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Kazuo Ishiguro

Wai-chew Sim

"I sometimes feel that if I had written a book like Kafka'sTrial, people would say to me, 'What a strange judicialsystem the Japanese have.'"

—Kazuo Ishiguro, qtd. in Bryson 44

In a discussion of the professional restrictions besetting cosmopolitanwriters, the critic Timothy Brennan suggests that they are "unableto enter the scene of letters as innovations in the v?ay, for example,that a talented North American novelist without ethnic baggagemight be packaged as the rude boy or girl of a new generation" (203).This is a simple fact of life for some artists, and it has certainly beena constant in the authorial reception of the Anglo-Japanese writerKazuo Ishiguro, as his comment above suggests. Faced with theperemptory demand that he explain a birth-culture deemed ineluc-tably alien, Ishiguro has had to be nimble in a variety of ways. In hisearly works he fends off straitjacket culturalist assumptions evenas he wrestles with compelling questions of identity. He writes fromthe exigencies of his location within and between two cultures, buthe also refuses to make a fetish of difference, to pander to demandsfor exotica and titillation.

But what is interesting about Ishiguro's early fictions is also theirclose attention to form, the way they probe received wisdoms, andhow they lay the groundwork for future development. For in hisrecent mature writing Ishiguro can justly be said to have expandedthe possibilities of the novel as an art from. He has increasedthe range of the high-modernist European novel associated withKafka. His troublesome pen has mounted trenchant, illuminatingcritique-cum-adaptations of certain popular genres—in particular,the country-house novel and the detective novel—exposing theirformal structures as agglomerations of certain readerly demandswith prohibitive aesthetic and social costs. And yet, because of that,he also extends their intellectual and emotional scope.

The outline above gives an idea of Ishiguro's range, and, for me,one of the most exciting thing about his work is just this refusal tostand still as a writer, this desire to push the envelope. This attri-bute can be seen in the shift from realist to fabulist writing in hisrecent fiction, although that assessment itself needs to be qualified,since even in his first novel Ishiguro deploys psychological realismonly to undermine it in the denouement. Another key attribute is

KAZUO ISHIGURO I WAI-CHEW SIM 81

his scrutiny of the tropes we use to describe ourselves and others.To use a term popularized by critics from the reception-aestheticsschool, Ishiguro confounds the horizon of expectation that readersbring to his fiction, and thus he also helps us to see the world in allits multihued complexity.

Ishiguro's characteristic stylistic and thematic concerns will bediscussed in greater detail below, but we can get a sense of howhe operates if we turn to his short story "A Family Supper." Anelucidation of this story allows us to appreciate the modus operandiunderwriting his five published novels to date.

"A Family Supper" opens with an account ofthe narrator's motherdying a painful death after eating Fugu fish—a dish that requirescareful preparation to deactivate the poison inside—at the home ofan old school friend. All through this period the narrator has beenliving in California estranged from his father. He learns the grue-some details surrounding his mother's death only when he returnsfrom the States, in what is also an attempt to mend fences. Fatherand son have not talked in over two years; the narrator's sister, whohas been away at university, has also returned for the occasion.Before the meal, however, several things suggest that a seeminglyinnocuous event is about to go badly wrong. The father declares thathis wife's death "was no accident" (439). He calls his former businesspartner, Watanabe, "a man of principle and honour" while recountinghis suicide following the collapse of their firm (435). When the fathergoes to attend to the cooking, the sister reveals what he omitted tosay, namely that Watanabe had killed his entire family before takinghis own life. As the siblings talk, a parallel is drawn between theirdeceased mother and a female ghost said to be haunting their garden,which then echoes the narrator's recollection that his father had oncebeaten him for "chattering like an old woman" (435). And finally weare told that the main course is an unspecified fish dish. By the timethe father mentions how he used to envy fighter pilots during his navydays because, unlike a stricken vessel, a plane could always be usedas "the final weapon" (440), we therefore have a strong presentimentof approaching disaster—it appears that a mass suicide or suicidecum homicide of some kind is about to take place.

My synopsis doesn't do justice to the skill with which the storybuilds up dramatic tension, but the implication is that the fatherblames his son for failing to take over the family business and alsofor the mother's death. He appears intent on emulating his formerbusiness partner, which suggests that the supper they have eatenis their last. Yet against the run of expectations, he declares thatWatanabe had made a "mistake"; his "judgement" had been "weak-ened" by the collapse of their firm, and, moreover, "there are otherthings besides work" (442).

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It is in this vein then of a bathetic ending disrupting our custom-ary assumptions that Ishiguro calls the story "a big trick"; the Japa-nese "love . . . melodramatic stories where heroes commit suicide,"he says, but they "don't go around killing themselves as easily aspeople . . . assume" (qtd. in Mason 343). While the concern in thiscase was to enjoin a wider conception of Japanese sociality, and theslightly strident note needs to be contextualized perhaps againstthe corporatist-state nostrums dominating the popular Zeitgeistof the eighties when "A Family Supper" first appeared, the storynevertheless helps us to appreciate what Ishiguro sets out to do inhis writing.

The characteristic features are a spare, elliptical style whereeverything works by inference and insinuation, an extraordinarycontrol of pace, and a focus on psychological minutiae rather thanexternal action. Effects are achieved by understatement and theskillful deployment of material. As mentioned earlier, Ishiguroconfounds the horizon of expectation that we bring to his texts. Heunsettles our familiar picture of the world, always posing the ques-tion of what is left out in any representation of experience. Up untiltbe incorporation of fabulist elements in his recent fiction, thesewould also be the hallmarks of an essentially minimalist writingstyle, with Ishiguro content to work within self-imposed limits andwhere control and economy are the main watchwords.

Whatever the stylistic variation, however, the world of his novelsis always suffused with a gut-wrenching melancholia. Ishiguromentions in many interviews that he took up fiction-writing in orderto preserve childhood memories of Japan before they disappeared.In one of them he confesses to "very strong emotional relationships. . . that were severed at a formative age," especially the one withhis grandfather, and how perforce, "the creative process for me isnever about anger or violence, but regret and melancholy." In thesame interview Ishiguro adds that he had only recently becomeaware of that "other life" he "might have had," that "whole person"he was "supposed to become," all of which appears to have shapedhis understanding of what the writing life amounts to (qtd. in Jaggi28). In his estimation, writing is "a kind of consolation"; writers"write out of some part of themselves" that he wouldn't exactly sayis "unbalanced," but where there is "a kind of lack of equilibrium"(qtd. in Vorda and Herzinger 30-31).

It is easy to see how these essentially exilic considerations findtheir way into Ishiguro's fiction. They appear to fuel the melancholictenor of his novels, to explain his preference for first-person narra-tors gripped by the hermeneutics of memory. What often happensis that differences residing in geographical space are turned andturned so that they become differences residing in developmental


historical time. Separated by half the length of England from thewoman he had loved—and still loves—the narrator in one of Ishig-uro's novels journeys to visit her. But everything he does during thetrip prompts a flashback. Everyone he meets initiates a recollectionof that period some two decades ago before they were separated,when things might have gone differently, when he might have hadanother life.

In such a situation it is perhaps not surprising that the uncer-tainty and the malleability of memory features so strongly in Ishig-uro's books, for the truth is both concealed and revealed by it. At thesame time his novels are full of individuals who are unconsoled, wholook back on their lives and realize that they had spent the bulk ofit mired in self-deception. Coming to terms with the past becomesfor that reason a pressing concern. All they can do is to retrieve ameasure of dignity from what is left, to face the fact—honestly andbravely—that, indeed, the past is a foreign country. The results canbe surprising—and deeply unsettling.

Born in 1954 in Nagasaki, Ishiguro came to England in 1960when his father, an oceanographer, joined a British governmentresearch project in the North Sea. His family settled in the afflu-ent London suburb of Guildford where he grew up receiving whathe later described as a "very typical middle-class southern Englishupbringing" (qtd. in Bryson 40). At home he was raised in the Japa-nese style. The expatriation was originally intended to be short-term and well into his adolescence his family apparently had plansto return to Japan. With the passage of time, however, the sojournbecame permanent.

Following his secondary school graduation in 1973, Ishiguroserved for a brief period as a grouse-beater for the Queen Motherat Balmoral Castle, Scotland. He also hitchhiked around the UnitedStates and Canada during his "gap year" before taking up study atthe University of Kent in Canterbury in 1974. During his studies hetook a year out and also worked as a community worker at a hous-ing estate in Scotland (1976). After earning his B.A. (Honors) inEnglish and Philosophy in 1978, Ishiguro went back to social work,working with the homeless in London for an organization knownas the Cyrenians. In late 1979 he enrolled in the creative writingMaster's program at the University of East Anglia, where he wastaught by Malcolm Bradbury and Angela Carter. He obtained hisM.A. in 1980, having secured a contract from Faber and Faber fora novel in progress.

That work, A Pale View of Hills, was published in 1982. A preco-cious flrst novel, it tells the story of a woman who looks back on herdays in postwar Japan before she came to England with her secondhusband, an Englishman. The novel won the Winifred Holtby Prize

84 THE REVIEW OF CONTEMPORAEY FICTION

from the Royal Society of Literature in 1983 and was translatedinto thirteen languages.

This was followed in 1986 by An Artist of the Floating World. Setin postwar Japan, the novel recounts the experiences of a painter whohad supported militarism in the 1930s. It won the Whitbread bookofthe year award and was short-listed for the Booker prize. It subse-quently appeared on best-seller lists in both Britain and America.

Ishiguro's most popular novel, The Remains of the Day, was pub-lished in 1989. It won the prestigious Booker prize that year andwas made into a successful film in 1993 by Merchant-Ivory Produc-tions starring Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson. The movieeventually garnered eight Oscar nominations.

Ishiguro's fourth novel. The Unconsoled, was published in 1995to mixed reviews. Its formal experiments, lengthy dream sequences,and opaque construction left many critics nonplussed. A reviewerfrom the Guardian declared that it "invents its own category ofbadness" (Wood 5). In contrast, the philosopher Richard Rorty wasconvinced that Ishiguro had "expanded the frontiers of the novel,"although he found the work itself obscure, suggesting that "some-times all a reviewer can do is express appreciative puzzlement" (13).In the same year Ishiguro received an OBE from the Queen for hisservices to literature.

When We Were Orphans, Ishiguro's most recent novel, was pub-lished in 2000. Set in London and Shanghai, it relates the experi-ences of a celebrated detective who tries to unravel the mystery ofhis parents' disappearance in Shanghai in the early years of theprevious century.

