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v

c on t en t s

list of illustrations viii

list of abbreviations ix

preface xbrian w. shaffer

acknowledgements xiii

contributors xiv

introduction: ‘it’s good manners, really’ – kazuo ishiguro and the ethics of empathy

sebastian groes and barry lewis 1

part i c r i t i ca l overv iews

1. kazuo ishiguro’s not-too-late modernismpatricia waugh 13

2. the pedagogics of liminality: rites of passage in the work of kazuo ishiguro

victor sage 31

3. lost and found: on the japanese translations of kazuo ishiguro

motoyuki shibata 46

4. ‘one word from you could alter the course of everything’: discourse and identity in kazuo ishiguro’s fiction

krystyna stamirowska 54

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part i i the ear ly, ‘ japanese’ , works

5. ‘putting one’s convictions to the test’: kazuo ishiguro’s an artist of the floating world in japan

motoko sugano 69

6. ‘cemeteries are no places for young people’: children and trauma in the early novels of kazuo

ishigurocaroline bennett 82

part i i i the remains of the day

7. ‘i can’t even say i made my own mistakes’: the ethics of genre in kazuo ishiguro’s the remains

of the daymeghan marie hammond 95

8. novelistic practice and ethical philosophy in kazuo ishiguro’s the remains of the day and

never let me golydia r. cooper 106

9. kazuo ishiguro’s the remains of the day: working through england’s traumatic past as a critique

of thatcherismchristine berberich 118

part iv the unconso led

10. into the labyrinth: kazuo ishiguro’s surrealist poetics in the unconsoled

jeannette baxter 133

11. ‘waiting for the performance to begin’: kazuo ishiguro’s musical imagination in the

unconsoled and nocturnesgerry smyth 144

12. ‘into ever stranger territories’: kazuo ishiguro’s the unconsoled and minor literature

tim jarvis 157

vi contents

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part v when we were orphans

13. ‘in the end it has to shatter’: the ironic doubleness of kazuo ishiguro’s when we were orphans

christopher ringrose 171

14. ‘shanghaied’ into service: double binds in when we were orphans

alyn webley 184

part v i never le t me go

15. the concertina effect: unfolding kazuo ishiguro’s never let me gobarry lewis 199

16. ‘something of a lost corner’: kazuo ishiguro’s landscapes of memory and east anglia in never let me go

sebastian groes 211

17. ‘this is what we’re supposed to be doing, isn’t it?’: scientific discourse in kazuo ishiguro’s never let me go

liani lochner 225

18. kazuo ishiguro’s never let me go and ‘outsider science fiction’andy sawyer 236

the new seriousness: kazuo ishiguro in conversation with sebastian groes 247

bibliography 265

index 280

contents vii

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i n t r odu c t i on : ‘ i t ’s good manne r s , r ea l l y ’ – kazuo i s h i gu ro and t he

e t h i c s o f empa thyseba s t i an g roe s and ba r r y l ew i s

Kazuo Ishiguro is one of the most accomplished and celebrated writers of our time. He has produced a body of best-selling work that receives consistent praise from both academic and broadsheet critics whilst appealing to a global readership. At the age of five Ishiguro arrived in the United Kingdom as a Japanese immigrant, and his work combines his unusual perspective and fine intellectual acuity to portray a wide variety of places, characters and concerns, particularly exploring the effects of class, ethnicity, nationhood, place and morality, as well as the issues surrounding artistic representation itself. He was marked out as an extraordinarily gifted graduate of the University of East Anglia’s MA in Creative Writing, and his first two, ‘Japanese’ works pointed to the emergence of a major writing talent in the early 1980s. His work was included twice in Granta magazine’s ‘Best of Young British Novelists’ list (in 1983 and 1993); his work has been translated into more than thirty languages; he has won many literary prizes; and all but one of his works has been nominated for the prestigious Booker Prize, which he won for The Remains of the Day (1989), a modern classic. This novel was adapted into an Oscar-winning blockbuster, and the adaptation of Never Let Me Go (2005) into an equally successful film further underlines the appeal of Ishiguro’s work to extraordinarily wide audiences.

Although primarily a novelist in the mould of classic writers of the humanist tradition, Ishiguro has also written across genres and for other media. After declaring that he uses ‘the short story form as a way to work out ideas for [his] novels’, he surprised his readers with a cycle of interconnected stories, Nocturnes (2009).1 Ishiguro has also writ-ten a number of teleplays and screenplays for films, including James

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2 introduction

Ivory’s The White Countess (2005), and song lyrics for jazz singer Stacey Kent’s album Breakfast on the Morning Tram (2007), which continue to underscore that, in Barry Lewis’s words, ‘the concepts of dislocation and homelessness . . . are versatile tools for exploring the richness of Ishiguro’s writings’.2 This diversity and range of his writing was further demonstrated in the surreal masterpiece and homage to Kafka, The Unconsoled (1995). Never Let Me Go is a stunning affirmation of his abil-ity to think about ethical dilemmas without compromising the art of storytelling.

