Kazuo Ishiguro in a Global Context 9781472446695, 9781315590974

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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 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © Cynthia F. Wong, Hülya Yıldız, and the contributors 2015 Cynthia F. Wong and Hülya Yıldız have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the editors of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. 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   Preface: Global Ishiguro   Rebecca L. Walkowitz Acknowledgments   Introduction: Ishiguro and His Worlds in Literature   Cynthia F. Wong and Hülya Yıldız Part I

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Crossing National and Aesthetic Borders

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

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11

23 39

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Translations of Culture, Space, and Time

6 The Unconsoled: Piano Virtuoso Lost in Vienna   Clare Brandabur

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7 Place Identity and Detection in When We Were Orphans   Margaret J-M Sönmez

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8 What Kathy Knew: Hidden Plot in Never Let Me Go   Olga Dzhumaylo

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‘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

10 Time and the Threefold I in Never Let Me Go   Duru Güngör

101 111

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11 Cosmos of Similitude in Nocturnes   Chu-chueh Cheng

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12 Oppositional Narratives of Nocturnes   Cynthia F. Wong

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Select Bibliography   Index  

145 157

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; AlBa’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 nineteenthcentury 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,

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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 LudwigMaximilians-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).

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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

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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.

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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.’

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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).

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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.

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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 selfidentified 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 See the British Council’s website at http://literature.britishcouncil.org/kazuoishiguro 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. 1

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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.

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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.

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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 ÖztabakAvcı 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

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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 selfconsciousness 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

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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

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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.

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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.

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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 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. 1

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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 CrossCultural 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 JapaneseGerman 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.

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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).

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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 thirdgeneration 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). 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 booklength 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). 2

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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.

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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.

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Ishiguro and ‘Language Migrant’ Writers In Translating One’s Self, Mary Besemeres draws upon the concept of ‘selftranslation’ 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).

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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.

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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 nonEnglish 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,

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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/fourthgeneration 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)

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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 Besemeres, Mary. Translating One’s Self: Language and Selfhood in CrossCultural Autobiography. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2002. Print. Cheng, Chu-chueh. ‘Making and Marketing Kazuo Ishiguro’s Alterity’. Post Identity 4.2 (2005): n. pag. Web. 2 April 2013. Hoffman, Eva. ‘Life in a New Language.’ Foreign Dialogues: Memories, Translations, Conversations. Comp. Mary Zournazi. Annadale: Pluto Press, 1998. 17–26. Print.

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Ishiguro, Kazuo and Kenzaburō Ōe. ‘The Novelist in Today’s World: A Conversation’. Boundary 2 18.3 (1991): 109–22. [Originally published Japan Foundation Newsletter 17.4]. JSTOR. Web. 9 December 2011. King, Bruce. ‘The New Internationalism: Shiva Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, Buchi Emecheta, Timothy Mo and Kazuo Ishiguro’. The British and Irish Novel Since 1960. Ed. James Acheson. Houndsmill: Macmillan, 1991. 192–211. Print. Ma, Sheng-mei. ‘Kazuo Ishiguro’s Persistent Dream for Postethnicity: Performance in Whiteface’. Post Identity 2.1 (1999): 71–88. Web. 8 December 2011. Matthews, Sean and Sebastian Groes. ‘“Your Words Open Windows for Me”: The Art of Kazuo Ishiguro’. Introduction. Kazuo Ishiguro: Contemporary Critical Perspectives. Ed. Matthews and Groes. London: Continuum, 2009. 1–8. Print. Nasta, Susheila. Writing Across Worlds: Contemporary Writers Talk. London: Routledge, 2004. E-book. 8 December 2011. Rothfork, John. ‘Zen Comedy in Postcolonial Literature: Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day’. Mosaic 29.1 (1996): 79–102. Proquest. Web. Accessed 2 April 2013. Shaffer, Brian W. Understanding Kazuo Ishiguro. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 1998. Print. Shaffer, Brian and Kazuo Ishiguro. ‘An Interview with Kazuo Ishiguro’. Contemporary Literature 42.1 (2001): 1–14. JSTOR. Web. 5 April 2013 Shibata, Motoyuki and Motoko Sugano. ‘Strange Reads: Kazuo Ishiguro’s A Pale View of the Hills and An Artist of the Floating World in Japan’. Kazuo Ishiguro: Contemporary Critical Perspectives. Ed. Sean Matthews and Sebastian Groes. London: Continuum, 2009. 20–31. Print. Shōnaka, Takayuki. Kazuo Ishiguro: ‘Nihon’ to ‘Igirisu’ no Hazama kara (Kazuo Ishiguro: From Between ‘Japan’ and ‘England’). Yokohama: Shunpusha. 2011. Print. Slaymaker, Doug. ‘Writing in the Ravine of Language’. Yōko Tawada: Voices from Everywhere. Ed. Doug Slaymaker. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2007. 45–57. Print. ———. ‘Yōko Tawada: Voices from Everywhere’. Introduction. Yōko Tawada: 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.