In addition to several short stories, Ishiguro has also written twooriginal screenplays for Britain's Channel Four television, A Profileof Arthur J. Mason (broadcast in 1984) and The Gourmet (broadcastin 1986). The latter is a black comedy about the plight ofthe home-less in London. More recently, Ishiguro was involved in a movie bythe Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin, titled The Saddest Music inthe World. The movie, about an international music competition setin Depression-era Winnipeg, originated in a script that he wrote.

Ishiguro also wrote the screenplay for The White Countess, aMerchant-Ivory production slated for release in fall 2005. Set inShanghai in the late 1930s, the movie stars Ralph Fiennes as adisillusioned former American diplomat who has lost his sight butwho creates a nightclub for the title character, an exiled Russiannoblewoman played by Natasha Richardson.

Ishiguro lives in Golders Green, London, with his thirteen-year-old daughter Naomi and Lorna Anne MacDougal, his Glaswegianwife and partner of over twenty years.


A Pale View of Hills (1982)

A Pale View of Hills is a novel whose themes and concerns resonatethroughout Ishiguro's oeuvre. Among them, it questions certaincommonplace assumptions about Japanese sociality. More striking-ly, it underscores the interestedness of memory and recall. Throughthe main protagonist, it points out that these processes are neverneutral. It shows that they are always subjected to the exigenciesof the present, which is to say of our need to fashion a usable pastout of incongruent, often disparate material.

The novel opens with Etsuko, the narrator, receiving a visit byher second daughter at her home in an English village. Uppermostin Etsuko's mind is the compromise she had reached with her secondhusband, Sheringham, over the naming of their daughter:

Niki, the name we finally gave my younger daughter, is not an abbrevia-tion; it was a compromise I reached with her father. For paradoxicallyit was he who wanted to give her a Japanese name, and I—perhapsout of some selfish desire not to be reminded of the past—insisted onan English one. He finally agreed to Niki, thinking it had some vagueecho of the East about it. (9)

Niki's visit operates in turn as the frame story for Etsuko as shetraces her memories of postwar Nagasaki before she came to Eng-land some two decades or so earlier. It also emerges that the multipleflashbacks between her days as a young pregnant wife in the sub-urbs of Nagasaki and her widowed life in the English countrysideare part of Etsuko's efforts to come to terms with the recent suicideof Keiko, her daughter from her first marriage: "Keiko, unlike Niki,was pure Japanese, and more than one newspaper was quick to pickup on this fact. The English are fond of their idea that our race hasan instinct for suicide, as if further explanations are unnecessary;for that was all they reported, that she was Japanese and that shehad hung herself in her room" (10).

Together with the intricately nuanced opening paragraph, whichregisters in the valences ofthe word "thinking" Etsuko's opposition tothe "vague" echo perceived by Sheringham, the direct address to theimplied reader's stock beliefs here suggests that Pale View sets out tobe contrarian. I described above how "A Family Supper" tackles thesuicide-instinct canard, and in this respect the offer to provide "fur-ther explanations" continues, we might say, that strand in Ishiguro'swriting that is concerned with the critique of essentialist assump-tions. Although Etsuko spends the rest of the novel circling aroundthe incident, Keiko's death is never satisfactorily explained. Textualgaps abound over this issue. At the end, the novel suggests that shehad found her new home alienating, and thus her death cannot be


attributed to anything ethnically distinctive. Like "A Family Supper,"that is, Ishiguro lures readers by offering to affirm essentialist veri-ties, but he never delivers. Instead, the textual gaps over this issueenjoin an examination of the stock beliefs elicited by the opening.

Such, at least, is one layer of the novel's multiple levels of mean-ing. It sets out to confound expectations, to make available alterna-tives to the seamless quality of culturalist descriptions. Despite themany reviewers engrossed with the "Japaneseness" of Ishiguro'searly fiction, therefore, his main concern is in some ways prelimi-nary to that, meaning that he firsts clears space for a genuine cul-tural encounter, one worthy of the name. It is through this, I feel,that Ishiguro attends to the exigencies of his location within andbetween two cultures. For with the critique of those descriptions, healso fashions a usable past out of that double patrimony.

For most readers the most intriguing part of Pale View, how-ever, is likely to be the shocking disclosure in the denouement.The enigma involves Etsuko's friend and alter ego, Sachiko. WhileEtsuko's father-in-law (Ogata-San) and first husband (Jiro) featureprominently in her fiashbacks, their main focus is the progress ofher friendship with Sachiko over the key summer months haunt-ing her recollections. We first meet Sachiko after the death of herhusband and with her having a hard time looking after her troubledyoung daughter, Mariko. Sachiko has an American boyfriend namedFrank and has set her heart on going to America with him. Whenshe goes off to be with Frank, Mariko is often left in the care ofEtsuko. By the close ofthe novel, it appears that Sachiko will not getto fulfill her dreams, and thus symbolically it is Etsuko who accom-plishes the overseas move, but to England rather than America,which she now balances against the decision to take Keiko with herwhen she left. From other parallels between the two women theirrelationship begins to take on doppelganger infiections, and this isthen confirmed in a haunting climax when Etsuko lets slip her useof Sachiko to stage her misgivings over the past.

The revelation follows Sachiko's drowning of Mariko's pet kit-tens, an incident that prefigures Keiko's death. Mariko runs awayin distress into the waste-ground near their riverside cottage, and itis in this psychically suggestive setting, therefore, that Etsuko findsMariko and urges her to be sensible. Before coming to Nagasaki,Mariko had witnessed a young, apparently deranged woman drowna baby in the war ruins of Tokyo. She appears to be traumatized bythe incident because she sometimes talks about a woman—probablyimaginary—whom she meets near the riverbank. Her fears aboutabandonment and resentment against Frank for displacing her inher mother's affections are projected onto her kittens, over whichshe is especially protective. And, additionally, our sense of forebod-


ing is heightened by newspaper revelations that there is a childkiller loose in the neighborhood.

But what is most shocking for us is that, without anything in theway of obvious signposting, Etsuko suddenly shifts into her ownfamilial reveries. Ostensibly, she is trying to persuade Mariko to besensible, to go home. Yet she suddenly says that, "If you don't likeit over there [overseas], we'll come straight back" (173). Speakingto Niki right at the novel's end, Etsuko also refers to Keiko oncegoing on a day trip to Inasa, the hill-park overlooking Nagasakibay, and of how she had been "happy" there (182). However, theonly Inasa day trip recounted in the novel is undertaken by Etsuko,Sachiko, and Mariko. Keiko thus surfaces in place of Mariko, andwhat lends the narrative its compelling poignancy, therefore, is ourrealization that Etsuko has all along been thinking about her eldestdaughter—and on her recent suicide in Manchester.

We understand as such that Etsuko's narrative combines pain andself-reproach over her decision to begin a new life overseas, as well asan unvoiced plea asking what else she could possibly have done. Theimplication is that Etsuko's recollections were designed all along toconverge on her exchanges with Keiko prior to their departure forEngland, to that promise to bring her back if she wasn't happy. Thenovel does not say how Etsuko's first marriage ended or how she metSheringham, only that he had once worked as a journalist in Japan.However, it suggests that Etsuko had lost her entire family duringthe nuclear destruction wrought on Nagasaki. She had lost her loveras well and had been mourning him when Ogata-San took her in. Inher own words, she was like a "mad person" during the immediatepostwar (postbomb) period, all of which adds to the plangency ofthe narrative moment (58). The loss of Keiko appears to be layeredover memories of earlier, even more unspeakable losses and of thesurvivor guilt they induced. Significantly, the novel's title refers to"a pale outline of hills visible against the clouds" that had givenEtsuko "a rare sense of relief from the emptiness" of long summerafternoons spent in her apartment (99). It transpires that the viewis of the hills of Inasa, and thus Etsuko's psychic investment inmisremembering Keiko's happiness is linked to the succor they hadonce provided. As a vista from an apartment window—perhaps as asymbol of durability amid shattering change—that "pale view" hadhelped her find the courage to rebuild her life. In the frame storyshe returns to it again, but this time to collapse Mariko and Keikointo, as it were, a single blurred outline.

Just as poignantly, Etsuko also sees herself writ-large in allthe disturbing figures mentioned above. She appears to see herselfrefiected not just in Sachiko's treatment of the kittens but also inthe child-killer and the deranged woman and also in an American


woman they meet during the Inasa trip. Like the other delineationsahove, the encounter is imbued with menacing overtones. It acquiresthis aspect because ofthe uncanny way they keep running into eachother during their passage through the hill-park. But, additionally,the American woman also sees Mariko drawing a "butterfly" in hersketchbook; she describes the butterfly—using broken Japanese—as"delicious" (114), and this then brings to mind an earlier disconcert-ing episode when Mariko had pretended to swallow a spider.

Through the associative logic linking these images, we infer thatEtsuko sees them as "premonition [s]" of Keiko's eventual demise(156). Her entire narration appears to be colored by that unspokenrebuke, by the idea that she should have heeded the warning theygave, and also by a paradoxical need to flnd or even to fabricate suchwarnings. What adds to the ominous mood ofthe climax is also thecurious presence of a piece of rope that Mariko (cum Keiko) spiesin Etsuko's hands when they meet up on the waste-ground. Etsukoprotests that she had picked up the rope because it got caughtaround her ankles. It just happened to be there, she says. But we arealso not sure how to respond because the incident repeats an eerilysimilar episode when Etsuko had gone looking for Mariko after sheran away from home. The reappearance of the rope in the climaxcould be a genuine repetition or a memory that Etsuko obsessivelyrecalls in the narrative present.

At the level of the individual psyche, then. Pale View underscoresthe interestedness of memory and recall. It shows how memoryreworks the past in response to current needs. Just as we often talkabout ourselves through an imaginary friend, Etsuko approaches herdeepest fears through Sachiko. A strategy of seeing herself in Sachikoappears to form part of a necessary accommodation to Keiko's death,but the process is also tinged with ambiguity. Up till the merger ofthetwo girls. Pale View appears to follow the conventions of narrative veri-similitude. The plot is constructed according to a plausible Cartesianlogic of cause and effect. There is consistent narrative point of view,lifelike characters, circumstantial detail, and convincing dialogue. Allofthe novel's technical ability to provide a particular sort of bourgeoiscredibility has been deployed. But with the emergence of Keiko atthe waste-ground everything changes. A great mystery ensues. Thedesign of the novel does not suggest that Sachiko is merely a mentalprojection. However, our realization that Sachiko and Mariko are insome sense doubles suggests that Etsuko has great psychic invest-ment in her version of events. Her need to see in the past a patternof ill-omened incidents obviously drives her recollections. And thismeans that her narration is radically unreliable.