The contributions to this volume of criticism suggest that the power of Ishiguro’s fiction lies in its ability to make us care about the world, about other people, about ourselves. The carefully crafted narratives invite us to invest our time and emotions in his fictional worlds and characters. This ethical imperative is Ishiguro’s signature. We do not just feel for the fictional characters, but we are also impelled to speak on behalf of them, however different from us they appear to be. Victor Sage stresses the role of the reader in this process: ‘despite, or perhaps because of this absence, its cruelty and pathos stand out and the reader is obliged to supply the emotions’. Think of Ono, the disgraced Japanese painter of An Artist of the Floating World (1986), whose sly, self-important understanding of himself is quashed by his daughter Etsuko; or of the butler Stevens, in The Remains of the Day, whose barely acknowledged realization that he has wasted his life in the service of an undeserving lord comes too late; or of Kathy H. and her fellow clones in Never Let Me Go, whose terrible predicament forces us to reflect upon our own humanity and respond with an outcry of injustice. They are not necessarily likeable characters, but Ishiguro’s craftsmanship transfigures our imaginative response to them and provokes a human, sympathetic response. As Motoyuki Shibata argues in his chapter, it is the protago-nists’ failure of empathy that makes Ishiguro’s work engaging: ‘yet in spite of all these distances, or possibly because of them, we are moved; Ishiguro’s characters’ very inability to connect emotionally with others or with themselves makes the . . . books emotionally powerful. That is the real Ishiguro magic’.

Authors write with what creative writing students would call an ‘Internal Judge’ or an ‘Ideal Reader’ looking over their shoulder; what characterizes Ishiguro is his sensitivity to the variety of his readers. As he put it in an interview: ‘I should talk to people in a way that they understand. If you’re talking to someone who just flew in from China or Rome you will talk to them in a slightly different way than to someone who has grown up alongside you because you know they’re not going to get the same cultural references. It’s good manners, really’.3 Ishiguro’s


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the ethics of empathy 3

work reduces references specific to place and culture to make his narra-tives ‘universal’, yet his reference to ‘good manners’ does not simply refer to etiquette or decorum but to his work’s profound engagement with moral questions. There is also the sense that Ishiguro’s own aware-ness of his status as a famous writer generates a responsibility towards his audiences. In the interview featured in this volume, he states:

I feel a certain kind of relationship with my readership. There is a readership out there that will follow you into all sorts of interesting places. Particularly today, there is this highly sophisticated mass-readership out there. . . . They’re not intimidated by strange things: they just don’t like boring, pretentious self-indulgence. There’s a readership out there hungry for new adventures. (p. 261)

Ishiguro trusts his readers, and we can trust him. Echoing the feeling of many readers, Haruki Murakami notes: ‘in all my years of reading Ishiguro, he had never disappointed me or left me doubting him’.4 It is this reciprocal awareness that makes moral agents of him and us. As with other authors, Ishiguro is aware of the contradictions and ambigui-ties of modern life, but rather than subscribing to the uncertainty, parti-ality and relativity in our understanding of ourselves and the world, he imbues his characters with the sense that their acts and choices do matter. Victor Sage therefore notes that Ishiguro’s writing has ‘a moral and ideological force that gives the work of this novelist a special place in the post-war novel’.

Ishiguro exploits several narrative techniques that regulate our emotional and intellectual engagement with his characters towards the practice of an ethics of empathy. From classic Greek tragedy, he draws his own version of dramatic irony: we have more knowledge and insight than the often self-deluding narrators, which makes us frustrat-ingly powerless. Ono, Stevens and Kathy H. never quite reach the point of anagnorisis, that moment of insight or self-recognition that would enable them to steer their lives in different directions. In the spirit of classical tragedy, Ishiguro’s fictions evoke a purging mixture of fear and, above all, pity. One may recall the heartrending close of Never Let Me Go, where Kathy H. stands alone before an empty Norfolk field after losing all her friends to a horrific organ-harvesting programme that will soon demand her life as well. Then there is the narrator in ‘Malvern Hills’ (2009), who, blinded by the arrogance of youth, is unable to see that the disillusionment of the older Swiss couple, Tilo and Sonja, will become his as well. When We Were Orphans (2000) asks us to leave behind two displaced orphans which, as Christopher Ringrose notes in his chapter,


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4 introduction

is ‘not a cheap irony – two ruined people clinging together and lying to each other – but a rich one touched by tenderness’.

Ishiguro is also adept at leaving blanks and gaps in the narrative that draw the reader in still further. The complex shifts in time and geographical dislocations in a novel such as A Pale View of Hills (1982) force us to make links between seemingly unconnected events, and by doing so we glimpse the protagonists’ secrets and hidden traumas. In the controlled interaction between revelation and concealment, the explicit and the implicit, we become woven into the invisible web that is the process of reading.

This masterly control over the text also manifests itself in Ishiguro’s linguistic scrupulousness. Most famously, the story told by Stevens’s father in The Remains of the Day of the tiger that is killed and removed from the dining room ends with the exquisite line: ‘dinner will be served at the usual time and I am pleased to say there will be no discern-ible traces left of the recent occurrence by that time’ (RD 36). In When We Were Orphans, the contortions of phrasing produced by Christopher Banks in his biographical account are both attempts to cover up his past and curious markers that alert the reader to his misrepresentation: ‘from behind the cheerful anecdotes, there was emerging a picture of myself on that voyage to which I took exception’ (WWWO 27). This self-deceiving language, as Sage notes in his chapter, ‘strikes a pang in the reader’. Ishiguro does not succumb to the powerful pull towards the colourful language of affliction pervasive in contemporary writing. His texts prefer stoicism, which encourages the reader’s steadfast acceptance of a detrimental situation.