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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.

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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:

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. 3

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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 wellknown 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 Pink Floyd, ‘Time.’ For a detailed discussion of the figure of the gentleman in Remains of the Day see

4 5

Berberich 2007.

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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).

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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

For a discussion of The Remains of the Day as a quest-romance see Kremkau.

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

10

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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. Firstperson 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 For a detailed comparison with Conan Doyle’s Holmes stories see Döring. See also Rowland for Golden Age detective fiction.

12 13

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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 reenacts 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 childhoodEden 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

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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:

For the school story see Musgrave and Grenby.

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“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.

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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:

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[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.

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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: WileyBlackwell, 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. . 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.

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Shaikh, Nermeen. ‘Kazuo Ishiguro’s Interior Worlds: Interview’. Asia Society. Web. 2 January 2013. . 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.

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). 1

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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 selfexamination 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

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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

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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

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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

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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, ‘realitytesting’ 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

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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’).

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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.

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’). 3

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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.

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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 empiricistidealist 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

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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

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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

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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,’

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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.

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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

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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

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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)

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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. . 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.

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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. .

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

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of reconciliation assigned to Ryder, his fictional counterpart in The Unconsoled. In his essay on Rubenstein, Gould called himself, with wry humor, ‘the selfappointed 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

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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.

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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 takeover, 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

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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’

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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

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exemplified by Gustav Mahler – while Christoff represents the newer postRomantic 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

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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)

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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.

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———. 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’

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(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 selfidentity 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-inEden 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-

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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 slopshop 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

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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 selfconsciously 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

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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 prisonlike, 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

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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 selfidentity 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

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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

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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

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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. . Auden, W.H. ‘The Guilty Vicarage. Notes on the Detective Story, by an Addict’. Harpers (May 1948). Harpers Archive. Web. 7 February 2013.

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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.

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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’. InBetween: 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.

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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 boardingschool 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.

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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-enabyme 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

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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

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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

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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 selfrespect 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

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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 postHailsham 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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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.

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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?’

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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. . 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.

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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. . ———. ‘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

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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.

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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

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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

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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: ‘…

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history is not simply a science but also and not least a form of remembrance . 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

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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)

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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.

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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. Trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane. Minneapolis, MN: U of 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

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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

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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).

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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 culturallinguistic 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.

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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 outerinner 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

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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

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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

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… “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 singularplural 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

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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

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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 Adelman, Gary. ‘Doubles on the Rocks: Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled’. Critique 42.2 (2001): 166–79. Print. Agamben, Giorgio. What is An Apparatus? and Other Essays. Trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2009. Print. 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 Schizophrenia. 1980. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987. Print. Derrida, Jacques. Limited Inc. Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1988. Print. ———. The Politics of Friendship. 1997. Trans. George Collins. London: Verso, 2005. Print. Eco, Umberto. Travels in Hyper Reality. 1967. Trans William Weaver. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1986. Print. 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. .

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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. . 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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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)

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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 illtempered 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 postNagasaki 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,

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lonely and cheap’ (136) and is rendered amenable to an invitation by his nextdoor 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

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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

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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. 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.

