unconsoled.

In his essay on Rubenstein, Gould called himself, with wry humor, ‘the self-
appointed bearer of the local neo-classical cross’ (Gould 283).

An ‘Extreme Occasion’

My idea for approaching The Unconsoled from the point of view of a public
performance by a musical genius as ‘extreme occasion’ was inspired by Edward
Said’s posthumous book, On Late Style, in which an important chapter entitled
‘The Virtuoso as Intellectual’ is devoted to Glenn Gould. Other important clues
include the fact that Ishiguro and Said were close friends, and Ishiguro himself
was an aspiring musician. Said describes the crisis in the performing arts when
Gould abandoned the concert circuit in 1964 to devote himself to studio recording
and sharing his love for music with popular audiences through radio talk shows
and videos. People loved him, talked about him, made films about him and he
continued to stun audiences with fine-tuned recordings of fresh and aggressive
interpretations of Bach, Schoenberg, Richard Strauss and others until his untimely
death in 1982 (Said 117). It is not my intention to suggest that Ryder is Glenn
Gould, but to explore through analogy some of the conflicts dividing the actual
musical world that are evoked and assumed in the postmodern dream world of
Ishiguro’s novel.
The three themes that I have distinguished – the musical, the psychological
and the historical – are intertwined: the presence of a large Hungarian refugee
community in the story reminds us of the thousands who fled Hungary in 1956
when Soviet tanks crushed the uprising (Lendvai 204–6), and the mention of
The Interpretation of Dreams reminds us of an earlier crisis when, in 1938, in
anticipation of the triumphal entry of Hitler into Vienna, Freud escaped and fled
to London.
Ishiguro’s protagonist was first and foremost a famous musical prodigy, and
he has been invited to an important musical event to arbitrate between two rival
schools of thought about musical interpretation. Ishiguro himself aspired to be
a singer/songwriter and did an apprenticeship hitchhiking through the US and
Canada with a guitar on one dollar a day before he decided to take the course in
Creative Writing taught by Malcolm Bradbury at East Anglia University. As a
citizen of a multicultural global village and a bona fide maker of world fiction, as
Pico Iyer identifies him in ‘The Empire Writes Back’ (Iyer 1993), it is plausible
to assume that Ishiguro knows about both the termination in Austria of Bruno
Kreisky’s Chancellorship in 1982, and the premature and shocking death in
Canada of Glenn Gould in the same year.
Though Ryder was scheduled to give an important concert and lecture, in fact
the only performance he gives is a rehearsal in a tiny hut on top of a remote hill
where no one hears him except the conductor Brodsky, who is in the cemetery
outside burying the dog Bruno for whom he had said repeatedly that he wanted
‘the best music’. Is the name of Brodsky’s dog significant for the novel? In these
 The Unconsoled 71

postmodern narratives full of pastiche and seemingly random names of places and
people it is hard to tell since, having left the familiar world of realism behind, such
narratives often acquire a strong flavor of allegory.
Many place names resonate with a regal Habsburg past and confirm that the
unnamed city could be Vienna. Several scenes are set on the famous Ring Tramway,
a later addition to the grand boulevard built by Habsburg Emperor Franz Joseph in
1861. Ryder is assured that, when his parents visited the city, they stayed at ‘a sort
of fairy-tale castle built by mad kings in the last century’ (TU 515). For their return
he orders what can only be a fantasy from the Habsburg past: a splendid carriage
pulled by white horses. The concert takes place in the famous Viennese domed
opera house, and we find references to the Maria Krystina Gardens, an allusion to
a Habsburg Queen – which evoke the Vienna of an imperial past.
Vienna is important for the psychological theme, since everyone in this dream
landscape is unconsoled: we can even see the unravelling of the novel as an
application of Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams which, like all of Freud’s major
works, was composed in Vienna, Freud’s residence from 1891 to 1938. It seems
that the only character in the novel who is not unconsoled is Sophie, since she was
loved as a child by her father Gustav. If we had to formulate Freud’s analysis of
child-parent relationships, we might say that he believed that parents who love
their children free them to love others, while parents who hate their children bind
them to themselves forever. Flashbacks into the childhood of Ryder illuminate
scenes of anguish as the little boy tries to block out the terrible arguments between
his parents, leaving him with the conviction that he is responsible for solving
their problems by becoming a great pianist, an interpretation offered by the author
himself in an important interview with Susannah Hunnewell in the Paris Review
(Hunnewell 15).
Two remarks by Ishiguro in this interview offer firm ground for a Freudian
psychoanalytic approach to The Unconsoled. First, the author says that when
he was embarking on The Unconsoled, he and his wife were discussing ways of
writing a novel. He said:

My wife pointed out that the language of dreams is a universal language.

Everyone identifies with it, whichever culture they come from. In the weeks
that followed, I started to ask myself, What is the grammar of dreams? ... The
language of dreams would also allow me to write a story that people would
read as a metaphorical tale as opposed to a comment on a particular society.
(Hunnewell 114)

This certainly helps to explain the sensation of nightmare created by many

passages in the novel, especially the weird worm-holes of time and space which
those of us more at home in the realistic novel find so disconcerting and anxiety
producing. It also helps prepare us for those flagrant violations of the ‘omniscient’
narrator convention when Ryder, a notoriously unreliable narrator, sees through
the doorway and down the corridor and into the living room, while still sitting in
the car outside, and reports to us the conversation taking place within. These are
qualities of dream rather than conventional realist techniques.
72 Kazuo Ishiguro in a Global Context / Brandabur

A second, equally important disclosure in the interview concerns the double

plot:

There are two plots. There is the story of Ryder, a man who has grown up with
unhappy parents on the verge of divorce. He thinks the only way they can be
reconciled is if he fulfills their expectations. So he becomes this fantastic pianist.
He thinks if he gives this crucial concert, it will heal everything. Of course, by
then it is too late. Whatever has happened with his parents happened long ago.
And there’s the story of Brodsky, an old man who is trying as a last act to make
good on a relationship that he’s completely messed up. He thinks that if he can
just bring it off as a conductor, he’ll be able to win back the love of his life.
These two stories take place in a society that believes all its ills are the result
of having chosen the wrong musical values. (Hunnewell 15, emphasis added)

Not only is the narrative style, according to Ishiguro himself, patterned after
the dream, but this psychoanalytic thread is the dominant theme of the novel. It
describes Ishiguro’s interest in how societies remember and forget, essentially the
mechanism of repression, which means in its psychoanalytic sense to exclude from
consciousness. But what is repressed will return to consciousness, Freud says,
in some disguised form. When Ishiguro describes the society within the novel
as believing that ‘all its ills are the result of having chosen the wrong musical
values,’ he is describing the mechanism of repression and preparing the way for
the reappearance of the repressed in an altered, substitute form. The return of the
repressed is explained in Freud’s essay on ‘The Uncanny’ as ‘that [which] ought to
have remained … secret and hidden but has come to light’ (‘The Uncanny’ 345).
Just as, in Moses and Monotheism, Freud expands the neurosis of the individual
and applies it to the entire national group, so, in The Unconsoled, Ishiguro is
working on one level with the neurosis of Ryder and on another level with the
collective neuroses of the Viennese elites. All the ills of Vienna are not caused by
having chosen the wrong musical values, but we can surmise, by adverting to the
terrible history of Austrian collaboration in the ethnic cleansing and annihilation
of Jews, intellectuals, dissidents, and others of their own society; it is an historical
catastrophe in which Ishiguro’s fictional Austrians played a role so terrible they
must banish memories of it to the unconscious.
In 1938, Freud escaped Vienna to take up residence in London, a move that
created a brief hiatus in the writing of Moses and Monotheism. In two historic
Prefatory Notes to the third section of Moses and Monotheism, Freud reveals the
trauma of his departure from Vienna: the first is dated March 1938, while the
second is dated June 1938. Of the Jews who remained in Austria after Hitler’s take-
over, most perished in Nazi concentration camps. Writing a text that perceives all
religion as neurosis, Freud calmly remarks on the barbarism into which Germany
had fallen, notes his former tenuous belief that the Catholic Church would shield
him from the depredations of the Nazis, and concludes somewhat sadly that the
Church had proved ‘a broken reed’ (Moses and Monotheism 57).
Vienna also locates the musical theme. Vienna figures in the evolution from
the waltzes of Johann Strauss through the stormy period of Gustav Mahler to
 The Unconsoled 73

Schoenberg’s atonal and twelve-tone compositions. In short, Vienna’s musical

history mirrors the novel’s conflict between two musical traditions represented by
the differences between the two conductors, Brodsky and Christoff, the conflict
Ryder has been invited to resolve. In The Red Prince, his book on the Habsburgs,
historian Timothy Snyder describes a society in denial, attributing to post-war
Vienna many features that match those of the unnamed city in which Ryder finds
himself. Ishiguro’s city is obsessed with music, its conflicted musical factions each
demanding Ryder’s undivided attention and agreement:

Vienna was rich, successful, democratic, and schizophrenic about its recent past.
… Austria’s self-presentation, whenever possible, escaped politics to emphasize
culture, above all music. … Jewish conductors and composers, at the center of
Viennese culture since Gustav Mahler took over the Court Opera in 1897, had
left the country in the 1930s or been killed in the Holocaust. (Snyder 249)

The political/historical theme is sounded also by the presence in the city of

Hungarian refugees represented from the start by Gustav and the Hungarian Café
where Gustav and his twelve disciple-porters hang out in the old city. This group
comprises an ethnic community that should command Ryder’s allegiance since he
is apparently married to Gustav’s daughter Sophie; yet so preoccupied is Ryder
with worry about his parent’s supposed arrival that he fails to honor Gustav’s
desperate appeal to intervene on behalf of these Hungarian refugees.
As we read The Unconsoled we feel the anxiety of nightmare increase as
Ryder’s attention is demanded by every person he meets. Finally, he must demand
time for his own rehearsal after having allowed himself to be sidetracked by the
needs of total strangers. This distracted lack of focus, and the anxiety it generates,
is reminiscent of the description that Said gives of the modern concert hall recital
as an ‘extreme occasion’:

As I have written elsewhere, the modern concert hall where we go to hear

prodigies of technical skill is in effect a sort of precipice, a place of danger
and excitement at the edge, where the noncomposing performer is greeted by
an audience attending the event as what I have called an extreme occasion,
something neither ordinary nor repeatable, a perilous experience full of potential
disaster and constant risk albeit in a confined space. (Said 118)

Glenn Gould was unusual in wanting to talk about his and others’ performances
and to share this discourse with a popular audience. Once he left the concert stage,
he moved into the recording studio, where he achieved what Said calls ‘new modes
of apprehension’ (Said 116–17). Ishiguro’s protagonist Ryder resembles Gould in
talking about and analyzing music as well as performing it, since he is scheduled
not merely to perform but also to give a lecture about music and aesthetics.
When he finally demands time for rehearsal, he is driven miles outside the city
and dropped off at the foot of a steep hill at the top of which there is a hut in the
midst of a cemetery. Here he reviews the intricacies of the music he plans to play
‘for his parents’ that evening. He plays the first movement of ‘Asbestos and Fibre’
74 Kazuo Ishiguro in a Global Context / Brandabur

with his eyes closed, and is just relaxing into the ‘sublime melancholy’ of the third
movement when he hears noises which turn out to be made by the conductor,
Brodsky, in the process of burying his dog. But Ryder continues to play and allows
himself to drift back to his childhood until it seems he is playing for his parents in
the home of a neighbor whose piano he had always wanted to play.
To start with the first plot centered on Ryder, he is both the narrator through
whose dream-like perception we view the events of the novel, and he is also a
musical genius who suffers from a kind of infantilism. Never having resolved the
complications of his family of origin, he still believes on some unconscious level
that he can make his parents happy and solve their marital problems by giving
perfect piano performancess. As a result, he is strangely detached from the woman
Sophie, who turns out to be his wife, and from her little boy Boris, who turns out
to be his son. The evening of the concert is so chaotic that he never gives either his
performance or his lecture, and instead sits in Miss Strathmann’s office sobbing
like a child when she informs him that his parents still have not arrived. Because
he is still emotionally stuck in the anxieties of his family of origin, he has been
unable to bring his intelligence and creative imagination forward to deal with the
challenge of his own marriage and parenthood.
However, even though Ryder himself fails to grow up and assume an adult
role, the plot is not totally tragic. A subplot involving his wife Sophie concerns
her relationship with her father Gustav. His death is caused by strenuous exertions
competing in a lugubrious dance with over-loaded suitcases, a custom at the
Hungarian Club that is surely a metaphor for their exile. Gustav had loved Sophie
so much when she was a child that he feared he loved her too much and resolved
to stop speaking to her directly. Since she had been twelve years old, they have
only exchanged words indirectly, through some intermediary. Inhibited from
expressing her love for her father directly, Sophie has bought a warm winter coat
for him, and having withheld it for three years, only now does she actually present
this gift as he is dying. This coat becomes a token through which they express
their love for each other by talking about its buttons, whether it will fit, and so
forth. Because she has been loved as a child, she comes to the limit of tolerance
for Ryder’s vagaries, asserts herself, claims her independence and walks away to
start a new life for herself and her son. Though he sobs after Sophie rebuffs his
feeble attempt to join her in mourning her father’s death, he is easily consoled by
the presence of a total stranger who is willing to talk to him about his parents. The
ease with which Ryder is consoled by the loss of his family is indicated by the
rapidity with which he finds cheering the splendid buffet which offers ‘virtually
everything I had ever wished to eat for breakfast’ (TU 534), a consolation suited to
his infantile psychological state.
The second plot involves Brodsky, Ishiguro says, an old man who is trying
to make good by proving himself as a conductor and thereby win back Miss
Collins, his one true love (Hunnewell 15). As we have seen, Brodsky is one of
two symphonic conductors who have divided the allegiance of the community.
It seems that Brodsky represents the more Romantic tradition – perhaps that
 The Unconsoled 75

exemplified by Gustav Mahler – while Christoff represents the newer post-

Romantic atonal tradition represented by Arnold Schoenberg. Christoff has been
actively conducting musical events in the town, but now Hoffman and others are
attempting to restore Brodsky to his position as official conductor. To this end,
Brodsky is being sobered up and allowed to rehearse the orchestra in preparation
for the important Thursday night event at which Ryder is also to perform. The
Brodsky plot comes to a tragic end: even though he pulls himself together and
performs magnificently in spite of Hoffman’s having enabled a drunken relapse,
and in spite also of an accident with a bicycle in which one of his legs must be
amputed. Luckily, it is his wooden leg! Sobering up, he manages to hobble up
to the podium with the help of an ironing board, and only collapses after having
given a rousing and convincing (even to the orchestra) peformance. Miss Collins,
however, is not convinced and ends their relationship definitively. To dramatize this
theme and relieve the somber tone, Ishiguro resorts to devices such as slap-stick,
exaggeration, and extreme irony. The ‘wooden leg’ episode may be an allusion to
a game described in Eric Berne’s Games People Play called ‘wooden leg’ in which
recovering addicts plead irresponsibility because ‘what can you expect of a man
with a wooden leg?’. This game is appropriate in the context of the struggle to
rehabilitate Brodsky, countered by Hoffmann’s secret plan to subvert his recovery.
In the fierce competition between Brodsky and Christoff that Ryder is supposed
to arbitrate, it is important to remember Ishiguro’s low-key comment that ‘these
two stories take place in a community that believes all its ills are the result of having
chosen the wrong musical values’ (Hunnewell 15). Thus the whole controversy
over fine details of musical interpretation represents a psychological displacement
– that is, a transfer of emotions and commitment appropriate for a matter of the
gravest importance (such as collective guilt consequent on massive war crimes
including collaboration in genocide) projected onto the far less controversial
realm of music.
At only one point does the repressed material emerge from its musical
camouflage: in the argument for and against the intrinsic emotional value of
‘pigmented triads’ (TU 197). Because the other examples of the specialized
musical vocabulary in this discussion are at least within the realm of possibility,
special attention should be drawn to ‘pigmented triads’ in the context of Ryder’s
intervention in the argument between Christoff and a group gathered to debate
the relative merits of the two contested viewpoints. In most of the reviews of
The Unconsoled, critics pass over this exchange as though it is just nonsense
language denoting the triviality of the discussion. However, when we see that the
whole dreamscape reveals a repression, it is worth looking carefully at the word
‘pigmented’, possibly as a sort of Finnegan’s Wake pun on ‘augmented triads’.
However, musical notes do not have pigment. What does have pigment is human
skin, and if we consider the possibility that the collective obsession with musical
values is, as Ishiguro suggests, a substitute for the repressed genocide with its
unspeakable horrors: lampshades made of human skin, burnings, or gas chambers,
then the choice of the word ‘pigmented’ takes on the character of an intrusion from
76 Kazuo Ishiguro in a Global Context / Brandabur

the psychic depths, heralding what Freud called the return of the repressed (Freud
[1899] 1998; 345).
The possibility that displacement of Viennese guilt onto an obsession with
music underlies the controversy surrounding pigmented triads is confirmed by Tim
Snyder’s comments on the self-justifying self-censored version of Austria’s image
of its own history. He suggests that the double clouded reflections of its Habsburg
and its Nazi past, one superimposed on the other, serve as two restricted mirrors
through which Austrians, especially Viennese, saw themselves after World War II.
As we have seen above, Timothy Snyder sees Austria as having ‘escaped politics
to emphasize culture, above all music’ (Snyder 249). It was in Vienna that the
Jewish Mahler had been so harassed by the musical community that he resigned.
Schoenberg was born in Vienna and spent most of his life there except for brief
forays to Berlin, leaving Vienna only in 1938 when Austria was joined to Germany
in the Anschluss and the citizens of Vienna cheered wildly as Hitler entered the city
in triumph. In his book, The Destruction of Memory: Architecture at War, Robert
Bevan records the deliberately planned destruction of Jewish culture and lives
in the entire region: ‘In Austria, dozens of synagogues and thousands of shops
were attacked and many totally destroyed. Out of the 21 synagogues in Vienna,
only the central synagogue survived – and that held the identifying records of
the Jewish community, which the Nazis were to use in their round-ups’ (Bevan
29). When Christoff tries to convince Ryder that his side of the musical dispute is
correct, the debate involves fantastic terminology like ‘ringed harmonies’ in the
context of which at first ‘pigmented triads’ sounds only slightly more fantastic
than the rest. By comparison, in a discussion of Schoenberg’s music, Glenn Gould
uses various terms involving triads in his discussion. For example, in his essay on
Schoenberg’s ‘Chamber Symphony No. 2.’ we find the following: ‘a vocabulary
of triadic relationships beyond the scope of key-centered tonality’ and ‘triadic
forms’, ‘triadic flow’ and ‘triad-prone sequences’ (Gould 137). However, as I have
noted above, the terminology involving ‘pigmented’ triads in the novel is given
special emphasis, since it occurs in a tense exchange wherein Ryder is asked by
one of the contenders named Claude to take a stand and make a pronouncement on
the ‘pigmented’ triad. Evidently the term has been at the center of a heated debate,
because as soon as Ryder arrives, Claude asks him:

“Perhaps it’s trivial. But let’s get it settled. Mr. Ryder, Mr. Ryder, is it truly the
case that pigmented triads have intrinsic emotional values regardless of context?
Do you believe that?”

I sensed the focus of the room fixing upon me. Christoff gave me a swift look,
something like a plea mingled with fear. But in view of the earnestness of the
inquiry – to say nothing of Christoff’s presumptuous behaviour up to this point
– I saw no reason not to reply in the frankest terms. I thus said:

“A pigmented triad has no intrinsic emotional properties. In fact, the emotional

colour can change significantly not only according to context, but according to
volume. This is my personal opinion.” (TU 197–8)
 The Unconsoled 77

In the silence that greets this weighty declaration, the room holds its breath – and
then one listener says quietly: ‘I knew it. I always knew it’. The strangeness of the
terminology may at first seem to be satirizing the seriousness with which Ryder
and his interlocutors take such a trivial subject. But by using such an invented
terminology as ‘pigmented’ triads, Ishiguro is doing something else. Remember,
he has told Hunnewell that ‘these two stories take place in a society that believes all
its ills are the result of having chosen the wrong musical values’ (Hunnewell 15).
Ishiguro implies that the ills of this society were not caused by a mistake in their
musical values, but this preoccupation seems to mask the real anxiety stemming
from a collective guilt over their role in the trauma of war, ethnic cleansing and
betrayal. These elites are using their obsessive-compulsive preoccupation with
music to displace the guilt arising from active participation in the Nazi genocide.
As Timothy Snyder remarks, ‘Austrians supplied themselves with a national myth
emphasizing suffering under the Germans in 1938–1945 and then the allies in
1945–1955. The fact that Austria during that first period was rather part of the
German Reich than its victim was obscured’ (Snyder 248). Snyder concludes of
Austria, ‘It was rich, successful, democratic and schizophrenic about its recent
past’ (Snyder 249). Snyder remarks in a note that ‘a separate study would be
needed to explore the peculiarities of Austrian national identity’ (Snyder, n. 12,
319). ‘Pigmented triads,’ then, is a metaphor in which the original repressed
emerges together with its symbolic displacement, an aesthetic cover for a moral
crisis undergoing slippage that is appropriate to dreams.
Ishiguro’s novel forces the reader to realize that we, too, are amnesiac, and
requires us to fill in the repressed history, both personal and collective, and to
empathize with all the unconsoled who fill this story with their suffering. Possibly
the title is even more inclusive: the unmentioned millions who perished in the
recent past, in gas chambers or in the anonymity of mass graves, are also among
the unconsoled. Perhaps Ishiguro’s brilliant novel will open the way for Central
Europeans to reconnect with their past and to bring to consciousness the horror
that has been banished to the unconscous. The novel uses various techniques to
ease the pain with its grotesque comic relief, not only from the black humor of its
style but also from the positive resolution of the plot from the consolatory point
of view of Sophie and Boris, who escape to live a happier family life in the future.

Works Cited

Berne, Eric. Games People Play: The Psychology of Human Relationships. New
York: Ballantine, 1992. Print.
Bevan, Robert. The Destruction of Memory: Architecture at War. London:
Reaktion Books Ltd., 2006. Print.
Freud, Sigmund. An Outline of Psycho-Analysis [1899]. The Standard Edition of
the Complete Psychological Works. Vol. XXIII. London: Viking, 1998. Print.
———. ‘The Uncanny’. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological
Works. Vol. XVII. London: Hogarth Press, 1955. 217–56. Print.
78 Kazuo Ishiguro in a Global Context / Brandabur

———. Moses and Monotheism: Three Essays. Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works. Vol. XXIII. London: Viking, 1939. Print.
Gould, Glenn. ‘Arnold Schoenberg’s Chamber Symphony No. 2’. The Glenn
Gould Reader. Ed. & Introduced by Tim Page. New York: Vintage, 1984.
134–42. Print.
———. ‘Rubinstein’. The Glenn Gould Reader. Ed. and Introduced by Tim Page.
New York: Vintage. 1984. 283–90. Print.
Hunnewell, Susannah. ‘Kazuo Ishiguro. The Art of Fiction’. Paris Review. 196
(2008). Web.
Ishiguro, Kazuo. The Unconsoled. London: Faber & Faber, 1995. Print.
Iyer, Pico. ‘The Empire Writes Back’. Time. 8 February 1993. Print.
Lendvai, Paul. One Day That Shook the Communist World: The Hungarian
Uprising and Its Legacy. Trans. Ann Major. Princeton & Oxford: Princeton
UP, 1989. Print.
Robinson, Richard. ‘Nowhere in Particular: Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled and
Central Europe’. Critical Quarterly. 48.4 (Winter 2006): 107–30. Print.
Said, Edward W. On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain. New
York: Pantheon Books, 2006. Print.
Snyder, Timothy. The Red Prince: The Fall of A Dynasty and the Rise of Modern
Europe. London: Vintage, 2009. Print.
 Chapter 7
Place Identity and Detection in
When We Were Orphans
Margaret J-M Sönmez, Middle East Technical University, Turkey

This essay analyses the appropriation by Ishiguro of place identities conventionally

associated with classic detective fiction in his novel When We Were Orphans
(WWWO). It is based upon the hypothesis that his much-discussed technique of
appropriation applies to more than just his fictional characters, and that places
are used in this way to the same extent. That is, in addition to their metaphoric
and symbolic values, places can become ‘projections of the narrator’s fears and
desires’ (Jaggi ‘In Search’ 8, qtd in Beedham 124). The places described in When
We Were Orphans are ‘constructed according to another set of priorities’, as
Ishiguro said about The Unconsoled, and in both novels the author openly admits
that he is ‘not trying to faithfully recapture what some real place is like’ (Jaggi
Writing 159). In When We Were Orphans, he is ‘trying to paint a picture of what
the world might look like if it ran according to the less rational emotional logic
that we often carry within us’ (Hogan, 157), and the less rational emotional logic
is dependent for its expression on the narrator’s fixation with detective fiction.
The fears and desires that create such expressionist (Holmes 12) versions of
places and people in the narrative are very clearly bound to specific experiences
that traumatized the narrator and shaped the subsequent development of his
self-identity. As Ishiguro recognizes, wounds to young psyches do not heal on
attaining adulthood: on the contrary, adulthood may bring even more profound
or extreme troubles, including existential anxieties and continuing adjustments to
self-identity (Jaggi Writing 165; Shaffer 169). In the novel, the ‘emotional logic’
of the narrative is based upon a traumatized memory, where ‘traces are revised at a
later date in order to correspond with fresh experiences or the attainment of a new
stage of development’ (Whitehead 6). The narrator’s response to his traumas is to
formulate his identity and to explain to himself the cruel world around him in the
simplified and reassuring terms of detective stories. This, then, is how he attempts
to remember and present his physical surroundings, too.

Place Identity

The term ‘place identity’ is used with two main meanings (Lewicka 211) that are
integrated in this novel. One is the identity that places have in themselves, ‘a set
of place features that guarantee the place’s distinctiveness and continuity in time’
80 Kazuo Ishiguro in a Global Context / Sönmez

(ibid.); the other concerns how one ‘conceives of it as a feature of a person’ (ibid.,
emphasis original), or what places mean to us, the part of an individual’s self-
identity that is related to place (Proshansky 147, Hernandez et al. 2007 310ff).
In the narrative of When We Were Orphans, both sorts are mediated by the place
identities typical of classic English detective fiction. Within his construction of a
detective-like self-identity, Christopher Banks describes his physical world in terms
that closely resemble the settings of classic detective stories, and he appropriates
for his self-identity – and for his narrative – the accumulated meanings of such
fictional places.
Place identity and allusions to detective fiction are merged in this novel,
because all of its representations occur primarily in the narrator’s mind as a
directed or altered memory. Christopher adopts and develops a self-identity
based upon detectives in books. This starts in childish make-believe games, is
deepened with his needs to regain his family and to feel in control when he has
been rendered unbearably vulnerable, and then grows into a grander and more
publically acceptable mission ‘to root out single-handedly all the evil in the
world’ (WWWO 16), ‘to combat evil—in particular, evil of the insidious, furtive
kind’ (21).
The ‘classic’ period of the British detective story is dated from the time of
Conan Doyle’s Sherlock stories (from 1887) until the outbreak of the Second
World War (1939) – or, for some commentators, until the early 1950s. This period,
which mostly coincides with that of the narrator’s life as recorded in When We
Were Orphans, coincides also with the peak and the downward fall of the British
Empire, and the varying fortunes of a national confidence that accompanied these
events. The detective stories of the time express confidence in the greatness of
Britain and accompanying prejudice against all foreigners (Watson 123ff). These
attitudes are reflected in the settings and plots of the stories, which demonstrate a
parochial Anglo-centrism in the literal as well as metaphoric senses of the word.
There is an apparently unbridgeable gap between the inward-looking, nationalistic
discourse of these works (Sim 226–7, Sönmez 74 et passim) and Ishiguro’s overt
attempts at creating truly international novels (Wong 2001 n.p.). Additionally,
there is a rift between the older discourse that presents a ‘quest for the criminal
and the interdiction of evil and restoration of the good … for the great good God’
(Spencer, qtd in Prchal 35) with the postmodern rejections of grand narratives to
which Ishiguro’s works belong.
Not only their plots but the whole tenor of classic English detective novels
is nationalist and parochial. They assert a view of English society as stable and
ideal, but one that could be threatened by dark forces that have somehow intruded
upon it. The detective plot in When We Were Orphans re-enacts the serpent-in-
Eden motif and represents the concealed act of the ‘negative creation’, and ‘the
rebel who claims the right to be omnipotent’ (Auden 2). In addition, the detective
is seen as the positive double of the criminal, since he has to retrace and relive
the criminal’s steps and thoughts in order to make sense of the crime and solve
the mystery. Both the detective and the criminal are thus ambivalent insider-
 Place Identity and Detection in When We Were Orphans 81

outsiders, and both display various behaviors that make the violated society
uncomfortable, again as found in When We Were Orphans. This essay discusses
the specific physical settings of classical detective fiction that reflect Christopher’s
descriptions of his own experiences; these turn out to cover most of the settings
described in Ishiguro’s compelling novel.