Ishiguro’s strategies for arousing empathy are supplemented by slip-pages of address to the reader. The curious ‘you’ to whom his narra-tors refer assumes that we are of a similar nature to them. But we, the addressees, are not butlers or clones. The ‘you’ spoken by the protago-nists is not universal, but our acts of mental translation turn it into what Andrew Gibson calls a ‘complex, ambiguous split-space’ where ‘identities twist round into each other and the reading subject becomes a profoundly ambivalent construction’.5 In the act of bridging this hiatus, we extend the tragically limited consciousness of the narrators until we carry the burden of their trauma and the guilt these charac-ters feel at their complicity in sustaining undesirable social systems. Although the protagonists lack the power to change their ways, we sense that we ourselves can – and must – forge a renewed agency.

The recent (re)turn to the study of empathy within literary stud-ies brings Ishiguro’s work to the fore. Krystyna Stamirowska explores ethics in relationship to language and identity in Ishiguro’s work,


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arguing for subtle differences in his representation of gender. Although she acknowledges that Ishiguro’s starting point for writing characters are human emotions that we all share, she also argues, contentiously, that whilst Ishiguro’s ‘male narrators have a stilted discourse that indicates emotional and ethical immaturity, his female protagonists express a more supple and ethically responsive discourse’. Meghan Marie Hammond continues this debate about Ishiguro’s ethics by focusing on the complex role of genre in The Remains of the Day, in which Stevens struggles to find the appropriate narrative mode that will allow him to tell his life story. The novel is a travel narrative and road novel; an oratorical autobiography and apologia for a life’s work; a state-of-the-nation novel; a love story and a romance; and, at times, a confession. This profusion of genres and their different rules of repre-sentation prevent, rather than help, Stevens from achieving the social and personal history that would have allowed him to acknowledge and atone for his part in Lord Darlington’s serious political and, above all, moral mistakes.

Despite his desire to write universal narratives, Ishiguro is also a contemporary writer whose work investigates the state of the world today. Over the past few decades, we have experienced a proliferation of new technologies and modes of communication; an omnipresent mass media; ever-faster forms of transport; and forces of globalization that have shrunk our horizons and propelled us into an increasingly ‘virtual’ experience of the world. These forces challenge the subject’s autonomy and diminish our capacity to take responsibility for ourselves and others, and also, crucially, our ability to feel and feel for. Fredric Jameson calls this the ‘waning of affect’, whilst J. G. Ballard refers to it more abruptly as the ‘death of affect’.6 Ishiguro’s ethic of empathy criti-cizes this condition, as Patricia Waugh states in her essay: ‘the emotional absence and ethical failure enacted as [the theme of Ishiguro’s books] is ironically and disturbingly redeemed by our proper responses as readers, pathos worryingly elicited in our recognition of the cultural apathia of an increasingly posthuman age’. Ishiguro’s work forces us to establish a profound and meaningful connection with others by emphasizing the importance of our mindful use of language, and in doing so makes a serious claim for the novel form as an important representational form that allows us to exercise our imagination.

Ishiguro’s ethics of empathy are directly related to the post-war consciousness. Unlike Rushdie, say, whose literary energies and empha-sis on ‘newness’ derive from a triumphant, post-imperial spirit, Ishiguro is what the Germans call a Nachkriegskind: a child born into a genera-tion that lives, and writes, in the shadow of the Second World War. This


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6 introduction

generation had no active role in – or made no direct contribution to – the atrocities perpetrated during that conflict, but they struggle to live as the inheritors of those tragic events which shaped them through their parents’ experience. In this sense, Ishiguro has contributed to the post-war ethos shared by writers such as Ian McEwan, Graham Swift, Julian Barnes and Martin Amis. But whereas the novels of McEwan, Amis and Rushdie often arouse controversial, divisive reactions, Ishiguro’s work has continuously generated a uniting, consolatory response across the globe. Unlike the often spectacular and sensational panoramas presented by his peers, Ishiguro’s narratives are quiet and shrewd, and closer to the ethical questions and dilemmas evoked by J. M. Coetzee’s work – but without the self-reflexive, metafictional game-playing. Coetzee’s inter-est in the writing of Jewish–Russian exile Joseph Brodsky (1940–96) is shared by Ishiguro, who gave his name to the composer and conductor in The Unconsoled. Brodsky never addresses politics directly, observes Coetzee, but looks to great literature rather than politics, philosophy or religion for redemption by setting classic literary form as ‘an example of moral and ethical purity and firmness’.7

More indirectly, Ishiguro keeps company with an earlier generation of writers such as J. G. Ballard, Kurt Vonnegut, Joseph Heller, Saul Bellow, Primo Levi, Jorge Semprún, Günther Grass and Harry Mulisch. These writers lived through the extraordinary eruption of violence between 1939 and 1945, and witnessed the savage effect of dehumanizing forces. A steady, if understated, attention to the atrocities and disasters of the twentieth century is characteristic of Ishiguro’s narratives. The first two major works, A Pale View of Hills and An Artist of the Floating World, are indirect meditations on the consequences of the destruction of Nagasaki and Hiroshima by the atomic bomb; Japan’s role in the Second World War is viewed from another perspective in When We Were Orphans and The White Countess; The Remains of the Day engages with British fascism in the run-up to the War and the waning of post-imperial power in its aftermath. The inescapable importance of the Second World War for Ishiguro is placed in a historical context by Christine Berberich, who suggests that The Remains of the Day functions as a therapeutic proc-ess of working through collective trauma whilst warning against the dangerous social and moral regression of the Thatcherite celebration of Englishness and Victorian moral values. The Unconsoled (1995) is a working-through of the traumatized East European consciousness after the collapse of dictatorial Communist regimes; and Never Let Me Go can be read, as Sage suggests, as an analogy of American slave culture, whilst the novel also reworks the fascist logic that led to the advocacy of eugenics and, eventually, the obscenity of the concentration camps.