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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. . 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.

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‘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 ÉruditionCNED, 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

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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’. PostIdentity 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.

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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.

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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 SelfDeception’. 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.

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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.

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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.

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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 Orphans’. Ed. S. Groes and B. Lewis. 2011. 184–95.

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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. 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.

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Index Adams, Tim 102 Adelman, Gary 128–9 Agamben, Giorgio 127–8 Althusser, Louis 57 Aristotle 127 Art of the Novel, The (Kundera) 69 Artist of the Floating World, An (Ishiguro) 2, 13, 16, 19, 67, 139 artwork in 59, 61, 62–3, 64–5 bridge in 138 character pairing in 135 inscribed “you” in 4, 49, 54 nostalgia in 44 setting of 122–3 stereotypes in 23, 24 artwork 5, 59–67 Bachelard, Gaston 95 Bashō, Matsuo 11 Beedham, Matthew 87 Belsey, Catherine 49 Benjamin, Walter 115, 116 Berne, Eric 75 Besemeres, Mary 3, 11, 12, 16, 17, 19, 20 Bevan, Robert 76 Bhaba, Homi K. 53 Big Four, The (Christie) 86 Bildungsroman 31 Black, Shameem 60 Black Skin, White Masks (Fanon) 104–5 boxes 95 Brandabur, A. Clare 5, 6, 69 Bridegroom Was a Dog, The (Tawada) 20 bridges 137–8 19th British Novelists Conference 1 Butcher, James 102 Butler, Judith Excitable Speech 108 Frames of War 6, 102, 104, 105–6 Psychic Life of Power, The 108 butterfly 62

Calvino, Italo 129–30 Cassin, Barbara xin2 Castle (Kafka) 69 ‘Cellists’ (Ishiguro) 121, 140 character pairing in 134 relationships in 126–7, 129 setting of 122, 123, 124, 138 Cheng, Chu-chueh 7, 16, 25, 121 Christie, Agatha 82 Big Four, The 86 Murder of Roger Ackroyd, The 86 collections 95–7 ‘Come Rain or Come Shine’ (Ishiguro) 16, 45, 121, 138–9, 140 characters in 134 music as theme in 65, 123 relationships in 126, 129 setting of 124, 138 Cook, Pam 45 Course of Recognition, The (Ricoeur) 4, 39, 40, 42 ‘Crooner’ (Ishiguro) 45, 121, 140–41 character pairing in 134, 135 music as theme in 65, 122, 123 relationships in 126, 127 setting of 121–2, 123, 124, 138 Culture and Imperialism (Said) 52, 55 Cunningham, H. C. 6 Currie, Mark 114 Damrosch, David xi, 5, 6 Dasgupta, Romit 3–4, 11 Deleuze, Gilles 116–17, 126 Derrida, Jacques 125, 127, 128 The Destruction of Memory: Architecture at War (Bevan) 76 detective fiction 6, 29–31, 44, 80–87 Dickens, Charles 29 Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan 29, 30, 80, 81, 82 ‘His Last Bow’ 86 ‘The Man with the Twisted Lip’ 81

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‘The Second Stain’ 86 dystopian fiction 33–4 Dzhumaylo, Olga 6, 91 Easthope, Anthony 50 Eco, Umberto 123 ‘The Empire Writes Back’ (Iyer) 70 English stereotypes 4, 13, 26–34, 49–50, 52 Englishness and National Culture (Easthope) 50 ‘Englishness/Englishnesses in Contemporary Fiction’ (Mergenthal) 52 ethics 6, 101–8 Excitable Speech (Butler) 108 Facing the Bridge (Tawada) 20 ‘A Family Supper’ (Ishiguro) 14n2, 23 Fanon, Frantz 104–5 Fiske, John 124–5 Fluet, Lisa 124 forgetting 45–6 Foucault, Michel 106 Frames of War (Butler) 6, 102, 104, 105–6 Freud, Sigmund 45–6, 76 On the Interpretation of Dreams 69, 70, 71 Moses and Monotheism 72 Mourning and Melancholia 44–5 ‘Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through’ 46 ‘The Uncanny’ 72 Fricke, Stefanie 4, 23 friendship 127–8 Games People Play (Berne) 75 Genette, Gérard 55 globalism xi–xiv, 16 Gould, Glenn 5, 69–70, 73, 76 Grahame, Kenneth 29 Granta 133 Great American Songbook 123, 124 Great Expectations (Dickens) 29 Griffin, Gabrielle 104 Groes, Sebastian xiv, 2 The Guardian Book Club 101, 108 Guattari, Félix 116–17, 126 Güngör, Duru 6, 111