Physical Settings of Classical Detective Fiction and WWWO

As Watson notes, in Doyle’s stories London ‘is exceedingly well-ordered … its

population is unfailingly obliging … It is a city whose every crime is soluble and
whose vices are sealed within narrow and defined areas. It is a cosy place. It is …
a safe place. It does not exist … [b]ut Doyle managed to build it in the minds of
his readers’ (24). The city appears like this in Christopher’s mind, too. We will find
that his London is presented in similarly well-ordered and safe terms: he mentions
only the areas that a man of fashion might frequent (Kensington, Knightsbridge,
Bloomsbury), a prestigious club (‘The Charingworth’), museums and galleries
and, above all, hotels and parks. Christopher is shown spending his personal and
social leisure time almost always in public spaces. This results in England being
presented, until the final chapter, almost entirely through references to the places
stereotypical of ‘cosy’ Edwardian fiction: a country cottage, private boarding
school, Cambridge University, small tea shops, wealthy London, and country
mansions. The ‘defined areas’ of an altogether different London, the London of
labor and poverty, have no place in Christopher’s reported experiences of that city.
This other side of London occasionally intrudes into the detective stories of
Christopher’s childhood. Here are found the ‘haunts’ of potential criminals –
immigrants and the impoverished; the city is shown with an emphasis on narrow,
twisted, dirty and sunless streets. Doyle describes the streets and buildings of
the East End as containing ‘vile’ alleys, with an opium ‘den’ ‘between a slop-
shop and a gin-shop approached by a steep flight of steps leading down to a black
gap like the mouth of a cave … down the steps, worn hollow in the centre by
the ceaseless tread of drunken feet’ (‘The Man with the Twisted Lip’); Rohmer
presents the Limehouse district of the East End, where most of London’s Chinese
population lived, as a ‘dubious underworld’ that displays ‘squalid activity’ and
is full of ‘burrow-like alleys’ (qtd in Watson 118). By contrast, Christopher’s
London contains no such places, but, provocatively, his memory of his childhood
in Shanghai does.
In When We Were Orphans, Christopher presents Shanghai’s safe/rich and
dangerous/poor areas as even more sharply separated than London’s. Beyond
the Concessions, where large European-built residences are described and life
is presented as orderly and crime-free, lie the greater Chinese parts of town.
Christopher remembers them as disordered, crowded, smelly and dangerous.
Chapei displays ‘huddled low rooftops … shack upon shack’ (54); ‘[a] messy
shoreline of boats, gangplanks, mud huts, dark wood jetties’ (28); ‘a mass of
82 Kazuo Ishiguro in a Global Context / Sönmez

shacks’ (160); an inn (residence of an opium-addicted ex police inspector)

comprising ‘low ceilings, dark damp wood and the usual smell of sewage’ (203);
narrow alleys, ‘dilapidated wooden shacks’ (225); ‘open gutters’ and ‘large heaps
of factory refuse’ (226) – and all of this is before his description of slums known
as ‘the warren.’
His identification with a fictional detective affects not only how Christopher
describes and remembers things, but also his life choices. When We Were Orphans
opens with a description of his newly rented flat in London. It seems to have
been carefully chosen to resemble fictional detectives’ rooms: the ‘b’ of its
address, ‘14b Bedford Gardens’ (3) alludes to not only the famous Baker Street
address, but also subsequent detectives’ number-plus-letter addresses: Wimsey’s
at 110A Piccadilly, Poirot’s at 56B Whitehaven Mansions and Campion’s at 17A
Bottle Street. Furthermore, a scene describing Watson and Holmes at home in
their lodgings became an opening formula used in many stories by Doyle and
later writers, and this is replicated in opening scenes of Ishiguro’s novel where
Christopher’s sitting room recalls that of Holmes and Watson. The ‘cheerfully
furnished’ rooms at 221b Baker Street, for instance, had a sitting room with a
window overlooking the street, a fireplace, two armchairs and a comfortable
sofa (Doyle 13). Christopher’s own flat is ‘furnished … in a tasteful manner
that evoked [the] unhurried Victorian past,’ to which Christopher has added ‘a
Queen Anne tea service’ (3), not an obvious choice for a young man in the self-
consciously modern age of the early 1920s. Like the Baker Street setting, the
window overlooks the street and the drawing room contains ‘an ageing sofa as
well as two snug armchairs’. Christopher seems to have created a personal space
that is ‘quaint enough to make nostalgic appeal’, which is how Watson describes
Doyle’s fictional London (24); Christopher’s nostalgia is for the make-believe
world of detective stories.
Christopher reports the settings of his English cases in terms that similarly echo
classic detective fiction, where the miniature societies depicted are enclosed or
isolated both physically and socially (Auden 2, Watson 169); they form elements
of what are effectively cybernetic social systems in which both crime and remedy
are constructed and deployed. Some detective plots go to great lengths to obtain
physically isolated locations for their crimes, the ultimate of which are ‘locked
room’ plots based on the apparently total inaccessibility of the place of the crime.
The crime settings are usually exclusive: secluded villages, hotels, gardens, boats,
trains, etc. (Craig xv). In classic murder mysteries, the relatively cloistered nature
of the crime’s physical setting is expressed by showing the start of the investigation
with the place being sealed off, and at the conclusion by the surviving members
of the group being required to gather in a similarly enclosed place to hear the
detective solve the mystery and identify the criminal.
Christopher’s recollections of the ‘Studley Grange business’ echo these
types of settings. The name he gives it resembles the title of a Christie mystery
(like The Affair at Styles), and the crime occurred in a doubly-secluded setting:
a walled garden (i.e., paradise, etymologically) within the ‘lower grounds’ of a
 Place Identity and Detection in When We Were Orphans 83

country house (WWWO 31). The secluded nature of this place is emphasized by
Christopher’s comment that it reminded him of ‘a roofless prison cell’ (ibid.).
The most secluded of settings of Christopher’s detecting is even more prison-
like, in stark contrast to an English rural idyll. This is the scene of Uncle Philip’s
revelations in 1937. Here he encounters the ‘yellow snake’ from his childhood
paradise in a guarded, ‘cavernous’ (295) study of a requisitioned house in the
French Concession of Shanghai (283). In a skewed version of ‘the traditional
disclosure scene of a detective novel’ (Sim 202), it is not the detective who
explains everything, but a criminal; Christopher, who asks the questions, is sitting
in the position of a prisoner, by a desk with a lamp shining uncomfortably in his
eyes (287). Furthermore, Uncle Philip, who is effectively a prisoner already, is
criminally involved, but not the perpetrator of the crimes that Christopher had
been investigating. What Christopher learns is that, in looking for a single criminal
and a single explanation to a single crime, and in requiring the mystery to follow
the formulae of detective fiction, he has been neither a clever nor a Sherlock-like
detective at all (288).
Christopher’s main case or quest is set outside England, even though he
investigates it from afar for many years. The scene of his parents’ disappearances
is also an exclusive and excluding place, but the place is less restricted physically
than the places mentioned so far, such as ‘the privileged haven of the International
Settlement of Shanghai’ (Finney n.p.). Even though Shanghai was a huge town
(in 1936 it had a population of about 3.5 million as reported in Cheung 12), and
one of the busiest places of international trade in the world, from Christopher’s
point of view it is ‘not such a vast place’ (167). Perhaps he is thinking only of the
International Settlement with its limited number of non-Chinese residents, and
ignoring its native population as well as the greater number living in the ‘other’
larger Chinese Shanghai. The physical setting for Christopher’s investigation into
the kidnappings of his parents (as he imagines the crime to be) is not, in fact,
notably restricted nor isolated. It is the metaphoric significance of the International
Settlement and its occupants’ attitudes towards the world that echo the parochialism
of classic detective fiction.
The realities of Shanghai clash with Christopher’s childhood memories and
place a considerable burden upon the maintenance of his constructed self and
place identities. He tries to ignore the Sino-Japanese war by seeing it as somehow
extraneous to his mission, but he cannot ignore the artifice of the International
Settlement’s social and emotional insulation from the terrible things happening so
close to it. A description of Christopher in a hotel reception watching the shelling
of Shanghai through opera glasses from a small balcony (160), for instance, is a
masterly piece of irony presented in entirely scenic terms.
It is a measure of Christopher’s psychic deterioration that he believes he will
find his parents alive and imprisoned in a house used for their captivity for more
than twenty years. Even more disturbingly, he remembers the entire Shanghai
international community as ready to believe the same thing. The mystery of
the disappearances lies at the origins of his need to see his world as that which
84 Kazuo Ishiguro in a Global Context / Sönmez

he found in detective fiction and with himself in the leading role. Essential to
Christopher’s fiction is his reinforcing the idea of a single and identifiable evil
(the crime, the snake in the garden) in an identifiable and locatable place (the
isolated or restricted setting of the mystery, the locked room). An investigation
led by the hero-detective leads to the mystery being solved and the evil (criminal,
snake, dragon) ritually slain. But, in Ishiguro’s novel, there is no actual crime
scene to investigate, and subsequently, no possibility of a solution. Through years
of long-distance investigation, Christopher has narrowed down the field of his
investigations to a house in Chapei. It has taken him a lifetime to reach this stage
in his investigations, and the climactic part of the investigation is about to happen.
The house turns out to be more difficult to access than any of the remote places in
classic detective fiction.
As he reports it, various obstacles lie in his path. First of all, like a questing
knight he is tempted by an alluring female to abandon the search altogether.
Sarah provides an option to end the increasingly grueling tasks of maintaining
his detective persona and the grand illusion that he is on a mission to root out evil
from the world. She asks him to leave Shanghai with him and he feels as though
‘a massive weight’ or ‘a heavy burden had been removed’ (214, 215). He is taken
to meet her in a shop in a little street off the Nanking Road that sells a piano and
other musical paraphernalia (220), and from there he abandons her. Christopher
is unaware of the similarity of this scene with a previous scene at the heart of his
childhood trauma, one that the reader sees as a repeated place motif of the shop
with a ‘piano accordion’ (120); this was the place where he believed he was being
taken when Uncle Philip abandoned him in a little street off the Nanking road
(121) on the day of his mother’s disappearance. Without consciously deciding to
let Sarah down and unconsciously echoing his father’s casual departure decades
earlier by saying he’ll be out for ‘just a few minutes’ (223), Christopher returns to
his search, forgetting all about her (225) as if she was merely an illusion like the
temptresses in Malory’s holy grail quests.
Attempting to reach the house, he faces increasingly unpleasant and dangerous
physical and military obstructions (225–6). He has unwittingly entered Chapei,
the part of Shanghai that for him is the equivalent of the ‘sealed off’ parts of
the criminalized London described above. As a child Akira had scared him with
stories of ‘dead bodies piled up everywhere, and flies buzzing all over them’ in
Chapei (54). He now panics, fearing that he is lost, getting too close to the fighting
and, above all, that he has inadvertently ‘left the Settlement’ (226–7, emphasis
original). At this point Christopher’s obsession with finding his parents has taken
him out of the safe realm of detective novel locations (he has mentally left the
Settlement), and what follows resembles a hallucination or a nightmare of more
wholesale destruction than could be found in or appropriated from a whodunit.
This scene is still mediated through his narrative, and it is still Christopher’s self-
identity that is revealed through images of place, but these places are no longer
recognizable as detective novel settings.
In Christopher’s construction, Chapei has been devastated by Japanese shells
and is a chaos of building-to-building fighting. He stumbles from one destroyed
 Place Identity and Detection in When We Were Orphans 85

living space to another in a townscape to which Akira’s scary stories had been but
a mild foreshadowing. In the ruins he rescues a wounded Japanese soldier whom
he recognizes as Akira, and together they continue the absurd and impossible
mission. The ‘sheer improbability’ of this being Akira ‘suggests some kind of
extreme psychological regression’ (Sim 240); the obstacles between Christopher
and his target are now life-threatening.
The house, in which Christopher’s parents are not to be found, of course,
seems to him at first untouched by the battle (WWWO 267). Soon, he finds it to
be half destroyed and this scene represents Christopher’s own case, in which he
appears intact to outward appearances, but is like a shattered shell within. (Self-)
realization is difficult, and for the first time he freely sobs as he tries to explain, ‘I
came here to find my parents but they are not here anymore. I am too late’ (274).
Christopher’s reference to ‘here’ is ambiguous and expresses his confusion not
only with places but also with the time associated with places: does he mean the
house, or Shanghai, or his life in general?
The emotional logic of the harrowing scenes in Chapei requires us to read them
symbolically. Like everything else in this novel, they happen inside Christopher’s
mind and show the enormous effort required to make himself believe that his
parents’ destinies will fit into his delusions. The closer he gets to a recognition
that they do not correlate, the more distressing and also the more unlike detective
fiction are his surroundings. He remains unmoved when viewing terrible things,
and this stoicism reflects the detachment of Christopher’s self-identity from the
ghastliness he describes. Being forced to remove himself, and his thoughts, to a
setting far from his habitual detective identity/world, he finds himself in a place
that presents settings that are more terrifying than even his worst childhood fears.
Returning to the Settlement after the Chapei episode, Christopher expresses the
failure of his lost-parents case and of his long-cherished detective self-identity – in
terms of place:

‘I’m beginning to see now, many things aren’t as I supposed.’

The colonel nodded. ‘Our childhood seems so far away now … our childhood
becomes like a foreign land once we have grown.’

‘Well, Colonel, it’s hardly a foreign land to me. In many ways, it’s where I’ve
continued to live all my life. It’s only now I’ve started to make my journey from
it.’ (277)

In detective stories, the criminal and usually the detective leave the society/scene
of the crime after the detective has unmasked the villain and explained the mystery.
There follows a re-formation of the original setting and community with only
minor, non-structural changes: ‘And then, the air cleared, everything would be
set to continue as before, right, tight and reliable’ (Watson 171). Ishiguro explains
that ‘the detective unmasks this one element and everything goes back to being
beautiful again’ (in Hogan 159). The scene of this unmasking in When We Were
Orphans is the meeting with Uncle Philip in the locked-room setting (a study) that
86 Kazuo Ishiguro in a Global Context / Sönmez

has been described earlier. This is where the plot presents its most ironic twists to
the formula, for it is the criminal-figure who solves the mystery, and the detective
who leaves the scene, shattered. Significantly, the site of this encounter is not in
the criminalized and war-torn Chinese part of Shanghai, but in a house whose
identity has appropriated that of the Banks family’s old Shanghai villa; like the
earlier place, it is in an ‘elegant’ district (282) in a Concession which belonged
to Europeans until being taken over by the Chinese. Uncle Philip is ‘at home’
again and the snake has returned to the garden. As in the Bible story, the human
(Christopher) sees his nakedness (‘I have not been so clever’ [288]), the snake
(Uncle Philip) is bruised (he is ‘haunted’ and ‘consumed with self-hatred’ [287]),
and the human is exiled (the ‘whole world’ and the coming war, is ‘no longer [his]
concern’ [296]).
After the great disillusionments of Uncle Philip’s revelations, and after a Second
World War that remains a hugely significant gap in the narrative, Christopher’s
settings are relatively impoverished, just as his dreams are diminished. He has lost
his mission and jettisoned his career, although he clings to some remaining shreds
of his appropriated world of detective fiction. Shanghai has become ‘a ghostly
shadow of the city it once was’ (300), and his mother’s elegant villa has been
replaced by a Hong Kong care home for the mentally disturbed. London is ‘not
like it used to be’ (307) and his London house and garden (a ‘sanctuary’ [131])
bought with money ostensibly inherited from his aunt (127) have been exchanged
for a ‘stuffy little flat’ (309) that is, perhaps, again rented (he could just ‘leave’
it, says Jennifer, not ‘sell’ it). His earlier patronage of grand London hotels has
been replaced with a stay in a country inn (306), and Jennifer, trying to recover
from a suicide attempt, lives in a shabby boarding-house (306). In order to cheer
them both up, it is Jennifer who initiates a pretending game: she suggests a ‘cosy’
plot resolution in which Christopher can live in Gloucestershire by her and her
imagined family, in ‘an old shed or something’ (309). Christopher believes that
she was only half-joking, and imagines that (not liking the idea of a shed) he may,
possibly, ‘take a cottage not far away’ from Jennifer in the country (310).
Jennifer intended her suggestion about the shed to be funny because it is
absurd, but there is something more to this image than mere frivolity. The idea of
living in a shed has literary associations with an idealized and essentially escapist
pastoral or even spiritual life: Sir Percival’s hermitage retreat in the Morte d’Arthur,
Wordsworth’s hermit’s cave in ‘Tintern Abbey’, and Yeats’s ‘small cabin’ in ‘The
Lake Isle of Innisfree’, for instance, all come to mind as retreats. Jennifer’s fantasy
thus offers Christopher a possibility of escape into another identity, one that is
perhaps even more restricted than the world of detective fiction. Christopher alters
this idea into one in keeping with his world of detective fiction, as he vaguely
considers taking a cottage in the country. Retirement for fictional detectives means
a return to nature: Sergeant Cuff retires to Surrey to grow roses (The Moonstone);
Holmes takes up bee-keeping in a farm in Sussex (‘His Last Bow,’ ‘The Second
Stain’); and Poirot grows marrows in his retirement (The Big Four, The Murder
of Roger Ackroyd). It seems unlikely that Christopher will copy their returns to
detecting, but he nevertheless holds on to his detective identity through memory
 Place Identity and Detection in When We Were Orphans 87

and reputation: he is pleased to be recognized as a once-famous investigator. The

continued presence of London’s parks and galleries, of the British Museum where
he can read old newspaper reports of his earlier successes, and of old London
friends allows him to live in a continuation of the least painful parts of his past.
Christopher’s retrenchment of ideals and lowering or even loss of expectations
have left him with both emptiness and bitterness (he becomes ‘morose’ when
left to himself, 309), but nostalgia remains as a comfort, precisely because the
unchanged parts of London allow him to retreat into an old identity without the
stress of actively maintaining it. He admits that ‘the city … has come to be my
home’ (313).
After his mystery was solved, then, unlike the murder mysteries that end with
everything being ‘beautiful again,’ everything seems to have got worse, especially
in the shorter term where there were battles, breakdown, war and attempted suicide.
In the longer term, however, it is seen that although there has been a general
lowering of standards in his environment, politically everything has returned to its
previous state, with a world of economic colonization and exploitation carrying on
much the same as before. For Christopher this world has less panache, now that it
is seen for what it is, and now that he can no longer be a heroic detective. Although
Sim finds the promise of regeneration in the novel mainly because of the presence
of Jennifer in Christopher’s life, a reading of the novel through its uses of place
identities associated with detective novels charts instead a set of deteriorations
with no satisfying resolutions.

Conclusion

Place identity and the motifs from detective fiction highlight many themes in the
novel, and this essay focused on a discussion of these two elements where they
interact. In Ishiguro’s novels, it was possible to find a consistent ‘emotional logic’
or, perhaps, believable psychological tale in the place identity of Christopher
Banks, and in the identities of the places as they are described in the character’s
discontinuous notes. This essay presented a reading that considers the various
degrees of realism found in Christopher’s narrative and may address the variety of
dissenting criticism about the novel as summarized by Beedham (128–9). Reading
When We Were Orphans from the perspective of place identity has provided a way
to consider the expressionist aspects of Ishiguro’s writing; this compelling motif
underscores all of Ishiguro’s novels to date (Sim 2006), and may provoke new
ways of perceiving the author’s fiction.

Works Cited

Anon. ‘The English Detective Story’. Classic Crime Fiction. Web. January 2013.
<Classiccrimefiction.com>.
Auden, W.H. ‘The Guilty Vicarage. Notes on the Detective Story, by an Addict’.
Harpers (May 1948). Harpers Archive. Web. 7 February 2013.
88 Kazuo Ishiguro in a Global Context / Sönmez

Beedham, Matthew. The Novels of Kazuo Ishiguro. A Reader’s Guide to Essential

Criticism. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Print.
Cheung, Joys Hoi Yan. Chinese Music and Translated Modernity in Shanghai,
1918–1937. Ann Arbor: UMI Microform. 2008. Google Books. Web. 19
February 2013.
Craig, Patricia. ‘Introduction’. The Oxford Book of English Detective Stories.
Oxford: Oxford UP, 1990. Print.
Delamater, Jerome H. and Ruth Prigozy, Eds. Theory and Practice of Classic
Detective Fiction. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1997. Print.
Doyle, Arthur Conan. A Study in Scarlet. London: Penguin, 2007. Print.
Finney, Brian. ‘Figuring the Real: Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans’. Jouvert
7.1 (Autumn 2002). Web. December 2012.
Hauge, Ashild Lappegard. ‘Identity and Place: A Critical Comparison of Three
Identity Theories’. Architectural Science Review, (1 March 2007). Highbeam
Research. Web. 14 August 2012.
Hernandez, Bernado, M. Carma Hidalgo, M. Esther Salazar-Laplace and Stephany
Hess. ‘Place Attachment and Place Identity in Natives and Non-natives’.
Journal of Environmental Psychology, 27. 4 (December 2007): 310–19.
Science Direct. Web. 14 August 2012.
Hogan, Ron. ‘Kazuo Ishiguro’. Conversations with Kazuo Ishiguro. Ed. Shaffer,
Brian W. and Cynthia F. Wong. Jackson, MS: UP of Mississippi, 2008. 156–60.
Print.
Holmes, Frederick M. ‘Realism, Dreams and the Unconscious in the Novels of
Kazuo Ishiguro’. The Contemporary British Novel. Ed. James Acheson and
Sarah C.E. Ross. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2005: 11–23. Print.
Ishiguro, Kazuo. When We Were Orphans. London: Faber and Faber, 2000. Print.
Jaggi, Maya. ‘In Search of Lost Crimes’. Guardian. 1 April 2000. The Guardian.
Web. 19 February 2013.
———. ‘Kazuo Ishiguro with Maya Jaggi’. Writing Across Worlds: Contemporary
Writers Talk. Ed. Susheila Nasta. New York: Routledge, 2004. 159–70. Questia.
Web. 15 August 2012.
Krotoski, Alex. ‘Untangling the Web’. (29 September 2011). Untangling the Web
with Alex Krotoski. Blog. Web. 14 August 2012.
Lewicka, Maria. ‘Place Attachment, Place Identity, and Place Memory: Restoring
the Forgotten City Past’. Journal of Environmental Psychology. 28 (2008):
209–31. Print.
Prchal, Timothy R. ‘An Ideal Helpmate: The Detective Character as (Fictional)
Object and Ideal Imago’. Theory and Practice of Classic Detective Fiction.
Ed. Jerome H. Delamater and Ruth Prigozy. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press,
1997. 29–38. Print.
Proshansky, Harold M. ‘The City and Self-Identity’. Environment and Behavior.
10.2 (June 1978): 147–69. Periodicals Archive Online. 30 January 2013. Web.
Shaffer, Brian W. and Cynthia F. Wong, eds. Conversations with Kazuo Ishiguro.
Jackson, MS: UP of Mississippi, 2008. Print.
 Place Identity and Detection in When We Were Orphans 89

Shaffer, Brian W. ‘An Interview with Kazuo Ishiguro’. Conversations with Kazuo
Ishiguro. Ed. Brian W. Shaffer and Cynthia F. Wong. Jackson, MS: UP of
Mississippi, 2008. 161–73. Print.
Sim, Wei-Chew. Globalization and Dislocation in the Novels of Kazuo Ishiguro.
Lewiston, New York: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2006. Print.
Sönmez, Margaret J-M. ‘Foreign Voices in Crime Fiction 1900–1950’. In-
Between: Essays and Studies in Literary Criticism 17 (2010): 73–94. Print.
Spencer, William David. Mysterium and Mystery: The Clerical Crime Novel. Ann
Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1989. Print.
Watson, Colin. Snobbery with Violence: English Crime Stories and their Audience.
London: Methuen, 1987. Print.
Whitehead, Anne. Trauma Fiction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2004. Print.
Wong, Cynthia. ‘Like Idealism Is to the Intellect: An Interview with Kazuo
Ishiguro’. CLIO (Spring 2001). Questia. Web. 16 January 2013.
———. Kazuo Ishiguro. Second edition. Horndon: Northcote House, 2005. Print.
This page has been left blank intentionally
 Chapter 8
What Kathy Knew:
Hidden Plot in Never Let Me Go
Olga Dzhumaylo, Southern Federal University, Russia

While Never Let Me Go (2005) establishes many of the themes and techniques that
also dominated Ishiguro’s earlier works, it is unique among his novels for several
reasons. There are the unusual ideas about organ donations providing the focus of
the clone-narrator’s story. The novel attracted a certain amount of sensationalism
when it first appeared in the context of contemporary biopolitics and bioethics,
subjects that generated much heated debate about personal freedom and authority
(Jerng 2007; Jennings 2010; Mirsky 2006). Second, Ishiguro’s proficiency in the
art of ‘concealment’ and his considerations of the so-called English boarding-
school fiction as a ‘platform’ for science-fiction dystopia were unique. Some
critics proposed fascinating deconstructionist approaches regarding exploration
of subjects such as empathy in the post-humanist era and a reincarnation of
Homo sacer (Agamben), with special emphasis on the nature of contemporary
experience, memory, identity, writing (Black 2009; McDonald 2007; Joy and
Neufeld 2007).
One of the more controversial questions is why the cloned protagonists, for
all their fine emotional inner life, prove unable to resist a fate that is sanctioned
by others and which results in their inevitable death. This logical question is
seriously complicated when the structuring motifs found in Ishiguro’s poetics are
introduced into the critical mix: a dystopian novel about clones suddenly appears
as an existential tale about the inescapable confines of human death. Ishiguro
indirectly addresses these controversies in an interview, in which he talks about
the philosophical acceptance of death as a common predestination, a shared human
heritage, the idea of which is most poignantly expressed in his novel about clones
(Mullan 2006).
Ishiguro uses his art of ‘concealment’ to craft a novel in which these
philosophical questions unfold as a subplot in line with Hailsham’s own ‘told
and not told’ principle (67). Kathy, the unreliable narrator of the novel, displays
variations on the theme of knowing/not knowing. Still, the reader must find a way
to undermine and re-shape what amounts to her fragmented ‘confession with a
loophole’ (Bakhtin 1984: 233) into an existential plotting of the work’s message.
Its articulation can be found through a complex layering of fictive elements among
which are elaborate metaphorical chains and leitmotif clusters.
92 Kazuo Ishiguro in a Global Context / Dzhumaylo

Narrative of Inescapable Disintegration

It is important to regard leitmotif clusters of knowing/not knowing not as an

exclusively semantic set of elements, but as building blocks within the novel’s
composition and structure. Thus, Hailsham guardians keep the truth of a clone’s
predestination hidden from the children. Later, they insist that silence was
merely a practice of ‘sheltering’ (263). Yet the disturbing series of seemingly
irrelevant episodes create the overall mood and narrative construction of the
children’s eventual and inescapable disintegration. This particular image from the
novel situates their fate: ‘The woods were at the top of the hill that rose behind
Hailsham House. …When it got bad, it was like they cast a shadow over the whole
of Haisham. … There were all kinds of horrible stories about the woods’ (49).
Ishiguro is a master at suggesting art and horror through deliberate, structured
motifs, and this essay examines selected ones.
One of the first instances of a disintegration motif is represented in a mise-en-
abyme story of a child who tried to escape from the school and was found dead in
the woods. The story echoes a leitmotif from Ishiguro’s first novel, A Pale View
of the Hills (1982), in which children mysteriously disappear or are found dead.
The appalling image of a hanged child projects a series of significant details that
disclose the personal tragedy of the narrator whose daughter committed suicide
by hanging. Infusion of this repeated image in Never Let Me Go emphasizes
the children’s painful insight into their own future doom and dismemberment.
Ishiguro’s leitmotif in the later novel is slightly modified: a hanged child on the
tree which haunts Etsuko from the first reappears in Never Let Me Go as a ‘child
tied to a tree with the hands and feet chopped off’ (50), and it is a story that haunts
young Kathy into her adulthood. Loss of freedom is symbolically represented by
chopped-off hands or feet (a motif of running-away-from-fate), as these signify
depersonalization and disembodiment: an individual loses forever an ability to
read individual lines of fate on the missing palms of chopped off hands. Ishiguro
approaches with rueful irony the emblematic concealment and disclosure of a
transition from being to non-being. In addition to a bitter disillusionment regarding
dream/reality, this ‘story’ foreshadows the impossibility of the clones’ escaping
from their fatal dismemberment.
In a similar way, Tommy’s sudden ‘blows’ foreshadow his final emotional
disturbance after meeting with Madam. The scene on the field culminating with
‘… Tommy’s figure, raging, shouting, flinging his fists and kicking out’ (269)
synthesizes the years of frustration during the Hailsham school years and offers
an ironic twist to the knowing/not-knowing binary. His classmates systematically
misinterpret Tommy’s desperate instances of ‘losing [his] temper’, gradually
causing him to be an outcast in school. Although his emotional and intellectual
senses are questioned by both his classmates and the reader, who regard him as
‘the idiot’ (7), or ‘mad animal’ (12), his tantrums actually show how deeply he
must sink in their eyes before he can express the truth about everybody’s final
 What Kathy Knew 93

destination. Many years later, Kathy will admit Tommy’s prescience with her
exclamation to him that, ‘[a]t some level you always knew’ (270).
This attitude towards Tommy, the one who ‘really doesn’t suspect a thing’ (7),
produces an ironic reversal when he courts the most profound suspicion about the
true nature of his own identity, and also when he seems innately aware of how they
are each reduced as an unthinking body or as a set of body fragments useful only
for organ donations. Tommy is the only boy who is never laughing at jokes about
donation such as this one: ‘Don’t you know? If it’s right on the elbow like that, it
can unzip … [and] it can unzip like a bag opening up. Thought you’d know that’
(83–4). There is stark irony here in that Tommy is the one who is painfully aware
of being similar to a ‘bag’ that one can zip and ‘unzip’.
But, even he falls for the illusion of deferral, which states that those who
are creative and loving may postpone their fatal donations if, as couples, they
are authentically in love. Tommy begins drawing meticulously his little animals
to reflect his increasing faith that some external system can save him from
defragmentation. When Tommy takes his ‘animal pictures’ to show Madam his
proof of being a human, he brings them in a ‘sports bag.’ He ‘begins to unzip
it’ (249) in order to display and donate them to the Gallery. Yet, he faces the
heartbreaking truth that the only sort of donation he is supposed to make will be
‘to unzip’ his organs. The scene brings us back to school jokes about organs which
one can ‘unzip like a bag opening up’. Here, Ishiguro refers to an archetypal motif
of sparagmos, the tearing to pieces, dismembering of a live flesh (a human or
an animal), which connects sacrifice with consumption. As so often happens in
Ishiguro’s writing, there is also a surrealistic tone where the mundane turns out
to be a horrible reality: for Tommy, the zipped/unzipped bag that symbolized the
fate of their own bodies was never a joke. In retrospect, Kathy observed the shifts
in attitude towards donations among her schoolmates, but it was Tommy who
sensed most deeply the pain of one’s bodily fragmentation or disappearance, or
those moments when a human body is regarded as biodegradable organic ‘stuff’.
Tommy is tormented by the idea of the self’s morbid progression to nothingness,
of becoming mere stuff that has no value to one’s own self. Just before his final
donation he articulates what amounts to his childhood sensations about the clones’
fate:

… [A]fter the fourth donation, even if you’ve technically completed, you’re

still conscious in some sort of way; how then you find there are more donations,
plenty of them, on the other side of that line; how there are no more recovery
centers, no carers, no friends; how there’s nothing to do except watch your
remaining donations until they switch you off. (274)

The shame of being reduced to ‘stuff’ was somehow clear to him as a boy, and
the knowledge remains constant throughout his young life. We may refer back
to the framing scene on the field that finally produces a bitter, ironic echo of
the beginning episode where Tommy loses his temper. Ishiguro adds seemingly
trivial details that express the significance of these important concepts of knowing
94 Kazuo Ishiguro in a Global Context / Dzhumaylo

through a process of repetition. For instance, ‘mud’ acquires its double meaning
with how it stresses Tommy’s inability at being creative. Kathy recalls a time
when Tommy had ‘a sizeable chunk of mud stuck on his rugby shirt near the
small of his back’ (91). One of the girls, in a seemingly friendly way, addressed
Tommy: ‘You got poo-poo on your back! What have you been doing?’ (91). Her
remarks call attention to Tommy’s deflated and soiled sense of self. Mud, like
rubbish, is to art what the self is to the world, and their final disillusionment about
deferral carries shame as well: if art means nothing, then it is ‘mud’ to which a
human is condemned. Looking for self-integrity is more than a force that spurs
these characters in their quest for meaning, for it notably shifts emphasis of the
knowing/not-knowing motif in insightful ways. It turns out that all the characters
innately know ‘what they are’, but in their own ways, they still try to escape this
knowledge. Thus, despite being presented as opposites, for instance, Tommy and
Ruth share one principle trait. In the long run, they admit their authenticity as
‘donors’ that are represented by ‘stuff’ that eventually becomes nothing more than
body fragments. These motif clusters – such as Tommy’s ‘mud’ and the macabre
implications of an ‘unzipped bag’ to what happens to their bodies – appear in
connection with Ruth’s remarks about the clones being ‘rubbish’ or ‘trash’.
It is significant that Ruth first looks for her ‘possible’ in the woman ‘who
might have been the model’ (137) for her, and she takes the idea of a model from
mass media-produced sources such as TV soap operas and advertisements from
billboards and magazines. These images stress her eagerness to retreat from
‘muddy’ reality to a more creative illusion (or delusion) about their origins. Ruth
describes finding a magazine advertisement in a way that reveals her covetous
illusion: ‘[The magazine] had fallen open at this glossy double page advert, and
though the paper had gone soggy and there was mud at one corner, you could see
it well enough. It showed this beautifully modern open-plan office with three or
four people who worked in it having some kind of joke with each other’ (142).
But Ruth prefers not to see the dark implications, and instead, she describes this
simulated image in terms of a ‘proper’ and ‘ideal’ picture of reality. Ruth conceals
her deeply hidden doubts about her own identity, but eventually expresses her
resentful revelation of their existence:

‘We all know it. We’re modeled from trash. Junkies, prostitutes, winos, tramps.
Convicts, maybe, just so long as they aren’t psychos. That’s what we come from.
We all know I, so why don’t we say it? … If you want to look for possible, if
you want to do it properly, then you look in the gutter. You look in rubbish bins.
Look down the toilet, that’s where you’ll find where we all came from’. (164)

Ishiguro lends an astonishingly great force to these motifs of perpetual reification

and dissemination of the clones’ situations. In the episode of the three friends’
last trip to see the ruined fishing boat stranded in the marshes, Ruth and Tommy
(who already are invalids) note that the boat’s paint was cracking and ‘the timber
frames of the little cabin were crumbling away’ (220). There is an unmistakable
connection between this image repeated later and the selfhood of the characters as
they are also in the process of crumbling to pieces. The rubbish motif reappears in
 What Kathy Knew 95

a poignant and revelatory fashion when Ruth has a dream about Hailsham, where
she ‘was looking out of the window and everything outside was flooded. Just like a
giant lake. And … [one] could see rubbish floating by under … the window, empty
drink cartons, everything’ (221).

Stuff vs. Re-collections

As for Kathy, her identity may derive not from dread of donations but from
recalling and maintaining memories of both childhood and young adulthood
that differ significantly from that of her friends. But, like the memories of Ruth
and Tommy, Kathy’s memories are consistent with their horror of everybody’s
eventual fragmentation. Being a carer, Kathy recounts episodes from her
Hailsham childhood to be shared with others. Her work with donors requires will
and compassion in hopes of fighting against their bodily erasure. In this respect,
Kathy’s narrative offers an opportunity for both a personal regeneration of self-
respect as well as a communal attempt to collectivize their lives. In fact, Kathy
emphasizes that the shapelessness of the self corresponds to an idea of corporal
‘stuff’ that could be humanized only by re-‘collection’ of individual memories
which shape an individual life story. She observes that in the end, ‘The donors will
all donate, just the same, and then they’ll complete’, but that a ‘good carer makes a
big difference to what a donor’s life’s actually like’ (276). Kathy therefore affirms
the importance of her carer work in the context of the clones’ ultimate destiny,
that both share the same fate, but that in the time granted to them, they must
make the most of what they are allotted. Kathy’s reference to ‘stuff’ includes her
personal collection of things. She notes how ‘I still had most of my old Hailsham
collection box safely stowed inside my pine chest in my bedsit’ (128), to illustrate
the significance of things – and even people – having their proper places and fates.
What is poignant is the way that Kathy cherishes those things, such as actual
‘stuff’, as well as her memories that are all ‘safely stowed.’
The box itself is one of Ishiguro’s most often repeated leitmotifs connected
with memory and identity. In the third chapter of Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics
of Space, ‘Drawers, Chests and Wardrobes’, there is a reference to an ‘absolute
casket’ (Bachelard 85). This innermost space may be symbolic of our recollection
or protection of an inner self. In such a box or casket, one’s memorabilia are
kept. Enclosures such as these drawers or chests are like organs of some secret
life and may serve as ‘models of our intimacy’ with self or others (Bachelard
78). The enclosed space of a casket emphasizes nothingness; it intensifies and
continually reconstitutes our sense of selfhood. The past, the present and the
still unknown future are all here in their ‘dimension of intimacy’ (Bachelard 85).
The casket itself invokes finality. In Never Let Me Go, references to casket-like
objects are significant and Kathy recalls, ‘You each had a wooden chest with
your name on it … and filled with your possessions – the stuff you acquired from
the Sales or the Exchanges’ (38). The contents of the box are both protected and
concealed but suggest that even myriad objects can be specially organized in an
96 Kazuo Ishiguro in a Global Context / Dzhumaylo

almost artful space. The collection of stuff acquired by the students at Hailsham
becomes ‘special: a jacket, a watch, a pair of craft scissors never used but kept
proudly’ (41). These objects remain safely zipped-up, closed off by choice,
and their exposure is subject to the whims of one’s own self and desires. Their
shared ‘hope and excitement’ (41) help each of the students maintain control over
individual disintegration. Human empathy also is shown in scenes such as the
‘exchanges’ that were ‘a kind of big exhibition-cum-sale of all the things [they’d]
been creating’ (15–16). The ‘exchange’ illuminates the full meaning of a variety
of transformations and transactions such as seen in the acquisition or repossession
of ‘the stuff that might become your private treasures’ (16).
These new kinds of ‘stuff’ that become a part of someone’s collection offers
the idea that objects, like experiences, can be shared, reified and even change
ownership. Thus, Susie R.’s poem or Jackie’s giraffe, for instance, might enter a
new dimension of intimacy when a new owner possesses it. These displacements
and re-allocations explain the episode when Ruth makes others believe that
her pencil case is a gift from her favorite guardian Miss Geraldine. Her story
elevates the object into a cherished one that she guards in her ‘collection chest’
(62). Significantly, the reverse may also cause similar effects: loss of a collection
could reveal signs of self-eradication as well. Consider the following passage,
where Kathy remembers querying Ruth about the collection chest during post-
Hailsham days and Ruth notes, ‘“My things all stayed in the holdall bag for
months, then in the end I threw them away. … I put them all in a bin bag, but I
couldn’t stand the idea of putting them out with the rubbish”’ (129). Actually, Ruth
wants these possessions to go to charity shops, and the desire may foreshadow her
future obligation of giving her organs as ‘a donation.’ Her inability to re-collect
childhood hopes and sympathies suggests a loss of personal identity or integrity.
Perhaps Ruth’s situation expresses one of the central metaphors in Ishiguro’s
writing. Ruth’s disappearing identity in its most literal meaning is linked to
a disappearance of memory as well. Nearing the end of her life, Ruth is quite
disillusioned and pretends that she ‘remembers nothing’ (199). Indeed, Kathy is
the only person who never seems to evade her wounds from the past. Her candid
closing words seem to speak for the absent longing that Ruth concealed and the
rage that Tommy by contrast expressed: ‘The memories I value most, I don’t see
them ever fading. I lost Ruth, then I lost Tommy, but I won’t lose my memories
of them’ (280).
If one accepts Kathy’s idea about the way that we retain memories in the face of
our own fragmentation and disappearance, the meaning of the novel’s title would
also stand for the whole universe of memorabilia that people once shared with
others. The tape with the song ‘Never Let Me Go’, which had been lost and then
happily found in Norfolk, could not be the exact same tape but a different one, not
unlike the one that was given earlier by Ruth as a sign of care and compassion for
Kathy’s loss of the first tape. Then, the tape-as-object stops being just ‘an object,
like a brooch or a ring, and especially now Ruth has gone, it’s become one of …
[my] most precious possessions’ (75). Thus, both collection and re-collection are
 What Kathy Knew 97

void of meaning without one’s capacity to evoke remembrances of some mutual

experience. The whole novel, written from Kathy’s point of view after Ruth and
Tommy already have passed away, produces an effect of a confession, a form of
sharing ‘the most precious’ and vulnerable experience with the readers.

The Way to Be Completed

The specific euphemism of the novel regarding final donation – to ‘complete’ –

scatters into more than one meaning. Consider the closing paragraph of the novel
in which Kathy observes how ‘all sorts of rubbish had caught and tangled. It was
like the debris you get on a sea-shore: the wind must have carried some of it
for miles and miles before finally coming up against these trees and these two
lines of wire’ (282). The detailed passage once more elucidates the significance
of various leitmotifs that express Ishiguro’s ideas about self-degradation in our
post-technological world. From this perspective, Tommy’s final fragmentation as a
result of his fourth donation corresponds to all sorts of torn stuff, rubbish and bags,
and produces a distant echo of a chopped up body of a child caught and tied to the
tree from a horror story long ago. Tommy ‘completes’ in this final act of indignity
and physical disintegration. The novel’s final paragraph drives us to more general
existentialist ideas. One of them is a Sartrean possibility of creating something
‘beyond death’, which might bring meaning to one’s self before death; this slippery
meaning within nothingness is one’s memory collection. ‘If we’re just going to
give donations anyway, then die, why all those lessons?’ (254), asks Kathy near
the novel’s end; and she answers to her own question: ‘I’ll have Hailsham with
me, safely in my head, and that’ll be something no one can take away’ (281).
Narrative metalepsis of Kathy’s confession and her being on the ‘look out for
Hailsham’ hence emerge as affective and symbolic acts of human completion
through redemptive memory. But why do Kathy’s memories of Hailsham not only
seem melodramatic but also in some way, feel false?
Ishiguro offers a unique kind of textual undecideability. It is indeed the case
that Kathy is ‘a really good carer’ (277) whose mission is to comfort her donors,
to give them her empathy and a record of shared recollections especially before
their last donation. But, her ability to understand fully an Other in wholeness of
his/her private experience is finally limited. Her extraordinary talent for keen
observation, which was especially remarked upon by Tommy who notes that,
‘You notice everything, don’t you, Kath?’(23), reminds the reader of Kathy’s
own project for self-preservation. Only the ‘author’ is able to collect the ‘hero’
and his life and to complete him to the point where he forms a whole (Bakhtin
1990: 38). The authorial ‘consummation’ provides the sense of coherence that
Paul Ricoeur identifies as ‘emplotment’ or ‘configuration’ of event and characters
associated with them. But, does she at least succeed partially at representing some
full memory of what the clones might have really experienced?
Tommy’s provocative remark late in the text, ‘Kath, sometimes you just
don’t see it. You don’t see it because you’re not a donor’ (276), is followed by an
98 Kazuo Ishiguro in a Global Context / Dzhumaylo

interesting confession. Tommy says that his notorious ‘blows’ and heated temper
were never the result of despair; conversely, he ‘felt really good’ (280) when he
had these outbursts of rage. Ishiguro attributes Tommy’s forms of release to an
artful configuration; Tommy’s character is constructed through inference and
misunderstanding, but he reveals the hidden plot of the clones’ fates. By contrast,
Kathy’s narrative glosses over some of these negative events.

Self-recollection Writing

Alfred Hornung in Reading One/Self (1987) argues that ‘… [The] act of refiguring
a story from the fragments of one’s art and life seems to be expressive of the latent
wish of reading the unity of one self’ (Hornung 177). His remarks seem appropriate
for assessing how Ishiguro narrates the unusual story about clones growing up in a
boarding school environment and how they come both to accept and refuse the fate
given them. Ishiguro’s extensive use of leitmotif clusters and narrative techniques
arise from the author’s own metaphorical act of self-recollection. We may read this
novel as one containing several leitmotifs from those found in Ishiguro’s earlier
novels. Akin to pieces of art from the students’ imaginary Gallery collection in the
novel, these fragments originating from the author’s ‘creative self’ could possibly
‘reveal his soul’ and novelistic craft.
Similar to Norfolk’s ‘lost corner’ in Never Let Me Go, the conclusion of The
Unconsoled (1995) has a scene where the narrator wanders in the opposite corner
of the room and finds ‘pinned on the wall a large sheet marked “Lost Property.”
On this sheet is a long list of entries in every kind of handwriting, a column each
for the date, the article lost and the owner’s name’ (Ishiguro 1995: 471). This detail
about ownership or guardianship in The Unconsoled corresponds to the story
about Kathy’s and Ruth’s membership in a ‘secret guard,’ that was formed and
intended as a foil to a mysterious plot to kidnap their art teacher Miss Geraldine.
This motif from The Unconsoled also is echoed in When We Were Orphans (2000)
where the children (Boris and Christopher, respectively) pretend to be guarding
or saving their parents. One’s sense of loss, guilt, or shame lingers in personal
memory and is often a burden that the character must bear with dignity. This
charge is embedded as well in The Remains of the Day (1989), The Unconsoled
and When We Were Orphans. Significantly, one’s burden of the past is sublimated
into professional spheres and becomes isolated from the epicenter of personal
suffering. Ishiguro seems to suggest that everybody bears such kinds of burdens
of self: butlers (The Remains of the Day), porters or musicians (The Unconsoled),
detectives (When We Were Orphans) or carers (Never Let Me Go). This leitmotif
of sharing the load (often of painful memories) is explicit in the episodes of The
Unconsoled and Never Let Me Go.
Along with this focus on representing authenticity, such a recollection principle
substantiates a dialogue between past and present selves in order to accentuate
imagery and unveil their hidden qualities. Leitmotifs from Ishiguro’s earlier novels
 What Kathy Knew 99

reappear in Never Let Me Go and emphasize the author’s existentialist concerns

about human dignity in the proximity of loss and death. Orphans, lost homes and
missing containers such as boxes, trunks or bags, as well as general collections of
personal trivia, are characteristic of Ishiguro’s use of objects in his novels. These
objects heighten our understanding of how human integrity and one’s managing of
personal memory may alleviate experiences of loss.
Consider this leitmotif variation in Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans: One
of the orphans, Jennifer, lives in a boarding house. She is looking forward to the
arrival of her trunk with its trifles, but her things that might have transformed the
empty space of her new room into something familiar, something familial, and
imbued with a sense of personal continuity, are lost in transit. Jennifer pretends
not to be upset, but Banks, being an orphan himself, knows of her purposeful
understatement of the loss that ‘it’s not true’ (132). Banks innately understands
the devastation of such loss when he tells Jennifer that ‘the things that came in my
trunk [during my move when young], those things, they were important to me …
My trunk was special’ (132). As a kind of thoughtful consolation for Jennifer, he
begins his explanation but instead haltingly remarks, ‘Forget your trunk for now.
But remember …’ (133). Moreover, young Jennifer asks Banks to be particularly
careful with her collection that is ‘comprised of some carefully selected sea-shells,
nuts, dried leaves, pebbles and a few other such items she had gathered over the
years’ (130). Of further significance is the fact that she gives them names and
wants to tell her adopted father ‘all about each of them’ (130). In both cases,
the metaphorical reaffirmation of the parental and the inter-subjective experience
is stressed. This scene from When We Were Orphans is re-envisioned in Never
Let Me Go to show the characters’ psychological retrieval of a past signified by
objects or memories, as the characters face their doom or physical annihilation.
The shared memories of one’s self may not inspire hope but nevertheless may
empower the one speaking with human dignity. For instance, Tommy holds his
drawings of little animals in ‘the bag protectively with both hands’ (270). This
cautionary gesture becomes an almost unbearable emblem of a person’s dignity in
defeat. A dread of impending death, as regarded from an existentialist perspective,
is somehow lifted by the last memory that is sentimentally shared between Tommy
and Kathy before their final parting. But, the scene also carries the lingering shame
of mortality and makes life itself an absurd endeavor. Like many of Ishiguro’s
other characters, Kathy ‘wasn’t sobbing or out of control’ and she cared more
‘about [her] donors staying “calm”’ (3) than her own repressed anxieties. The stoic
calm and reserve characteristic of Ishiguro’s portrayals should not be calculated
as the author’s lack of compassion. Instead, Ishiguro’s characterizations should be
understood as showing how individuals reach for self-dignity in the face of deep
wounding and their inescapable mortality. In his fiction, characters deal with the
‘situation’ uniquely allocated to them; they confront courageously their mortality
in a disenchanted world.
Leitmotifs that emphasize how characters recollect both a sense of self and
their remembered experiences from fragments are therefore key elements in all
100 Kazuo Ishiguro in a Global Context / Dzhumaylo

of Ishiguro’s novels. Does Ishiguro expect to be criticized for his ‘full disclosure’
of these forms of human expression? The author is eager to share his personal
experience with hopes that a reader may empathize with both his characters and
their situations. The novel’s form and content replicates its theme of what can be
‘told and not told.’ This enables the reader to affirm the rich variety of the author’s
view of these most universal themes in Never Let Me Go; the novel turns out be the
writer’s and his characters’ ongoing project of creative self-completion.

Works Cited

Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Trans. Maria Jolas. Boston: Beacon
Press, 1958. Print.
Bakhtin, Mikhail. ‘Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity’. Art and Answerability:
Early Philosophical Essays by M.M. Bakhtin. Trans. Vadim Liapunov. Austin:
U of Texas P, 1990. Print.
———. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Trans. Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis: U
of Minnesota P, 1984. Print.
Black, Shameen. ‘Ishiguro’s Inhuman Aesthetics’. Modern Fiction Studies 55.4
(2009): 785–807. Print.
Hornung, Alfred. ‘Reading One/Self: Samuel Beckett, Thomas Bernhard, Peter
Handke, John Barth, Alain Robbe-Grillet’. Exploring Postmodernism. Ed.
Matei Calinescu and Douwe Fokkema. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John
Benjamins Publishing Company, 1987. 175–98. Print.
Ishiguro, Kazuo. A Pale View of Hills. London: Faber & Faber, 1982. Print.
———. The Unconsoled. London: Faber & Faber, 1995. Print.
———. When We Were Orphans. London: Faber & Faber, 2000. Print.
———. Never Let Me Go. London: Faber & Faber, 2005. Print.
Jennings, Bruce. ‘Biopower and the Liberationist Romance’. Hastings Center
Report 40.4 (2010): 16–19. Print.
Jerng, Mark. 2007. ‘Giving Form to Life: Cloning and Narrative Expectations of
the Human’. Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas
6.2 (2007): 365–93. Print.
Joy, Eileen A. and Christine M. Neufeld. ‘A Confession of Faith: Notes Toward
a New Humanism’, Journal of Narrative Theory 37.2 (2007): 161–90. Print.
McDonald, Keith. ‘Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go As “Speculative Memoir”’.
Biography 30.1 (2007): 74–83. Print.
Mirsky, Marvin. ‘Notes on Reading Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go’.
Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 49.4 (2006): 628–30. Print.
Mullan, John. ‘Kazuo Ishiguro Talks to John Mullan’. The Guardian. 11 March
2006. Web. <http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/culturevulture/archives/2006/03/23/
guardian_book_club_kazuo_ishiguro_talks_to_john_mullan.html>
 Chapter 9
‘How dare you claim these children are
anything less than fully human?’:
The Shared Precariousness of Life as a
Foundation for Ethics in Never Let Me Go
Liani Lochner, Concordia University, Canada

The failure of Kazuo Ishiguro’s characters in Never Let Me Go to protest against the
medical purpose they, as clones, will serve once they reach adulthood, writes John
Mullan, provoked the most animated discussions and disputes on The Guardian
Book Club’s weblog. Many readers were frustrated by the clones’ ‘passivity’,
which some also compared with Stevens’s inaction in The Remains of the Day.
Mullan summarizes a number of responses when he concludes, ‘Feeling frustrated
about what characters cannot do might be part of the purpose.’ On the eve of
becoming a donor, and after having lost both Ruth and Tommy to the donations
programme, Kathy H’s memories center on their idyllic childhood at Hailsham.
Her memories are ‘a source of consolation,’ Ishiguro tells us: ‘As her time runs
out, as her world empties one by one of the things she holds dear, what she clings to
are her memories of them’ (‘A Conversation’). The reader’s investment in Kathy’s
narrative is the result of being caught up in the literary work as performance: we
share her intimate childhood memories, her nostalgia for the past and her sadness
at the loss of her friends, and we rebel against her stoical acceptance of her fate.
The affective response elicited from the reader, I argue in this chapter, is crucial as
foundation for an ethical relation to the other.

Affect and Ethics

By being interpellated as a clone by the narrator, the reader experiences the

powerful effects of language: much of the tension in the novel, and the intensity
of the affective response we feel while being performed by it, results from our
constant awareness of the part of our identity which exceeds this interpellation,
even as we identify with the clones for whom this realization is never fully raised
to consciousness. Thus, the novel enacts a shared vulnerability with Kathy and her
friends that contradicts the ontology of personhood, or biological individuation,
which the ‘humans’ in the novel resort to in an effort to justify the subjugation of
the clones.
102 Kazuo Ishiguro in a Global Context / Lochner

In doing so, the novel mobilizes the thinking on the ethics of biotechnology
found in Judith Butler’s Frames of War: ‘The question is not whether a given being
is living or not, nor whether the being in question has the status of a “person”; it
is, rather whether the social conditions of persistence and flourishing are or are
not possible’ (20). Butler here is responding to two key arguments that ethical
questions on reproductive rights often turn on: the right to life, and the notion of ‘an
ontology of personhood’. The latter, she claims, ‘relies on an account of biological
individuation … the postulated internal development of a certain moral status
or capacity of the individual becomes the salient measure by which personhood
is gauged’ (Frames 19). As history shows, and Never Let Me Go depicts, this
ontology of individuation can also serve a darker purpose, forming the basis for
the exploitation and subjugation of certain groups framed as not fully human in
society. However, the shared precariousness of life, the idea that we are always
given over to others and share a primary, bodily vulnerability with them, implies
for Butler ‘a social ontology which calls that form of individualism [of an ontology
of personhood] into question’ (Frames 19). The issue at stake in biotechnological
debates would, therefore, have to be reformulated not as ‘life itself’ but as the
conditions which make life possible and under which life is liveable.
‘I’ve heard it said enough’, Kathy says about rumours that as a Hailsham
student she has had the special privilege of choosing the donors she cares for,
‘so I’m sure you’ve heard it plenty more’ (4). The intimacy established by this
direct address suggests that Kathy’s narrative is aimed at other clones, especially
evident in her repeated phrase, ‘I don’t know how it was where you were’ (13,
67). This interpellation, together with Kathy’s detailed account of ‘teachers, rules,
crushes, and peers’ draws us more deeply into the novel, Ruth Scurr argues, ‘and
the effect is to encourage us to access our own intimate memories of growing up at
school’ even as we wonder at her obliviousness to Hailsham’s undue emphasis on
healthcare. Moreover, we balk at Kathy’s use of euphemism and understatement
when revealing troubling details about the suffering she has seen as a carer; she
mentions, for example, ‘a particularly untidy operation’ (99), which resulted in
a clone’s death. Her expectation that we will have the same disaffected response
to the clones’ physical fate is clearly impossible. Indeed, many initial reviewers,
including Tim Adams and James Butcher, found this aspect of Kathy’s narrative
‘disturbing’. The effect on the reader is one of simultaneous familiarization and
estrangement, which is supported by Ishiguro’s revelation of his strategy in
writing Never Let Me Go: ‘we’re looking at a very strange world, at a very strange
group of people, and gradually, I wanted people to feel they’re not looking at
such a strange world, that this is everybody’s story’ (‘About Life’ 216). This dual
perspective of the reader, as clone and as human, is crucial to our becoming aware
of the shared precariousness of life as a foundation for an ethical relation with the
other, even as the humans in the novel never come to this realization.
This duality can also be seen in the unsolvable paradox between what, on
the surface at least, appears to be conflicting interpellations resulting in Kathy’s
dual subjectivity: as a clone and as a student from Hailsham. Her consciousness
 ‘How dare you claim these children are anything less than fully human?’ 103

as a clone is demonstrated by her acceptance of and desire to fulfil her duty as a

carer, despite witnessing the inhuman sacrifice this requires. On the other hand,
her subjectivity as a student is encoded in her deep interest in her interpersonal
relationships with Ruth and Tommy, her closest friends at the school. Hailsham’s
aim is to educate the clones as to their future purpose. At the same time, its safe,
boarding school environment and the emphasis on creativity establish their
subjectivity as students with expectations beyond the donations programme. This
results in a simultaneous knowledge, and lack of acknowledgement, of their reason
for existence. Hailsham acts as an intermediary, protecting the clones from the
public discourse on the donations programme. Therefore, while it was supposed
to prepare them for the encounter with the outside world, it also shielded them
from that world and its perceptions to the extent that they do not understand the
nature and the implications of their difference: ‘Thinking back now, I can see we
were just at that age when we knew a few things about ourselves – about who
we were, how we were different from our guardians, from the people outside –
but hadn’t yet understood what any of it meant’ (36). The effect of the sheltered
Hailsham environment is that their knowledge of being clones is never fully raised
to consciousness; they don’t really know what it means or what their position in the
outside world is. This is evident when Miss Emily reveals the real purpose of the
Hailsham project towards the end of the novel – ‘we did it to prove you had souls
at all’ – and Kathy asks incredulously, ‘Why did you have to prove a thing like
that, Miss Emily? Did someone think we didn’t have souls?’ (255). When she hears
about the conditions at the government institutions, Kathy also does not understand
‘why people would want students treated so badly in the first place’ (257).
This tension is mirrored in society’s view of the donations programme and
Hailsham as an institution that attempted to challenge the way it was being run.
Despite objections to the donations programme in its initial stages, Miss Emily
tells Kathy and Tommy, rapid scientific breakthroughs after the Second World
War offered people ways to treat previously incurable conditions, and there was no
pause to consider the possible implications. She points out the complexity: ‘How
can you ask a world that has come to regard cancer as curable, how can you ask
such a world to put away that cure, to go back to the dark days?’ (258). People’s
fear at the loss of their own loved ones outweighed the discomfort over the clones’
existence:

So for a long time you were kept in the shadows, and people did their best not to
think about you. And if they did, they tried to convince themselves you weren’t
really like us. That you were less than human, so it didn’t matter … Here was the
world, requiring students to donate. While that remained the case, there would
always be a barrier against seeing you as properly human. (258, my emphasis)