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Ishiguro has voiced his concern at the erosion of the protections accorded to civilians in recent conflicts and genocides, which suggests that his work is more political than some accounts (including, at times, his own) would suggest.8

The novels of Ishiguro focus on episodes in modern history that confront us with the limits of our humanity and the problem of making sense of a seemingly senseless world. The work makes us aware of this irony, yet it is an unpostmodern, non-nihilist form of irony, as Christopher Ringrose explains in his reading of When We Were Orphans. Ringrose notes that it is the (religious) spirit of Kierkegaard that can be found in the complex forms of irony that Ishiguro’s text evokes, and which prevent closure. He has, instead, made it his task to contribute towards the recovering of the human element. Mr Stevens’s desper-ate quest to locate ‘a little of that crucial quality of “dignity”’ (RD 70) in his life story is telling. Ishiguro’s project is similarly an attempt to recover human dignity and to restore the possibility of giving mean-ing and value to human life. Lydia R. Cooper frames The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go in the post-Holocaust ethical philosophy of Hannah Arendt and Jorge Semprún. Cooper shows that within ‘autonomy-denying systems’ such as Darlington Hall and Hailsham the narrators’ willing postponement of an awareness of their situations, and their acceptance of a lack of autonomy, renders them complicit in the atrocities committed by their respective societies. Ishiguro’s novels are, according to Cooper, ‘haunted by glimpses of a radical empathy that could undermine’ these systems. Liani Lochner continues this debate by showing how Never Let Me Go can be interpreted as a criticism of scientific discourse, which has a tendency to normalize the clinical, rationalizing values upon which it is built. For Lochner, ‘Ishiguro posits the novel itself as a form of culture that can recuperate the “human” from science’s purely mechanistic and materialistic definitions’.

Ishiguro’s fiction often explores innovatively more popular forms or genre fictions, such as the detective novel in When We Were Orphans (2000) and science fiction in Never Let Me Go. Alyn Webley shows that Ishiguro stretches the conventions of the detective genre by making Christopher Banks, the protagonist of When We Were Orphans, forge an identity as a detective in order to hide the true nature of the problems he is trying to solve. Andy Sawyer traces how Never Let Me Go fits in a recent genre of ‘outsider science fiction’ by operating within a sci-fi register and exploiting the techniques of defamiliarization associated with that genre, but without conforming to its rules. These texts, like the others, unfold a dense and complex layering of meanings and a deeply resonant intertextuality that only the flexibility of the novel


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8 introduction

form allows. Ishiguro’s work reminds us of Milan Kundera’s claim that the strength of the novel lies not only in its ‘spirit of complexity’ but also in ‘the spirit of continuity: each work is an answer to preceding ones, each work contains all the previous experience of the novel’.9 And Murakami notes that Ishiguro’s novels present a ‘sort of compos-ite universe’ which is in dialogue with many previous writers, from Sophocles and Shakespeare to George Eliot and T. S. Eliot.10

What is also distinctive about reading Ishiguro’s work is that it creates the sense that we are absorbed into a wider community that crosses geographical and linguistic barriers to stretch across the globe and through time. Victor Sage’s essay therefore views Ishiguro’s work through an anthropological framework in order to show how his novels persistently rework traditional rituals and rites of passage that oper-ate across all cultures. Sage demonstrates that all of Ishiguro’s novels subject such rites to an aesthetic and narrative interference that causes them to fail in their original function of progressing an individual to a new social stage and status within a particular culture. It is significant that Sage’s exploration of universal reference in Ishiguro’s work takes Shakespeare as its point of reference.

Ishiguro can be construed as a classic writer with affinities to the humanist tradition, which conflicts with the critical tendency to pigeonhole him as a postmodernist or, even more problematically, a postcolonial writer. Waugh notes that Ishiguro is often (mis)represented as an International Novelist in the mould of Rushdie whilst his work, in fact, ‘does not easily “fit” the model of the international literary novel associated with post-modernizing experimentalism and flamboyant hybridity’. Waugh moves on to situate Ishiguro amongst two differ-ent strands of modernism. The first is that associated with the ‘high modernism’ of Eliot, Woolf and Conrad. These ‘English’ writers explored the depth of interior consciousness and its modes of representation, and they were concerned to find means of overcoming the ‘dissociation of sensibility’, or split between thought and feeling, that Eliot had identi-fied as fracturing English literature since the metaphysical poets. The second strand of modernism is more continental and engages with the strange and surreal. Writers such as Kafka, Beckett and Albert Camus often exaggerated the split between thought and feeling by collapsing the boundaries between the internal and external or generating absurd, expressionist landscapes. Ishiguro’s oeuvre straddles both these modern-ist camps: An Artist of the Floating World has affinities with the former, whilst The Unconsoled echoes the latter.

Ishiguro’s labyrinthine and surreal fourth novel, The Unconsoled, lends itself particularly well to this critical reframing of Ishiguro as a


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late modernist. Jeannette Baxter explores the ways in which the legacy of the surrealists can be used to understand The Unconsoled’s complex narrative strategies of defamiliarization. Baxter cites Ishiguro’s use of the labyrinth and other uncanny spaces as devices that disorientate the reader, turning The Unconsoled into a counter-historical, surrealist event. Tim Jarvis explores Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of ‘minor literature’ to understand The Unconsoled’s engagement with Kafka: rather than focusing on the subject matter, Jarvis shows that Ishiguro’s amplified evocation of Kafka’s aesthetic and formal qualities is reflecting, and grappling with, an estrangement caused by the post-national and tran-scultural consciousness of the age of globalization. In Gerry Smyth’s analysis of Ishiguro’s engagement with music in The Unconsoled and in Nocturnes we find a tension between classic, Romantic and modernist conceptions of the arts. Smyth ponders upon Ishiguro’s long-standing interest in music, noting that ‘one of the principal recurring strategies of the “music-novel” is the introduction of music as a palliative effect in a range of crisis situations’, another characteristic that Ishiguro’s work offers us: the possibility of art as consolation.