Harrison, M.J. 118 Hayot, Eric xi Hegel, Georg 134 Heidegger, Martin 5, 59 ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’ 59, 61, 63, 65, 66, 67 ‘The Thinker as Poet’ 59 ‘His Last Bow’ (Doyle) 86 History of Sexuality, The (Foucault) 106 Hitchens, Christopher 133–4 Hoffman, Eva 12, 17–18, 19 Holmes, Sherlock 29, 30, 80, 82, 86 Hornung, Alfred 98 Hunnewell, Susannah 71, 72, 74, 75, 77 “I,” threefold 111–18 identity place 79–81, 87 self 4, 39–44, 80, 91–5, 98–100, 101–8 Ihara, Saikaku 62 ‘In Front of Trang Tien Bridge’ (Tawada) 21 inauthenticity 124–5 inscribed “you” 4, 49–57 intertextuality 124–5 Ishiguro, Kazuo. see also specifics works global reach of works xi–xiv interculturality of 11–21 Japan and 13–16 personal background of xi–xii, 141–2 ‘Ishiguro and Worlds of Art’ (Tomkinson) 5 ‘Ishiguro’s Inhuman Aesthetics’ (Black) 60 Ivanhoe (Scott) 29 Iyer, Pico 70 Jaggi, Maya 18 James, Henry 5 Jameson, Frederic 125 Japanese-ness xii, 3, 11–12, 13–16 Japanese stereotypes 4, 24–6 Kadohata, Cynthia 12, 14 Kafka, Franz 69 Katshshika, Hokusai 62 Kawabata, Yasunari 3, 11, 14 Kazuo Ishiguro (Sim) 52 King, Bruce 13 Kingston, Maxine Hong 12 Klee, Paul 115 Kogawa, Joy 12

Index

159

Krotoski, Alex 5 Kundera, Milan 69 Kurosawa, Akiro 3n3

musicians 69–70, 73, 76, 122, 134–5 mutual recognition 41–4 myth. see stereotypes

Laertius, Diogenes 127 ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ (Yeats) 86 landscapes 121–5 language migrant writers 3, 11, 12, 16, 17–21 Lewis, Barry 2 Lives of Eminent Philosophers (Laertius) 127 Lochner, Liani 6, 101 London, England 81, 86 Lost in Translation (Hoffman) 12, 17 Loti, Pierre 25n3

Nabokov, Vladimir 12 Nagasaki, Japan 18–19 Never Let Me Go (Ishiguro) 2, 6–7, 66, 91–100, 101–9, 111–18, 139 artwork in 60, 63–4, 65–6 character pairing in 135–6 completion in 97–8 disintegration in 92–5 ethics in 6, 101–8 memory in 46, 95–7, 115 music as them in 142 mutual recognition in 41–3 nostalgia in 32 self-identity in 91–5, 98–100, 101–8 shared vulnerability in 108–9 stereotypes in 4, 23, 31–4 threefold “I” in 6, 111–18 New Yorker, The 133 Nezammafi, Shirin 20 ‘Nocturne’ (Ishiguro) 121, 139–40, 141 character pairing in 135 music as theme in 123 relationships in 126, 127 setting of 124, 138, 139–40 Nocturnes (Ishiguro) 7, 121–30, 133–42. see also ‘Cellists’ (Ishiguro); ‘Come Rain or Come Shine’ (Ishiguro); ‘Crooner’ (Ishiguro); ‘Malvern Hills’ (Ishiguro); ‘Nocturne’ (Ishiguro) character pairing in 133–6 inauthenticity in 124–5 landscapes in 121–5 music as theme in 65, 122, 123–4, 133–5, 136, 142 relationships in 125–30 self-realization in 134 themes in 133–6 nomadic relationships 125–6, 129 nostalgia 4, 18, 31, 32, 44–5, 138 ‘Nowhere in Particular’ (Robinson) 69