Elsewhere, I have pointed out the irony of the view that the clones are ‘less than
human’, as they are exact genetic copies of humans, and furthermore, the world
apparently has to actively suppress this knowledge – by not thinking about the
clones, or by considering them members of a ‘genetic underclass’ – to continue
104 Kazuo Ishiguro in a Global Context / Lochner

with the donations programme (Lochner 230). Miss Emily’s explanation exposes
the functioning of scientific norms and the instrumentalisation of the human
body in a discursive framework that determines the condition of precariousness
whereby the clones are exposed to, and the ‘humans’ are protected from, violence
in this society.
These frames generate ‘specific ontologies of the subject’ (Frames 3), according
to Butler: ‘Subjects are constituted through norms which, in their reiteration,
produce and shift the terms through which subjects are recognized. These
normative conditions for the production of the subject produce an historically
contingent ontology, such that our very capacity to discern and name the ‘being’
of the subject is dependent on norms that facilitate that recognition’ (Frames 3–4).
As ‘Shadowy objects in test tubes’ (256), the clones are seen as artefacts, products
of an artificial process of creation, and therefore their lives are unrecognizable
as worth sustaining or even ‘lose-able’ in the full sense. Madame’s repetition of
the phrase, ‘poor creatures’ (267), when talking to Kathy and Tommy, suggests
the internalisation of this frame, as does Kathy’s own revelation that clones do
not ‘die’ but ‘complete’. For Gabrielle Griffin, in her essay on the functioning
of science in the ‘cultural imaginary’, this is the result of ‘the normalization or
domestication of scientific language’ (651) and ‘the dehumanized normalization
of biological opportunities’ (657) on relations of power between different groups
in society. Never Let Me Go, she argues, ‘challenges conceptions of difference as
absolute categories and contests the ethical imperatives underlying the insistence
on such absolute difference’ (653). The reader’s task, then, is to develop a critical
stance toward that ‘ordinariness’ resulting from ‘the breakdown of the boundaries
between science and the everyday which is part of the contemporary landscape’
(657). While I agree with Griffin’s arguments on the discursive normalisation of
scientific practice, which the novel indeed exposes, this does not fully account
for the particularly literary intervention the novel can make in this discourse
of dehumanization. Never Let Me Go stages the formative power of scientific
discourse in the constitution of the individual as subject; moreover, our experience
of the powerful effects of language through being hailed as clones by Kathy’s
narrative, even as we do not wholly recognize ourselves in this address, leads to a
realization of common bodily vulnerability.
Both the humans and the clones in the novel, however, appear to be incapable
of this understanding. Kathy seems to fully submit to her inferiority as a clone.
After an incident where she and her friends decide to swarm Madame to test
Ruth’s theory that Madame was afraid of them, she reflects, ‘Madame was afraid
of us. But she was afraid of us in the same way someone might be afraid of spiders
… It had never occurred to us to wonder how we would feel, being seen like that,
being the spiders’ (35). Kathy finds herself locked in what Frantz Fanon in Black
Skin, White Masks describes as the ‘suffocating reification’ of the white man’s
gaze in the colonial encounter: ‘here I am an object among other objects’ (89). She
later thinks back on this moment: ‘The first time you glimpse yourself through
the eyes of a person like that, it’s a cold moment. It’s like walking past a mirror
 ‘How dare you claim these children are anything less than fully human?’ 105

you’ve walked past every day of your life, and suddenly it shows you something
else, something troubling and strange’ (36). Kathy sees herself as an object rather
than as a person; she sees not herself reflected in the mirror, but herself as the
creature that Madame dreads. The unequal differential of power, like that in the
colonized society, means that the ‘human’ gaze, or the white gaze, is the only valid
one. Kathy has no ontological resistance in the eyes of the humans; she will always
exist as a clone in relation to the humans who created her. Even though she is upset
and disturbed by the various encounters with Madame, she doesn’t register any
surprise at her reaction; rather, she is anticipating this event to affirm her sense of
otherness, ‘waiting for the moment when you realise that you really are different
to them’ (36). The act of recognition that Kathy performs, as if the ‘hail’ was really
addressed to her and no-one else (to paraphrase Althusser), constitutes her social
identity as a clone. Her readiness to yield to the voice of authority reveals a prior
attachment to the law; it confers a linguistic existence, a social identity, even if
the price for this subjectivation is subjection to, and subjugation by, the humans.
Kathy’s observation later in the novel, during the drive back to the care centre
after an encounter with Madame and Miss Emily, affirms her recognition of their
subject position as clones:

I kept us on the most obscure backroads I knew, where only our headlights
disturbed the darkness … I realised, of course, that other people used these
roads; but that night, it seemed to me these dark byways of the country existed
just for the likes of us, while the big glittering motorways with their huge signs
and super cafés were for everyone else. (267, my emphasis)

As readers, we resist the clones’ passivity and feelings of inferiority,

which points to our awareness of that part of our identity that exceeds Kathy’s
interpellation; this means, however, that perhaps we find ourselves on the side of
the humans in the novel. Anne Whitehead argues that while ‘identification would be
too strong a term for the reader’s relation to those ordinary people who profit from
the clones, Ishiguro nevertheless invites us to examine our (complicitous) relation
to them’ (78). Whitehead reads Never Let Me Go as shedding light on the potential
pernicious impact of basing a society or politics on empathy, which can just as
easily become the basis for exploitation. This becomes significant in the light of
Ishiguro’s view of the novel as an allegorical exploration of how humans ‘face up
to mortality’, as he claims in an interview with Mullan. How the clones face their
foreshortened lives is, of course, its central concern; however, the clones are also
created to ward off death for the ‘humans’ in the novel. While the precariousness
of life is a common condition for both Miss Emily and Madame and the clones,
this does not lead to a ‘reciprocal recognition, but to a specific exploitation … of
lives that are not quite lives, cast as “destructible” and “ungrievable”’ (Frames
31), as Butler writes regarding the differential exposure of certain populations to
illegitimate state violence or famine:

Such populations are ‘lose-able,’ or can be forfeited, precisely because they are
framed as being already lost or forfeited; they are cast as threats to human life
106 Kazuo Ishiguro in a Global Context / Lochner

as we know it … Consequently, when such lives are lost they are not grievable,
since, in the twisted logic that rationalizes their death, the loss of such populations
is deemed necessary to protect the lives of ‘the living’. (31)

In Never Let Me Go, this rationalisation has a very literal application: the clones
were created to prolong the lives of ‘the living’, but at the same time, for the
donations to be acceptable, their existence has to be framed as a threat to ‘normal’
human life. Therefore, when the Scottish scientist, James Morningdale, wants to
offer people the possibility of children with enhanced characteristics, a generation
of children that would be part of society, it is rejected. Cloning is acceptable if the
‘product’ is less, and not more, than human.
This conflicting, paradoxical rationalisation is evident also at the institutional
level. The Hailsham project and other institutions like it attempted to challenge
the way ‘the donations programme was being run’ (256) through recourse to an
‘ontology of personhood’ (to use Butler’s phrase): ‘we demonstrated to the world
that if students were reared in humane, cultivated environments, it was possible for
them to grow to be as sensitive and intelligent as any ordinary human being’, Miss
Emily explains. They collected the clones’ artwork to put on special exhibitions
across the country: ‘“There, look!” we would say. “Look at this art! How dare you
claim these children are anything less than fully human?”’ (256, my emphasis).
However, despite these noble-sounding words, Hailsham was just an attempt
to improve the conditions in which the clones were raised, not to abolish the
programme altogether. As Miss Emily tells Kathy and Tommy after hearing about
their dream of being able to defer, they never had the power to grant such favours,
‘even at the height of [their] influence’ (256). Hailsham, it is revealed, is not an
institution outside of the framework; its very existence as a site for the separation
and containment of the clones from the rest of society, as well as its practices,
reflects the functioning of the frame. The humane treatment of clones that Hailsham
prides itself on does not mask the fact that it is an institution created specifically
and only as part of the donations programme. Hailsham’s very separateness from
the rest of society, its isolation, the syllabus and its over-emphasis on health testify
to the fact that its pupils are clones. This recalls Foucault’s writing on the topic
of sex and boarding schools in the eighteenth century in The History of Sexuality:
‘On the whole, one can have the impression that sex was hardly spoken of at
all in these institutions. But one only has to glance over the architectural layout,
the rules of discipline, and their whole internal organization: the question of sex
was a constant preoccupation’ (27). The ‘internal discourse of the institution – the
one it employed to address itself, and which circulated among those who made it
function’, in a not dissimilar fashion to the internal discourse of Hailsham on the
topic of health and cloning which underscores the clones’ difference, ‘was largely
based on the assumption that this sexuality existed, that it was precocious, active,
and ever present’ (28). The existence of Hailsham, and other institutions like it,
confirms that the clones are considered other to, and less than, the humans they
were modelled on.
 ‘How dare you claim these children are anything less than fully human?’ 107

The two main characters behind the Hailsham project, Miss Emily and
Madame, hold the same view of the clones as the rest of society (as already
suggested by the latter’s use of the term ‘creatures’). Therefore, Miss Emily is not
too perturbed at Hailsham’s closure, which puts the clones back in the shadows.
Tommy’s incredulity that there was no higher purpose to their lessons and the
artwork selected for Madame’s Gallery leads her to comment: ‘There was a certain
climate and now it’s gone. You have to accept that sometimes that’s how things
happen in this world. People’s opinions, their feelings, they go one way, then the
other. It just so happens you grew up at a certain point in this process’ (261). Her
dismissive attitude, the cruelty of this statement and the matter-of-factness with
which she condemns them to their fate – ‘Your life must now run the course that’s
been set for it’ (261) – confirm that she too sees the clones as less than human.
Miss Emily herself, it is further suggested, is about to benefit from the donations
programme; she reveals that, even though she has not been well, she soon would
be able to get rid of her wheelchair (cf. Lochner 2011).
On the one hand, we are given some insight into, and develop a certain measure
of empathy for, the humans’ motivations behind the donations programme,
while on the other hand, we are invited to condemn them. Kathy’s language, her
acceptance of bodily suffering, and her acquiescence to an inferior position in
society are in direct contrast to her fervently expressed desire to live, which can
be seen in her belief in a possible deferral. Reading as clones, we register Kathy’s
emotional narrative as exposing the functioning of the norm which differentiates
between humans and clones in the novel; in other words, the clones reveal more
human feeling and perhaps more soulfulness than their human counterparts. This
leads us to question the clones’ inability to determine a future independent from
the one that they have been created for.
Apart from the mysterious ‘they’ that Kathy often refers to, who seem to
communicate with letters to inform the clones when they are to become carers or
start donating, it is not clear who actually runs the cloning programme. The clones
are free to move around, as they are able to leave the Cottages to go on daytrips
and travel across the country as carers, but yet they do not try to escape. Inevitably,
this aspect of the novel elicited allegorical readings, which is perhaps a testament
to readers’ identification with the clones. For Bruce Robbins, the novel’s depiction
of social stratification has a counterpart in class divisions in contemporary British
society, often based on status at birth and maintained by public and private
schooling. ‘[S]ocial origins deviously reproduce themselves’ and, therefore, there
‘is less freedom out there than we think’, Robbins argues. ‘In one way or another
things are arranged so that rewards end up in the hands of those who started out
at the top of the social hierarchy’ (Upward Mobility 211). In another essay, he
reads Kathy’s professional ambitions as ‘set within a bureaucracy that resembles
the welfare state both in its rationale and in its total penetration of the private
lives of those in its care,’ defining ‘a certain possible path of modest professional
advancement’ but, in the novel, with ‘a biological limit’ (‘Cruelty’ 291). However,
and as Robbins also points out, many born into the welfare system or into a less
108 Kazuo Ishiguro in a Global Context / Lochner

privileged sphere of society create better lives for themselves, while Ishiguro
presents a rather bleak view of the possibility of escaping your social conditions
or class. Like Stevens in The Remains of the Day, the clones in Never Let Me Go
seem irretrievably trapped which, as The Guardian Bookclub’s readers’ responses
illustrate, is responsible for much of the affective impact of both these novels.

Shared Vulnerability

During their first winter at the Cottages, the clones talk endlessly about their ‘dream
futures’. Significantly, the ‘veterans’ who have started their training as carers do
not participate in these daydreams, which become a way for the younger clones
‘to forget for whole stretches of time who we really were’. But Kathy resigns
herself to reality: ‘It couldn’t last, of course, but like I say, just for those few
months, we somehow managed to live in this cosy state of suspension in which we
could ponder our lives without the usual boundaries … lost in conversation about
our plans for the future’ (140, my emphasis). However, even then they remain
conscious that it is just a dream. ‘Mind you’, Kathy tells us, ‘none of us pushed
it too far’ (140). Their linguistic survival as clones depends on their willingness
to turn back onto themselves, or as Butler puts it, ‘attaining recognizable being
requires self-negation’ (Psychic Life 130), but through their dreams they express a
desire to live beyond their predetermined futures. The explanation of their inability
to bring this into being can be found in the novel’s staging of interpellation not
only as the hailing of the dominant discourse or the law, but also as the call of
other discourses that support it. The relations of power in which the clones find
themselves are not dominated by a sovereign figure or an authoritarian regime,
but rather reflect the Foucauldian nature of power as dispersed and myriad. The
effectiveness of interpellation is determined by the dominant discourse’s ability to
keep on ‘calling’ or ‘hailing’ the individual as a subject even in the absence of any
overtly repressive structures.
In Excitable Speech, Butler, here concerned with gender and race, argues
that ‘the tacit and performative operation of authorisation and entitlement is not
always initiated by a subject or by a representative of a state apparatus … the
racialisation of the subject or its gendering or, indeed, its social abjection more
generally is performatively induced from various and diffuse quarters that do
not always operate as “official” discourse.’ She sees this very ‘expropriability of
the dominant, “authorized” discourse’ (157) as a potential site of a subversive
resignification of terms by those who were denied social power to rally a political
movement. In Never Let Me Go, however, it is also the source of a more enduring
form of oppression; Kathy’s interpellations as a clone and as a Hailsham student
are, in the last instance, not in conflict but steer her towards the same end. Ruth
tells Kathy and Tommy, ‘“I think I was a pretty decent carer. But five years felt
about enough for me. I was like you, Tommy. I was pretty much ready when I
became a donor. It felt right. After all, it’s what we’re supposed to be doing, isn’t
 ‘How dare you claim these children are anything less than fully human?’ 109

it?”’ (223). The question suggests that they are not entirely sure of the obligation to
be donors, but, on the other hand, that it is all they know; moreover, it is something
that they share with only each other. Kathy’s Hailsham classmates do no relate
to her as a clone – she is a friend, perhaps an enemy or a lover. The question
can also be asked, where would she escape to if she could? She would always
think of herself as a clone in relation to the humans in the ‘outside world’, and
perhaps also face discrimination when her scientific origin is revealed. In a world
that requires the donations programme, there would be no realization of a shared,
bodily vulnerability and, therefore, the conditions for flourishing would not be
possible.
The readers of Never Let Me Go are made to feel what the humans in the novel
seem incapable of feeling. The emotional impact of this work does not lessen on
revisiting it, even with the foreknowledge of its outcome. The reader is engaged
by the novel’s staging of the potentially pernicious influence, and ideological
function, of an instrumentalized scientific discourse in the subjectivation of its
main characters; furthermore, by constituting the reader as clone, the novel enacts
a shared vulnerability with Kathy and her friends that recognizes them as fully
human. On the other hand, this realisation of life’s precariousness also leads to
an understanding of Miss Emily’s explanation of society’s desire for scientific
and medical advances. Never Let Me Go explores questions about the social
constitution of the cloned individual within the parameters of a created, even if
familiar, world. In doing so, the novel demonstrates literature’s unique capacity
to play out the ethical issues raised by developments in biotechnology without
advancing a moral code.

Works Cited

Adams, Tim. ‘“For Me, England is a Mythical Place”’. The Observer, 20 Februray
2005. Web. 12 February 2013. <observer.co.uk>.
Althusser, Louis. ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Towards an
Investigation)’. On Ideology. London: Verso, 2008. 1–60. Print.
Butcher, James. ‘A Wonderful Donation’. The Lancet 365 (9 April 2005): 1299–
1300. Print.
Butler, Judith. Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative. New York:
Routledge, 1997. Print.
———. The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection. Stanford: Stanford
UP, 1997. Print.
———. Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? London: Verso, 2009. Print.
Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Trans. Richard Philcox. New York:
Grove, 2008. Print.
Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction. Trans.
Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage, 1978. Print.
Griffin, Gabriele. ‘Science and the Cultural Imaginary: The Case of Kazuo
Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go’. Textual Practice 23.4 (2009): 645–63. Print.
110 Kazuo Ishiguro in a Global Context / Lochner

Ishiguro, Kazuo. The Remains of the Day. Toronto: Key Porter, 1989. Print.
———. Never Let Me Go. London: Faber and Faber, 2005. Print.
———. Interview. ‘A Conversation with Kazuo Ishiguro’. Random House, n.d.
12 January 2007. Web.
———. ‘Interview with Kazuo Ishiguro’. By John Mullan. The Guardian Review
Book Club Podcast, 23 Mar. 2006. Web. 12 May 2010. <guardian.co.uk>.
———. ‘A Conversation About Life and Art’. By Cynthia F. Wong and Grace
Crummett. Conversations with Kazuo Ishiguro. Ed. Brian Schaffer and Wong.
Jackson, MS: U of Mississippi P, 2008. 204–20. Print.
Lochner, Liani. ‘“This is What We’re Supposed to be Doing, Isn’t It?”: Scientific
Discourse in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go’. Kazuo Ishiguro: New
Critical Visions of the Novels. Ed. Sebastian Groes and Barry Lewis. London:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Print.
Robbins, Bruce. ‘Cruelty is Bad: Banality and Proximity in Never Let Me Go’.
Novel 40.3 (2007): 289–302. Print.
———. Upward Mobility and the Common Good: Toward a Literary History of
the Welfare State. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2007. Print.
Scurr, Ruth. ‘The Facts of Life’. Rev. of Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro. The
Times Literary Supplement, 13 March 2005. Web. 14 January 2007.
Whitehead, Anne. ‘Writing with Care: Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go’.
Contemporary Literature 52.1 (2011): 54–83. Print.
 Chapter 10
Time and the Threefold I in
Never Let Me Go
Duru Güngör, Fanshawe College, Canada

In all of Kazuo Ishiguro’s novels, the narrative consists of a collection of memory

fragments related in the first person by the protagonist. This structure poses the
recollecting I as a complex problem to be investigated in two directions: the nature
of the I who recollects, and the nature of the time in which such recollections
dwell. Kathy H., the narrator/protagonist of Never Let Me Go, presents an I who,
while remaining inaccessible in itself, is in a position to relate whatever happens to
Kathy H.; another I who is situated in the distant past; and finally, a third I that exists
in a rather nondescript present. Since all the past and present events recounted by
Kathy are memory fragments, their totality results in a strictly interior landscape,
attributable to the inaccesible I, wherein all the different moments coexist with,
rather than succeed one another.
This is a dystopic landscape about human clones raised and educated in sports,
arts and literature in the idyllic atmosphere of Hailsham, a private institution
located in a secluded corner of East Sussex, England, only to turn first into ‘carers’
and then ‘donors’ in their early adulthood, parting with their organs one by one, and
dying, naturally, by or before their fourth donation. As Kathy’s narrative unfolds,
it becomes clear that the students of Hailsham are ironically privileged, that they
draw the envy of the clones raised in all the other institutions, since Hailsham has
been a unique project designed to offer the clones at least a happy childhood, if
not a different end. Curiously enough, the obvious horrors of the fate that befalls
young and innocent people, who are stripped of any other future and whose very
humanity is questioned by the population at large, fail to arouse any shock effect
in the novel. The flat, nonmelodramatic tone of the narrative is mainly attributable
to Kathy’s peculiar technique of narration, which is marked by preterition. It is,
however, evident that the rhetorical device of preterition is employed precisely to
refer to something even more emphatically, by professing to say nearly nothing
about it, to pass it over as if it were a given. That is to say, the turbulent melodrama
comes to be still included in the story, by way of omission.
Moreover, preterition constitutes a significant rhetorical choice for Kathy, as a
human clone created by man, if considered under the light of the Christian doctrine
of preterition, which branches out of the doctrine of election. According to the
latter, God actively designates some men for salvation and others for damnation.
The doctrine of preterition adds a third category to the elect and the reprobate; this
112 Kazuo Ishiguro in a Global Context / Güngör

would be the preterite, the multitudes who are simply passed over and damned, as
it were, by inertia rather than any divine decree. ‘Deprived of the dignity imparted
by God’s individuating wrath’, notes the critic Louis Mackey, ‘the Preterite
perish en masse in His ignorance’ (56). The clones of Never Let Me Go follow a
surprisingly similar path to that of the preterite, with silence surrounding all their
existential struggles, and their lives consumed before their indifferent creators.
Such a drama repeats the old story between God and Man, only redistributing the
roles between Man and Clone. And thus, rhetorical preterition comes to echo only
too clearly the position of Kathy H., acting as the voice of the preterite.
However, the abundant use of one rhetorical device does not suffice to
fully characterize the narrator’s technique. As has been amply noted, Kathy
has a peculiar way of spiraling around a topic, first touching upon it marginally
while apparently talking about something else and thus inseminating the idea in
the reader’s mind, so that when she eventually returns to it for a more liberal
disclosure, nothing comes off as a great surprise (Beedham 140; Currie 94; Mullan
109; Sim 107). By Kathy’s own testimony, the reader learns that the exact same
method of manipulation has been consistently used upon the clones of Hailsham
by their ‘guardians’, in order to elicit in the students the deceptive impression that
they have always known about their grim fate, that they have never been lied to:

Tommy thought it possible the guardians had ... timed very carefully and
deliberately everything they told us, so that we were always just too young to
understand properly the latest piece of information. But of course we’d take it in
at some level, so that before long all this stuff was there in our heads without us
ever having examined it properly. (75)

There are obvious advantages to such a method of ‘telling and not telling’, as one
of the guardians, Miss Lucy, calls it (74), since it eases the clones into fulfilling
their function in life without any resistance or rebellion. Yet, it is still rather
bizarre that one of the evident victims of this treatment should herself employ
the same method in reconstructing her past. A simple explanation would involve
the narrator’s unreliability in her retrospective self-examination. Besides, despite
her sensitivity, her effort at fairness and the accuracy of the details she can recall,
Kathy never breaks free from the fog of her formative years. In this respect, it is
important to keep in mind that Kathy H. is addressing a fictional readership of
fellow clones like herself, as suggested by her casual remarks in chapters two and
six: ‘I don’t know how it was where you were, but ...’ (12; 62). In other words,
the actual reader of the novel is caught in the territory of, and yet dissociated from
both the cloned threefold I and the cloned you. Any truth of Kathy’s narration thus
becoming inaccesible or even irrelevant, the true story of Never Let Me Go proves
less about what happens to Kathy the clone and her best friends in a dystopic
sci-fi, than about how she relates to what happens to her; what Ishiguro attempts
here, as in his other novels, is to render an animated portrait of a consciousness
contemplating itself.
 Time and the Threefold I in Never Let Me Go 113

In this sense, the novel is highly reminiscent of dream landscapes, wherein

people, animals, inanimate objects and even the architectural structures surrounding
the dreamer are thought to be unsuspected reflections of the dreamer’s self. To go
another step further, it is even possible to consider Kathy’s indulgence in endless
reminiscence to be the reenactment of a mystical pattern, that of the divinity who
creates an entire universe – in this case, of memories – in order to be able to
contemplate itself. It then follows that Kathy’s threefold I combines the role of the
creator, with the role of the created preterite. Such a combination does not strike
one as accidental, in view of Ishiguro’s steady focus on the issues of creativity
and creation in the novel, whether it be in relation to the sci-fi premise that the
clones cannot procreate, or on artistic grounds related to Tommy’s torments, or
else through Madame’s systematic collection of the best artwork produced by
Hailsham students in an ultimately fruitless attempt to prove the existence of their
‘souls’ to humanity at large.
However, none of these reflections provides a satisfactory answer as to why
Kathy H. should narrate her recollections by way of ‘telling and not telling’, when
she herself is aware of the possibility that this method is systematically employed
by ‘guardians’ to manipulate clones into confusion, submission and, ultimately,
resignation about their predetermined future. Given the notoriety of Never Let
Me Go for the frustration it instills in readers because of the clones’ failure to
even dream about escape (Mullan 105), is Kathy’s unquestioning appropriation
of a method of oppression just another way in which Ishiguro drives his readers,
if not his clones, into rebellion? In fact, a closer analysis of the method reveals
an unsuspected possibility: that there is an undertone of resistance in Kathy’s
narration, traceable in a shifty middle ground between the thematic and structural
levels; that Ishiguro’s vision in this novel might be less fatalistic than generally
assumed.
Following Miss Lucy’s formulation of ‘telling and not telling’ might be
misleading, as her phrase suggests a sequence of first telling something, and
then not telling it, when the guardians’ method actually entails a conflation or
simultaneity, rather than a sequence. ‘Telling by not telling’ and ‘not telling by
telling’ would be more effective in capturing the guardians’ discourse. The first
alternative, ‘telling by not telling’, covers those instances where the guardians take
advantage of deliberate silence to let the clones absorb a matter only indirectly,
while the second one, ‘not telling by telling’, involves the extremely detailed
explication of one point only to obfuscate another, more essential point.
These opposing instances of silence and explication, when examined through
the clones’ temporal perspectives of retrospections and anticipations, turn out to
be curiously similar. In retrospect, all the matters that have been presented through
silence could either remain unnoticed or become subject to a reinterpretation, and
thus a reinvention of the past. In moments of anticipation, the unknown shrouded
in silence either passes unnoticed or becomes ground for false hope, and thus the
invention of a false future. The extreme explication of a matter by the guardians
114 Kazuo Ishiguro in a Global Context / Güngör

produces the exact same results in the clones’ retrospections and anticipations.
What, then, are the implications of these parallels?
The future, for the clones, is a closed door; it is immutable and identical
for all. In its relation to such a future, the method of ‘telling and not telling’,
whether through silence or extreme explication, clearly serves the purposes of
the oppressors – it keeps the clones obedient and/or distracted by false hopes
until resignation sets in. In its relation to the past, however, the very same method
serves the needs of the clones – it empowers them to reinvent and discover a
hidden exit in the past. In other words, the past for the clones is exactly what the
future is thought to be for ‘normal’ humans; it is open and malleable, subject to
willful action. Hence the dying donor who tries to ‘remember’ Kathy’s Hailsham
‘just like it had been his own childhood’ (5) proves indeed not to be delusional at
all; like Kathy herself, he is busy building his way out.
These traces, however subtle, of resistance, empowerment and freedom
detectable in the repercussions of a method of oppression, inspire fresh insights
into the temporality of Never Let Me Go. In his thorough analysis of the novel’s
temporal structure, the critic Mark Currie formulates several paradoxes: those of
‘unwanted freedom’, ‘remembered forgetfulness’, ‘recollected anticipation’ and
‘privileged deprivation’ (91–103). The following proposes three further paradoxes
that are rooted in the novel’s most evocative emblems, and valuable for folding the
question of temporality into the construction of Kathy’s threefold I.
Kathy’s portrait at large is executed in time, but Ishiguro frequently condenses
it into miniature emblems that repeat the gist of her story in spatial terms. The
significance of some of these emblems, such as the little boat stranded in the
marshes (204), or the clown holding a bunch of helium balloons by their strings
(194), is obvious to the characters themselves. Kathy, for instance, associates
the latter spectacle with the fragile state of Hailsham students after their beloved
school is closed; if someone were to cut the strings holding the balloons together,
she reflects, ‘there’d be no real sense in which those balloons belonged with each
other any more’ (194). Several other emblems, however, speak more to the reader
than to the struggling characters, and three of these seem particularly noteworthy:
Ruth’s private room at the recovery centre in Dover, Tommy’s drawings of fantastic
animals and the wired fence at the end of the novel.
In the novel’s last paragraph, Kathy comes to a fence separating her from
ploughed fields stretching for acres, with wind-swept bits and pieces of plastic and
other rubbish caught on the barbed wire. Contemplating all this waste, which is
evidently an echo of the clones’ discarded lives, Kathy imagines that everything
she has lost since her childhood is brought by the wind to this point, and that
Tommy is just about to appear on the horizon as a small yet fast approaching dot.
As such, the fence and its surroundings constitute a substitute for what Norfolk has
been for the younger Kathy and all the other Hailsham students: a place where all
lost things gather and hence could be found again (60).
This landscape proves to serve as more than just a physical manifestation
of the limit that Kathy reaches at the end of her personal narrative; it offers a
 Time and the Threefold I in Never Let Me Go 115

powerful emblem for the paradoxical function of her memory. While each of
Kathy’s recollections is a mournful affirmation of irrevocable loss – for one
can only remember what is no more – it is at the same time a stark negation of
the finality of such loss, by the very nature of remembrance, by Kathy’s ability
to resurrect all the ghosts of her past, including Tommy, upon the incalculable
acres of her mind. Remembrance is simultaneously loss and the defiance of loss.
The resonance between this first paradox, and the liberating repercussions of
the method of ‘telling and not telling’ in relation to the clones’ past, becomes
immediately evident: the past offers the clones explosive possibilities that are
absent from their future. Yet, this is not all. The wind keeps blowing through the
fence and over Kathy’s face, bringing things of the past, and it will keep blowing,
sweeping her into the inevitable future of donations and ‘completion’ looming
behind her shoulders. The wind fills the entirety of the landscape, and although
one can determine a direction, a vector in it, it is impossible to divide it into a
source left behind, a middle and an end. As long as the wind blows, the wind
simply is. The image of Kathy before the wired fence thus depicts not only the
paradox of remembrance as the simultaneous affirmation and negation of loss, but
also the indivisibility of time into past, present and future.
Curiously, the scene is also highly reminiscent of Walter Benjamin’s famous
reading of a painting by Paul Klee in his essay ‘On the Concept of History’:

There is a picture by Klee called Angelus Novus. It shows an angel who seems
about to move away from something he stares at. His eyes are wide, his mouth
is open, his wings are spread. This is how the angel of history must look. His
face is turned toward the past. Where a chain of events appears before us, he
sees one single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and
hurls it at his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make
whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise and has
got caught in his wings; it is so strong the angel can no longer close them. The
storm drives him irresistibly into the future, to which his back is turned, while
the pile of debris before him grows toward the sky. What we call progress is this
storm. (2003, 392)

The resemblance between Benjamin’s analysis and the details of the final
portrait of Kathy H. is so uncanny that one wonders if Ishiguro himself might
have had in mind Benjamin’s notions of a redeemable past while envisioning
Kathy as his own ‘angel of history’. Benjamin intends, in the said essay and
elsewhere in his writings, to draw clear distinctions between the approaches of a
historicist and a historical materialist. The historicist regards the past as ‘empty’
and ‘homogeneous’, to be simply filled by a process of adding the historical data,
while the historical materialist follows a process of construction and discerns in a
historical object ‘a revolutionary chance in the fight for the oppressed past’ (2003,
396). For Benjamin, the past is not only fluidly linked with the present – ‘Doesn’t
a breath of the air that pervaded earlier days caress us as well?’ (390) – but also
open and capable of affirming what could have been, as well as what was: ‘…
116 Kazuo Ishiguro in a Global Context / Güngör

history is not simply a science but also and not least a form of remembrance
<Eingedenken>. What science has “determined”, remembrance can modify. Such
mindfulness can make the incomplete (happiness) into something complete, and
the complete (suffering) into something incomplete’ (1999, 471). The same effort
as that of the historical materialist colours Kathy’s musings in front of the wired
fence, as she faces both the debris of all she lost, and the flashing fantasy about its
return to her.
Ruth’s private room at the recovery centre in Dover constitutes the second
emblem bearing a fundamental temporal paradox. Kathy lovingly characterizes
this centre as her place of choice to fulfil her future career as a donor. Her warm
description of the recovery rooms proves quite telling, since most readers would
likely find it cold and repelling to spend much time where Kathy feels so much at
home:

Everything – the walls, the floor – has been done in gleaming white tiles, which
the centre keeps so clean when you first go in it’s almost like entering a hall of
mirrors. Of course, you don’t exactly see yourself reflected back loads of times,
but you almost think you do. When you lift an arm, or when someone sits up in
bed, you can feel this pale, shadowy movement all around you in the tiles. (16)

The difficulty of justifying Kathy’s fondness of these rooms through common

sense or taste leads one to read the architectural details as an emblem of what
Kathy does with her memory fragments throughout the novel: to surround herself
with multiple quasi-mirrors in which she can only see herself darkly, like a shadow
captured within different, yet coexisting segments of time. The image of gleaming
white tiles stretching left and right, up and down in any sequence one might
choose to trace thus serves as a subtle concretization of Ishiguro’s understanding
of memory and nonchronological time, which closely resonates not only with that
of Benjamin, but also with that of Gilles Deleuze, both in his solo works and
co-writings with Félix Guattari. Indeed, reading this tale of oppression through
the critical lenses of Benjamin, Deleuze and Guattari proves particularly fruitful,
given these authors’ systematic opposition, though at different periods of the
twentieth century, to fascist, oppressive and totalizing ideologies prevailing in the
political, socio-cultural, clinical and linguistic spheres.
In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari draw a distinction between
a ‘childhood memory’ and a ‘childhood block’, in favor of the latter; childhood
memories have a reterritorializing function, fixating one before a representation
of his or her past and cutting the remembering adult away from the remembered
child, while also fettering the two together in a causal or sequential relationship
of past and future positions. Whereas childhood blocks entail the notion that:
‘“a” child coexists with us, in a zone of proximity or a block of becoming, on
a line of deterritorialization that carries us both off – as opposed to the child we
once were, whom we remember or phantasize, the ... child whose future is the
adult’ (1987, 294). Viewed in this light, the tiles come off almost as material
manifestations of childhood blocks grouping and regrouping around Kathy H. in
 Time and the Threefold I in Never Let Me Go 117

countless configurations of varying intensity, connecting with each other through

ever-shifting points of entrance and exit.
Moreover, Deleuze and Guattari’s emphatic bracketing of the indefinite article
in the phrase ‘a child,’ alongside their subsequent brief allusion to Virginia Woolf,
both imply the idea that one cannot quite claim ownership for childhood blocks.
‘This will be childhood’, says Woolf, ‘but it must not be my childhood’ (qtd. in
1987, 294). In this respect, the tiles at the Dover centre once again effectively
emblematize the universal streak of Kathy’s childhood blocks. The shadowy
movement captured on their surface could originate from anyone present in the
room; it does not matter whether it is Kathy herself or someone else moving – and
Kathy’s own choice of words insinuates this impossibility of ownership as well:
‘When you lift an arm’, she says, ‘or when someone sits up in bed, you can feel
this ... movement ... in the tiles’ (16; emphasis added).
Thus, there proves to be a paradoxically simultaneous proximity and distance
between Kathy’s threefold I, and the childhood blocks that constitute the novel. In
different episodes, both Kathy and Miss Emily, the ‘head guardian’ of Hailsham,
refer to her recollections as the only things that cannot be taken away from her,
and yet they are not exclusively hers either. One is tempted to suggest, following
Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘Joan of Arc effect’ (1983, 86), that a ‘Kathy H. effect’ has
run over one clone girl and it might easily run again over another. To once again
refer to the anonymous donor Kathy mentions in the first chapter, he would be an
excellent candidate for such a repetition; his obsessive need to hear everything
about Hailsham stems from a desire to replace his own childhood blocks with
those surrounding Kathy: ‘He knew he was close to completing and so that’s
what he was doing: getting me to describe things to him, so they’d really sink in,
so that maybe ... the line would blur between what were my memories and what
were his’ (5).
Coming to Tommy’s ‘imaginary animals’, they fulfil a different function.
Rather than the coexistence of childhood blocks in time, they emblematize the
flexibility of the time allocated for the clones’ disposal, while also touching upon
the link between artistic creativity and divine creation. Ishiguro, it seems, uses
Tommy’s progress from ridiculous elephant watercolors to intricate drawings of
considerable mastery to reflect how, sooner or later, the created takes upon himself
the role of the creator within whichever limits, in a fluid chain from God to Man
to Clone. Tommy does not concern himself with anything like the cold beauty of
proportions; his is a literally creative effort, an attempt to animate his drawings,
to let his creatures breathe, move, fight and defend themselves, even though only
within the two dimensions granted by the sheets of his notebooks:

‘The thing is, I’m doing them really small. Tiny. I’d never thought of that at
Hailsham. ... If you make them tiny, and you have to because the pages are only
about this big, then everything changes. It’s like they come to life by themselves.
Then you have to draw in all these different details for them. You have to think
about how they’d protect themselves, how they’d reach things.’ (163–4)
118 Kazuo Ishiguro in a Global Context / Güngör

The fact that Tommy professes to have found the secret of animation in the
smallness of his drawings is significant. There is certainly a kindred spirit between
the creatures thought out by Tommy down to every detail in miniature scale, and
the clones like Tommy himself, whose existence has been plotted by their creators
in every possible sense within the narrowest confines (not to mention Ishiguro and
his imaginary creatures, the characters he invents for his novels). Indeed, Kathy,
Tommy, Ruth and all the other clones know how to exist, how to dwell only in the
smallest fractions of space and time, be they the physical boundaries of Hailsham
or the Cottages, or the two or three years they are granted to be young and in love.
And yet, it is precisely through such limitations that time shows its flexibility, a few
happy moments stretching to equal years. About her search for Judy Bridgewater’s
cassette in Norfolk together with Tommy, Kathy says: ‘Everything suddenly felt
perfect: an hour set aside, stretching ahead of us, and there wasn’t a better way to
spend it’ (81).
Early reviewers of Never Let Me Go, such as M.J. Harrison, have aptly
interpreted the ‘otherness’ of the clones in their extreme submission to injustice
and oppression as an allegory for the condition of the modern human being who
abides by a series of predetermined routines, whether for education, work, or
desire, without ever questioning the power structures that profit from his or her
inability to envision alternative courses of individual and collective existence. The
novel, Harrison observes, lays bare ‘why we don’t just wake up one day and go
sobbing and crying down the street, kicking everything to pieces out of the raw,
infuriating, completely personal sense of our lives never having been what they
could have been’ (26). However, despite the validity of such reactions elicited
by the novel, it is also important to recognize the elements Ishiguro employs to
alleviate, if not to dissipate, the fatalist gloom. If a parallel is to be established
between the figures of man and clone in terms of oppression and resignation, it
becomes essential to include a discussion of coping strategies for the comparison
to hold. The three temporal paradoxes presented herein, operating in conjunction
with the ambivalent method of ‘telling and not telling’, serve exactly that purpose:
they constitute the clones’ coping strategies. The paradox of remembrance as the
affirmation and negation of loss favours the past as the seat of hope, instead of the
future. The paradox of the simultaneous proximity and distance between Kathy’s
threefold I and her childhood blocks favours a protean, impersonal self rather than
one with a single fixed identity. The paradox of minute segments of space-time
condensing years’ worth of experience favours all forms of existence in miniature
rather than in grand scale. Together, these paradoxes articulate another landscape,
another vision that is only slightly different than the dark one the novel invokes
at a first reading; however, in that slight difference lies the fragile refuge of lives
treated as disposable rather than indispensible. In a world that worships grandeur,
in victory as well as in defeat, Never Let Me Go is perhaps a eulogy for the small
and silent ones, all the ‘debris’ caught on the barbed wire.
 Time and the Threefold I in Never Let Me Go 119

Works Cited

Beedham, Matthew. The Novels of Kazuo Ishiguro. Ed. Nicolas Tredell. London:
Palgrave MacMillan, 2010. Print.
Benjamin, Walter. Selected Writings. Vol. 4. Ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W.
Jennings. Trans. Edmund Jephcott and others. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap
P of Harvard UP, 2003. Print.
———. The Arcades Project. Trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin.
Cambridge, MA: The Belknap P of Harvard UP, 1999. Print.
Currie, Mark. ‘Controlling Time: Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go’. Kazuo
Ishiguro: Contemporary Critical Perspectives. Ed. Sean Matthews and
Sebastian Groes. London: Continuum, 2009. Print.
Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia.
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Minnesota P, 1983. Print.
———. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian
Massumi. Minneapolis, MN and London: U of Minnesota P, 1987. Print.
Harrison, M.J. ‘Clone Alone’. Guardian 26 February 2005, final ed.: 26. Print.
Ishiguro, Kazuo. Never Let Me Go. London: Faber and Faber, 2005. Print.
Mackey, Louis. ‘Paranoia, Pynchon, and Preterition’. Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s
Rainbow. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House, 1986. Print.
Mullan, John. ‘On First Reading Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go’. Kazuo
Ishiguro: Contemporary Critical Perspectives. Ed. Sean Matthews and
Sebastian Groes. London: Continuum, 2009. Print.
Sim, Wai-chew. Kazuo Ishiguro. London: Routledge, 2010. Print.
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 Chapter 11
Cosmos of Similitude in Nocturnes
Chu-chueh Cheng, National Chung Hsing University, Taiwan

Ishiguro’s Nocturnes (2009) consists of five short stories: ‘Crooner’, ‘Come Rain
or Come Shine’, ‘Malvern Hills’, ‘Nocturne’ and ‘Cellists’. These stories, each
of which is narrated by a musician or music lover, comprise a narrative structure
analogous to a quintet. Janeck of ‘Crooner’ is a guitarist of Eastern European
background playing for three different café orchestras in Venice; he recalls his
brief association with Tony Gardner, during which the American singer confided
in him his faded stardom and imminent divorce. ‘Come Rain or Come Shine’
is narrated by Raymond, an English-as-a-Second Language (ESL) teacher who
returns from Spain to England to rescue his friends’ marriage but unwittingly
entangles himself with the two friends’ marital problems. In ‘Malvern Hills’,
a young songwriter, after years of wandering in London, works at his sister’s
restaurant in Malvern Hills where a Swiss couple shares with him the joy and
agony of being traveling musicians. Steve the saxophonist in ‘Nocturne’ tells how
he befriends Lindy Gardner, who appeared briefly in ‘Crooner’ as Tony Gardner’s
wife, and what their instantaneous camaraderie discloses regarding the wishes and
anguish of Hollywood aspiring celebrities. The Italian café musician of ‘Cellists’
unfurls the encounter of a Hungarian cellist named Tibor with an American tourist,
Eloise McCormack, and the consequences of that brief association.
Each of the five stories is set in a locale different from the other four, and in
all of them, English is a shared language and American popular culture a common
source of cultural references. Together, these stories present a cosmos of similitude
in which foreigners are indistinguishable from natives and local sceneries are
recognized through globally familiar markers. The structure of Nocturnes resembles
a configuration of Lego bricks: each of the five stories is an independent unit and
yet they form a longer narrative when snapped together. Characters and scenes in
Nocturnes also resemble Lego bricks; they are independent entities adaptable to
new circumstances. In the cosmos of similitude that Nocturnes presents, change is
unremitting and alterity contained. An indeterminate landscape and inconsequential
comradeship among characters create a disconcerting condition of this millennium:
the self subsumes the others in a globe erased of local differences.

Indeterminate Landscape

The landscape of each story from Nocturnes seems to offer local details, but these
respective features are soon revealed to be strikingly similar across stories. Janeck,
the narrator of ‘Crooner,’ is a café musician working with various music members
122 Kazuo Ishiguro in a Global Context / Cheng

in Venice’s Piazza San Marco, where café managers frequently tell him: ‘Just play
and keep your mouth shut … That way the tourists won’t know you’re not Italian.
Wear your suit, sunglasses, keep the hair combed back, no one will know the
difference, just don’t start talking’ (4). The managers insist that Janeck and other
non-native musicians act like Italians, because that is what tourists want to see in
Italy and their job is to deliver that expected spectacle. In addition to internationally
recognizable sights, tourists look forward to hearing what they believe to be Italian
sounds. Janeck’s remark on the tourists’ musical taste is noteworthy: ‘Okay,
this is San Marco, they don’t want the latest pop hits. But every few minutes
they want something they recognize, maybe an old Julie Andrews number, or
the theme from a famous movie’ (4-5). Janeck may only intend to explain why
the theme from the popular film, The Godfather, is played from band to band
and sometimes nine times in one single afternoon, but the remark inadvertently
explains why this setting parades well-known Venetian features such as piazzas,
serenades, boats and gondoliers. As the American singer Tony Gardner candidly
advises, musicians should know the audiences and adjust their performance to
their differences. Janeck’s narration does just that. His depiction of place delivers
the sights and sounds that tourists will immediately recognize as Venetian. The
familiar foreignness of Venice proves that appearance is the key to a successful
invocation and instant recognition of an internationally popular spot.
Whereas geographical markers effectively sketch a familiar, renowned
scenery, a hasty identification of familiar signs could lead to a fallacious
conclusion. ‘Cellists’ proves to be such a case. The story’s unidentified narrator
mentions repetitive playing of the Godfather tune in the Italian piazza where he
works as a café musician. He states in the very beginning: ‘It was our third time
playing the Godfather theme since lunch’ (189). The reference to the Godfather
theme engenders a deceptive resemblance to ‘Crooner’, misleading the reader to
speculate that ‘Cellists’ is equally set in Venice’s Piazza San Marco and perhaps
even narrated by the same character. Misidentification is further encouraged when
the narrator brings up the Adriatic, Museo Civico, Arts and Cultural Festival, San
Lorenzo Church, and the Excelsior. This supposition is nevertheless contradicted
by the narrator’s remark as he laments the estrangement of former band members:
‘… [I]f every now and then someone moves on, you want to think he’ll always
stay in touch, sending back postcards from Venice or London or wherever he’s
got to, maybe a Polaroid of the band he’s in now – just like he’s writing home
to his old village’ (190). Under normal circumstances, postcards will not be sent
from Venice to Venice. The setting of ‘Cellists’ is a fictional composite of assorted
scenes from Venice, Florence, Rome and other Italian tourist spots.
Location markers in ‘Cellists’ are comparable to those in Ishiguro’s The
Unconsoled and An Artist of the Floating World. These geographic signs form
a pastiche, invoking a specific ambience and yet referring to nowhere in the real
world. In An Artist of the Floating World, Ishiguro constructs a metaphorical
setting with an unmistakable Japanese aura. In the unidentified city of Ono’s (the
artist-narrator) residence, Arakawa and Izumimachi of Tokyo, Sakemachi Station
 Cosmos of Similitude in Nocturnes 123

of Nagoya and Negishi Station of Yokohama coexist with invented places such
as Kashuga Park Hotel, Takami Garden and Kawabe Park. The landscape of
The Unconsoled is even more surreal. The musician-narrator Ryder visits places
such as Altstadt (Old Town), Chalet, the Wall, Hungarian Café and St. Peter’s
Cemetery. All of these places represent a geographic collage of non-fictional
and fictional places: actual historical sites and tourist attractions from Salzburg,
Switzerland, Germany, Hungary and Austria are woven with made-up places. In
The Unconsoled, the city is not only unidentified in Ryder’s narration but also
unidentifiable in the real world. Permutation of the factual and the fictional equally
characterizes the settings of Nocturnes.
The geographic pastiche blends reality with fantasy and that mishmash
generates a reality of its own. Disneyland is a perfect example of this innovative
artificiality. The theme park, as Umberto Eco astutely notes, ‘blends the reality of
trade with the play of fiction’ and its enormous success proves that ‘technology
can give us more reality than nature can’ (41, 44). Since its opening in 1955,
Disneyland has fostered a good number of duplicates such as Disney World in
Florida, Disneyland Park in Paris, Tokyo Disneyland, Hong Kong Disneyland
and Shanghai Disneyland Park. These Disneyland clones prove that pastiche,
a representation of representations, can be an origin for others to emulate. A
reconfigured reality also shapes the landscape of Las Vegas. There reproductions
of buildings and sculptures from different geographical locations congregate to
form a new cityscape. Bold and loud, architectures and billboards in the city’s
commercial strips remind visitors of other tourist attractions they have visited
or renowned artifacts they have glimpsed elsewhere. And it is this medley of
ostentatious replicas that gives Las Vegas its unique spectacle and ambience.
These worldwide replications of local characteristics engender deceptive
resemblance among different sites, and it is an approach that Ishiguro adopts in
his fiction. The visual and auditory backdrops of ‘Crooner’ and ‘Cellists’ provide
illustrations. The narrators of these two stories both mention that tourists expect
distinctive (although sometimes imaginary) sights and sounds of Italy when they
visit the actual Italy. Music, especially American popular music, is one of the
keys to unlocking the visitors’ collective memory of the places that they may
never have visited but have known intimately through second-hand sources such
as popular films. The Godfather theme and other American popular songs assure
international tourists that they are visiting the Italy they have known through these
cultural sources. The use of American popular music is equally conspicuous in
the other three stories. Characters in ‘Come Rain and Come Shine’, ‘Malvern
Hills’ and ‘Nocturne’ also play, listen to or talk about music. They mainly refer
to pieces from the Great American Songbook, a collection of memorable music
performed in Broadway theaters, musical theatres and Hollywood musicals during
the period between 1920s and early 1960s. The nimble assimilation of music into
a narrative confirms Ishiguro’s earlier admission that he uses images and sounds
in mass media as ‘a kind of shorthand for atmosphere and mood and for deeper
things as well’ (Shaikh, screen 1).
124 Kazuo Ishiguro in a Global Context / Cheng

In Nocturnes, popular music serves as an auditory shorthand for an anticipated

mindscape. Song titles from the Great American Songbook – such as ‘It Was
Just One of Those Things’, ‘One For My Baby’ and ‘One For the Road’ – are
incorporated into the story-novel because they, as Ishiguro admits, ‘speak for
themselves’ (Tonkin, screen 2). Broadway melodies – along with gossip about
the Carpenters, Robert De Niro, Meg Ryan, Marlon Brando, Chet Baker, Frank
Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald – are as evocative as spoken words in the story. These
sounds promptly produce an atmosphere reminiscent of a certain moment or place.
This skillful employment of popular culture testifies to Fiske’s observation that
popular texts are generally ‘incomplete, and insufficient unless and until they
are incorporated into the everyday lives of the people’ (Understanding Popular
Culture 123). The novelist’s works subsume popular culture, which in turn
contributes to their accessibility and adaptability because popular culture, other
than outlining an intended atmosphere, also conveys significance across a cultural-
linguistic boundary.
The prevalence of mass-produced sights and sounds engenders an ambience of
familiarity in five different locales of Nocturnes. Whether it is a piazza, café, hotel
or tourist spot, each setting appears confusingly like the other four because they
are transitional sites where locals and tourists mix and mingle. This resemblance
necessitates differentiation. To identify indistinguishable locations, one has to
rely on their narrators’ descriptions. Raymond of ‘Come Rain or Come Shine’
announces that he is visiting friends in London; the song-writer of ‘Malvern Hills’
states that he is currently working at his sister’s lodge in Malvern Hills; Steve
of ‘Nocturne’ mentions his convalescence in a luxurious hotel in Beverly Hills.
Whether in London, Malvern Hills or Beverly Hills, the name of each location
immediately sets forth the intended ambience of transience. In comparison with the
above stories, ‘Crooner’ and ‘Cellists’ provide greater geographical details. Janeck
of ‘Crooner’ informs us from the outset that he plays music in the Piazza San
Marco in Venice and throughout his narration offhandedly mentions Caffè Lavena,
gondolas and a gondolier. Sometimes, a narrator’s account can be misleading. As
discussed earlier, the narrator of ‘Cellists’ never specifies the city he works in and
yet his musical and geographical allusions encourage one to assume it is Venice.
Just as Ishiguro’s settings often enfold imaginary and real places, his narratives
weave literary works with popular culture. Such a literary practice has ignited
rigorous discussions on the issue of originality (Walkowitz 2001, 1049; Lewis
133; Damrosch 230; Robinson 107). In her analysis of The White Countess, Lisa
Fluet states that the movie ‘invokes many character-types, plot situations, settings
and conflicts developed in his novels’ and that the movie, like other works by
Ishiguro, exhibits ‘a curious inauthenticity’ because some of its elements are
‘dislodged’ from previous texts by the novelist (207). ‘Inauthenticity’ is indeed,
as Fluet observes, a distinct feature of Ishiguro’s authorship, but it is his means
rather than his aim. The novelist appropriates, edits, and reframes popular culture
as well as his own works. His writings accordingly feature what John Fiske defines
as ‘vertical intertextuality’ and ‘horizontal intertextuality’ in television culture.
 Cosmos of Similitude in Nocturnes 125

Fiske notes, ‘Horizontal relations are those between primary texts that more or less
explicitly linked, usually along the axes of genre, character, or content. Vertical
intertextuality is that between a primary text … and other texts of a different type
that refer explicitly to it’ (Television Culture 108).
‘Inauthenticity’ in Ishiguro’s writing is also germane to ‘citationability’ and
‘iterarability’. Jacques Derrida explains that a written sign, like an utterance, is
subject to infinite reframing because it is never ‘tethered’ to its original context
(Limited 20). Derrida holds that each written sign, when cited or iterated, is
grafted onto a new context in which it takes on different significance. Both in
connotation and relevance, ‘citationability’ and ‘iterability’ are more adequate than
‘inauthenticity’ to explain Ishiguro’s representation of representations. Popular
culture operates like a written sign or an utterance: it is detachable from its initial
frame of reference, transportable to other frameworks and variable in significance.
For Ishiguro, words, images and sounds promulgated through mass media – in
spite of their origins, forms and scales – are usable parts for him to structure an
organic whole of his own design.
Each of the five stories in Nocturnes is at once an assembly of parts and a
fraction of a grander configuration. Whether in Italy, England, or the States, these
five story-settings so profusely incorporate Broadway melodies, Hollywood
gossip and snapshot images of tourist attractions that they all appear confusingly
alike. These pastiches display unsettling features that Frederic Jameson discerns
in postmodern architecture: reversibility of inside and outside, equation of a
photographic image for empirical reality, loss of spatial references and sense of
displacement (98–9, 117, 124). Landscape mirrors mindscape. Dissolution of
inner and outer spaces corresponds to an interchangeability between friend and
stranger; equating the façade with the interior parallels mistaking friendliness for
friendship; a disorientation in space coincides with a displacement of self.

Inconsequential Comradeship

‘Inauthenticity’ in Ishiguro’s works entails duplicity, artificiality, promiscuity,

capriciousness, and insincerity. An indeterminate landscape in a narrative
parallels the capricious relationships of its fictional characters, and this outer-
inner correlation recurs in the novelist’s works. The landscapes of Nocturnes are
reminiscent of the surreal backdrop of The Unconsoled, which Richard Robinson
describes as a ‘two-dimensional backcloth’ and ‘a cardboard cut-out Euroland’
because Scandinavian, German and French names may give the city a European
façade but behind that it has neither depth nor individuality (108–9). The familiar
foreign cityscape corresponds to the superficial comradeship Ryder retains with
other characters; the former is an appearance without substance and the latter a
gesture without sincerity.
The externalization of one’s private agony remains conspicuous in Nocturnes.
Like Ryder, characters in Nocturnes are nomads whose ties to places are
126 Kazuo Ishiguro in a Global Context / Cheng

tenuous, their understanding of culture fragmented and their friendships with

strangers capricious. If companionship is established through the individuals’
shared sentiments and values, its transience suggests frivolity or just an illusory
camaraderie. Characters in Nocturnes are joined by shallow, if not entirely
imagined, commonalities. Café musicians, would-be celebrities, ESL teachers, and
international tourists establish and abandon relationships as circumstances dictate.
For them, friendship is widely available and easily disposable. Itinerant figures in
the floating world of Nocturnes remind us of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s
remark on nomads. They liken nomads to rhizomes, for both are shallow-rooted:
‘A rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things,
interbeing, intermezzo. The tree is filiation, but the rhizome is alliance, uniquely
alliance’ (21). The analogy, though reasonable, is not as conspicuous as that
between Lego bricks and nomads that apply to Ishiguro’s works. Whereas rhizomes
are subterranean stems gradually generating roots beneath and sending up shoots,
Lego bricks are discreet pieces, each of which has several round studs on the top and
a concave bottom enabling it to be effortlessly interlocked with, and pulled apart
from, other pieces. Compact, sturdy and yet adaptable to different configurations,
Lego bricks balance independence and flexibility, two indispensable qualities for
a nomadic life. Like Lego bricks, nomads click and crack effortlessly. The easy
connection and disconnection of Lego bricks also relates Deleuze and Guattari’s
concepts of deterritorialization and reterritorialization to a nomadic society.
Communities with which nomads are momentarily affiliated mutate with the influx
and exodus of their constituents. They undergo constant expansion, contraction
and reconfiguration just as all cultures experience continuous deterritorialization
and reterritorialization.
Each story in Nocturnes bears witness to a volatility of affiliation as individuals
drift from place to place for a variety of reasons. In ‘Crooner’, Janeck recalls
his brief acquaintance with American singer Tony Gardner when the latter visits
Venice with his soon-to-be ex-wife Lindy. Tony confides in Janeck that he hopes
to rescue his career and restore his earlier glamour through an upcoming divorce.
Tony’s intimacy with Janeck is as instrumental as his marriage; both relationships
are disbanded as promptly as they are established. Similarly, ‘Come Rain or Come
Shine’ revolves around Raymond’s strained friendship with Emily and Charlie. It
begins with Raymond’s endeavor to rescue Emily and Charlie’s failing marriage
and yet ends with estrangement of the three. The young songwriter in ‘Malvern
Hills’ fleetingly befriends two Swiss tourists, Tilo and Sonja. During the course of
their brief encounter the couple confides in him their regret as traveling musicians,
and to them he admits his anguish and ambition. The story ends with the couple’s
departure from Malvern Hills and their decision to go separate ways. ‘Nocturne’
begins with Steve’s encounter with Lindy at a lavish hotel in Beverly Hills. The
two of them, recently divorced, quickly become each other’s confidant, but their
camaraderie hastily ends as Lindy moves on to start a new chapter of her life.
The transience of human relationships is further highlighted in ‘Cellists’. The
unnamed saxophonist recalls a former band member Tibor’s acquaintance with
 Cosmos of Similitude in Nocturnes 127

an American tourist Eloise McCormack, who poses as a cellist but later proves
to be a fake. The encounter changes Tibor, his self-perception, career choice and
friendship with the narrator. It is the narrator’s lament over an estranged friendship
that prompts his account of these occurrences seven years earlier. Recalling
Tibor’s closeness with McCormack in that summer, the narrator hints at Tibor’s
earlier solidarity with him. Unveiling the story of Tibor’s unfulfilled potential, the
narrator intimates his own disappointment, for he remains in the same piazza while
former band members have gone elsewhere. He examines his prior relationship
with Tibor through Tibor’s impulsive intimacy with McCormack. Whereas Tibor
and McCormack move among communities, promptly abandoning old alliances
and forming new ones, the narrator awaits a newcomer who might become his
friends as Tibor once did.
The volatile friendship in ‘Cellists’ is reminiscent of a whimsical solidarity
found as well in the other stories. This reverberation draws attention to two
disquieting conditions: the first-person narrator’s unusual closeness with a stranger
he encounters in a foreign land and the narrator’s alienation from family and
friends at home. The narrator and the stranger agree on so many different things
that the intimate details which the strangers disclose sound like the narrators’ own
experiences. For instance, in ‘Crooner’, Janeck’s account of his association with
Tony Gardner largely centers on the latter’s confession. It is difficult to determine
whether Gardner really confides in Janeck, mumbles to himself through the
presence of Janeck, or Janeck bares his secret through the story of an imaginary
stranger named Tony Gardner. In ‘Malvern Hills’, the crestfallen songwriter resents
the working condition in his sister’s café and laments his unfulfilled potential. He
is unable to communicate with his sister and brother-in-law and yet feels at ease
in confiding to a Swiss couple because they are musicians and know about the
aspirations and frustrations associated with music. His dialogues with the Swiss
couple sound like an externalization of his interior monologues and a reflection
of the couple’s antithetical worldview. Steve of ‘Nocturne’ establishes a curious
intimacy with Lindy when they stay in a lavish hotel in Beverly Hills. There, they
reveal what they would not even share with their families and friends. They are
each other’s double, and the respective confessions made when their faces are
heavily bandaged remind one of the orchestrated soliloquies in a surreal world.
The intimacy that occurs among strangers necessitates an examination of
their philosophical discourses on the nature of friendship. Giorgio Agamben,
when defining ‘friend,’ resorts to a passage presumably quoted from Aristotle in
a modern edition of Diogenes Laertius’s Lives of Eminent Philosophers: ‘philoi,
oudeis philos, “He who has (many) friends, does not have a single friend”’ (27).
This version of Aristotle’s remark, as Agamben points out, is markedly different
from Montaigne’s version that Jacques Derrida cites in The Politics of Friendship:
‘O my friends, there is no friend’ (172). These two translations are different in
semantics and syntax, but they coincide in capturing the paradoxical nature of
friendship. Agamben considers ‘con-sent’ or ‘joint sensation’ as the essence
of friendship, and indeed, friends are mirror images of each other: ‘One must
128 Kazuo Ishiguro in a Global Context / Cheng