Sebastian Groes also pays attention to the disruptive interventions of modernity into tradition by exploring Ishiguro’s representation of East Anglia in Never Let Me Go. Ishiguro has often claimed that he uses England as a mythical place, but Groes points out that Ishiguro’s fifth novel fits into a highly specific literary tradition of writing about East Anglia as a peripheral, melancholic space where symbolically the nation’s collective memory is stored. Groes also suggests that Ishiguro punctuates this novel with bleak, haunting images drawn from a distinctly modernist legacy. The analysis of Never Let Me Go’s intricate temporality undertaken by Barry Lewis demonstrates how the compres-sion of the lifespan of the clones throws up questions about time, consciousness and memory that are familiar to any reader of James Joyce or Virginia Woolf. Caroline Bennett also points out Ishiguro’s elaborate use of temporality by focusing on the representation of chil-dren in Ishiguro’s early work. She notes that they often function as vehicles for the displaced traumas of the adults: ‘rather than showing a radical epistemological divide between the child and the adult, these novels suggest that the two roles are bound by degrees of unselfcon-sciousness and knowledge’. The blurring of the child and adult suggests that, particularly in the traumatized subject, there is no such thing as a clear division between the younger and older self.

Another form of exchange is traced by Motoyuki Shibata, who adds to the study of Ishiguro’s work a short but illuminating account of the problems that occur when his novels are translated ‘back’ into


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10 introduction

Japanese. What seems exotic to a Western audience loses its otherness for a Japanese readership, whilst Ishiguro’s constrained, formal language is not perceived as unusual. Motoko Sugano provides us with a new insight into the reception of Ishiguro’s An Artist of the Floating World in Japan. She continues Shibata’s technical analysis of translation, but suggests that the Japanese audience had difficulties with this novel because of its representation of Japan’s responsibility for its role in the Second World War, a topic that is still considered taboo in Japan. Her chapter is significant also for our understanding of Ishiguro due to its inclusion of actual Japanese war paintings by four of the many real-life ‘artists of the floating world’: Takeshiro Kanokogi, Ryushi Kawabata, Kakuzo Seno and Saburo Miyamoto.

Ishiguro’s success with audiences around the world is driven by his unconditional commitment to understanding the world and its people, but also by his ability to provide consolation and a sense of community often seemingly lost in the contemporary, globalized world. And, as this volume of essays demonstrates, his work continues to stimulate lively and far-reaching debates amongst his critics.

notes 1. Kazuo Ishiguro in conversation with Sean Matthews, ‘I’m Sorry I Can’t Say

More: An Interview with Kazuo Ishiguro’, in Sean Matthews and Sebastian Groes (eds.), Kazuo Ishiguro: Contemporary Critical Perspectives (London and New York: Continuum, 2009), p. 122.

2. Barry Lewis, Kazuo Ishiguro (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), p. 2.

3. Ishiguro in conversation with Claire Hamilton for ‘Hamilton on Sunday’, BBC Radio Merseyside; fi rst broadcast 3 June 2007.

4. Haruki Murakami, ‘On Having a Contemporary Like Kazuo Ishiguro’, in Sean Matthews and Sebastian Groes (eds.), Kazuo Ishiguro, p. vii.

5. Andrew Gibson, Postmodernity, Ethics and the Novel: From Leavis to Levinas (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), pp. 199–200.

6. See Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism (London and New York: Verso, 1991), p. 10; J. G. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition (London: HarperPerennial, 2006), pp. 84–5, 108–9; originally published by Jonathan Cape in 1970.

7. J. M. Coetzee, ‘The Essays of Joseph Brodsky’, in Stranger Shores (London: Secker & Warburg, 2001), p. 158.

8. Kazuo Ishiguro in conversation with Martha Kearney in the Queen Elizabeth Hall, South Bank Centre, London, 13 May 2009.

9. Milan Kundera, ‘The Depreciated Legacy of Cervantes’, in The Art of the Novel (London: Faber, 1999), p. 18; fi rst published in French as L’Art du roman in 1986 by Éditions Gallimard.

10. Murakami, ‘Ishiguro’, p. vii.


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i n dex

absurdity 57–8Adelman, G. 158, 164Adorno, T. 29affect 20–1

refusal to acknowledge feelings 56–7waning or death of 5

affective cosmopolitanism 17–20agency

lack of in Never Let Me Go 231–4moral 106–8narrative agency in The Remains of

the Day 95–8alienation 59–60, 114, 159alternative history 225, 236–7, 245Amis, M. 6, 14, 252anagnorisis 3, 113–17, 214–15anthropology 31–2, 54, 65

see also rites of passageapologetic narrative mode 100–1appeasement politics 121–4Arendt, H. 7, 108Aristotle 214art, and empathy 20–5art music 146Artist of the Floating World, An 2, 6,

8, 10, 47, 55, 209, 214, 250children and trauma 83, 88–91irony 174–5male narrator 56moments of illumination 25, 26reception in Japan 10, 69–81;