Among other things, what engages our interest about Pale Viewis the craftsmanship attendant on such a conflguration: the great


skill through which readers are drawn in via the conventions ofrealist fiction; the instant deflation of those conventions followingthe emergence of Keiko; the frisson of the uncanny evoked by thisdevelopment; the mystery surrounding the nature ofthe psychogenicrelationship between Etsuko and Sachiko. These all stem from thatdesign. We are blindsided by the switch in persona. But as my accountabove shows, it is also a fitting one, given that already in the openingparagraph Etsuko confesses to a "selfish desire not to be reminded ofthe past," meaning that she can only approach it tangentially (9). Asa result, the novel also reveals in an interesting way the gap betweenappearance and reality, which is to say that it underlines the humanneed to distort or to conceal the latter. This is, I feel, its primary con-cern, for at its deepest level Pale View bears out something universal.It reveals the pathos and the sorrow of the stories we tell ourselvesto cope with reality, including those we tell ourselves to keep otherstories at bay, stories concerning, for instance, the unspeakabledestruction unleashed at Nagasaki. Our ability to tell the differencebetween truth and falsehood within the imagined world of a novel isfundamentally compromised here, but it is done for a purpose.

What is worth mentioning, finally, is the way Ishiguro rewritesthe Madama Butterfly (1904) story in Pale View. He does thisthrough Sachiko, whose plight mirrors Cho Cho San, the womanabandoned by her American lover in the opera. In this regardFrank calls to mind Puccini's protagonist, Benjamin FranklinPinkerton. Befitting the story's marine associations—Pinkertonis a naval officer—Frank is offered a job aboard a cargo ship. LikePinkerton, he goes home promising to return later to bring hislover over. Pale View in set in Nagasaki, where the opera is set aswell, and even the Inasa locality is suggestive, for the EncyclopediaBritannica tells us that a mansion located there was the home of anineteenth-century British merchant reputed to be the inspirationfor Puccini's fictional Pinkerton. What Ishiguro does as such is tomodify the opera's desertion plot for his own writerly concerns. Inthe opera Cho Cho San kills herself because Pinkerton returns,not as promised to bring her over, but to claim their child forhimself and his new American bride. For Pale View, in contrast,the focus is on the child, on Keiko, and on Etsuko's attempt tocome to terms with her suicide years after the accomplishmentof that dream of an overseas move. Through such a modificationIshiguro attends, it would seem, to the "melancholy" from which heself-professedly draws creative inspiration. We might say that hemodifies the desertion plot to voice exilic and diasporic concerns, toexplore the hermeneutics of memory in tandem with the aestheticpossibilities opened up by unreliable narration, as outlined above.And this would also be typical of what Ishiguro does in his writing.


something to watch out for. For in his subsequent work the samepattern persists, meaning that the raw material and the tropesavailable in the general culture will be taken up, and somethingunique will be fashioned out of it.

An Artist ofthe Floating World (1986)

An Artist ofthe Floating World picks up and develops the Ogata-Sansubplot in Pale View. Ogata-San's revanchist views about the warare suggested by the language he uses when he plays chess withhis son. While Jiro plays half-heartedly and is indifferent when heloses, Ogata-San is quick to rebuke him for "defeatism"; Jiro shouldbe "planning" his "defence" so that he can "survive and fight" again,he says (129). Nevertheless, Ogata-San's recidivist proclivities arecensured in no uncertain terms, for Pale View takes pains to estab-lish his culpability in the sacking and imprisonment of five teacherswho had opposed the war. His role in the incident is revealed by anex-pupil who rebukes him at one point in the novel, and in the endOgata-San's acceptance of that rebuke is suggested by his decisionto end his summer visit with Jiro and Etsuko, the telling point beinghis acknowledgment that he shouldn't "sit here [in their apartment]thinking about chess all day" (155).

Unlike Pale View, however. Artist is set entirely in Japan. Com-posed in four narrative sections stretching between October 1948and June 1950, it tells the story of a retired artist named MasujiOno who had supported the rise of militarism during the 1930s withpropaganda art pieces. At one point he denounces one of his pupils,turned dissident, who as a result spends the war in prison. When thenovel opens, Ono's wife and only son are dead, the former from anallied bombing raid, the other from fighting in Japan's expansionistventures on the Chinese mainland. Over a number of months Ono isvisited by his eldest daughter, tries to arrange a respectable marriagefor his second daughter, revisits an ex-colleague, drinks at a bar witha former pupil, and attends a monster movie with his grandson.

Behind these quotidian events, however, the scale of postwarchanges, the ideological desertion of his ex-pupils, and, more imme-diately, the desire to secure his younger daughter's marriage causesOno to examine his past. Afraid that any disclosure of his misdeedswill derail the nuptial arrangements, he tries without success toinitiate reconciliation with Kuroda, the pupil he had betrayed. Healso confesses his misdeeds before the family of the prospectivegroom, but his behavior strikes us as self-serving: his so-calledconfession seems to be aimed merely at forestalling possible qualmson the part of the groom's family about the marriage. It is onlyafter further self-scrutiny, coupled with the unremitting impact of


disturbing social change, that Ono gains a limited insight into thecontours of his life. He understands eventually that he had spentthe bulk of it mired in self-deception, and thus the novel ends on anote of resignation as he gazes at the pleasure district he knew as ayouth, now converted into a business quarter. Ono consoles himselfwith the thought that a younger generation will "make a better go ofthings" (206). If his generation made ruinous mistakes, the hope isthat others will learn from them, and from that he tries to retrievea measure of dignity for himself as well.

As suggested by the foregoing, the focus oi Artist is the meaningof Ono's artistic career. More obviously than with Ogata-San, Artistdraws compelling parallels between Ono's private experiences andconduct and the direction of public events. His acknowledgment ofblameworthiness acquires, that is, emblematic significance, for withhim, more general questions about responsibility and guilt duringthis contested period of Japanese history are also raised. It is inArtist, moreover, that Ishiguro develops his favorite theme, namelythe limits and the difficulties of self-knowledge. Through Ono'sflashbacks and meandering first-person narration, the details of histraining and working conditions before the war are revealed. In theprocess he moves ever closer to understanding the magnitude of hiserrors. The idea that we can spend huge parts of our lives pursuinggoals that matter little in the greater scheme of things is forcefullybrought across, and with that the attendant question arises of howwe come to terms with such a past.

More specifically, Ono realizes that his betrayal of Kuroda wasanalogous to his own expulsion from an artists' colony prior to hisenrollment in the ultranationalist body that commissioned hisartworks. As the infiuence from that organization grew, Ono hadstrayed from the aestheticist nostrums championed by the head ofthe colony, a man named Moriyama or Mori-san. As a result he hadbeen kicked out. As Ono plumps the depths of his memories, herealizes that his betrayal of Kuroda was compensatory behavior forhis own hurtful treatment at the hands of Mori-san. He realizes inaddition that an earlier banishment of another pupil by Mori-sanfor pursuing unsanctioned artistic experiments had foreshadowedthe two subsequent events. From this attainment of a capacity tosee the self in others, Ono gains insight into his own behavior. Self-reflexivity is made coeval with his attainment of that capacity, andthus the link between the two is emphasized.

At the heart of the novel, then, is Ono's deliberation over the piv-otal moments of his career. In chronological terms it goes throughthree stages. Ono starts as an artist-illustrator at a commercialstudio run by a man named Takeda. He joins Mori-san's outfit afterthat and is subsequently recruited by the previously mentioned


ultranationalist organization (known as the Okada-Shingen or"new life" society); sometime later he also sets up his own artists'colony espousing promilitarist views. As Ono deliberates over thepast, the unstated but obvious implication is that he should not haveleft Mori-san's establishment. Narrative wisdom appears to lie in anamplification of this idea, and hence, for many readers, the colonyalso takes on the mantle of a sanctuary. It appears to represent thehalcyon times of proverbial allusion. Descriptions of its communallife suggest purposeful, unalienated labor, and in fact the wholeplace seems to be a refuge from the world of practical affairs andunrewarding toil.

The reading outlined here is reinforced by the title of the book.The fioating world appellation refers to a tradition of Japanese artnamed ukiyo-e (literally, floating world pictures). Popularized by thefamous Tokugawa painter and printmaker Kitagawa Utamaro (1753-1806), the genre emphasizes the depiction of sad, transitory events,oftentimes the stylized world of the Japanese pleasure quarter andits demi-monde denizens. But significantly, Mori-san is also labeled"the modern Utamaro" because he seeks to " 'modernize' the Utamarotradition" in his work (140). When Ono gazes at the pleasure quarterhe had known and painted as a youth, the poignancy that arises fromhis acknowledgment of waste is therefore linked to a consideration ofwhat he lost when he broke away from Mori-san. And this is also tosay that the closure oi Artist invites a consideration ofthe differencesbetween the bohemian lifestyle promoted by Mori-san and Ono's sub-sequent pursuit of militarist objectives through his art.

Such, at least, has been the focus of much of the commentaryon Artist. The common strand in most responses has been a ten-dency to cast Ono's departure in prelapsarian terms. In a reviewoi Artist, Anne Chisholm states, for example, that, "One would liketo think . . . that it is always the Floating World, the world of love,beauty and art, that endures, and that the 'real' world of action, ofpolitics and war, turns out to be treacherous and temporary. Butthe Floating World, in Japan as elsewhere, is always under threat;the old man's longings for his past become a universal lament forlost worlds" (162). Separately, Brian Shaffer describes the Mori-sanoutfit as the "stereotypically bohemian world of the postromanticartist cut off from an inhospitable, materialistic, aesthetically shal-low, mainstream society" (52). When he breaks from the school, "itis precisely the 'real world' in general, and Japanese economic andmilitary aspirations in particular, that Ono hopes to shape andreflect" (53). In similar terms Wendy Brandmark argues that the"central irony" of the book is Ono's rejection of "the art of the fioat-ing world"; he breaks away from the colony because he finds theirwork too "ephemeral"; but what he discovers after the war is that


the political ideals through which he sought intransigence "wereindeed transitory" (1).

In order to appreciate the rhetorical setup oi Artist, however, weneed to highlight what these readings leave out. For what a close read-ing ofthe pertinent sections shows is actually the opposite. Instead ofbeing a variant on the fall-from-paradise trope, Ono's artistic devel-opment is from the beginning coeval with national developments. Thenovel maintains an isomorphic fit between the two realms, and thismakes problematic any attempt to cast the Mori-san outfit as someembodiment of the authentic, or some autochthonous, proto-Edeniclocale threatened by change and corruption.