… “con-sent” that his friend exists, and this happens by living together and by
sharing acts and thoughts in common [koinōnein]’ (32–3). Agamben further
explicates the self-other proximity in friendship: ‘The friend is not an other I,
but an otherness immanent to selfness, a becoming other of the self’ (34–5). A
friend is an intimate other, who at the moment of one’s vulnerability lends one
an ear, fears what one fears and loves what one loves. Ishiguro’s portrayals of
the intimacy between strangers call into question the nature of friendship as well.
The numerous strangers with whom one can become intimate in alien settings or
at moments of loneliness could reflect instead the desire of one to see oneself in
the other. If one who has too many friends but in fact has no true friend, then by
this reasoning, he who befriends numerous strangers becomes a stranger to his
(intimate) friends and even to himself.
Agamben argues for the Aristotelian impossibility of multiple commitments
to friends and echoes the singularity of friendship emphasized by Montaigne
and Derrida. Derrida phrases his perspective as a rhetorical question: ‘How are
you going to reconcile “more than one friend” with what “perfect friendship”
maintains of the “indivisible”?’ (The Politics of Friendship 181). If friendship,
singular and indivisible, demands a person to give himself entirely to his friend,
then he will not be able to divide or multiply himself to other friends. The singular-
plural conflict in Derrida’s explication concurs with, rather than contradicts, the
self-other proximity in Agamben’s remark. Both attend to the hazy differentiation
between self and the other and the impossible duplication of singularity in
friendship. This highlights the exclusivity of friendships and associates it with
uniqueness, exceptionality, inimitability and sincerity. Friendship is tethered to a
specific context and its significance depends on that certainty.
Certainty is nevertheless elusive in an intimacy established by strangers.
Whereas friendship is solemn and singular, the intimacy among strangers is more
likely capricious. Intimacy between strangers contradicts the very essence of
friendship; it duplicates affection in various circumstances and divides loyalty to
different allies. One’s compulsive closeness with strangers hence intimates one’s
detachment from family, friends and even oneself. The stranger with whom one
immediately identifies might be a double – literally, an other – that one wishes
for and through whose confession one discloses one’s own ineffable anguish.
The spontaneous solidarity between strangers that Ishiguro explores in Nocturnes
is symptomatic of self-absorption and global displacement. In an exceedingly
mobile world, strangers glimpse a superficial or even deceptive resemblance in
each other and friends inevitably drift apart when circumstances force them to
take different paths.
Two essays on The Unconsoled may help unravel the intricate intimacy of
strangers in Nocturnes. Gary Adelman holds that in the unspecified city of The
Unconsoled, the traveling musician Ryder ‘meets himself at every turn in characters
and relationships that refract his history’, and that these accidental encounters
‘externalize the central character’s interior life’ (167, 178). During his four-day
visit in a foreign city, Ryder quickly bonds with the townsfolk and recognizes in
 Cosmos of Similitude in Nocturnes 129

them himself at different stages of life. The narrator’s perpetual self-projection,

evident in The Unconsoled, equally prevails in Nocturnes though it appears in a
slightly varied style. Whereas The Unconsoled unveils the narrator’s inner world
through a number of strangers he encounters, Nocturnes presents five versions of
revelation, in each of which the narrator bares his soul through a stranger’s (or a
now estranged friend’s) confession. The stories in Nocturnes not only reverberate
with each other but also resonate with The Unconsoled in addressing the self-other
confluence in a world void of alterity. The transitory relationships expressed in
Nocturnes resemble the indeterminate relationships that Ryder of The Unconsoled
retains with the strangers he encounters in the foreign city. In his reading of The
Unconsoled, Bruce Robbins considers Ryder a nomadic figure overwhelmed
by his obligations to the society of his origin, that of his profession and those
of his global connections. Robbins writes: ‘The novel’s distortions of time and
space becomes a metaphor for the harriedness of ordinary life, and the conflicting
demands of home and work become a metaphor for the conflicting scales and
rhythms of the foreign and the domestic’ (430). In the familiarly foreign city, Ryder
cannot distinguish the public from the private, friends from strangers and, worst
of all, self from the other(s). The city he visits may have been his hometown; the
porter’s daughter and grandson his estranged family; and strangers’ anguish mimic
his own undisclosed distress. Ryder’s uncanny encounters with strangers, family
and former acquaintances in the city suggest that individuals of global mobility
can easily make homes away from home and yet feel disoriented on native lands.
They may befriend strangers but estrange themselves from families, friends and
themselves.
Nocturnes echoes The Unconsoled in addressing the blurring divide between
self and the other, public and private, native and foreign, and fiction and reality.
Global mobility may have shortened geographical distances and increased
interpersonal contacts, but it also challenges conventional notions of self, home,
friendship, community and loyalty. In the floating world of Nocturnes, international
people cross paths but their encounters, inadvertent and transitory, often conclude
inconsequentially. Two passages from the story-novel are particularly worth noting.
Raymond of ‘Come Rain or Come Shine’ expresses his disenchantment after years
of teaching English in different European countries: ‘You spend a lot of time in
bars, friends are easy to make, and there’s a feeling you’re part of a large network
extending around the entire globe … and this gets you thinking that if you wanted,
you could drift around the world indefinitely, using your contacts to get a job in
any faraway corner you fancied’(40). The narrator of ‘Cellists’ equally mourns
the transience of earlier connections, especially ‘[h]ow the bosom pals of today
become lost strangers tomorrow, scattered across Europe, playing the Godfather
theme or “Autumn Leaves” in squares and cafes you’ll never visit’ (190).
Perhaps Nocturnes echoes another global author, Italo Calvino, and his
prescience for the twenty-first century. Before his sudden death in 1985, Calvino
intended to celebrate the upcoming millennium with six memos: lightness,
quickness, exactitude, visibility, multiplicity and consistency. However, the memo
130 Kazuo Ishiguro in a Global Context / Cheng

on ‘consistency’ was never written. Even so, four of the five existing memos
illustrate the condition that this millennium has already witnessed. Nocturnes
captures a skewed image of these four qualities. Lightness, quickness, visibility
and multiplicity mutate into frivolity, hastiness, superficiality and duplicity.
Collectively, the five stories of Nocturnes assemble a cosmos of superficial
similitude in which nomads drift from place to place and establish immediate, if
estranged, intimacy with strangers whom they encounter. And, when circumstances
change, they hastily abandon those friendships to form new affiliations with
strangers elsewhere, reflecting their resilience or their desperation.

Works Cited

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42.2 (2001): 166–79. Print.
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Calvino, Italo. Six Memos for the Next Millennium. Trans. Patrick Creagh. New
York: Vintage, 1993. Print.
Damrosch, David. What is World Literature? Princeton: Princeton UP, 2003. Print.
Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
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1987. Print.
Derrida, Jacques. Limited Inc. Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1988. Print.
———. The Politics of Friendship. 1997. Trans. George Collins. London: Verso,
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Eco, Umberto. Travels in Hyper Reality. 1967. Trans William Weaver. New York:
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Fiske, John. Television Culture. London: Routledge, 1987. Print.
———. Understanding Popular Culture. 1989. Reprint. London: Routledge,
1994. Print.
Fluet, Lisa. ‘Anti-social Goods’. Novel 40.3 (2007): 207–15. Print.
Ishiguro, Kazuo. Nocturnes. London: Faber & Faber, 2009. Print.
Jameson, Frederic. Postmodernism. Durham: Duke UP, 1991. Print.
Lewis, Barry. Kazuo Ishiguro. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000.
Print.
Robbins, Bruce. ‘“Very Busy Just Right Now”: Globalization and Harriedness
in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled’. Comparative Literature 53.4 (2001):
426–41.
Robinson, Richard. ‘“Nowhere, in Particular”: Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled
and Central Europe’. Critical Quarterly 48.4 (2006) 107–30. Print.
Shaikh, Nermeen. ‘Kazuo Ishiguro’s Interior Worlds’. Asia Society (2000). Web.
August 31, 2013. <http://asiasociety.org/arts/literature/kazuo-ishiguros-
interior-worlds> .
 Cosmos of Similitude in Nocturnes 131

Tonkin, Boyd. ‘Kazuo Ishiguro: The writer’s musical short-story collection belies
his love for warrior tales’. The Independent May 8, 2009. Web. August 21,
2009. <http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/
kazuo-ishiguro-the-writers-musical-shortstory-collection-belies-his-love-for-
warrior-tales-1680747.html>.
Walkowitz, Rebecca L. ‘Ishiguro’s Floating Worlds’. ELH 68.4 (200): 1049–76.
Print.
———. ‘Unimaginable Largeness: Kazuo Ishiguro, Translation and the New
World Literature’. Novel 40.3 (2007): 216–39. Print.
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 Chapter 12
Oppositional Narratives of Nocturnes
Cynthia F. Wong, University of Colorado Denver, USA

The five short stories collected in Nocturnes (2009) by no means represent the
first time that Kazuo Ishiguro tried his hand at the shorter form. Ishiguro’s first
published works were short fiction that preceded his first novel, A Pale View of
Hills (1982), and Granta named him as among the best of young British novelists
on the literary promise shown in those early works. Brian Shaffer calls the novels
‘more finely chiselled’ (11) than the short stories but argues that the debut short
fiction and ‘later works are far more organically connected, in particular in their
exploration of trauma, than is generally recognized’ (9). Only one other short
story, ‘A Village After Dark’ appeared in The New Yorker in 2001, years before the
appearance of Nocturnes, a collection that Ishiguro refers to as a ‘story book’ or one
grouped like a music album in which there are five seemingly ‘separate pieces of
music but they go together’ (Aitkenhead). In making sense of ways to describe or
anoint the collection, Levi Stahl observes that Ishiguro’s writing here ‘feels not so
much transitional [from realism to fantastical rendering] as oppositional, a working
out of [his] two narrative approaches in shorter form.’ Like Shaffer’s point that
Ishiguro’s writing represents an evolution of both content and form, Stahl’s remark
encourages an exploration of stylistic tensions found throughout the Nocturnes
stories that express a continuity of Ishiguro’s innovative narrative style: expressing
inner and outer states of being, or directly and especially indirectly conveying their
surfaces or depths; focusing on the contrasts between realism and fantasy, or actual
and imagined situations; and oscillating between poignant and comical notes are
among the host of such oppositions that compel temporal and spatial progression
within each story and across this collection. The oppositions indicate rich contrasts
between Ishiguro’s realist mode with one that is usually described as ‘Kafka-esque’
(Jarvis 157), an aspect characterizing the short stories and The Unconsoled, and
together, these modes complement Ishiguro’s fiction to date.

Contrasting Themes and Characters in Nocturnes

The word ‘nocturnes’ presents two motifs from which to draw these thematic
and technical oppositions, a point expressed in the subtitle of the collection, Five
Stories of Music and Nightfall. Christopher Hitchens comments on the musical
reference and the instance when daylight transitions into dusk and darkness
(nightfall), thereby provoking a corresponding metaphor about enlightenment
134 Kazuo Ishiguro in a Global Context / Wong

and disenchantment. Hitchens focuses on this metaphor for self-realization when

he quotes Georg Hegel’s poetical assessment, ‘the owl of Minerva spreads its
wings only with the falling of the dusk’, to explain that ‘an epoch or an era cannot
really be judged or estimated until it has entered its closing phase.’ Then, moving
away from the philosophical implications of Hegel’s owl to depict such definitive
awareness of self and situation in an unfolding of personal histories, Hitchens offers
his rendition of this revelatory event in more pedestrian situations: ‘For those of us
fated to lead smaller and less portentous existences, it is still the gathering shade of
evening that very often gives rise to our most intense, and sometimes necessarily
our most melancholy moments of reflection and retrospect’(2009).
These solemn self-revelations occurring at a precise transitional moment also
appear in scenes from the novels, such as when Stevens in The Remains of the
Day (1989) sits on the Weymouth pier – a place that transitions land and water –
following his much anticipated but heartbreakingly brief reunion with Mrs. Benn
(whom he persistently refers to as Miss Kenton, based on his cherished memories
of their shared past at Darlington Hall). Stevens eventually reflects on that last
meeting while he waits for the pier lights to turn on; meanwhile, during a pause
in his reflection of this meaningful encounter, he engages in a conversation with a
retired butler who claims that ‘for a great many people, the evening was the best
part of the day, the part they most looked forward to’ (240). It is this ‘best part’ both
of days and nights tied to a narrator’s hopeful remembrances and anticipations that
Ishiguro uses to depict his characters managing their disappointments; this focus
helps to link the Nocturnes stories with achievements from his prior works.
In Nocturnes, characters resemble those from the novels in that shame, guilt or
embarrassment structure their self-defense in narrative reconstruction; painful losses
or mournful events debilitate and disquiet their tone, while forced cheerfulness or
dignified stoicism permit self-dignity and even repose; and frequently, no matter
the circumstance, they do not lack an ability to rationalize their shortcomings,
whether to cover up guilt or evade further shame (Walkowitz 2001, 1057;
Eckert 78–9). Ishiguro’s structural organization of the collection, ‘storybook’, or
‘musical album’ – flexible terms depending on the reader’s perspective and focus
– expresses a variety of oppositions or contrasts at work, which partly accounts
for one difficulty with fixing its form according to conventional literary terms and
genres. Young and mature musicians feature in each story, except the second one,
‘Come Rain or Come Shine’, in which music signifies instead the deteriorating
friendships of three mid-life professionals. The first story, ‘Crooner’, and the last
one, ‘Cellists’, are both narrated by a young guitarist (named Janeck in the first
story, but unnamed in the last), but neither of the stories is directly about him nor
his problems. The first involves the last serenade that famed ageing singer Tony
Gardner will perform for his wife Lindy, whom he plans to divorce in order to move
on with his career; and the last involves the unusual tutelage of a young Hungarian
cellist named Tibor by a middle-aged American tourist named Eloise McCormack.
In neither of these stories does the narrator act as a moral arbiter of the events that
he describes, but through Ishiguro’s rendering of his consciousness, he conveys
 Oppositional Narratives of Nocturnes 135

a great deal that is implied in the seemingly ordinary interactions. The third and
middle story, ‘Malvern Hills’, is told by a twenty-something aspiring guitarist
who does all he can to conceal his resentment against the music industry that he
clearly wishes to join, but the story turns out to include an older Swiss couple,
musicians Sonja and Tilo, who are floundering in a painful twilight of their own.
Both the guitarist and the older couple express varying degrees of performance
agitation that signifies a deeper sense of unease lurking beneath their otherwise
placid exchanges. The fourth story mirrors the comical dysfunctions of the second
story in terms of farcical moments punctuating more ponderous or serious matters,
and it tells of the days following cosmetic surgery for both Steve the narrator and
Lindy Gardner, who makes a reappearance from ‘Crooner’. Like ‘Malvern Hills’,
the pairing or contrasting of characters appears in ‘Nocturne’, where Steve is a
minion of the music industry while Lindy has had her run with being the trophy
wife of a celebrated musician. On the surface, these stories seem to depict different
stages and artistic or vocational experiences of people moving through life – the
aspirations and disappointments that accompany these journeys; the people who
serve as direct and inadvertent mentors to their aspirations – and to examine the
ways by which people celebrate or console themselves of the consequences of
their choices. But, Ishiguro’s surface depictions often belie deeper and more
desperate realizations than even the character can know or accept, and the ongoing
juxtapositions of insight/blindness and truth/denial of truth, for instance, forestall
easy conclusions about what each story is really about (Smyth 147).
To show these various oppositions, Ishiguro pairs characters who seem
diametrically opposed, in order to highlight differences of age, desire, motive,
psychology or destiny, and he frequently adds a third person into the mix in
order to triangulate or add a new dimension to mere foiling. Pairing of characters
occurred in Ishiguro’s earlier works, for instance, in the story ‘Waiting for J’ with
the narrator plotting a treacherous meeting with another man from his past – or
so it seems (Shaffer 13), and in A Pale View of Hills with Etsuko remembering a
woman from her past named Sachiko who bears such uncanny resemblance to
her own history that the two could be one and the same (Lewis 36). Such pairs
signaled mirrors, reflections and even deflections of self and others in uniquely
provocative ways and helped a reader to map cognitive and emotional senses of
self. Situations involving three characters include Ono and his two daughters in
An Artist of the Floating World (1986), as the younger one enters into marriage
negotiations in the shadow of her sister’s apparently successful marriage and their
father’s disgraced past; Stevens and his two paternal figures – his employer, the
once-great Lord Darlington whom he served indefatigably, and his biological
father, from whom we discover one origin of Stevens’s emotional stoicism and
miscalculated devotion to professional service; from The Unconsoled (1995),
Ryder excluded from his parents, who are supposed to arrive for his long-awaited
performance, or Ryder estranged from a woman named Sophie and her son Boris,
who may be related to Ryder’s past in some unaddressed way; and, from Never
Let Me Go (2005), Kathy’s tumultuous friendships with Ruth and Tommy charted
136 Kazuo Ishiguro in a Global Context / Wong

from childhood to the devastating finality of their young lives, as well as the
children relating to their guardians and clone-industrialists in the world beyond
their fabled Hailsham. Ishiguro is not simply replicating these characters – either
by pairing up a single character with another single one, or a single character with
a couple – for the Nocturnes stories, but he does return to some of the ways that
people communicate with one another in both the social, physical world, as well
as recall or incorporate others into their reminiscences or narratives. He continues
his exploration of deeper issues that investigate the ways that people cope with
their problems and the degrees to which they are able to admit either to themselves
or others their failings; and, subsequently, how they might form or re-form those
perspectives to present to others. While his first-person narratives often seem to
show only narrow and insular perspectives – as subjective points of view tend
towards – an interpellation of these human relations in the stories expands what
would be merely a singular or myopic perspective. The literary compositions
of these relationships may benefit from a correlation with the idea of musical
composition as noted by Smyth, such as ‘repetition with variation, evenness of
tone, the manipulation of meaning at the material level of the signifier’ (152) that
also apply to Ishiguro’s narrative technique.

Mapping Surfaces and Depths

In Nocturnes, pairs and triplets have musical resonance with psychological

implication for characters and events: chords, concords, and discords are elements
associated with music and may help guide an assessment of the mental and
emotional states of characters. The early short stories and novels included a range
of intense subjects such as people healing from Nagasaki’s nuclear devastation or
young human clones preparing for the end of their truncated lives in a laterally
imagined universe, for instance, or gruesome subjects such as murder, sexual
and child abuses and suicide. These traumatic episodes are not the subjects of
Nocturnes, where young musicians seem to be ordinary people who go about
their rehearsals, auditions and mundane playing jobs; middle-aged people who
look both back into their past or forward into what remains of their dissipating
future; and, where older musicians express weariness about the profession; or,
ordinary people conduct everyday life with typical struggles of maintaining good
friendships, cordial work relationships, or courteous encounters with others. These
imperatives of the social world can provoke misunderstandings, just as they do
in Ishiguro’s prior works, and in Nocturnes he also explores serious and comical
consequences of such instances.
The middle story, ‘Malvern Hills’, features an unnamed twenty-something
guitarist who takes a self-prescribed ‘interlude’ (89) from his unfruitful London
auditions to spend the summer in the hometown where his sister Maggie has
established a thriving cafe. Eager to flee the ‘extremely shallow and inauthentic’
(91) music scene from which he persuades himself that he nevertheless had ‘an
 Oppositional Narratives of Nocturnes 137

invaluable experience’ (89), the self-absorbed narrator admits that the summer
work with room and board arrangement ‘was all a bit unclear’ (92) and that
his brother-in-law Geoff ‘seemed torn between giving me a kick up the arse
for not doing enough, and apologizing for asking me to do anything at all, like
I was a guest’ (92). While this sense of humour seems to establish the narrator
as an objective, easy-going young artist capably adapting to circumstances, his
descriptions soon reveal that he does all he can to escape physical work for his
kin and rationalizes everything to his benefit (90; 95; 97; 115; 117). Irritated by
the customers who intrude on his time for more constructive activities like writing
songs, he uses unkind nicknames such as ‘Hag Fraser’ (95) for a former teacher
whose very appearance at the cafe inspires again his ‘hatred for the old dragon’
(96) or ‘the Krauts’ (97) to describe what turns out to be a Swiss couple named
Sonja and Tilo. In this silently malicious way the narrator reveals his intolerance,
disdain, and general immaturity accompanied by spontaneous emotions of puerile
anger and rage (103; 117).
When he escapes afternoon work to go into the hills ostensibly to work on a
song, he encounters the Swiss couple and warms immediately to their praise when
‘they turned to me with big smiles and applauded [my playing], sending echoes
around the hills’ (107). But, even the narrator senses that surface expressions can
mislead, such as when he notices how the couple ‘exchanged glances with what
I thought was just a hint of tension’ (109) or ‘again something vaguely awkward
hovered between them’ (111), which signal distress beneath appearances. The
next day at the same place on the hill, he encounters Sonja alone and the ‘earlier
good atmosphere’ that had characterized the first meeting ‘was definitely slipping
away’ (113), as their conversation turns towards more revealing truths about life’s
disappointments. Tilo’s optimistic demeanor can neither transform nor adjudicate
Sonja’s sense that what is for Tilo ‘fine,’ (120), ‘splendid’ (120), ‘majestic and
mysterious’ (121), for her is far more ordinary and even a let-down. Her admission
that Tilo said the couple ‘are finished’ (121) either as a married or musical pair hits
a nerve with the narrator. In response to Sonja’s sad news, the narrator notes that
while he is excited about his music and plans to return to London to find a band,
another reality must be faced: ‘After a moment, I said, quite quietly: “Then again,
I may not bother. It’s not so easy, you know”’ (121). Sonja’s hope that the narrator
‘“will carry on”’ (122) in spite of general futilities and uncertain outcomes seems
to invigorate him momentarily, at least long enough to make a contemplative and
even empathetic observation as he ‘gazed at the clouds, and at the sweep of land
below me’ and concludes with thoughts about ‘the bridge passage I still hadn’t got
right’ (123). Is this ending like those in the novels where a futile optimism offers
some modicum of redemption or consolation?
Bridges are transitional places, and like the nocturnes metaphor about light’s
day easing into night’s darkness or that it is at the end of something from which
another more profound event like knowledge truly emerges, the notion of ‘passages’
too reflects movement from realm to realm, situation to situation. Ideally, bridges
and passages would improve or enlighten one state to the next in an ameliorative
138 Kazuo Ishiguro in a Global Context / Wong

process. But, will the narrator of ‘Malvern Hills’ become a wiser person as a result
of Sonja’s sober admissions? He may be seeing a version of his future self in either
Sonja’s dejection or Tilo’s mask of optimism but certainly senses during these
meetings that his own future is somehow tied to his sense of their conflicts. The
best-known bridge scene from Ishiguro’s novels appears at the very beginning of
the second novel, An Artist of the Floating World, when Ono crosses ‘the Bridge
of Hesitation’ and climbs ‘the steep path’ in order to see the roof of his house that
sits at ‘a commanding position on the hill’ (7). In geographical terms, Ono both
transposes space and time to see above and beyond the main objects ahead; in
narrative terms, Ono raises himself in order to gain focus or perspective on both
the ascent and descent of his artistic and professional life.
Both ‘Come Rain or Shine’ and ‘Nocturne’, the two stories enfolding ‘Malvern
Hills’ as the second and fourth stories, respectively, contain specific locales for the
mid-life professionals struggling with various impasses in their lives. Just as Ono
does, each of these characters strives towards a brimming moment even as they
couch their insecurities. Like ‘Malvern Hills’, ‘Come Rain or Shine’ takes place
in Britain; but like ‘Crooner’ and ‘Cellists’, the fourth story ‘Nocturne’ could be
set anywhere in the world that a ‘swanky hotel’ (128) might exist. Specific, named
locations turn out to be less important in these two stories than the particular type
of dwellings in which the stories take place. Like Ryder’s forays in the strange,
unnamed city in The Unconsoled, it is in fact significant that Ishiguro represents ‘a
nameless and unidentifiable urban labyrinth’ that is a metaphor for the surrealism
of both place and its associated ‘displaced memories, dreams and desires’ (Baxter
133) that all turn out to be applicable to understanding the Nocturnes stories. In
contrast to Ono atop the hill overlooking his ‘imposing’ (7) house, Ray the narrator
from ‘Come Rain or Shine’ is at the untidy home of his friends from college,
Charlie and Emily, while Steve from ‘Nocturne’ is a self-described ‘jobbing tenor
man’ (127) who narrates the time he is stuck in post-cosmetic surgery recovery
at that hotel where his next door neighbor is Lindy Gardner, the divorced wife
of Tony Gardner from ‘Crooner’. The main characters – Ray, Steve, and Lindy
– of the respective stories are all estranged from the people who turn out to be
important members to the stories told by the narrators. These narrators’ isolated
or physically sequestered conditions mean that they can contemplate or reflect as
Ono does in order to gain perspective about their situations.
Notably, ‘Come Rain or Shine’ is not on the surface a story about musicians,
with Ray who identifies with his ‘extended family of itinerant [international]
teachers’ (40) and his friends who seem to be white-collar professionals and work
in high-level office jobs with harried meeting schedules. Listening to music by
Sarah Vaughan, Chet Barker, Julie London or Peggy Lee formed one way that
Ray and Emily bonded as young students (38), and it is the nostalgia for both
the music itself and the circumstances of listening to those specific tunes that
illuminate Ray’s glowing memories of that youthful period. When Ray visits the
couple ‘at the start of this summer’ (41), he comments on its transformation from
that of a once warm and inviting home that had seemed like ‘a posh hotel’ (41)
 Oppositional Narratives of Nocturnes 139

to the untidy, filthy mess it has become. Before long, Ray witnesses the domestic
disintegrating and fragmenting household with the couple taking jabs at each other
and directly at him. They each tell Ray that essentially his ‘“situation’s hopeless”’
(44), that he must ‘“take charge of [his] life”’ (45), among a host of other ill-
tempered assessments and direct insults (48; 49; 51) which he seems not to register
as especially disparaging. To make things worse, when the couple disbands and
leaves him home alone, Ray comes across Emily’s diary that contains hurtful
remarks about her dislike of him (56), and he damages the book and sets off a series
of hilarious episodes – that include a dog and a concoction on the stove plus some
unproductive phone calls with Charlie who has gone away on a business trip –
and finally culminates with Emily seeming to forgive his innocuous transgression.
At story’s end, Ray dances with Emily and with relief observes that ‘for another
few minutes at least, we were safe, and we kept dancing under the starlit sky’
(86), signaling that the reprieve is brief but cherished, that what remains unsaid
threatens this ephemeral tranquility abstracted by music.
Steve similarly reflects on his own comedic situation that includes a nocturnal
wandering with Lindy around the hotel with this hopeful note: ‘Maybe this really
is a turning point for me, and the big league’s waiting. Maybe [Lindy’s] right’
(185). His optimistic musing is on the surface reminiscent of so many of Ishiguro’s
endings to stories, and the satisfaction expressed in the narrator’s words frequently
contrast with the reader’s sense that not all is nor will be well. In Ishiguro’s
worlds, people frequently failed to change, transform or metamorphose into better
versions of self, even if they say this is the case. Beyond assessments made at a
dusk or nocturne of existence, his characters narrating their ignorance, delusion
or pained desires seem both aware of and resistant to change. A closing phase of
awareness may lead to comfort and consolation, but often, the overbearing shame
or impossibility of improvement seems woven into the fabric of their telling.
Etsuko from A Pale View of Hills watched a bit too cheerfully as her second,
still-alive daughter walks away from her in order to return to life in London; Ono
from An Artist of the Floating World seemed overly eager as he congratulates the
working youth of Japan and praises their energy and revitalization during the post-
Nagasaki period; and, both Ryder from The Unconsoled and Christopher from
When We Were Orphans each affects a discordantly upbeat demeanor at the end of
their narratives as well, particularly when considering the devastating events that
had just been revealed. Perhaps Kathy H.’s painful acceptance of her friends’ and
her own certain death in Never Let Me Go proves an exception to the narrator’s
tones of the first four novels.
In the story ‘Nocturne’, Steve is caught like Ishiguro’s other characters in the
tides of other people’s demands upon them. Bradley, his stage manager, tells him
that he is ‘“dull, loser ugly”’ (129), a blunt remark that precipitates the cure-all
cosmetic surgery. Bradley, with Steve’s estranged wife Helen, conspire an unlikely
situation in which her new lover, Chris Prendergast, will fund Steve’s journey
towards aesthetic self-renovation that will open doors for him to enter into music’s
‘big league’ (127). After the drugs wear off from the surgery, Steve feels ‘depressed,
140 Kazuo Ishiguro in a Global Context / Wong