Ma, Sheng-mei 15 Machinal, Hélène 30 Mackey, Louis 112 Madame Butterfly 24–5 Madame Chrysanthème (Loti) 25n3 ‘Malvern Hills’ (Ishiguro) 45, 121, 136–8, 140 character pairing in 135 music as them in 123 relationships in 126, 127 setting of 124 ‘The Man with the Twisted Lip’ (Doyle) 81 Maruyama, Okyo 62 Mason, Gregory 4 Matthews, Sean xiv, 2, 3, 53 Mazullo, Mark 141 memory 39 nostalgia and 44–5 self-identity and 4, 39–44, 95–7 unforgetting 45–6 Memory, History, Forgetting (Ricoeur) 4, 39, 42–3, 46 Mergenthal, Silvia 52 Mishima, Yukio 3n3, 14 Moonstone, The 86 Mori, Kyōko 17n5 Morte d’Arthur 86 Moses and Monotheism (Freud) 72 mourning 44–5 Mourning and Melancholia (Freud) 44–5 Mullan, John 42, 101, 105 Murakami, Haruki 2, 3, 11, 141 Murder of Roger Ackroyd, The (Christie) 86 music, theme of 65, 76, 123–4, 133–5, 136, 138, 141–2

Ōe, Kenzaburō 3, 11, 13–14 Okada, John 12, 14 On Late Style (Said) 70

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‘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 WorkingThrough’ (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 Time and Narrative (Ricoeur) 4, 41 ‘Tintern Abbey’ (Wordsworth) 86 Toki ga nijimu asa (Yang) 20 Tomkinson, Fiona 5, 59 Translating One’s Self: Language and Selfhood in Cross-Cultural Autobiography (Besemeres) 12, 17 translation of works xii–xiv, 14n2, 16, 53 ‘The Uncanny’ (Freud) 72 Unconsoled, The (Ishiguro) 2, 5, 15–16, 67, 69–77, 139, 142 character pairing in 135 as extreme occasion 69–77 memory and 45–6 music as theme in 65 mutual recognition in 43–4 relationships in 128–9 self-recollection in 98 setting of 69, 79, 122, 123, 125, 138 ‘Unimaginable Largeness’ (Walkowitz) 49 utopia 45 Venice, Italy 122 Vienna, Austria 69, 71–3, 76 ‘A Village After Dark’ (Ishiguro) 133 ‘Waiting for J’ (Ishiguro) 135 Walkowitz, Rebecca L. xi, 6, 16, 21, 49, 53 Wall, Kathleen 56 Warhol, Robyn R. 55

161

‘We’re like Butlers’ (Suter) 49 When We Were Orphans (Ishiguro) 2, 5–6, 15, 65–6, 67, 139 mutual recognition in 43 nostalgia in 18, 31, 44, 45, 46, 67 place identity in 79–81, 87 self-recollection in 98, 99 setting of 81–7 stereotypes in 4, 23, 29–31 Where Europe Begins (Tawada) 20 White Countess, The 124 whitefacing 12, 15, 16 Whitehead, Anne 39n1, 105 Wind in the Willows (Grahame) 29 Wodehouse, P.G. 26, 29, 52 Wong, Cynthia F. xiii, 1, 7, 13, 133 Wood, Michael 34 Woolf, Virginia 117 Wordsworth, William 86 WorldCat xii Wuthering Heights 29 Yang, Yi 20 Yeats, W. B. 86 Yıldız, Hülya xiii, 1 Yomiuri Shimbun 13 “you,” inscribed 4, 49–57 Yu, Miri 20 Zhuangzi 62, 63 Zournazi, Mary 17