At no stage of Ono's career is he, in fact, free from foreign orworldly infiuence. Already at the Takeda outfit we are told thatOno and his colleagues sometimes have to paint "around the clock"(66) to complete commissions for "geishas, cherry trees, swimmingcarps" and the like, the "essential point" being that these picturesmust "look 'Japanese' to the foreigners to whom they were shippedout" (69). In the sections devoted to the Mori-san sojourn, whatis even more revealing is that he seeks to modernize his art formaccording to declared "European" precepts. Although Mori-san uses"traditional device [s]," his work is "full of European influences";he abandons the use of the "traditional dark outline to define hisshapes, preferring instead the Western use of blocks of colour, withlight and shade to create a three-dimensional appearance"; and justto press the point home the novel reiterates that Mori-san "hadtaken his cue from the Europeans in what was his most centralconcern: the use of subdued colours" (141).

What Ono crucially retains when he leaves Mori-san is, in fact,this European-initiated use of color. The propaganda piece for whichhe retains a recidivist affection in the narrative present is titled"Eyes to the Horizon"; Ono tellingly addresses an implied interlocu-tor—us the reader—as being possibly "acquainted" with it because"as a print in the thirties, [it had] achieved a certain fame andinfiuence throughout this city" (168). And this piece, we are told,had received fulsome praise precisely because of its "powerful useof colour" (169).

It seems, then, that Artist highlights not so much "the Utamarotradition" per se but the attempt to modernize it. It underscores theprogression between the use of "subdued" hues at Mori-san's estab-lishment and the use of more "powerful" ones after that. But in thisway Artist also invites a consideration of a key episode in the novelwhen a recruiter from Okada-Shingen tells Ono to leave Mori-san:"Listen, Ono, Japan is no longer a backward country.... We are nowa mighty nation, capable of matching any of the Western nations.In the Asian hemisphere, Japan stands like a giant amidst cripples


and dwarfs. . . It's time for us to forge an empire as powerful andwealthy as those of the British and the French" (173-74). Despitethe appeal of prelapsarian themes, therefore. Artist precludes sucha reading. It is not so much that Ono undergoes a sea change whenhe leaves Mori-san but that he develops his notions from seeds sownearlier. The idea of Mori-san taking "his cue" from European art-ists and Ono's subsequent elaboration on that color palette is madeanalogous to Japan's emulation of the Great Powers using, in fact,the same social-Darwinist rhetoric deployed by them. The historicalsubtext here is Japan's attempt to make up for its late-developingstatus, namely its seizure of colonies in Korea and China prior tothe launch of the Pacific war.

If, as argued above, the novel directs attention at Ono's career,what it highlights is therefore the fit with wider developments.Instead of being a refuge from the world, art shadows it. The asso-ciative logic here suggests that Japan's Second World War aggran-dizement was in some respects emulatory. And this is connectedwith Ono's dim recognition that he was both emulatory and culpablewhen he betrayed Kuroda. What Ishiguro tries to do here is, I think,the presentation of alternatives; he tackles the seamless quality ofculturalist descriptions, something that he does in Pale View aswell. Moreover his efforts need to be contextualized against thedecade in which Artist first appeared. As a perusal of the relevantnews reports will show, this was a period when the referent "Japan"was a figure of danger within the social and political imaginary,when the general culture was awash with images of double-dealingbusiness warriors and samurais-in-suits. Where references to itseconomic arrangements were made, Japan's neomercantilist poli-cies were often portrayed as straightforward revanchism, and henceits overall image was that of a corporatist-state out to destroy "ourway of life."

In other words, this was also a period when the twin metaphorsproffered by the American anthropologist Ruth Benedict held anall-encompassing sway. Benedict's infiuential book The Chrysan-themum and The Sword was a best-seller when it was publishedin 1946. As the double metaphor in its title makes clear, Benedictoffers hyperaestheticism and militarism as timeless attributes of aposited Japanese ethnonational character. Despite the passage oftime, its perdurable infiuence can still be seen in its endorsement byBarry Lewis, who in his recent book on Ishiguro calls it a "seminal"anthropological work, "many of [whose] observations still hold true"(155). But if Benedict offers in effect the trope of paradox to explainthings—art and war belong together—Artist offers something dif-ferent, something less obscurantist and objectionable. Through theassociative logic outlined above, we might say that both planks of


Benedict's double metaphor are given a temporal dimension anddenaturalized. In this way, alternatives to purely culturalist descrip-tions are opened up. Against the grain of ethnicity-based explana-tions, we get the clarification that Japan committed itself to warfor intelligible if condemnable reasons of self-interest. Rather thantimeless attributes, we see actions located in history. To that extentthey are changeable and hence the relevance of Ono's wish that ayounger generation will "make a better go of things." Together withthe focus on the difficulties of self-understanding, the exorbitanceunderwriting essentialist tropes is also targeted, and this meansthat any recourse to prelapsarian notions needs to be rethought ifwe want to do justice to this book.

The Remains ofthe Day (1989)

The Remains of the Day tells the story of a butler named Stevenswho spends the bulk of his professional life in unquestioning ser-vice to Lord Darlington, who, at the time of the Nazi rise to powerduring the 1930s, had been a fascist sympathizer. In the name ofduty Stevens fires two young Jewish refugee girls hired as maids,spurns his dying father, and fails to realize a relationship with MissKenton, the housekeeper. Like Ishiguro's earlier novels. Remainsdeploys a recognition plot tracing Stevens's growing realization thathis life has been overwhelmed by self-deception. These hesitantapprehensions develop in the course of numerous fiashbacks as heundertakes a motorcar journey from Darlington Hall to meet MissKenton (now Mrs. Benn) in Cornwall some twenty years after sheleft Darlington's service. In the frame story set in 1956 Darlingtonhas died and the estate has been bought by an American business-man named Farraday. Ostensibly, Stevens undertakes the tripto ask Miss Kenton to rejoin the Hall to relieve a staff shortage.However, the novel suggests they had been in love and that Stevenshopes to rekindle their relationship.

Despite Stevens's use of a formal language riddled with specialpleading, Remains secures the pathos of that loss as an instance ofcontinuing pain, intensified by his failure to attend to his fatheras he lays dying. Both events occurred because Stevens chose dutyover personal feelings and responsibilities, the two key occasionscoinciding with two diplomatic conferences held at the Hall, onein 1923 and another in 1936, when Darlington had tried to getBritain's political elites to pursue pro-Germany and then profascistpolicies. On his journey, however, Stevens reexamines his idolatry ofDarlington. When he finally meets Miss Kenton and learns that hermarriage had been unhappy and that she too regrets their failureto make known their feelings for each other, Stevens's misguided


investment in an ethos of self-abrogation becomes abundantlyclear to him at the same time as he realizes that the past cannotbe retrieved. By the end of the novel, Stevens appears to appreci-ate that in internalizing a rationalization of his role, he had notonly truncated his life but also achieved stability at the expenseof conscience and principles. However, the novel's use of unreliablenarration—the fact that his insights emerge tacitly and against thegrain of a first-person account—means that the depth of his self-understanding is not reliably established.

Remains is a powerful and disturbing book. Despite or becauseof his persistent denials, it secures effectively our empathy for Ste-vens. It underscores the sense of waste, tragic in its intensity, thathe wrestles with as he reassesses the choices he made in life. Thisidea that we can unknowingly waste large portions of our lives isreinforced additionally by its structure, by the fact that it takes theform of a journal de voyage. Thus the culmination of Stevens's tripcoincides with a kind of muted epiphany. Stevens sits on a pier inWeymouth, southern England, pondering his recent meeting withMiss Kenton. The pain from that encounter brings home what helost in adhering to his professional codes. He realizes that despite hisadherence to rigid class nostrums, he was merely an auxiliary figurein an exclusivist setup. And hence we get the Sartrean moment whereStevens gives in finally to tears. On the pier he falls to talking withan ex-butler (who happens to be there on a bench). He admits that forall his faults Darlington at least "made his own mistakes," whereashe had entrusted that key responsibility to Darlington—"Really," hewonders, "what dignity is there in that?" (243)

In this way. Remains asserts Ishiguro's favorite theme, namelythe limits and difficulties of self-knowledge. Ishiguro's first two booksare set wholly or partially in Japan, and the fact that he returns tothis theme even when he switches his field of vision to Britain is sig-nificant. It underscores, I feel, the anti-Manichean sensibility under-writing his novels. Stevens's experience obviously parallels those ofOgata-San in Pale View and Ono in Artist. All three men have tocome to terms with the fact that they led self-deceiving lives; theirprivate experiences also refiect and refract major historical events.But given these parallels, what needs to be emphasized is the conti-nuity of theme between the three books, for read within the context ofan extended corpus. Remains might be said to stress similarities, notdifferences. Authorial development undercuts, it would seem, thosecommentators who tend to read Ishiguro's early works as convenientexposes of Japanese sociality—and nothing else.

Apart from the above, two other things need to be highlightedabout Remains. The first concerns its topicality. As mentioned earlier,part of its allure stems from the way it garners sympathy for Stevens.


His plight is poignant because it is linked with the demise of anentire way of life, with the evocation of a bygone era of magnificentvillas, posh parties, and high-born fin-de-sifecle elegance. Such is theimpression gleaned from any initial encounter with the book, and thisis also to say that its topicality is sometimes unappreciated. Unfor-tunately, much of the commentary on Remains fails to contextualizeit adequately against the decade in which it was published, whichmeans that its status as a condition of England novel has also beenoverlooked. I would like to address that shortcoming here.

The other feature that needs to be highlighted is its acutely self-conscious construction. In a review of Remains, Salman Rushdiecalled it "a brilliant subversion of the fictional modes from which itat first seems to descend" (244), and, expanding on his comments,I would like to draw attention to its examination of generic conven-tions. More specifically, its antipastoral and demystificatory thrustwill be elaborated.

To appreciate these two dimensions, we need to pay some atten-tion to the British cultural landscape ofthe eighties. In particular,we need an awareness ofthe identity politics proffered by conserva-tive ideologues. Among other things, they sought to characterizeorganized labor, immigrants, and the countercultural movement asa kind of incipient fifth column. These were demonized and labeled"the enemy within" so that the hegemonic notion of a homogenized,national "we" could be peddled to the public—and this was alsohow the Conservative Party in Britain sought to mobilize its his-toric voting bloc. Related to this were frequent invocations of pasthistoric triumphs, as epitomized by Margaret Thatcher's call toBritons throughout the eighties to emulate the Victorians.