lonely and cheap’ (136) and is rendered amenable to an invitation by his next-
door neighbor Lindy to spend time together, despite his general contempt for her
‘vacuous celebrity’ (138). At one meeting, he shares his saxophone music with
her and, hoping that it would ‘meet with Lindy’s approval’, is in fact disappointed
when her initial enthusiasm ‘faded’ and ‘I realized something was wrong’ and
‘I couldn’t read her expression’ (154). He notices that her voice had ‘become
sulky and quiet’ (154) and she eventually betrays that she had been thinking of
her ex-husband Tony’s music (155) while listening to Steve’s and even indirectly
conveys that she finds his amateurish. The mood of intimate sharing dissipates, as
it had in ‘Malvern Hills’ and ‘Come Rain or Shine’ when an enlightening instant
is just about to be shared with another person. Ishiguro’s calculated humour in this
story defuses such social tensions; when he has Steve and Lindy meet, their heads
are swathed in post-surgery bandages to signify that they are masked and their
facial expressions are inaccessible to one another. They also remain anonymous
to the police officers that catch them during their late-night antics around the hotel
corridors, which involve a statuette and a turkey’s rear end.
In these stories, people hide behind other personae, recast their identities or
say the opposite of what they mean. Ishiguro explores his narrator’s identities
through their tendency towards equivocation and even obfuscation (Newton 270).
In Ishiguro’s works, surface appearances mislead but can expose underlying
attempts to cover up one’s faults or shortcomings. Janeck suspects in ‘Crooner’
that Tony Gardner’s plan to serenade his wife as one last romantic gesture before
he divorces her ‘had been some kind of malicious joke’ (28), just as he remarks
in his retelling of the young Hungarian Tibor’s cello lessons in which Eloise’s
‘words would strike him initially as pretentious and far too abstract’ (202) but
turn out to be effective. These stories frame Nocturnes and turn out to be mirrors
in terms of the relationships described by the narrator, who filters information in
the narrative. Both of the stories contain an older, wiser, seemingly more seasoned
professional authorized to dispense advice and perspective. Like Ono’s father
who claims that artists ‘live in squalor and poverty’ (46) in order to dissuade the
young boy from a career in painting and Jiro-San, Etsuko’s father-in-law from A
Pale View of Hills, who proclaims that ‘Discipline, loyalty, such things held Japan
together once’ (65) and ‘We devoted ourselves to ensuring that proper qualities
were handed down, that children grew up with the correct attitude to their country,
to their fellows’ (66), both Tony from ‘Crooner’ and Eloise from ‘Cellists’ are
enacting their authoritative role to inform, educate, and perhaps improve or reform
the values and talents of those they deem in their charge. But, are these truly
authoritative figures that are really qualified to take on these tasks? And, when the
one addressed fails to heed – and indeed, choose either to rebel against or conform
to – such advice?
Besides dispensing performance advice to Janeck (17–18), Tony tells him some
anecdotes about how people climb the ladder to success. In particular, he tells the
story of Meg who ‘hadn’t made it. But the point is, she’d watched the ones who had’
(20), in order to illustrate his sense of the importance of perception or observation
 Oppositional Narratives of Nocturnes 141

over actual, empirical or lived experience. Meg had advised young girls like Lindy
on how to attract a famous man for marriage, and Tony unassumingly concedes
that such ambition is the result of advice, as much as ‘“beauty and charm,”’ or just
having plain luck (21) – in other words, through relatively random and inexplicable
forces of chance and fortune. Eloise turns out to be much like Meg in terms of her
self-authorized tutelage of Tibor. A self-proclaimed virtuoso, she stopped playing
at age eleven, and explains to Tibor, ‘I had to protect my gift against people who,
however well-intentioned they were, could completely destroy it’ (213). While
her explanation strikes one as being odd and maybe delusional – and certainly
altered the mood of respectful engagement that had been growing between Eloise
and Tibor during their intense music sessions – it underscores what Mark Mazullo
describes as an ‘ethics of vocation’ (90) found in Ishiguro’s works, in which
one’s life work – or literally, ‘one’s calling’ from the Latin vocātiō for a calling
or summons – can be life-forming or all-consuming. Tony Gardner believes that
the next stage of his already-successful career is to cannibalize the very endeavors
that had proven effective when he was younger: thus, he will marry an even more
attractive, more youthful woman despite the fact that he and the ageing Lindy still
love each other; Steve from ‘Nocturne’ gets cajoled into a face-changing surgical
operation in order to join the glamorous, adored and successful; and Tibor follows
Eloise’s lessons in order to move beyond the low-level employment of playing for
the masses as the narrator does. Ishiguro contrasts the teachers with those being
taught, the ambitions of the young with those who have already passed the apex
of their actual or self-perceived talents and careers, and the thwarted realities that
often accompany these exertions on all sides.

Ishiguro’s Evolving Craft

Importantly, Ishiguro presents each character and each situation as empathetic in

spite of their tragic or comedic implications. Empathy is an important quality that
provides Ishiguro’s unique tone in his works (Groes and Lewis 2011, 3; Neagu
280). Indeed, Ishiguro’s sense that human failings are worth as much literary
consideration as their successes runs through every one of his works. His unique
subjects and provocative narrative styles continue to evolve, prompting fellow
contemporary author Haruki Murakami to make this insightful exclamation:

[A]ll of [Ishiguro’s] novels are so different; from one to the next, they are
put together in different ways, and point in different directions. In structure and
style, each is clearly meant to stand apart from the others. Yet each also bears
Ishiguro’s unmistakable imprint, and each forms a small yet wonderfully distinct
universe in itself. (vii)

Murakami’s points about ‘Ishiguro’s unmistakable imprint’ also remind us that

music has long been one of Ishiguro’s preoccupations for his explorations of
identity and fate. As a young man, he wrote music and songs, played some of these
142 Kazuo Ishiguro in a Global Context / Wong

in the Paris Metro station and wrote the lyrics for a jazz album (Mazullo 80). In A
Pale View of Hills, we learn that young Etsuko was once a devoted violin player
who gave up the instrument around the time of the Nagasaki bombing, perhaps
an indication that sometimes music will fail to offer consolation; The Unconsoled
is a novel that is as much about music as it is not about music but about the
failure of the promised performance; in Never Let Me Go – a title that refers to
the fictional song in that novel – Kathy possesses three different music cassettes,
each symbolizing a significance associated with the title song and corresponding
set of events related to her growing awareness of the life destined for her and her
friends. In Nocturnes, music figures in a variety of ways to explore multitudinous
themes and techniques related to Ishiguro’s exploration of human experiences, and
it also signifies his persistently evolving art. This time, his wry humor heightens
the contrasts of what we take seriously and how we struggle to share with others
our trials as we await their response with bated breath.

Works Cited

Aitkenhead, Decca. ‘Kazuo Ishiguro.’ The Guardian. 26 April 2009. Web. <http://
www.guardian.co.uk/2009/apr/27/kazuo-ishiguro-interview-books/>
Baxter, Jeanette. ‘Into the Labyrinth: Kazuo Ishiguro’s Surrealist Poetics in The
Unconsoled’. Kazuo Ishiguro: New Critical Visions of the Novels. Ed. S. Groes
and B Lewis. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. 133–43.
Eckert, Ken. ‘Evasion and the Unsaid in Kazuo Ishiguro’s A Pale View of Hills’.
Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas 10.1 (2012):
77–92. Print.
Groes, Sebastian and Barry Lewis. ‘Introduction: “It’s Good Manners, Really”:
Kazuo Ishiguro and The Ethics of Empathy’. Kazuo Ishiguro: New Critical
Visions of the Novels. Eds. S. Groes and B. Lewis. London: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2011. 1–10.
Hitchens, Christopher. ‘Fade to Black’. Rev.of Nocturnes, by Kazuo Ishiguro. The
New York Times. 4 October 2009.
Ishiguro, Kazuo. A Pale View of Hills. New York: Vintage, 1982. Print.
———. An Artist of the Floating World. New York: Vintage, 1986. Print.
———. Never Let Me Go. New York: Vintage, 2005. Print.
———. Nocturnes. New York: Knopf, 2009. Print.
———. The Remains of the Day. New York: Vintage, 1989. Print.
———. The Unconsoled. New York: Vintage, 1995. Print.
———. When We Were Orphans. New York: Vintage, 2001. Print.
Jarvis, Tim. ‘“Into Ever Stranger Territories”: Kazuo Ishigruo’s The Unconsoled
and Minor Literature’. Kazuo Ishiguro: New Critical Visions of the Novels.
Ed. S. Groes and B. Lewis. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. 157–70. Print.
Lewis, Barry. Kazuo Ishiguro: Contemporary World Writers. Manchester:
Manchester UP, 2000. Print.
 Oppositional Narratives of Nocturnes 143

Mazullo, Mark. ‘Alone: Kazuo Ishiguro and the Problem of Musical Empathy’.
The Yale Review 100.2 (2012): 79–98. Print.
Murakami, Haruki. ‘On Having a Contemporary Like Kazuo Ishiguro’. Trans.
T. Goossen. Kazuo Ishiguro: Contemporary Critical Perspectives. Ed. S.
Matthews and S. Groes. London: Continuum, 2009: vii–viii. Print.
Neagu, Adriana. ‘International Writing? Kazuo Ishiguro and the Introvert Identities
of the Novel’. English 59.226 (2010): 269–80. Print.
Newton, Adam Zachary. ‘Telling Others: Secrecy and Recognition in Dickens,
Barnes, and Ishiguro’. Narrative Ethics. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1997. Print.
Shaffer, Brian. ‘“Somewhere Just Beneath the Surface of Things”: Kazuo Ishiguro’s
Short Fiction’. Kazuo Ishiguro: Contemporary Critical Perspectives. Ed. S.
Matthews and S. Groes. London: Continuum, 2009. 9–19. Print.
Smyth, Gerry. ‘“Waiting for the Performance to Begin”: Kazuo Ishiguro’s Musical
Imagination in The Unconsoled and Nocturnes’. Kazuo Ishiguro: New Critical
Visions of the Novels. Ed. S. Groes and B. Lewis. London: Palgrave Macmillan,
2011. 144–56. Print.
Stahl, Levi. ‘Nocturnes by Kazuo Ishiguro’. Quarterly Conversation. (2009).
Web. <http://quarterlyconversation.com/noctures-by-kazuo-ishiguro-review>.
Walkowitz, Rebecca L. ‘Ishiguro’s Floating Worlds’. ELH 68.4 (2001): 1049–76.
Print.
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 Select Bibliography

Kazuo Ishiguro in a Global Context

Novels by Kazuo Ishiguro

A Pale View of Hills. London: Faber and Faber, 1982.

An Artist of the Floating World. London: Faber and Faber, 1986.
The Remains of the Day. London: Faber and Faber, 1989.
The Unconsoled. London: Faber and Faber, 1995.
When We Were Orphans. London: Faber and Faber, 2000.
Never Let Me Go. London: Faber and Faber 2005.
The Buried Giant. London: Faber and Faber 2015.

Short Stories by Kazuo Ishiguro

‘A Strange and Sometimes Sadness’. Introduction 7: Stories by New Writers.

London: Faber and Faber, 1981. 13–27.‘Getting Poisoned’. Introduction 7.
1981. 38–51.‘Waiting for J’. Introduction 7. 1981. 28–37.
‘A Family Supper’. Firebird 2. Ed. T.J. Binding. London: Penguin, 1983. 121–31.
‘The Summer After the War’. Granta 7 (1983): 121–37.
‘A Village After Dark’. The New Yorker. 21 May 2001. 86–91.
Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall. London: Faber and Faber, 2009.

Screenwriting by Kazuo Ishiguro

‘A Profile of Arthur J. Mason’. Television show. Dir. M. Whyte. UK, Channel 4.

18 October 1984.
‘The Gourmet.’ Television show. Dir. M. Whyte. UK, Channel 4. 8 May 1986.
The Saddest Music in the World. Film. Dir. Guy Maddin. 25 October 2003.
The White Countess. Film. Dir. James Ivory. 21 December 2005.

Films of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Novels

The Remains of the Day. Dir. James Ivory. Adapted by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. 12
November 1993.
Never Let Me Go. Dir. Mark Romanek. Adpated by Alex Garland. 2010.

Musical Work by Kazuo Ishiguro

‘The Ice Hotel’. For the Stacey Kent album Breakfast on the Morning Tram. CD.
Prod. Jim Tomlinson. Token Productions, 2009.
146 Kazuo Ishiguro in a Global Context

‘I Wish I Could Go Traveling Again’. For Breakfast on the Morning Tram.

‘Breakfast on the Morning Tram’. For Breakfast on the Morning Tram.
‘So Romantic’. For Breakfast on the Morning Tram.

Single Author Book-Length Studies

Cheng, Chu-chueh. The Margin without Centre: Kazuo Ishiguro. Frankfurt: Peter
Lang, 2010.
Lewis, Barry. Kazuo Ishiguro. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000.
Parkes, Adam. The Remains of the Day: A Reader’s Guide. New York: Continuum,
2001.
Petry, Mike. Narratives of Memory and Identity: The Novels of Kazuo Ishiguro.
Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1999.
Porée, M.D. Kazuo Ishiguro: The Remains of the Day. Paris: Didier Érudition-
CNED, 1999.
Sim, Wai-chew. Kazuo Ishiguro. London: Routledge, 2010.
Shaffer, Brian W. Understanding Kazuo Ishiguro. Columbia: University of South
Carolina Press, 1998.
Teo, Yugin. Kazuo Ishiguro and Memory. London: Palgrave, 2014.
Veyret, Paul-Daniel. Kazuo Ishiguro: Au risque de la mémoire. Bordeaux: Presses
Universitaires de Bordeaux, 2002.
Wong, Cynthia F. Writers and Their Work: Kazuo Ishiguro. Tavistock: Northcote
House, 2000. 2nd expanded edition, 2005.

Anthologies of Essays, Interviews

Fluet, Lisa, ed. Novel: A Forum on Fiction, 40.3 (2007): Special issue on Ishiguro:
Rebecca L. Walkowitz, Alexander M. Bain, Lisa Fluet, Bruce Robbins, Jeff
Nunokawa.
Groes, Sebastian and Barry Lewis, eds. Kazuo Ishiguro: New Critical Visions of
the Novels. Includes 18 essays and one interview: Patricia Waugh, Victor Sage,
Motoyuki Shibata, Krystyna Stamirowska, Motoko Sugano, Caroline Bennett,
Meghan Marie Hammond, Lydia R. Cooper, Cristine Berberich, Jeannette
Baxter, Gerry Smyth, Tim Jarvis, Christopher Ringrose, Alyn Webley, Barry
Lewis, Sebastian Groes, Liani Lochner, Andy Sawyer.
Matthews, Sean and Sebastian Groes, eds. Contemporary Critical Perspectives:
Kazuo Ishiguro. London: Continuum, 2009. Includes a preface by Haruki
Murakami, eight essays, and one interview: Sebastian Groes, Sean Matthews,
Brian W. Shaffer, Motoyuki Shibata, Motoko Sugano, Paul-Daniel Veyret,
Justine Baillie, David James, Richard Robinson, Hélène Machinal, Mark
Currie, John Mullan.
Shaffer, Brian W. and Cynthia F. Wong, eds. Conversations with Kazuo Ishiguro.
Interviews and conversations with Ishiguro: Gregory Mason, Christopher
Bigsby, David Sexton, Graham Swift, Suanne Kelman, Kenzaburo Ōe, Allan
 Select Bibliography 147

Vorda, Kim Herzinger, Don Swaim, Maya Jaggi, Peter Oliva, Dylan Otto
Krider, François Gallix, Ron Hogan, Brian W. Shaffer, Cynthia F. Wong, Lewis
Burke Frumkes, John Freeman, Karen Grigsby Bates, Grace A. Crummett.

Critical Essays and Book Chapters

Adams, Anne Marie. ‘Tradition and the Individual Servant: Kazuo Ishiguro and
the Aesthetic Ends of Modernism.’ The Kentucky Philogocial Review 23
(2008): 31–8.
Adelman, Gary. ‘Doubles on the Rocks: Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled’. Critique
42.2 (Winter 2001): 166–79.
Arai, Megumi. ‘Ishiguro’s Floating Worlds: Observations on His Visions of
Japan’. General Education Review 22 (1990): 29–43.
Atwood, Margaret. ‘Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro’. In Other Worlds: SF
and the Human Imagination. New York: Anchor, 2011. 168–73.
Baillie, Justine and Sean Matthews. ‘History, Memory, and the Construction of
Gender in Kazuo Ishiguro’s A Pale View of Hills.’ Ed. S. Matthews and S.
Groes. 2009. 45–53.
Bain, Alexander M. ‘International Settlements: Ishiguro, Shanghai,
Humanitarianism.’ Novel 40.3 (2007): 240–64.
Baxter, Jeannette. ‘Into the Labyrinth: Kazuo Ishiguro’s Surrealist Poetics in The
Unconsoled’. Ed. S. Groes and B. Lewis. 2011. 133–43.
Bennett, Caroline. ‘“Cemeteries are no places for young people”: Children and
Trauma in the Early Novels of Kazuo Ishiguro’. Ed. S. Groes and B. Lewis ed.
2011. 82–92.
Berberich, Christine. ‘Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day: Working Through
England’s Traumatic Past as a Critique of Thatcherism’. In S. Groes and B.
Lewis ed. 2011. 118–30.
Black, Shameem. ‘Ishiguro’s Inhuman Aesthetics’. Modern Fiction Studies 55.4
(2009): 785–807.
Carroll, Rachel. ‘Imitations of Life: Cloning, Heterosexuality and the Human in
Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go’. Journal of Gender Studies 19.1 (2010):
59–71.
Cheng, Chu-chueh. ‘Making and Marketing Kazuo Ishiguro’s Alterity’. Post-
Identity 4.2 (2005):
———. ‘Cosmopolitan Alterity: America as the Mutual Alien of Britain and
Japan in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Novels’. Journal of Commonwealth Literature 45.2
(2010): 227–44.
Cooper, Lydia R. ‘Novelistic Practice and Ethical Philosophy in Kazuo Ishiguro’s
The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go’. Ed. S. Groes and B. Lewis.
2011. 106–17.
Currie, Mark. ‘Controlling Time: Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go’. Ed. S.
Matthews and S. Groes, 2009. 91–103.
Davis, Rocio G. ‘Imaginary Homelands Revisited in the Novels of Kazuo
Ishiguro’. Miscelánea 15. 139–54.
148 Kazuo Ishiguro in a Global Context

Döring, Tobias. ‘Sherlock Holmes – He Dead: Disenchanting the English

Detective in Kazuo Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans. Ed. Christine Matzke
and Susanne Muhleisen. Postmortems: Crime Fictions from a Transcultural
Perspective. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006. 59–86.
Doyle, Waddick. ‘Being an Other to Oneself: First Person Narration in Kazuo
Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day’. Ed. E. Labbe. L’Altérité dans la literature
et la culture du monde Anglophone. Le Mans: University du Maine, 1993.
70–76.
Eatough, Matthew. ‘The Time that Remains: Organ Donation, Temporal Duration,
and Bildung in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go’. Literature and Medicine
29.1 (2011): 132–60.
Eckert, Ken. ‘Evasion and the Unsaid in Kazuo Ishiguro’s A Pale View of Hills’.
Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas 10.1 (2012):
77–92.
Ekelund, Bo G. ‘Misrecognizing History: Complicitous Genres in Kazuo Ishiguro’s
The Remains of the Day’. International Fiction Review 32.1–2 (2005): 70–90.
Fairbanks, A. Harris. ‘Ontology and Narrative Technique in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The
Unconsoled’. Studies in the Novel 45.4 (2013): 603–19.
Finney, Brian. ‘Figuring the Real: Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans.’ Jouvert: A
Journal of Postcolonial Studies 7.1 (2002):
Fluet, Lisa. ‘Immaterial Labors: Ishiguro, Class, and Affect’. Novel 40.3 (2007):
265–88.
Forsythe, Ruth. ‘Cultural Displacement and the Mother-Daughter Relationship in
Kazuo Ishiguro’s A Pale View of Hills’. West Virginia University Philological
Papers 51 (2005): 99–108.
François, Pierre. ‘The Spectral Return of Depths in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The
Unconsoled’. Commonwealth Essays and Studies 26.2 (2009): 77–90.
Fraser, Nancy. ‘ON JUSTICE Lessons from Plato, Rawls and Ishiguro’. New Left
Review 74 (2012): 41–51.
Gehlawat, Monika. ‘Myth and Mimetic Failure in The Remains of the Day’.
Contemporary Literature 54.3 (2013): 491–519.
Griffin, Gabriele. ‘Science and the Cultural Imaginary: The Case of Kazuo
Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go’. Textual Practice 23.4 (2009): 645–63.
Groes, Sebastian. ‘“Something of a lost corner”: Kazuo Ishiguro’s Landscapes
of Memory and East Anglia in Never Let Me Go.’ Ed. S. Groes and B. Lewis.
2011. 211–24.
Groes, Sebastian and Paul-Daniel Veyret. ‘“Like the Gateway to Another World”:
Kazuo Ishiguro’s Screenwriting’. Ed. S. Matthews and S. Groes. 2009. 32–44.
Guo, Deyan. ‘Trauma, Memory, and History in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Fiction’. Theory
and Practice in Language Studies 12.2 (2012): 2508–16.
Guth, Deborah. ‘Submerged Narrratives in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the
Day’. Forum for Modern Language Studies 35.2 (1999): 126–37.
Hammond, Meghan Marie. ‘“I can’t even say I made my own mistakes”: The
Ethics of Genre in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day’. Ed. S. Groes
and B. Lewis. 2011. 95–105.
 Select Bibliography 149

Harris, Fairbanks A. ‘Ontology and Narrative Technique in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The

Unconsoled’. Studies in the Novel 45.4 (2013): 603–19.
Ingersoll, Earl G. ‘Desire, the Gaze, and Suture in the Novel and the Film: The
Remains of the Day’. Studies in the Humanities 28.1–2 (2001): 31–47.
———. ‘Taking Off the Realm of Metaphor: Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go’.
Studies in the Humanities 34.1 (2007): 40–59.
James, David. ‘Artifice and Absorption: The Modesty of Kazuo Ishiguro’s The
Remains of the Day.’ Ed. S. Matthews and S. Groes. 2009. 54–66.
Jarvis, Tim. ‘“Into ever stranger territories”: Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled
and Minor Literature.’ In S. Groes and B. Lewis. 2011. 157-168.
Jirgens, Karl E. ‘Narrator Resartus: Palimpsestic Revelations in Kazuo Ishiguro’s
The Remains of the Day.’ Q/W/E/R/T/Y: Arts, Littératures & Civilisations du
Monde Anglophone. 9 (1999): 219–30.
Lang, James. ‘Public Memory, Private History: Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of
the Day’. CLIO 29.2 (2000): 143–65.
Levy, Titus. ‘Human Rights Storytelling and Trauma Narrative in Kazuo Ishiguro’s
Never Let Me Go’. Journal of Human Rights 10.1 (2011) 1–16.
Lewis, Barry. ‘The Concertina Effect: Unfolding Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me
Go.’ Ed. S. Groes and B. Lewis. 2011. 199–210.
———. ‘Kazuo Ishiguro’. British Writers: Retrospective Supplement. 3. Ed. J.
Parini. New York: Scribner’s Sons, 2009. 149–64.
Lochner, Liani. ‘“This is what we’re supposed to be doing, isn’t it?”: Scientific
Discourse in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go.’ Ed. S. Groes and B. Lewis.
2011. 225–35.
Luo, Shao Pin. ‘“Living the wrong life”: Kazuo Ishiguro’s Unconsoled Orphans’.
Dalhousie Review 83.1 (2003): 51–80.
Ma, Sheng-mei. ‘Kazuo Ishiguro’s Persistent Dream for Postethnicity: Performance
in Whiteface’. Post Identity 2.1 (1999): 71–88.
Machinal, Hélène. ‘Kazuo Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans: Narration and
Detection in the Case of Christopher Banks’. Ed. S. Matthews and S. Groes.
2009. 79–90.
MacPhee, Graham. ‘Escape from Responsibility: Ideology and Storytelling in
Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism and Ishiguro’s The Remains of the
Day’. College Literature 38.1 (2011): 176–201.
Mallett, Peter J. ‘The Revelation of Character in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of
the Day and An Artist of the Floating World’. Shoin Literary Review 20 (1996)
1–20.
Marcus, Amit. ‘Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day: The Discourse of Self-
Deception’. Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas
4.1 (2006) 129–50.
Mason, Gregory. ‘Inspiring Images: The Influence of Japanese Cinema on the
Writings of Kazuo Ishiguro.’ East-West Film Journal 3.2 (1989): 39–52.
Mazullo, Mark. ‘Alone: Kazuo Ishiguro and the Problem of Musical Empathy’.
Yale Review 100.2 (2012) 78–98.
150 Kazuo Ishiguro in a Global Context

McCombe, John P. ‘The End of (Anthony) Eden: Ishiguro’s The Remains of the
Day and Midcentury Anglo-American Tensions.’ Twentieth Century Literature
48.1 (2002): 77–99.
McDonald, Keith. ‘Days of Past Futures: Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go as
“Speculative Memoir”’. Biography 30.1 (2007): 74–83.
Molino, Michael R. ‘Traumatic Memory and Narrative Isolation in Ishiguro’s A
Pale View of Hills’. Critique 53.4 (2012) 322–36.
Mullan, John. ‘On First Reading Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go.’ Ed. S.
Matthews and S. Groes. 2009. 104–13.
Neagu, Adriana. ‘International Writing? Kazuo Ishiguro and the Introvert Identities
of the Novel’. English 59.226 (2010): 269–80.
O’Brien, Susie. ‘Serving a New Order: Postcolonial Politics in Kazuo Ishiguro’s
The Remains of the Day’. Modern Fiction Studies 42.2 (1996): 787–806.
Park, Seonjoo. ‘“Spontaneous Mirth Out of a Misplaced Respectfulness”: A
Bakhtinian Reading of Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day’. Ariel 39.3
(2008): 45–71.
Patey, Caroline. ‘When Ishiguro Visits the West Country: An Essay on The
Remains of the Day’. Acme 44.2 (1991): 135–55.
Pégon, Claire. ‘How to Have Done with Words: Virtuoso Performance in Kazuo
Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled’. Études Britanniques Contemporaines, Revue de
la Société d’Études Anglaises Contemporaines 27 (2004): 83–95.
Phelan, James and Mary Patricia Martin. ‘The Lessons of “Weymouth”:
Homodiegesis, Unreliability, Ethics, and The Remains of the Day’.
Narratologies: New Perspectives on Narrative Analysis. Ed. David Herman.
Columbus, OH: Ohio State UP, 1999. 88–109.
Puchner, Martin. ‘When We Were Clones’. Raritan 27.4 (2008): 34–49.
Quarrie, Cynthia. ‘Impossible Inheritance: Filiation and Patrimony in Kazuo
Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled’. Critique 55.2 (2014): 138–51.
Reitano, Natalie. ‘The Good Wound: Memory and Community in The Unconsoled’.
Texas Studies in Literature and Language 49.4 (2007): 215–24.
Ringrose, Christopher. ‘“In the end it has to shatter”: The Ironic Doubleness of
Kazuo Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans’. Ed. S. Groes and B. Lewis. 2011.
171–83.
Robbins, Bruce. ‘Very Busy Just Now: Globalisation and Harriedness in Ishiguro’s
The Unconsoled’. Comparative Literature 53.4 (2001): 426–42.
———. ‘Cruelty is Bad: Banality and Proximity in Never Let Me Go’. Novel 40.3
(2007): 289–302.
Robinson, Richard. ‘Nowhere, in Particular: Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled
and Central Europe’. Critical Quarterly 48.4 (2006): 107–30.
———. ‘“To Give a Name, Is That Still to Give?”: Footballers and Film Actors
in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled’. Ed. S. Matthews and S. Groes. 2009.
67–78.
Rothfork, John. ‘Zen Comedy in Postcolonial Literature: Kazuo Ishiguro’s The
Remains of the Day’. Mosaic 29.1 (1996): 79–102.
 Select Bibliography 151