Ono in English and Japanese versions 69–74; war and Japanese responsibility 74–80

rites of passage 32–7

Asahi Shimbun 78Astor, Lady 123atomic bomb 6atonement 95–8Atwood, M. 200, 232, 237–8Auden, W.H. 224audience see reader/audienceAuster, P. 49autobiographical writing 252

oratorical autobiography 100–1autonomy-denying systems 7, 106–17

bachelorhood 162Baker, N. 201Ballard, J.G. 5, 6, 252

‘Storm-bird, Storm-Dreamer’ 217banking system 204banter 98, 103–4Barnes, J. 6, 252Bataille, G. 134Bateson, G. 187, 190Beckett, S. 8, 161, 222

Waiting for Godot 223Bellow, S. 6belonging 16–17Benson, S. 146, 147Benveniste, É. 66Betjeman, J. 216Bevan, A. 119biotechnology 227, 236, 237

see also cloningblack American slave culture 44Blackshirts 119, 120Blade Runner 42, 240–1Blake, W. 253, 254

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body/body parts 25, 228–31Bolaño, R. 261Booker Prize 1Bourdieu, P. 228, 233Bowen, E., The Heat of the Day 120Bradbury, M. 247Breakfast on the Morning Tram 149–50Breton, A. 133, 134British Empire 125, 126, 127, 189British fiction, contemporary 144–6British history 6, 118–30

appeasement politics 121–4critique of Thatcherism 124–8fascism and literary responses

119–21British Union of Fascists (BUF) 119,

120Broderick, D. 238Brodsky, J. 6Brownsword, R. 230Buchenwald 109Buford, B. 13–14

Camus, A. 8capitalism 127

imperial 185, 186, 187–8, 189care, ethics of 22–5Carlisle, C. 176Carroll, J. 226Carroll, L. 134

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland 137–8

Carter, A. 247–8, 249Carver, R. 51Caulfield, T. 230‘Cellists’ 151–2, 152–4Central and Eastern Europe 6,

134–9eradication of culture 139–42

Chabon, M. 238Chamberlain, N. 122Chaudhuri, A. 158, 159children/childhood

Bank’s contradictory and traumatic childhood in When We Were Orphans 185–7, 189–95

and trauma 9, 82–92China

opium trade 177, 186, 187war with Japan 75, 91

Chirico, G. de 136Hebdomeros 135

choicemoral choices in autonomy-

denying systems 106–17painful choices in When We Were

Orphans 189–92cities 213, 254

see also Londonclairvoyance 160classical Greek tragedy 3cloning 42, 199–200, 226, 227, 230,

231, 239, 242–3Coetzee, J.M. 6, 253cognitive estrangement 236–7, 244Colebrook, C. 160, 174, 176collective enunciation 161, 162‘Come Rain or Come Shine’ 151compassion 109compression, narrative 199–210concentration camps 109concept albums 152concertina effect 9, 199–210confessional mode 103confusion 58–9connectedness 255Conrad, J. 8, 15–16, 98consciousness 259, 260consolation 26–7, 147–50contemporary British fiction

144–6continental/European modernism

8, 16continuity, spirit of 8cosmic irony 174cosmopolitanism, affective 17–20creative denial 100–2‘Crooner’ 151–2culture

loss and repression of 139–42mass culture 262–3Snow’s ‘Two Cultures’ 226

Cunningham, H.C. 177currency 204Czechoslovakia 140

Daily Mail 126Dante, The Divine Comedy 215deception 63–4, 101–2

see also self-deception


PROOF

282 index

defensive narrative 100–1Defoe, D., Robinson Crusoe 21–2Deleuze, G. 159–62, 164, 166, 167denial

creative 100–2of culpability 112of history 126of personal history 104–5self-denial 96

depth 15–16, 20detective genre 173–4

Banks’s identity as detective in When We Were Orphans 7, 192–4

deterritorialization 160, 161, 165dialogue 61, 64–5Dick, P.K., Do Androids Dream of

Electric Sheep? 240–1Dickens, C. 253, 254

Great Expectations 177Our Mutual Friend 212

digitalization 145–6dignity 7, 19, 41, 106, 110, 114,

116–17discourse

ethically responsive 61–5and identity 4–5, 54–66scientific 7, 225–35

disorientation 16, 139–42displacement 136–8, 160dissent, exclusion of 34–6distance, emotional 49–50, 52,

59–60Döring, T. 173double binds 184–95doubleness, ironic 174–82doubling of protagonists 158, 164–7doxa 233Doyle, A.C. 253dramatic irony 174Du Maurier, D., ‘The

Breakthrough’ 217dual audience 110–12duty 233dystopia 225–6

East Anglia 9, 211–24history of writing about 216–18

economic inequality 254, 255economics 203–4Eichmann, A. 109, 116

Ekelund, B.G. 96Eliot, G. 8, 212Eliot, T.S. 8, 15, 20, 21, 26, 209, 253,

262The Waste Land 27, 161, 222–3

émigrés 255–6emotional distance 49–50, 52, 59–60emotional power 2, 52emotional recognition, moments

of 25–6empathy 240, 244

art and 20–5autonomy-denying systems 109–10ethic of 1–10

Englishness 118–19, 126, 250Enlightenment 226Ernst, M. 134estrangement, cognitive 236–7, 244ethical philosophy 19, 106–17ethics

of empathy 1–10ethically responsive discourse 61–5of genre 5, 95–105

Europe 134, 141–2Central and Eastern Europe 6,

134–42European/continental modernism

8, 16everyday, music of the 146–50,

154–5evolutionary regression 212–13exclusion of dissent 34–6explanation 204–5

falling 215false humility 56family

double binds in 187–9, 190–2familial triads 164

‘Family Supper, A’ 243–9Fanon, F. 90fascism 134

British 119–21fate 228‘Father’ figure 36, 45feelings see affect; empathyfemale narrators 2, 55–6, 61–5,