As Ishiguro lucidly states in an interview, however, these areprecisely the things that Remains wishes to interrogate:

The Remains ofthe Day is not an England that I believe ever existed.. . . What I'm trying to do . . . is to actually rework a particular mythabout a certain kind of England [consisting of] sleepy, beautiful vil-lages with very polite people and butlers and people taking tea on thelawn. . . . The mythical landscape of this sort of England, to a largedegree, is harmless nostalgia. . . . The other side of this, however,is that it is used as a political tool. . . . This can be brought out bythe left or right, but usually it is the political right who say Englandwas this beautiful place before the trade unions tried to make it moreegalitarian or before the immigrants started to come or before thepromiscuous age ofthe '60s came and ruined everything, (qtd. in Vordaand Herzinger 14-15)

Elsewhere, he identifies the demystificatory, antipastoral thrustof the novel as an attempt to "rewrite P. G. Wodehouse": "I wished


to set this book in a mythical landscape, which to a certain extentresembled that mythical version of England that is peddled in thenostalgia industry at the moment. . . . I felt it was a perfectly reason-able mission on my part . . . [to] say that there is a shadowy side to it.. . . I wanted to rewrite P. G. Wodehouse" (qtd. in Kelman 73-74).

In the light of the above. Remains might be said to contest theway in which imagery of the stately-home milieu and countrysidelandscape are used as floating metaphors for a certain kind of funda-mental Englishness. Remains criticizes the unthinking venerationof a prelapsarian, organicist England because it tends to be sociallyexclusivist. As many commentators have observed, the vision of thepast proffered by the dominant conservative discourse of the periodemphasized Victorian "greatness." In a speech during the 1978-79general election campaign, Thatcher vowed to restore the appella-tion "Great" to Britain. This subsequently became a mainstay of heroratorical repertoire, and, additionally, the same concept was usedin the 1987 general election campaign, where the conservativesdeployed the slogan "putting the Great back into Britain."

But given the semantic loading of the term "Great" what isstriking is to find it doggedly anatomized in Remains. This occursin two key passages at the start of Stevens's journey when theconjoining of toponym and topography invites us to question thoseArcadian invocations, one of whose chief components was thetagging of the countryside as the true repository of a pristine,unadulterated national identity. The first passage comes duringthe evening of Stevens's first day of travel when he muses on theview of the "rolling English countryside" espied earlier from thetop of a knoll; he asks what constitutes "Great" in the appellation"Great Britain" and suggests that the answer lies in the landscape(28). More specifically, it is the "lack of obvious drama or spectaclethat sets the beauty of [the] land apart" from other more osten-sibly spectacular formations (28). At the same time, this nationalgreatness question is "akin" to something that has "caused muchdebate" in his profession, namely the "question" of what makes abutler "great" (29). A while later Stevens returns to this topic, andby now it is clear that he is trying to shore up his crumbling self-image, to convince himself that his sacrifices were not undertakenin vain. He needs, in short, to bolster his notions of vocational"greatness" (28), and it's telling then that his language betraysits own intemperance. While other countries have "manservants,"only England has "butlers"; other races "are as a breed incapable ofthe emotional restraint which only the English" can muster; theycannot "maintain a professional demeanour other than in the leastchallenging of situations"; and hence the "dignity" that Stevensvalorizes is "beyond" them (43).


What Stevens tries to justify here is his lifelong commitment to aprinciple of vocational greatness. Nevertheless, the contemporane-ous allusions are unmistakable. If, as Peter Riddell contends, theruling political vision in Britain in the eighties was "a world of Vic-torian values and Samuel Smiles" (231), Stevens obviously adheresto the tenets of Smiles's Victorian best-seller Self Help when he triesto improve his English and when he pledges to learn how to banterin order to please his new American employer. When he choosesduty over personal well-being at the two diplomatic conferences heldat the hall, he adheres to the Victorian tenet of self-denial. And infact his entire bearing and demeanor is almost a caricature of theproverbial stiff-upper-lip ethos.

But if the entire movement oi Remains points out that formality,repression and self-effacement have truncated Stevens's life, thenhis story is also a forceful interrogation of the formulations above.His super-Victorian configuration becomes, as it were, a reductio adabsurdum of those clarion calls to return to Victorian values and torestore national "greatness." To use the term deployed by Ishiguro,Stevens illustrates the "shadowy" side of such invocations. Throughhim, Ishiguro points out that certain groups have been made scape-goats for the distempers of the time. And this means that Remainsalso enjoins an expansion of the cultural and semantic perimetersof Britishness. Its call for a more inclusivist view of society wouldbe the sense in which Remains operates as a condition of Englandnovel.

Related to this aspect of the book is its critique of heritage con-sumerism. At first glance, as Rushdie suggests in the quotationabove. Remains strikes us as a conventional product of the country-house novel form; it appears to descend straightforwardly from thatgeneric mode. However, two key incidents reveal Ishiguro's warinessabout that lineage. The first involves Stevens's ritual humiliation bya houseguest for his lack of knowledge about international affairs.Despite Stevens's professionalism, Darlington colludes throughinaction in this humiliation, and thus his advocacy of decency to"German[s]" (73) is shown to be merely part of that confraternity ofdiplomatic and governing classes still drawn in Europe in the 1920sand 1930s from the old aristocracy. Inasmuch as plot and characterdevelopment traces Stevens's painful acknowledgment of the mag-nitude of this betrayal, the intellectual background of Remains is,therefore, consonant with a critique of the stately-home order. Thedesignation of a narrow sliver of culture as national heritage parexcellence is thereby prohibited.

More strikingly. Remains also opposes its own arrogation to anydiscourse that sanctifies patrician privilege. This aspect is forceful-ly established in the humorous episode where Darlington entrusts


Stevens vs ith the task of conveying to his twenty-three-year-oldgodson, Reginald Cardinal, information about human reproduc-tion, about what he calls the "facts of life" (82). Reginald's father, afriend of Darlington, has failed in this endeavor; he has requestedDarlington's help, and hence Stevens is roped in as well. Stevensultimately fails in his mission, which underlines his inexperience inthis arena. But the telling detail is that Darlington assigns Stevensthe task while clutching in his hands a copy of "Who's Who" (81).

The reference to Who's Who here is important, for with it Remainsdemonstrates an awareness, we might say, of how social reproductionoperates. Insofar as the country-house novel participates in socialreproduction when it uncritically offers "country-house England" asa distillate of national or communal life, which is to say that itperpetuates status-quo conservatism, this episode shows Remains'acute self-consciousness about its own pedigree. It demonstrates itsaversion to any discourse that might, like a copy of Who's Who,work to reproduce an elitist form of life. Metacritical in its ambit,Darlington's assignment draws a link between human reproductionand the way the country-house novel genre perpetuates patricianprivilege. Ishiguro's declared wariness about the "nostalgia indus-try" emerges most strongly here, for in effect Remains distancesitself from that lineage through an allusion deployed as a mise enabyme—it draws attention to its own conditions of possibility inorder to criticize them.

Apart from the fact that we get to hear the servant's side of thestory, the metacritical gloss above suggests that Remains is not aninnocent product of a particular generic form. Instead it mounts atrenchant critique of that form and in the process enhances its aes-thetic reach. I pointed out earlier that Ishiguro often revises the rawmaterial and the tropes available in the general culture. In Remainshe does basically the same thing but taken one step further. Heappropriates the country-house novel for his own purposes, and it isentirely characteristic, then, that the same essentially metacriticallens gets trained on other genres as well in his subsequent works.

The Unconsoled (1995)

The Unconsoled is strikingly different from Ishiguro's earlier work.Like the first three novels, it utilizes a first-person narrator whois radically unreliable. There is a shared tone of regret and mel-ancholy, but that is where the similarity ends. Long, opaque, anddisorientating, the novel is set in an unnamed central Europeantown. Its narrator, a feted English pianist named Ryder, arrives togive a classical concert. He is waylaid by a succession of townspeoplewith a host of inane demands. In surrealist fashion he lurches from


one outlandish errand to another. But everything he does is a falsestart. He doesn't complete anything because he is always off againon another errand. His inability to refuse the requests thrown athim means, moreover, that he is unable to prepare for his concert.Over the course of three days, Ryder judges musical recitals, triesto reconcile estranged families, pleads the cause of a disgracedformer conductor, and even causes a public scandal when he acci-dentally intervenes in local politics. He also serves as the guestof honor at the funeral of a complete stranger. Behind all theserequests is the omnipresent expectation that he will transform thecultural life of the city. In the same move he is expected to restorethe morale of a community gripped by a profound despair. Yet thereason for that despair and that exorbitation of his role is neverreliably established.

In the interim, odd slippages in time, place, and person keepoccurring. Ryder drives out to a mansion in the countryside andwanders around in it and is suddenly back in the hotel left behind intown. Near the beginning ofthe novel, he falls in with a woman anda child who are ostensibly strangers but who turn out, inexplicably,to be his wife, Sophie, and his son, Boris. Later in the novel Ryderand Boris stop at a coffee shop in the center of town for a snack.Ryder goes off for an interview with two journalists in the courtyardoutside. In the middle ofthe interview they go for a photo shoot, andhe eventually fetches up in a roadside truck stop apparently milesaway from town. But then the very next moment he walks through adoor at the back ofthe truck stop and is promptly back with Boris.

The elasticity characterizing the novel's geographical terrainextends to its temporal arrangement as well. Ryder's childhood friendsand university acquaintances have a disconcerting habit of poppingup all over the place, but their presence in the town is never explained.We are expected to accept that they just happen to be there, for whenRyder meets them, he never expresses astonishment. What heightensour disorientation, therefore, are such odd slippages between past andpresent, for Ryder may be lying on his hotel bed gazing at the ceiling,and yet somehow it gets transformed, assuming the contours of hisaunt's home "on the borders of England and Wales" (16).

In any event Ryder never gets around to giving his performance.Predictably as well, none of the townspeople expresses surpriseabout this. The detail is merely one of many in the book that adver-tises its inconsequentiality. At the end of the novel, Ryder fails todissipate the mysterious gloom hanging over the town, to mend itsmany broken relationships, or even to mend his own. Throughout thesojourn, he indulges in blame displacement, projecting onto Sophieresponsibility for various things. Despite repeated attempts, theirefforts at reconciliation come to naught. And thus as the novel ends.


Ryder is on his way to Helsinki, apparently choosing a nomadicexistence over meaningful familial attachments.