Sage, Victor. ‘The Pedagogics of Liminality: Rites of Passage in the Work of

Kazuo Ishiguro’. Ed. S. Groes and B. Lewis. 2011. 31–45.
Sarvan, Charles. ‘Floating Signifiers and An Artist of the Floating World’. Journal
of Commonwealth Literature 32.1 (1997): 93–101.
Sauerbert, Lars Ole. ‘Coming to Terms – Literary Configurations of the Past in
Kazuo Ishiguro’s An Artist of the Floating World and Timothy Mo’s An Insular
Possession’. EurAmerica: A Journal of European and American Studies 36.2
(2006): 175–202.
Sawyer, Andy. ‘Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go and “Outsider Science
Fiction”’. Ed. S. Groes and B. Lewis. 2011. 236–46.
Scanlan, Margaret. ‘Mistaken Identities: First Person Narration in Kazuo Ishiguro’.
Journal of Narrative and Life History 3.2/3 (1993): 139–54.
Shaddox, Karl. ‘Generic Considerations in Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go’. Human
Rights Quarterly. 35.2 (2013): 448–69.
Shaffer, Brian W. ‘“Somewhere Just Beneath the Surface of Things”: Kazuo
Ishiguro’s Short Fiction’. Ed. S. Matthews and S. Groes. 2009. 9–19.
Shibata, Motoyuki. ‘Lost and Found: On the Japanese Translations of Kazuo
Ishiguro’. Ed. S. Groes and B. Lewis. 2011. 46–53.
Shibata, Motoyuki and Motoko Sugano. ‘Strange Reads: Kazuo Ishiguro’s A Pale
View of Hills and An Artist of the Floating World in Japan’. Ed. S. Matthews
and S. Groes. 2009. 20–31.
Sim, Wai-chew. ‘Kazuo Ishiguro’. Review of Contemporary Literature 25.1
(2005): 80–115.
Smyth, Gerry. ‘“Waiting for the performance to begin”: Kazuo Ishiguro’s Musical
Imagination in The Unconsoled and Nocturnes’. Ed. S. Groes and B. Lewis.
2011. 144–56.
Spark, Gordon. ‘The Mysterious Case of the Disappearing Empire: History and the
Golden-Age Detective Genre in Kazuo Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans’.
Sub/versions: Cultural Status, Genre and Critique. Ed. Pauline MacPherson,
Christopher Murray, Gordon Spark and Kevin Corstorphine. Newcastle upon
Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2008. 124–34.
Stamirowska, Krystyna. ‘“One word from you could alter the course of
everything”: Discourse and Identity in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Fiction.’ Ed. S. Groes
and B. Lewis. 2011. 54–66.
Stanton, Katherine. ‘Foreign Feeling: Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled and the
New Europe’. Cosmopolitan Fictions: Ethics, Politics and Global Cange in
the works of Kazuo Ishiguro, Michael Ondaatje, Jamaica Kincaid, and J.M.
Coetzee. Abingdon: Routledge, 2006. 9–24.
Su, John J. ‘Refiguring National Character: The Remains of the British Estate
Novel’. Modern Fiction Studies 48.3 (2002): 552–80.
Sugano, Motoko. ‘“Putting one’s convictions to the test”: Kazuo Ishiguro’s An
Artist of the Floating World in Japan.’ Ed. S. Groes and B. Lewis. 2011. 69–81.
Sumners-Bremner, Eluned. ‘“Poor creatures”: Ishiguro’s and Coetzee’s Imaginary
Animals’. Mosaic 39.4 (2006): 145–60.
152 Kazuo Ishiguro in a Global Context

Suter, Rebecca. ‘“We’re like butlers”: Interculturality, Memory, and Responsibility

in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day.’ Q/W/E/R/T/Y: Arts, Littératures
& Civilisations du Monde Anglophone 9 (1999): 241–50.
Tamaya, Meera. ‘Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day: The Empire Strikes Back’.
Modern Language Studies 22 (1992): 45–56.
Teo, Yugin. ‘Testimony and the Affirmation of Memory in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never
Let Me Go’. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 55.2 (2014): 127–37.
Terestchenko, Michel. ‘Servility and Destructiveness in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The
Remains of the Day’. Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History
of Ideas 5.10 (2007): 77–89.
Toker, Leona and Daniel Chertoff. ‘Reader Response and the Recycling of Topoi
in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go.’ Partial Answers: Journal of Literature
and the History of Ideas. 6.1 (2008): 163–80.
Trimm, R.S. ‘Inside Job: Professionalism and Postimperial Communities in The
Remains of the Day.’ LIT 16.2 (2005): 135–61.
———. ‘Telling Positions: Country, Countryside, and Narration in The Remains
of the Day’. Papers on Language and Literature 45.2 (2009): 180–211.
Tsao, Tiffany. ‘The Tyranny of Purpose: Religion and Biotechnology in Ishiguro’s
Never Let Me Go.’ Literature & Theology 26.2 (2012): 214–32.
Valis, Noël. ‘Collecting, The Rescue of Things, and The Human.’ Yale Review
100.3 (2012): 67–85.
Vinet, Dominique. ‘The Butler’s Woman: A Strategy of Avoidance in Kazuo
Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day’. Études Britanniques Contemporaines,
Revue de la Société d’Études Anglaises Contemporaines 16 (1999): 63–80.
———. ‘The Avatars of the Father in The Remains of the Day’. Études Britanniques
Contemporaines, Revue de la Société d’Études Anglaises Contemporaines 19
(2000): 53–67.
———. ‘Frugal Tempo in The Unconsoled’. Études Britanniques Contemporaines,
Revue de la Société d’Études Anglaises Contemporaines 27 (2004): 127–41.
———. ‘Revisiting the Memory of Guilt in Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans’.
Études Britanniques Contemporaines, Revue de la Société d’Études Anglaises
Contemporaines 29 (2005): 133–44.
Wain, Peter. ‘The Historical-Political Aspect of the Novels of Kazuo Ishiguro’.
Language and Culture 23 (1992): 177–205.
Walkowitz, Rebecca L. ‘Ishiguro’s Floating Worlds’. ELH 68.4 (2007): 1049–76.
———. ‘Unimaginable Largeness: Kazuo Ishiguro, Translation, and the New
World Literature’. Novel 40.3 (2007): 216–39.
Wall, Kathleen. ‘The Remains of the Day and Its Challenges to Theories of
Unreliable Narration’. Journal of Narrative Technique 24.1 (1994): 18–42.
Waugh, Patricia. ‘Kazuo Ishiguro’s Not-Too-Late Modernism’. Ed. S. Groes and
B. Lewis. 2011. 12–30.
Webley, Alyn. ‘“Shanghaied” into Service: Double Binds in When We Were
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 Select Bibliography 153

Weiss, Timothy. ‘Where is Place? Locale in Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans’.

Anglophone Cultures in Southeast Asia: Appropriations, Continuities,
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Tam.. Heidelberg: Universitatverlage, 2003. 271–94.
Westermann, Molly. ‘“Is the butler home?”: Narrative and the Split Subject in The
Remains of the Day’. Mosaic 37.3 (2004): 157–70.
Weston, Elizabeth. ‘Commitment Rooted in Loss: Kazuo Ishiguro’s When We
Were Orphans’. Critique 53.4 (2012): 337–54.
Whitehead, Anne. ‘Writing with Care: Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go’.
Contemporary Literature 52.1 (2011): 54–83.
Whiteley, Sara. ‘Text World Theory, Real Readers and Emotional Responses to
The Remains of the Day’. Language & Literature 20.1 (2011): 23–42.
Whyte, Philip. ‘The Treatment of Background in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of
the Day. Commonwealth Essays and Studies 30.1 (2007): 73–82.
Winsworth, Ben. ‘Communicating and Not Communicating: The True and the
False Self in The Remains of the Day’. Q/W/E/R/T/Y: Arts, Littératures &
Civilisations du Monde Anglophone 9 (1999): 259–66.
Wong, Cynthia F. ‘The Shame of Memory: Blanchot’s Self-Dispossession in
Ishiguro’s A Pale View of Hills’. CLIO 24.2 (1995): 127–45.
———. ‘Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day’. A Companion to the British
and Irish Novel 1945–2000. Ed. Brian W. Shaffer. London: Blackwell, 2000.
493–503.
Yoshioka, Fumio. ‘Beyond the Division of East and West: Kazuo Ishiguro’s A
Pale View of Hills’. Studies in English Literature. (1988): 71–86.
Zinck, Pascal. ‘The Palimpsest of Memory in Kazuo Ishiguro’s When We Were
Orphans’. Études Britanniques Contemporaines, Revue de la Société d’Études
Anglaises Contemporaines 29 (2005): 145–58.

Interviews

Adams, Tim. ‘“For me, England is a mythical place”: Interview with Kazuo
Ishiguro’. Observer 20 February 2005. 17.
Aitkenhead, Decca. ‘Kazuo Ishiguro’. The Guardian. 26 April 2009.
Bates, Karen Grigsby. ‘In Conversation with Kazuo Ishiguro’. NPR radio broadcast.
4 May 2005, transcribed. Ed. B. Shaffer and C. Wong. 2008. 199–203.
Bigsby, Christopher. ‘In Conversation with Kazuo Ishiguro’. Writers in
Conversation 1 (1987): 193–204. Ed. B. Shaffer and C. Wong. 2008. 15–26.
Bradbury, David. ‘Making Up a Country of His Own’. Times 2 (6 April 2000):
12–13.
Bradbury, Malcolm. ‘Breaking Loose’. W Magazine 1 (1995): 34–7.
Chira, Susan. ‘A Case of Cultural Misperception’. New York Times. 28 October
1989.
De Jongh, Nicholas. ‘Life After the Bomb’. Guardian. 22 February 1982. 11.
154 Kazuo Ishiguro in a Global Context

Freeman, John. ‘Never Let Me Go: A Profile of Kazuo Ishiguro’. Poets and Writers
Magazine (May-June 2005). Ed. B. Shaffer and C. Wong. 2008. 194–8.
Frumkes. Lewis Burke. ‘Kazuo Ishiguro.’ The Writer 114.5 (2001). Ed. B. Shaffer
and C. Wong. 2008. 189–93.
Gallix, François. ‘Kazuo Ishiguro: The Sorbonne Lecture’. Études Britanniques
Contemporaines, Revue de la Société d’Études Anglaises Contemporaines (18
June 2000). Ed. B. Shaffer and C. Wong. 2008. 135–55.
Groes, Sebastian. ‘The New Seriousness: Kazuo Ishiguro in Conversation with
Sebastian Groes’. Ed. S. Groes and B. Lewis. 2011. 247–64.
Hogan, Ron. ‘Kazuo Ishiguro’. Beatrice.com. 2000. Ed. B. Shaffer and C. Wong.
2008. 156–60.
Iyer, Pico. ‘A New Kind of Travel Writer’. Harper’s Magazine 30 February 1996.
32.
Jaggi, Maya. ‘Dreams of Freedom. Guardian. 29 April 1995. 28.
———. ‘Kazuo Ishiguro Talks to Maya Jaggi’. Wasafiri 22 (1995): 20–24.
———. ‘Kazuo Ishiguro with Maya Jaggi’. Writing Across Worlds: Contemporary
Writers Talk. Ed Shusheila Nasta. London: Routledge, 2004.. Ed. B. Shaffer
and C. Wong. 2008. 110–19.
Kelman, Suanne. ‘Ishiguro in Toronto’. The Brick Reader. Ed. Linda Spalding and
Michael Ondaatje. Toronto: Coach House Press, 1991., Ed. B. Shaffer and C.
Wong. 2008. 42–51.
Krider, Dylan Otto. ‘Rooted in a Small Space: An Interview with Kazuo Ishiguro’.
Kenyon Review 20.2 (1998). Ed. B. Shaffer and C. Wong. 2008. 124–34.
Mackenzie, Suzie. ‘Into the Real World’. Guardian. 15 February 1996. 12.
———. ‘Between Two Worlds’. Guardian. 25 March 1998. 10–11, 13–14, and 17.
Mason, Gregory. ‘An Interview with Kazuo Ishiguro’. Contemporary Literature
30.3 (1989): 335–47. Ed. B. Shaffer and C. Wong. 2008. 3–14.
Matthews, Sean. ‘“I’m sorry I can’t say more”: An Interview with Kazuo Ishiguro’.
2009. Ed. S. Matthews and S. Groes. 2009. 114–25.
Morrison, Blake. ‘It’s a Long Way from Nagasaki’. Observer. 29 October 1989.
Ōe, Kenzaburo and Kazuo Ishiguro. ‘The Novelist in Today’s World: A
Conversation’. Boundary 2.18 (1991). Ed. B. Shaffer and C. Wong. 2008.
52–65.
Ohno, Barbara. ‘Who is The Unconsoled?: A Profile of Novelist Kazuo Ishiguro’.
Mars Hill Review 5 (1996): 137–42.
Oliva, Peter. ‘Chaos as Metaphor: An Interview with Kazuo Ishiguro’. Filling
Station Magazine 9 (1996). Ed. B. Shaffer and C. Wong. 2008. 120–24.
Sexton, David. ‘Interview: David Sexton Meets Kazuo Ishiguro’. Literary Review.
(January 1987): 16–19.
Shaffer, Brian W. ‘An Interview with Kazuo Ishiguro’. Contemporary Literature
62.1 (2001): 1–14. Ed. B. Shaffer and C. Wong. 2008. 161–74.
Swaim, Don. ‘Don Swaim Interviews Kazuo Ishiguro’. 1990. Ed. B. Shaffer and
C. Wong. 2008. 89–109.
 Select Bibliography 155

Swift, Graham. ‘Kazuo Ishiguro’. Bomb (1989): 22–3. Ed. B. Shaffer and C.
Wong. 2008. 35–41.
Vorda, Allen and Kim Herzinger. ‘An Interview with Kazuo Ishiguro’. Mississippi
Review 20 (1991): 131–54. Repr. as ‘Stuck on the Margins: An Interview with
Kazuo Ishiguro’. Face to Face: Interviews with Contemporary Novelists. Ed.
Allen Vorda.Houston: Rice UP, 1993. 1–36). Ed. B. Shaffer and C. Wong.
2008. 66–88.
Wachtel, Eleanor, ed. ‘Kazuo Ishiguro’. More Writers and Company. Toronto:
Knopf, 1996. 17–35.
Wong, Cynthia F. ‘“Like Idealism is to the Intellect”: An Interview with Kazuo
Ishiguro’. CLIO 30.3 (2001): 309–25. Ed. B. Shaffer and C. Wong. 2008.
174–88.
Wong, Cynthia F. and Grace A. Crummett. ‘A Conversation About Life and Art
with Kazuo Ishiguro’. 2006. Ed. B. Shaffer and C. Wong . 204–20.
This page has been left blank intentionally
 Index

Adams, Tim 102 Calvino, Italo 129–30

Adelman, Gary 128–9 Cassin, Barbara xin2
Agamben, Giorgio 127–8 Castle (Kafka) 69
Althusser, Louis 57 ‘Cellists’ (Ishiguro) 121, 140
Aristotle 127 character pairing in 134
Art of the Novel, The (Kundera) 69 relationships in 126–7, 129
Artist of the Floating World, An (Ishiguro) setting of 122, 123, 124, 138
2, 13, 16, 19, 67, 139 Cheng, Chu-chueh 7, 16, 25, 121
artwork in 59, 61, 62–3, 64–5 Christie, Agatha 82
bridge in 138 Big Four, The 86
character pairing in 135 Murder of Roger Ackroyd, The 86
inscribed “you” in 4, 49, 54 collections 95–7
nostalgia in 44 ‘Come Rain or Come Shine’ (Ishiguro) 16,
setting of 122–3 45, 121, 138–9, 140
stereotypes in 23, 24 characters in 134
artwork 5, 59–67 music as theme in 65, 123
relationships in 126, 129
Bachelard, Gaston 95 setting of 124, 138
Bashō, Matsuo 11 Cook, Pam 45
Beedham, Matthew 87 Course of Recognition, The (Ricoeur) 4,
Belsey, Catherine 49 39, 40, 42
Benjamin, Walter 115, 116 ‘Crooner’ (Ishiguro) 45, 121, 140–41
Berne, Eric 75 character pairing in 134, 135
Besemeres, Mary 3, 11, 12, 16, 17, 19, 20 music as theme in 65, 122, 123
Bevan, Robert 76 relationships in 126, 127
Bhaba, Homi K. 53 setting of 121–2, 123, 124, 138
Big Four, The (Christie) 86 Culture and Imperialism (Said) 52, 55
Bildungsroman 31 Cunningham, H. C. 6
Black, Shameem 60 Currie, Mark 114
Black Skin, White Masks (Fanon) 104–5
boxes 95 Damrosch, David xi, 5, 6
Brandabur, A. Clare 5, 6, 69 Dasgupta, Romit 3–4, 11
Bridegroom Was a Dog, The (Tawada) 20 Deleuze, Gilles 116–17, 126
bridges 137–8 Derrida, Jacques 125, 127, 128
19th British Novelists Conference 1 The Destruction of Memory: Architecture
Butcher, James 102 at War (Bevan) 76
Butler, Judith detective fiction 6, 29–31, 44, 80–87
Excitable Speech 108 Dickens, Charles 29
Frames of War 6, 102, 104, 105–6 Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan 29, 30, 80, 81, 82
Psychic Life of Power, The 108 ‘His Last Bow’ 86
butterfly 62 ‘The Man with the Twisted Lip’ 81
158 Kazuo Ishiguro in a Global Context

‘The Second Stain’ 86 Harrison, M.J. 118

dystopian fiction 33–4 Hayot, Eric xi
Dzhumaylo, Olga 6, 91 Hegel, Georg 134
Heidegger, Martin 5, 59
Easthope, Anthony 50 ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’ 59, 61,
Eco, Umberto 123 63, 65, 66, 67
‘The Empire Writes Back’ (Iyer) 70 ‘The Thinker as Poet’ 59
English stereotypes 4, 13, 26–34, 49–50, ‘His Last Bow’ (Doyle) 86
52 History of Sexuality, The (Foucault) 106
Englishness and National Culture Hitchens, Christopher 133–4
(Easthope) 50 Hoffman, Eva 12, 17–18, 19
‘Englishness/Englishnesses in Holmes, Sherlock 29, 30, 80, 82, 86
Contemporary Fiction’ Hornung, Alfred 98
(Mergenthal) 52 Hunnewell, Susannah 71, 72, 74, 75, 77
ethics 6, 101–8
Excitable Speech (Butler) 108 “I,” threefold 111–18
identity
Facing the Bridge (Tawada) 20 place 79–81, 87
‘A Family Supper’ (Ishiguro) 14n2, 23 self 4, 39–44, 80, 91–5, 98–100, 101–8
Fanon, Frantz 104–5 Ihara, Saikaku 62
Fiske, John 124–5 ‘In Front of Trang Tien Bridge’ (Tawada) 21
Fluet, Lisa 124 inauthenticity 124–5
forgetting 45–6 inscribed “you” 4, 49–57
Foucault, Michel 106 intertextuality 124–5
Frames of War (Butler) 6, 102, 104, 105–6 Ishiguro, Kazuo. see also specifics works
Freud, Sigmund 45–6, 76 global reach of works xi–xiv
On the Interpretation of Dreams 69, interculturality of 11–21
70, 71 Japan and 13–16
Moses and Monotheism 72 personal background of xi–xii, 141–2
Mourning and Melancholia 44–5 ‘Ishiguro and Worlds of Art’ (Tomkinson) 5
‘Remembering, Repeating and ‘Ishiguro’s Inhuman Aesthetics’ (Black) 60
Working-Through’ 46 Ivanhoe (Scott) 29
‘The Uncanny’ 72 Iyer, Pico 70
Fricke, Stefanie 4, 23
friendship 127–8 Jaggi, Maya 18
James, Henry 5
Games People Play (Berne) 75 Jameson, Frederic 125
Genette, Gérard 55 Japanese-ness xii, 3, 11–12, 13–16
globalism xi–xiv, 16 Japanese stereotypes 4, 24–6
Gould, Glenn 5, 69–70, 73, 76
Grahame, Kenneth 29 Kadohata, Cynthia 12, 14
Granta 133 Kafka, Franz 69
Great American Songbook 123, 124 Katshshika, Hokusai 62
Great Expectations (Dickens) 29 Kawabata, Yasunari 3, 11, 14
Griffin, Gabrielle 104 Kazuo Ishiguro (Sim) 52
Groes, Sebastian xiv, 2 King, Bruce 13
The Guardian Book Club 101, 108 Kingston, Maxine Hong 12
Guattari, Félix 116–17, 126 Klee, Paul 115
Güngör, Duru 6, 111 Kogawa, Joy 12
 Index 159

Krotoski, Alex 5 musicians 69–70, 73, 76, 122, 134–5

Kundera, Milan 69 mutual recognition 41–4
Kurosawa, Akiro 3n3 myth. see stereotypes

Laertius, Diogenes 127 Nabokov, Vladimir 12

‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ (Yeats) 86 Nagasaki, Japan 18–19
landscapes 121–5 Never Let Me Go (Ishiguro) 2, 6–7, 66,
language migrant writers 3, 11, 12, 16, 17–21 91–100, 101–9, 111–18, 139
Lewis, Barry 2 artwork in 60, 63–4, 65–6
Lives of Eminent Philosophers (Laertius) 127 character pairing in 135–6
Lochner, Liani 6, 101 completion in 97–8
London, England 81, 86 disintegration in 92–5
Lost in Translation (Hoffman) 12, 17 ethics in 6, 101–8
Loti, Pierre 25n3 memory in 46, 95–7, 115
music as them in 142
Ma, Sheng-mei 15 mutual recognition in 41–3
Machinal, Hélène 30 nostalgia in 32
Mackey, Louis 112 self-identity in 91–5, 98–100, 101–8
Madame Butterfly 24–5 shared vulnerability in 108–9
Madame Chrysanthème (Loti) 25n3 stereotypes in 4, 23, 31–4
‘Malvern Hills’ (Ishiguro) 45, 121, 136–8, 140 threefold “I” in 6, 111–18
character pairing in 135 New Yorker, The 133
music as them in 123 Nezammafi, Shirin 20
relationships in 126, 127 ‘Nocturne’ (Ishiguro) 121, 139–40, 141
setting of 124 character pairing in 135
‘The Man with the Twisted Lip’ (Doyle) 81 music as theme in 123
Maruyama, Okyo 62 relationships in 126, 127
Mason, Gregory 4 setting of 124, 138, 139–40
Matthews, Sean xiv, 2, 3, 53 Nocturnes (Ishiguro) 7, 121–30, 133–42.
Mazullo, Mark 141 see also ‘Cellists’ (Ishiguro);
memory 39 ‘Come Rain or Come Shine’
nostalgia and 44–5 (Ishiguro); ‘Crooner’ (Ishiguro);
self-identity and 4, 39–44, 95–7 ‘Malvern Hills’ (Ishiguro);
unforgetting 45–6 ‘Nocturne’ (Ishiguro)
Memory, History, Forgetting (Ricoeur) 4, character pairing in 133–6
39, 42–3, 46 inauthenticity in 124–5
Mergenthal, Silvia 52 landscapes in 121–5
Mishima, Yukio 3n3, 14 music as theme in 65, 122, 123–4,
Moonstone, The 86 133–5, 136, 142
Mori, Kyōko 17n5 relationships in 125–30
Morte d’Arthur 86 self-realization in 134
Moses and Monotheism (Freud) 72 themes in 133–6
mourning 44–5 nomadic relationships 125–6, 129
Mourning and Melancholia (Freud) 44–5 nostalgia 4, 18, 31, 32, 44–5, 138
Mullan, John 42, 101, 105 ‘Nowhere in Particular’ (Robinson) 69
Murakami, Haruki 2, 3, 11, 141
Murder of Roger Ackroyd, The (Christie) 86 Ōe, Kenzaburō 3, 11, 13–14
music, theme of 65, 76, 123–4, 133–5, 136, Okada, John 12, 14
138, 141–2 On Late Style (Said) 70
160 Kazuo Ishiguro in a Global Context
‘On the Concept of History’ (Benjamin)
115
On the Interpretation of Dreams (Freud)
69, 70, 71
Orientalism 24–6
‘The Origin of the Work of Art’
(Heidegger) 59, 61, 63, 65, 66, 67
Öztabak-Avcı, Elif 4, 49
Ozu, Yasujiro 3n3, 14
Pale View of the Hills, A (Ishiguro) 2, 13,
14n2, 15, 34, 66, 133, 139, 140,
142
artwork in 61–3
character pairing in 135
disintegration in 92
music as them in 142
self-recognition in 40
stereotypes in 23, 24–6
Paris Review 71
personhood 101–8
place identity 79–81, 87
Poetics of Space, The (Bachelard) 95
Politics of Friendship, The (Derrida) 127,
128
postethnicity 15
preterition 111–12
Prince, Gerald 55
Psychic Life of Power, The (Butler) 108
Puccini, Giacomo 25
Radstone, Susannah 39n1
Reading One/Self (Hornung) 98
recognition
and memory 39–41
mutual 41–4
Red Prince, The (Snyder) 73
Remains of the Day, The (Ishiguro) 2, 13,
14, 15, 61, 65–7, 101, 108
character pairing in 135
inscribed “you” in 4, 49–57
nostalgia in 44, 66
self-recognition in 40–41, 98, 134
stereotypes in 4, 23, 26–9
‘Remembering, Repeating and Working-
Through’ (Freud) 46
Ricoeur, Paul 4, 39–40, 97
Course of Recognition, The 4, 39, 40,
42
Memory, History, Forgetting 4, 39,
42–3, 46
Time and Narrative 4, 41
Robbins, Bruce 107, 129
Robinson, Richard 69, 125
Rosei-ga yume-no cho-wa orisue (Ihara) 62
Rossington, Michael 39n1
Said, Edward 5
Culture and Imperialism 52, 55
On Late Style 70, 73
Salam (Nezammafi) 20
Scott, Walter 29
Screening the Past (Cook) 45
Scurr, Ruth 102
‘The Second Stain’ (Doyle) 86
self-identity 4, 39–44, 80, 91–5, 98–100,
101–8
self-recognition 39–41, 134
self-translation 3, 12, 16, 17, 19
seppuku 4, 23, 24, 25
Shaffer, Brian 18, 133
Shanghai, China 81–2, 83, 86
Shibata, Motoyuki 14, 53
Shiroi kami (Nezammafi) 20
Shōnaka, Takayuki 13, 14, 18
Sim, Wai-chew 52, 56, 87
Skylife 11
Slaymaker, Doug 20
Smyth, Gerry 136
Snow Country (Yukiguni) (Kawabata) 14
Snyder, Timothy 73, 76, 77
Sönmez, Margaret J-M 5–6, 79
sparagmos 93
Stahl, Levi 133
stereotypes 4, 23–35
English 4, 13, 26–34, 49–50, 52
Japanese xii, 13, 14, 23, 24–6
Su, John J. 45, 55
Subaru 14n2
Sugano, Motoko 14, 53
suicide 4, 23, 24, 25
Suter, Rebecca 49
Tawada, Yōko 4, 12, 20–21
Teo, Yugin 4, 39
‘The Thinker as Poet’ (Heidegger) 59
Thousand Plateaus, A (Deleuze and
Guattari) 116
 Index 161

Time and Narrative (Ricoeur) 4, 41 ‘We’re like Butlers’ (Suter) 49

‘Tintern Abbey’ (Wordsworth) 86 When We Were Orphans (Ishiguro) 2, 5–6,
Toki ga nijimu asa (Yang) 20 15, 65–6, 67, 139
Tomkinson, Fiona 5, 59 mutual recognition in 43
Translating One’s Self: Language and nostalgia in 18, 31, 44, 45, 46, 67
Selfhood in Cross-Cultural place identity in 79–81, 87
Autobiography (Besemeres) 12, 17 self-recollection in 98, 99
translation of works xii–xiv, 14n2, 16, 53 setting of 81–7
stereotypes in 4, 23, 29–31
‘The Uncanny’ (Freud) 72 Where Europe Begins (Tawada) 20
Unconsoled, The (Ishiguro) 2, 5, 15–16, White Countess, The 124
67, 69–77, 139, 142 whitefacing 12, 15, 16
character pairing in 135 Whitehead, Anne 39n1, 105
as extreme occasion 69–77 Wind in the Willows (Grahame) 29
memory and 45–6 Wodehouse, P.G. 26, 29, 52
music as theme in 65 Wong, Cynthia F. xiii, 1, 7, 13, 133
mutual recognition in 43–4 Wood, Michael 34
relationships in 128–9 Woolf, Virginia 117
self-recollection in 98 Wordsworth, William 86
setting of 69, 79, 122, 123, 125, 138 WorldCat xii
‘Unimaginable Largeness’ (Walkowitz) 49 Wuthering Heights 29
utopia 45
Yang, Yi 20
Venice, Italy 122 Yeats, W. B. 86
Vienna, Austria 69, 71–3, 76 Yıldız, Hülya xiii, 1
‘A Village After Dark’ (Ishiguro) 133 Yomiuri Shimbun 13
“you,” inscribed 4, 49–57
‘Waiting for J’ (Ishiguro) 135 Yu, Miri 20
Walkowitz, Rebecca L. xi, 6, 16, 21, 49, 53
Wall, Kathleen 56 Zhuangzi 62, 63
Warhol, Robyn R. 55 Zournazi, Mary 17