250–2fences 22fictions, myths and 128


PROOF

index 283

Fijalkowski, K. 140films 1–2, 48–9, 126Finney, B. 172–3, 179, 182first-person narration, distortion of

conventions of 160flow of speech 71–2folding see concertina effectfootpaths 213–14, 221–2formalism 159Forster, E.M. 15, 16

Howards End 14Fowler, R. 127France 139, 140fraternity 109–10free-market economy 127Freud, S. 133, 135, 139Fujita, T. 78Fuller, J.F.C. 119funeral rites 44

gaps in narrative 4gender 162–3

discourse and identity 4–5, 54–66writing across 250–2

generational conflicts 33, 85–7, 89–91genetic determinism 231–2, 233–4genetic enhancement 230Gennep, A. van 31, 36, 39, 44, 45genre

detective 7, 173–4, 192–4ethics of in The Remains of the

Day 5, 95–105Germany 120, 122Gibson, A. 4globalization 5, 145–6Goebbels, J. 120Golders Green 252–3Gothic, the 248–9Granta magazine 1, 13–14Grass, G. 6Gray, A. 14greatness 99, 100Griffin, G. 226group consensualism 44Guattari, F. 159–62, 164, 166Gusdorf, G. 102, 104Guth, D. 96, 101

habitus 228, 232Hail, S. 238

Halifax, Lord 123Harding-Russell, G. 172Harrison, M.J. 200Hayek, F. 203–4Heinlein, R.A. 238Heller, J. 6High Modernism 8, 14–16, 20, 222hiragana writing system 53, 70Hiroshima 6history 218

alternative 225, 236–7, 245historical parable and 79The Remains of the Day and British

history 6, 118–20socio-historical context 261–2

Hitler, A. 120Holmes, F.M. 173–4Holocaust 108, 116homeliness 136–9, 142homesickness of émigrés 255–6horizontality–verticality dynamic

220–2Howarth, W. 100humanity 115–16, 240–1

music and performing our human-ity 154–5

Hume, D. 226humiliation, rites of 32, 37, 40–1,

42–3humility 51–2Hungary 139Huxley, A., Point Counter Point 120hybridity 14–15

‘I Wish I Could Go Travelling Again’ 150

‘Ice Hotel, The’ 150ideal reader 2, 97identity 4–5, 23, 243

Bank’s identity as detective in When We Were Orphans 7, 192–4

discourse and 4–5, 54–66immersive fantasy 244immigration 254imperial capitalism 185, 186, 187–8,

189impersonality 20incorporation, rites of 31–2, 37, 44inequality 254, 255inertia 38–40


PROOF

284 index

infantilization 90institutional double-bind 187–8, 192intergenerational conflict 33, 85–7,

89–91international literary novels 8, 13–17irony 3–4

When We Were Orphans 7, 171–83; ironic doubleness 174–82

Ishiguro, Kazuoarrival in the UK 1diversity of writing 1–2interviewed by Groes 3, 247–64musical expression 146prizes 1University of East Anglia Creative

Writing MA 1, 247Italy 119, 120

Jameson, F. 5, 17Japan 6

National Mobilization Law (1938) 75

National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo 75, 78

reception of An Artist of the Floating World in 10, 69–81

Second World War 6, 87; war responsibility 10, 74–80

Japanese translations 9–10, 46–53An Artist of the Floating World 69–81Never Let Me Go 51–2A Pale View of Hills 46–9The Remains of the Day 49–50, 51, 52

Japanese writing systems 48, 53, 70–1Jews 119

see also HolocaustJoyce, J. 222, 259

Kafka, F. 8, 147, 148, 160, 161, 162, 164, 222

The Castle 158, 164The Trial 164The Unconsoled and 9, 157–9

kanji writing system (Chinese ideographs) 48, 53, 70–1

Kanokogi, T. 10, 76katakana writing system 48, 53, 70–1Kawabata, R. 10, 76Kent, S. 2, 149–50Kermode, F. 61, 128

Keynes, J.M. 122Kierkegaard, S. 7, 172, 174, 175, 176King, B. 124–5Kundera, M. 8, 139, 140, 141

labyrinth, surrealist 133–43Lacan, J. 54, 66Laing, R.D. 189–90landscapes 99

depiction of 9, 211–24language 4–5

and describing music 153discourse and identity 4–5, 54–66elaborate 65minor literature and The

Unconsoled 161–2scientific discourse 7, 225–35scrupulousness 4

Larkin, P. 17lateness 21Lee, H. 40Lessing, D. 13Levi, P. 6, 43Levinas, E. 66Lewis, B. 2, 9, 138, 158lies 63–4, 101–2

see also deceptionlight and dark imagery 113–17liminality 31–45Lippmann, W. 126London 125, 213, 252–5Lone Ranger 90loss 16loyalty 34, 35

Macmillan, H. 119madness 194–5male narrators 5, 54–61, 64, 65‘Malvern Hills’ 3, 151, 256–7Manchuria 75, 91mass culture 262–3Masson, A. 134McCarthy, C. 238McDonald, K. 239McEwan, I. 6, 14, 252McGraw, T. 257meaning 204–5memory 256–9