In my opinion, a sound understanding of The Unconsoled requiresan appreciation of the commentary that Remains attracted. Ear-lier I noted that reviewers had an idee fixe on the Japanesenessof Ishiguro's early fiction, and unfortunately, we might add thatthis tendency was carried over to Remains as well. Thus for somecritics the book's examination of the stately-home milieu was merelya dissimulation of Ishiguro's continuing interest in the question ofJapanese identity. Despite the lack of a single reference to thingsJapanese, for instance, Pico Iyer labels Remains "the most reveal-ing" among the genre of books "purporting to explain Japan to theWest" (585), the novel achieving this distinction because its por-trayal of Stevens "lights up the Japanese mind from within" (587).To Gabriele Annan, Ishiguro's first three novels are "explanations,even indictments, of Japanese-ness" (3). On the road, each of the"specimens of ordinary, warm-hearted, decent humanity" encoun-tered by Stevens are "an argument for spontaneity [and] openness,"which means that, for Annan, the "message" of Remains is its appealto national identity, its appeal to "be less Japanese, less bent ondignity . . . less restrained and controlled" (4). In similar termsDavid Gurewich is struck by Stevens's "insistence on ritual" and his"loyalty to his master that confiicts with his humanity," these being,for him, "prominent aspects of the Japanese collective psyche" (80).And finally we get the ne plus ultra of this mode of analysis with theinanity of Rocio Davis's praise for Ishiguro's "Japanese subtlety":Ishiguro "revisions Japan in a novel that is not even set in Japanbut has as its theme six unexceptional days in the life of that mostEnglish of characters, a butler"—hence the approbation (144).

The counterpart to this fixation with some ineluctable, dyed-in-the-wool Japaneseness was the astonishment over the veracity ofthe novel's portrayal of English culture. Thus Gurewich himselfconfesses that "one would never suspect" had Ishiguro publishedRemains "under an assumed Anglo name" (80). And Paul Gray isastonished at Remains's "uncanny" verisimilitude, for to him, Eng-land's culture has always been "notoriously impervious to outsidersand immigrants" (qtd. in O'Brien 798). As a result, however, thebook's critique of generic conventions was completely glossed over.As Steven Connor correctly points out, the dubious idea that "thealien eye of the Japanese immigrant writer" had disclosed "a once-present but now lost essential Englishness" appears to have gainedground (111), and from that perspective, I would add. Remainsappears to have been kitschified. Grasped in a manner directlyopposed to its primary concerns, it seems to have been transformedin some readings into a paean for a lost way of life.


There are many layers to The Unconsoled, but given the sum-mary above, one of its most important features becomes clear. Thenovel challenges, it would appear, Ishiguro's commodification as asupplier of English and Japanese authenticity. It asserts the right toaddress the universal rather than the particular, as the necessarilylengthy citation below makes clear:

If there is something I really struggle with as a writer . . . it is thiswhole question about how to make a particular setting actually takeoff into the realm of metaphor. . . . If you make it too concrete . . .people start saying, "Oh, that's what it was like in Japan at a certaintime," or, "He's saying something about Britain in the 1930s." . . . I'mtrying to find some territory, somewhere between straight realism andthat kind of out-and-out fabulism, where I can create a world that isn'tgoing to alienate or baffle readers . . . [that] isn't documentary or . . .isn't history or . . . isn't journalism. I'm asking you to look at this worldthat I've created as a reflection of a world that all kinds of people livein. (qtd. in Vorda and Herzinger 16-17)

Together with the epigraph at the head of this essay, these com-ments suggest that The Unconsoled's aggressive push into the realmof Kafkaesque expressionism comes with a purpose. The moveunderscores Ishiguro's determination to circumvent the literal-mindedness that had plagued the reception of his earlier works. Headopts in Ryder the pattern of unconsummated actions, false starts,and general paralysis of will typifying Kafka's protagonists in orderto evade the culturalist nostrums underwriting that reception. TheGerman critic Theodor Adorno observed that in Kafka's fiction,"each sentence says 'interpret me' " (246), and in that respect wemight say The Unconsoled strives after the same thing. It dissolvesgeography in Kafkaesque fashion to elicit closer attention to thesubstance of its argument and its design; it gets rid of setting sothat the symbolic and the allegorical can he accentuated.

Such a reading allows us to make sense of two things apparent inThe Unconsoled. It explains first of all the self-referential undertonesarising from what is arguahly its most conspicuous feature, namelythat it is one long delineation of an artist failing in what he sets outto do. It suggests that at one level the novel is a wry self-burlesque,a parodic rendition of Ishiguro's own experiences of artistic emas-culation. In that interpretation the telling detail—mentioned oncein passing—would be the moment where Ryder tells Sophie, "I stillhave more trouble with French than I do with Japanese. Really. Iget by in Tokyo better than in Paris" (249).

Reading The Unconsoled like this also sheds light on those sec-tions where a pastiche of Remains takes place. It explains whyThe Unconsoled takes a special delight in defiating expectations.


in disappointing those who wanted it to be, as it were, a secondhelping of kitsch. And in fact it makes fun of these expectations.Thus Ryder's first encounter in the town is with Gustav, a hotelporter who launches into a lengthy declamation on his luggage-handling policy. The parody of Stevens extends to Gustav's accountof his actions following the death of a pet hamster belonging to hisdaughter. His inability to express solicitude as his daughter liescrying in her room recalls Stevens's inaction following the deathof Miss Kenton's aunt. In turn, the masochistic inflections of suchdeep-set affective ineptitude culminates in an extraordinary setpiece in which, together with other members of an association ofhotel porters, Gustav stages a dance-cum-weight-lifting displaythat eventually kills him. But Gustav's death also recalls the deathof Stevens's father, apparently from overwork; and even his porters'association appears to be a send-up of the "Hayes Society" (31) ofbutlers eulogized in Remains.

But beyond the self-burlesque and the assertion of authorialautonomy, there is also the astonishing innovations introduced byIshiguro. The attempt to evade culturalist sequestration gives, thatis, only part ofthe picture, for what The Unconsoled provides is alsoa whole new approach to plot and to characterization. It provides inthis regard an alternative way to write a novel, one that Ishigurocalls "appropriation": "This way of telling a story was something I'vebeen wanting to do for some time.... I wanted to have someone justturn up in some landscape where he would meet people who are notliterally parts of himself but are echoes of his past, harbingers ofhis future and projections of his fears about what he might become"(qtd. in Steinberg 105). Put another way, "This character appropri-ates people, the people he runs into stand for various parts of hislife. They exist in their own right but they are also being used to tellthe narrator's story. . . . It's just a different way of telling someone'slife and if people don't grasp it the book will seem to be directionlessor disparate" (Smith 17).

In the light of the above, the nature of Ryder's interaction withthe townspeople becomes clear, for in doppelganger-infiected fash-ion it seems they are telling the story of his life. They "exist in theirown right" and also "stand for various parts of his life": Stephan,a young musician whose recital Ryder evaluates, is a version of theyoung Ryder trying desperately to win the approval of his parents.Brodsky, the disgraced drunk conductor whom Ryder fails to reha-bilitate, is a projection of his deepest fears. Sophie and Boris areRyder's wife and son, but they are also the daughter and grandsonrespectively of Gustav. And, additionally, Boris's loneliness helps toelucidate Ryder's unhappy childhood. In the same way that Sachikoilluminates Etsuko's dilemma in Pale View, the various "echoes" of


Ryder help to weave in, that is, the background to his struggles.The recognition plots of Ishiguro's first three novels always containmoments where the protagonist sees himself in another character.So what he does is simply to multiply those moments. He gives us a"recognition" plot with a twist.

In effect, Ishiguro does something intriguing and puzzling. Itis a truism that the placement of flashbacks is one of the mostdifficult parts of a writer's job. The expectation first of all is thatbackground details will he weaved in unobtrusively. Where fiash-hacks occur they should not impede the forward momentum of thestory. But in peopling his novel with doppelgangers, Ishiguro hasalso ohviated the need for flashbacks. Memory comes alive and isarticulated together with the narrative present. The conventionalsignposts hetween the two are eliminated so that we get purelyimagistic transitions hetween them. That narrative logic permits,among other things, Ryder's "realis [ation]," as he peers into a homein an estate he visits with Boris, that he is looking at the "parlour"of a house that he had lived in long ago in Manchester (214). In thesame manner Ryder's hotel room morphs into something completelydifferent, and the town center can be reached from the hack of atruck stop. Ishiguro hasically renders time as space.

As a result, plot also operates in a unique manner. Anita Brooknersaid in a review of The Unconsoled that the "the logic of [its] procedureis never in douht" (40), and, expanding on her comment, we mightadd that its plot is driven by a kind of oneiric or associative logic. Agood example here would he the way in which the storyline takes upRyder's recollection of his aunt's home as he gazes at the ceiling ofhis hotel room. Later in the night, Ryder is awakened by the hotelmanager, Hoffman. Without explanation, Hoffman drives Ryder tothe previously mentioned country mansion. Hoffman reveals duringthe journey that he likes to redecorate rooms. His favorite hohhy is,in fact, the renovation of hotel rooms to "match" the "vision" in his"head"; he confesses that he is "ohsessed" with redecoration once hesees "the potential of a particular room," and then he asks if thismight be a "defect" in his "nature" (121). What we get, as such, is atrain of events linked by the logic of association. Ryder's "flashhack"as he gazes at the ceiling of his hotel room develops into Hoffman'sconfession that he likes to redecorate them, and this in turn makesplausihle the journey to a country mansion (a room "writ large" asit were). To use a musical analogy, a motif is played, and from thathrief melodic or rhythmic formula, longer passages are developed;the plot repeats these motifs or flgures in a different key.

Without exaggeration, it has to he said that all this is quiteextraordinary. While the account ahove might give the impressionthat The Unconsoled is systematic and orderly, a large part of the


writerly pleasure we get as readers stems from the surprising per-mutations that Ishiguro offers using this new emplotment technique.In stressing how we appropriate others to tell our life stories, Ishig-uro suggests that the defense mechanisms of the ego—repression,denial, projection, introjection—are always in full play. He developshis favorite theme concerning the limits of self-knowledge. But healso does this with an extraordinary array of technical innovations.He offers us a fictional world with its own unique rules, and thus healso extends the range ofthe high-modernist European novel.

When We Were Orphans (2000)

When We Were Orphans tells the story of a celebrated detectivenamed Christopher Banks and his efforts to unravel the mysteryof his parents' disappearance in old Shanghai. It begins in Londonin the 1930s but soon circles back to Banks's expatriate childhoodin Shanghai's International Settlement in the early years of thecentury. There are ructions at home because his mother is a vocifer-ous opponent of the opium trade, from which his father's companyobtains its profits. First bis fatber and tben bis motber disappear,kidnapped it seems and probably murdered by sbadowy figures con-nected to tbe trade. Young Cbristopber is repatriated to tbe care ofan aunt in Sbropsbire. He attends scbool and university and decidesto become a detective. He forms a tentative liaison witb a womannamed Sarab Hemmings, an orpban like bimself. After setting upan office in London, be also begins to notcb up some notable inves-tigative successes.

Despite increasing fame, bowever, London society bolds littleattraction for Banks, and in 1937 be sets off for Sbangbai for wbatwill be bis biggest case yet. Witb tbe narrative taking an increas-ingly surrealistic turn, be moves from tbe glitter of tbe Sbangbainigbtclubs to bis former bome in tbe settlement to tbe slum warrensin tbe Cbinese quarter of tbe city. Against all odds, be believestbat bis parents are still beld captive in an abandoned bouse in tbequarter. As be makes bis way tbere be finds bimself caugbt in tbeconfused warfare between tbe Cbinese communists, Cbiang Kai-sbek's army and tbe invading Japanese. In tbe sbell of a bouse befinds and rescues bis cbildbood friend, Akira, now a soldier in tbeJapanese army, and tben, after furtber meanderings, tbey eventu-ally find tbe bouse and enter it.

As we bave long realized, bowever, Banks bas been living a debili-tating fantasy life. Instead of bis parents, tbey find a young Cbinesegirl, ber family lying dead beside ber from tbe sbelling, wbo pleadswitb tbem to revive ber injured dog, upon wbicb be breaks down sob-bing. Despite taking on tbe mantle of a novel of adventure, tberefore.


tbe narrative focus is beavily psycbological, wbere against tbe grainof Banks's first-person narration, Isbiguro reveals bow be bad, as itwere, mummified bis cbildbood to cope witb tbe trauma of parentalloss. It appears tbat Banks bad embellisbed tbe bostage "rescue"games (113) devised and played witb Akira in tbe montbs followingbis fatber's disappearance into a kind of alternative universe, so tbatas readers we get a purcbase on tbe wounds of cbildbood as tbey driveand distort adultbood. Tbe psycbological climax of tbe novel is tbustbe episode wbere Banks enters tbe abandoned bouse, for witb it betakes tbe first step toward confronting tbose deceptions.

Subsequently, tbe mystery of bis parents' disappearance is clearedup in a key denouement cbapter tbat is structurally analogous to tbedisclosure scene of a detective novel. From "Uncle Pbilip," a man onceconsidered to be a family friend. Banks learns tbat bis fatber badnot converted to tbe antiopium cause, tbat be bad not sabotaged biscompany's sbipments and fallen victim to ensuing criminal intrigue,as Banks bad long believed. Instead, be bad eloped witb bis mistressand bad died two years later from typboid in Malaya. His putativekidnapping was merely a tale concocted by Banks's motber to conceala painful event from bim. More importantly. Banks learns tbat intbe course of ber antiopium campaigning, bis motber bad crossed aCbinese warlord wbo planned to muscle in on tbe trade. In response,tbe warlord bad kidnapped ber witb tbe belp of Pbilip, and later sbebad reacbed a "financial arrangement" (313) witb ber captor so tbatBanks would be ricbly provided for. As a result, bowever, sbe suffersenslavement, bumiliation, and concubinage.

In tbis way tbe novel reveals itself to be a variation on CbarlesDickens's Great Expectations (1861), a development explicitly sign-posted in Banks's encounter witb a Japanese colonel during bis trektbrougb tbe slum warrens, wbo declares tbat be is "especially fond ofyour Dickens" (296). In Dickens's novel tbe bero, Pip, is rocked by tbediscovery tbat tbe patron responsible for bis ascension to gentility isnot tbe elderly gentlewoman Miss Havisbam but tbe ex-convict Mag-witcb, and similarly in Orphans Banks learns tbat bis real benefactoris tbe warlord Wang Ku and not bis aunt. As Pbilip puts it, Banks'sscbooling and bis place in London society are all owed to Wang Kuor ratber to bis motber's "sacrifice" (313). And tbis means tbat tbecbief revelation of tbe denouement cbapter—tbe novel's penultimateone—is of a life built on drug money, on tawdry spoils.

Tbe final cbapter recounts Banks's reunion witb bis motber in aHong Kong sanatorium in tbe fifties. Sbe bad survived tbe anarcbyof tbe warlord era, invasion, war, and revolution but bad lost bermind, somebow fetcbing up in an asylum in Cbungking before beingsbipped to Hong Kong wben Cbina closed its borders. In a quietlymoving coda Banks fails to penetrate tbrougb ber mental fog but


experiences a kind of compensatory epiphany. He realizes that shehad always loved him and that her love had not been conditionedon him performing heroics. Banks's search for his parents is some-times couched as an oddly monumentalized desire to save the world,to fight "encroaching wickedness" (31), and to "combat evil" (22),and now it becomes clear that these were the consequence of thetrauma he had to endure.

At the same time the novel's romantic interest is tidied up. In theinterim between their tentative courtship and Banks's decision toreturn to Shanghai, Sarah had married an ex-diplomat and had setoff for the city as well. Sarah's husband ill-treats her, and after rees-tablishing ties there, Sarah and Banks decide to elope. When Banksfails to make their agreed rendezvous—he is off searching for hisparents—Sarah sets off alone for Macao, where she meets the manshe considers the true love of her life. Faced with the loss. Banksconsoles himself with the thought that, in setting off for Macao,Sarah too had been searching for her parents, that their fate wasalways to "face tbe world as orphans, chasing tbrough long years tbesbadows of vanished parents" (335-36). Like Stevens in Remains,Banks seeks reconciliation witb tbe mistakes of bis life. But unlikeStevens, be is accorded a more rejuvenatory denouement; be gets toenjoy a degree of solace in an adopted daugbter, Jennifer, also anorpban, witb wbom be bas a close and abiding relationsbip.

As tbe foregoing makes clear, tbe two issues crucial to any eluci-dation of Orphans are its rewriting of Dickens and its deploymentof tbe detective narrative form. Wbile its use of a stilted, manneredlanguage ecboes, as one reviewer puts it, "tbe stiff world of 1930sdetective fiction" ("Back to Basics" 12), tbe fact tbat Isbiguro glossesover tbe details of Banks's work suggests tbat it is not a conven-tional crime caper. A striking feature of Orphans, in fact, is tbeway it defies genre conventions. Despite bis gumsboe appellation.Banks never gets to exblbit ratiocinative brilliance or to engage inintricate spadework. We are told tbat be gets increasingly famousas be solves bigger cases. References are made to "tbe Roger Parkermurder" (31) and "tbe Studley Grange business" (32). But tbe dis-tinctive readerly pleasures of an ortbodox detective tbriller areconspicuous by tbeir absence.

Given tbat Orphans rewrites Great Expectations to bigbligbt tbetainted provenance of Banks's wealtb, we migbt say tbat it operatesat one level as an indictment of tbe opium trade. It belps to restorea notable bistorical trespass to our cultural arcbive. And, inter-estingly, tbat aspect of its design did bave an immediate impact,for wben tbe novel first came out, tbe London-based trading groupJobn Swire & Co. quickly took offense, accusing Isbiguro and bispublishers of blackening its name. Orphans bad used tbe name of


its former Sbangbai subsidiary, Butterfield and Swire, to designatetbe company employing Banks's fatber, and bence it bad writtento Isbiguro's publisber, Faber and Faber, expressing its outrage.Eventually, an "amicable settlement" was reacbed sucb tbat allfuture editions of Orphans would replace tbe disputed title witban entirely fictitious alternative—Morganbrook & Byatt—but bytben tbis aspect of tbe book bad already been beavily underscored(Milmo).

But more tban tbat, Isbiguro's rewriting of Dickens needs to beunderstood, I feel, in tbe ligbt of a distinction between tbe nine-teentb-century novel and its modern-day epigones. Isbiguro turnsto Dickens because it offers, I tbink, a different cosmography, adifferent take on man's relation witb tbe world and witb society. ForDickens, we need to remember, injustice was typically representedas an occurrence in a social matrix, one tbat was still improvable.Oddness and eccentricity of tbe kind tbat Banks exhibits in spadeswere treated sympatbetically by Dickens as evidence of an implicitand sometimes explicit recommendation tbat society at large sbouldalso sbow sympatby. Tbe outcast and tbe odd and tbe orpbans oftbe world could still at some point be gatbered into tbe extendedembrace of tbe (social) family. And it is in tbis respect, tberefore,tbat Dickens's David Copperfield (1850) presents itself as a liter-ary precursor of Orphans. Botb books cbart tbe efforts made byorpbans—tbey're filled witb tbem—to find tbeir way in tbe world.

Witb tbe fiction tbat comes later, bowever, tbat cosmograpby beginsto cbange, so tbat tbe convictions tbat tbe nineteentb-century novelstill barbored (for instance in tbe work of Jane Austen and GeorgeEliot) are no longer available. In tandem it seems concerns aboutanomie and alienation take center stage. Tbe realization is tbat ourbasic emotional and spiritual needs are no longer comprebended nornourished by society. And bence tbe plangency tbat suffuses tbe workof, say, D. H. Lawrence or a novel sucb as E. M. Forster's HowardsEnd, wbicb begins witb tbe epigrapb "only connect. . ."

Tbis perbaps explains tbe enduring popularity of Dickens in tbecultural Zeitgeist. But in tbe same way I tbink Dickens's trademarksentimentality finds its way into Orphans because of tbat enjoinmentto establisb deeper connections between self and otber. At one pointin tbeir wanderings tbrougb tbe slum warrens, for instance, Akiratells Banks tbat "Wben we nostalgic, we remember. A world bettertban tbis world we discover wben we grow [up]" (282, sic). In anearlier episode Akira quotes a Japanese monk to tbe effect tbat cbil-dren are tbe "twine" tbat keep togetber tbe "slats" of a window-blind,tbat tbey bind togetber, "not only a family, but tbe wbole world" (73).And again it is striking tbat tbe Japanese colonel responsible for tbeDickens allusion also quotes from tbe works of an ancient Japanese


"court lady," lamenting that "our childhood becomes like a foreignland once we have grown" (297).

At its deepest level then Orphans is about such connections,about the need for them. Childhood is seen as the embodiment ofsomething vital we lose when we grow up, of that instinct, whichis usually found only among the young and the eccentric, to estab-lish an immediate and vital connection between self and other. AsIshiguro explains it, the orphan metaphor in the title "refers tothat moment in our lives when we come out of the sheltered bubbleof childhood and discover that the world is not the cosy place thatwe had previously been taught to believe. . . . Even when we becomeadults, something of this disappointment, I think, remains"; Banksrepresents a naive and innocent part of us that wants, accordingly,"to go back, to fix things" (qtd. in Mackenzie 17). The assertionin the title that we are, all of us, orphans is therefore linked tothat imperative to "fix things," for as Ishiguro adds, there is "noth-ing wrong with nostalgia. . . . It is a much maligned emotion. TheEnglish don't like it, under-rate it, because it harks back to empiredays and to guilt about the empire. But nostalgia is the emotionalequivalent of idealism. You use memory to go back to a place betterthan the one you find yourself in. I am trying to give nostalgia abetter name" (qtd. in Mackenzie 17).

One of the strengths of Orphans is the way it gets us to investin the libidinal dynamic of Banks's search for his parents, of hisdesire to fight "encroaching wickedness" (31) and to "combat evil"(22). Ishiguro's wager appears to be that, by so doing, the novel canget us to grasp a slice of the (economic) logic connecting metropoli-tan society and what lies outside its everyday consciousness, to movefrom the rarefied world ofthe London social set into the urban purga-tory of a remote slum quarter blighted by poverty. In the process thenarrative acquires quasi-allegorical significance. It seeks to enlargeour vital sympathies and imaginative capacities, our sense of whatfellow-feeling amounts to. If The Unconsoled gives us the self-alien-ated urbanite of Kafkaesque derivation. Orphans explores an alter-native moral and spiritual terrain. In his earlier novels Ishiguro setshimself a largely "negative" task. In essence he trains a metacriticallens on the tropes and genres of the general culture. In Orphansthe same thing happens with detective fiction, but a more "positive"development also occurs, where surprisingly it might seem Ishiguroasserts against the grain of an all-embracing Kulturpessimus thatsociety can be sympathetic, that it is still improvable. The melancholythat suffuses his fiction is still there, but this desire to "give nostalgiaa better name" is definitely a new turn.

In a critique of the novels undertaken before the publication ofOrphans, Sheng-mei Ma took Ishiguro to task for writing what he


calls "universalist parables" (74). It was all very well him highlight-ing the difficulties of self-understanding through protagonists suchas Stevens and Ryder, but, as a result, Ishiguro also fails to delin-eate his position within British sociality, which is to say his posi-tion as "an Asian minority living in the West" (81). As my accountshows, however, Ishiguro operates on a wider canvass, or, at anyrate, a different one. He offers a cosmography that is still recogniz-ably modernist and Kantian, where the appeal to the "universal" isnot immediately parsed as guilty or as stillborn from inception. Inrewriting Dickens as detective fiction, he draws together the emotiveand the ratiocinative realms, with memory (nostalgia) providing thecatalyst to initiate a remorseless dissatisfaction with the present onthe grounds of some remembered plenitude. In this way Ishiguroasserts that the imagination is the source of the good, and that artcan offer that.

The implication in all this is that a writer's job is in some respectsa metacritical one, his function to cast a jaundiced eye over certaincultural forms—the country-house novel, the high-modernist Euro-pean novel, the detective novel—to highlight their depredations andtheir embedded Utopian impulses, to perform something akin toideologikritik. In the process he also helps to extend our intellectualand aesthetic frames of reference, allowing us to see the world inall its complexity.

From The Unconsoled onward Ishiguro also appears to havefound his voice. What began as an attempt to evade culturalistsequestration grew into something more, an innovative ontologicaland fictional terrain that is replicated in the surrealist tenor ofcertain plot sequences in Orphans. Among them, we have Banks'sinterminable trek through the slum quarter where he finds Akiraand meets the previously mentioned Japanese colonel. Taken as awhole this evocation of a world uneasily poised between the literaland the solipsistic clearly contains a key hermeneutic function forIshiguro. It plumbs the depths of memory for succor and relief,but it also contains the conditions of possibility of a transcendentfuture—it opens the doors to that. Prediction in art is an inherentlyrisky business, but I would venture to say that these concerns willcontinue to feature strongly in Ishiguro's work.

Works Cited

Adorno, Theodor. Prisms. Trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber. London:Neville Spearman, 1967.

Annan, Gabriele. "On the High Wire." Rev. of A Pale View of Hills, AnArtist of the Floating World, and The Remains of the Day, by KazuoIshiguro. New York Review of Books 1 December 1989: 3-4.


"Back to Basics." Rev. of When We Were Orphans, by Kazuo Ishiguro.Economist Review 15 April 2000: 12.

Benedict, Ruth. The Chrysanthemum, and the Sword. 1946. Boston:Houghton Mifflin, 1989.

Brandmark, Wendy. Contemporary Writers: Kazuo Ishiguro. London:British Council, 1988.

Brennan, Timothy. At Home in the World: Cosmopolitanism Now.Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1997.

Brookner, Anita. "A Superb Achievement." Rev. of The Unconsoled, byKazuo Ishiguro. Spectator 24 June 1995: 40-41.

Bryson, Bill. "Between Two Worlds." New York Times Magazine 29April 1990: 38, 40, 44, 80.

Chisholm, Anne. "Lost Worlds of Pleasure." Rev. of A;i Artist oftheFloating World, by Kazuo Ishiguro. Times Literary Supplement 14February 1986: 162.

Connor, Steven. The English Novel in History. London: Routledge,1996.

Davis, Rocio G. "Imaginary Homelands Revisited in the Novels ofKazuo Ishiguro." Miscelanea 15 (1994): 139-54.

Gurewich, David. "Upstairs, Downstairs." Rev. of The Remains oftheDay, by Kazuo Ishiguro. New Criterion 8.4 (1989): 77-80.

Ishiguro, Kazuo. An Artist ofthe Floating World. London: Faber andFaber, 1986; New York: Putnam, 1986.

—. "A Family Supper." The Penguin Book of Modern British ShortStories. Ed. Malcolm Bradbury. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988.434-42.

—. A Pale View of Hills. London: Faber and Faber, 1982; New York:Putnam, 1982.

—. The Remains of the Day. London: Faber and Faber, 1989; NewYork: Knopf, 1989.

—. The Unconsoled. London: Faber and Faber, 1995; New York:Knopf, 1995.

—. When We Were Orphans. London: Faber and Faber, 2000; NewYork: Knopf, 2000.

Iyer, Pico. "Waiting upon History." Rev. of The Remains ofthe Day, byKazuo Ishiguro. Partisan Review 58.3 (1991): 585-89.

Jaggi, Maya. "Dreams of Freedom." Guardian 29 April 1995: 28.Kelman, Suanne. "Ishiguro in Toronto." The Brick Reader. Ed. Linda

Spalding and Michael Ondaatje. Toronto: Coach House Press,1991. 71-77.

Lewis, Barry. Kazuo Ishiguro. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2000.Ma, Sheng-mei. "Kazuo Ishiguro's Persistent Dream for Postethnic-

ity: Performance in Whiteface." Post Identity 2.1 (1999): 71-88.Mackenzie, Suzie, "Between Two Worlds." Guardian Weekend 25

March 2000: 10-11, 13-14, 17.


Mason, Gregory. "An Interview with Kazuo Ishiguro." ContemporaryLiterature 30 (1989): 334-47.

Milmo, Cahal. "We Were Never Opium Importers, Insists Firm Namedin Ishiguro Novel." Independent 1 June 2000. <http://enjoyment.independent.co.uk>.

O'Brien, Susie. "Serving a New World Order: Postcolonial Politics inKazuo Ishiguro's The Remains ofthe Day." Modern Fiction Studies42 (1996): 787-806.

Riddell, Peter. The Thatcher Government. Oxford: Blackwell, 1985.Rorty, Richard. "Consolation Prize." Rev. of The Unconsoled, by Kazuo

Ishiguro. Village Prize Literary Supplement Octoher 1995: 13.Rushdie, Salman. Imaginary Homelands. London: Granta, 1991.Shaffer, Brian. Understanding Kazuo Ishiguro. Columbia: U of South

Carolina P, 1998.Smith, Julia Llewellyn. "A Novel Taste of Criticism." Rev. of The

Unconsoled, by Kazuo Ishiguro. Times 3 May 1995: 17.Steinberg, Sybil. "Kazuo Ishiguro: 'A Book about Our World.'" Rev.

of The Unconsoled, by Kazuo Ishiguro. Publishers Weekly 18 Sep-tember 1995: 105-06.

Vorda, Allan, and Kim Herzinger. "Stuck on the Margins: An Inter-view with Kazuo Ishiguro." Face to Face: Interviews with Contem-porary Novelists. Ed. Allan Vorda. Houston: Rice UP, 1993. 1-36.

Wood, James. "Ishiguro in the Underworld." Guardian 5 May 1995: 5.

A Kazuo Ishiguro Checklist

Novels

A Pale View of Hills. London: Faber and Faber, 1982; New York:Putnam, 1982.

An Artist ofthe Floating World. London: Faber and Faber, 1986; NewYork: Putnam, 1986.

The Remains ofthe Day. London: Faber and Faber, 1989; New York:Knopf, 1989.

The Unconsoled. London: Faber and Faber, 1995; New York: Knopf,1995.

When We Were Orphans. London: Faber and Faber, 2000; New York:Knopf, 2000.

Never Let Me Go. Yew York: Knopf, 2005.

Short Stories

"A Family Supper." Firebird 2. Ed. T. J. Binding. Harmondsworth:Penguin, 1983. 121-31. Rpt. The Penguin Book of Modern BritishShort Stories. Ed. Malcolm Bradbury. Harmondsworth: Penguin,1988. 434-42.

"Getting Poisoned." Introduction 7: Stories by New Writers. London:Faber and Faber, 1981. 38-51.

"A Strange and Sometimes Sadness." Introduction 7: Stories by NewWriters. London: Faber and Faber, 1981. 13-27.

"Waiting for J." Introduction 7: Stories by New Writers. London: Faberand Faber, 1981. 28-37.

"Summer after the War." Granta 7 (1983): 119-37.

Screenplays

The Gourmet. Granta 43 (1993): 89-127. Originally broadcast in theUK by Channel 4. 8 May 1986. Dir. Michael Whyte, prod. AnnSkinner (Skreba/Spectre).

A Profile of Arthur J. Mason. Unpublished manuscript. Originallybroadcast in the UK by Channel 4. 18 October 1984. Dir. MichaelWhyte, prod. Anne Skinner (Skreba/Spectre).

Nonfiction

"In Conversation with Timothy Mo." Fiction Magazine 1.4 (1982):48-50.

KAZUO ISHIGURO CHECKLIST 115

"Bomb Culture." Guardian 8 August 1983: 9.Introduction. Snow Country and Thousand Cranes. By Yasunari

Kawabata. Trans. Edward G. Seidensticker. Harmondsworth:Penguin, 1986. 1-3.

Letter to Salman Rushdie. The Rushdie Letters: Freedom to Speak,Freedom to Write. Ed. Steve MacDonogh. London: Brandon, 1993.79-80.

"There Was a Liberating Feeling." Guardian 28 November 2000: 5.

kazuo ishiguro - wordpress.com · kazuo ishiguro wai-chew sim "i sometimes feel that if i had...

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