Never Let Me Go: concertina effect 199–210; depiction of


PROOF

landscapes and 9, 211–24; unreliable 97

Mendelsohn, F. 238, 244mental evasion 91mental landscapes 213–15Merchant–Ivory films 126migration 14–15, 254, 255–6militarism 74–80Milton, J., Paradise Lost 215minor literature 9, 157–68

characteristics of 160–2Mitchell, D. 262–3Mitford, D. 120Mitford, N. 120

Wigs on the Green 120–1Mitford, U. 120Miura, M. 74, 77, 80Miyamoto, S. 10, 77, 78Miyata, S. 78Mo, T. 14modernism 5, 8, 13–30, 222–3

continental/European 8, 16high 8, 14–16, 20, 222

moral agents 106–8moral choices

anagnorisis and 113–17in autonomy-denying systems

106–17mortality 209Mosley, O. 119–20, 123, 129Mukai, J. 78Mulisch, H. 6Munich Agreement (1938) 122Murakami, H. 3, 8, 46, 49, 51, 261music 9, 44, 144–56

and contemporary British fiction 144–6

Nocturnes 150–5The Unconsoled 60–1, 146–50,

154–5, 158myth 127–8

Nachkriegskind, D. 5–6Nagasaki 6, 47–8Nakamura, K. 78nakedness, fear of 26–7names, translation of 70–1narrative

agency 95–8compression 199–210

gaps in 4Japanese translations: An Artist

of the Floating World and linear narrative 74; regular form and polite form 51–2

modes in The Remains of the Day 98–104

National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo 75, 78

Nazism 120, 122Never Let Me Go 1, 2, 3, 6, 17, 26, 55,

56, 82, 259–60, 261art, emotion and social justice 22–5autonomy-denying systems 7,

106–17concertina effect 9, 199–210in context 239–42female narrator 55–6, 61–5genesis of 236–9Japanese translation 51–2landscapes and memory 9,

211–24and ‘outsider science fiction’ 7,

236–46rites of passage 41–4scientific discourse 7, 225–35title taken from a song 115, 144–5

New Party 119Nicholas of Myra, Saint 166Nietzsche, F. 28Nocturnes 1, 9, 150–5, 215, 248nomadism 14–15Norfolk 216, 217–18nostalgia 16, 48, 88, 138–9

émigrés 255–6novum 237, 239, 245nuclear technology 227

objective correlative 20, 21, 24, 29Öe, K. 15Olympia Rally 119, 120Onodera, K. 70opium trade 177, 186, 187Opium Wars 186oratorical autobiography 100–1organ donation 42, 199, 227, 239organic resonance 150–4Other, the 61–2, 64–5‘outsider science fiction’ 7, 236–46Ozu, Y. 48–9

index 285


PROOF

286 index

Pale View of Hills, A 4, 6, 14, 91, 175, 209, 215, 220, 221, 248

children and trauma 83–8female narrator 55–6Japanese translation 46–9

parents longing for a parent 259–60parent–child relationships 85–7

Paris surrealist group 140Parkes, A. 110passivity 108, 231–4Pearson, Y. 231–2performance

life as rehearsal 25–9music and performing our

humanity 154–5permissiveness 126personal history 128

denial of 104–5Petry, M. 128Phelan, J. 96, 101place 213, 253

sense of 49see also landscapes

‘Platform of Prague, The’ 140‘Pleasure Principle’ exhibition 140politeness 38, 42

concealing menace 59polite form of narrative and

Japanese translation 51–2political-ideological bias 158–9politics 249–50

appeasement politics 121–4British fascism 119–21minor literature and 160–1of style 160Thatcherism 124–8, 250

popular music 145postcolonial writing 263postmodernism 8, 13–17, 20, 29,

117, 155, 176, 262, 263post-war consciousness 5–6Poulet, G. 88Pound, E. 262power relationships 190Prague surrealist group 140predetermination 51pre-modern man 104–5professionalism 19proliferating figures 158, 164–7

propaganda, war 75–8, 81Proust, M. 202, 259psychological rupture 88

Rashômon 258rationality 226readability 71, 73–4, 79reader/audience 2–3, 4, 261

dual 110–12ideal reader 2, 97Never Let Me Go 110–11The Remains of the Day 110, 111

realism 172–3, 248, 249regression, evolutionary 212–13regular form of narrative 51rejection, ritual of 34–6Remains of the Day, The 2, 6, 7, 17,

18, 55, 150, 163, 172, 175, 180, 185, 215, 222, 241, 247, 248, 249, 250, 258

autonomy-denying systems 7, 106–17

Booker Prize 1and British history 6, 118–30depiction of landscape 213–14ethics of genre 5, 95–105Japanese translation 49–50, 51, 52linguistic scrupulousness 4male narrator 57, 58moments of illumination 26rites of passage 37–41two contexts of meaning 203

reminiscence bump 257repressed unconscious 95–6repressive symptoms 87–8responsibility, personal 106–17retrospection 212revelations 177–8, 214–15Ribbentrop, J. von 123, 124rites of passage 8, 31–45

An Artist of the Floating World 32–7Never Let Me Go 41–4The Remains of the Day 37–41

Robinson, R. 134, 158roles, inhabiting 95–8Roma-ji writing system (Roman

alphabet) 70romance genre 102–3Romantic-expressionist aesthetic 23rubbish 222–3


PROOF

index 287

Rubin, J. 46–7Rushdie, S. 5, 6, 14–15Ryuchi, S. 48–9

Saddest Music in the World, The 145Samuel, R. 127schizophrenia 190science

scientific discourse 7, 225–35scientific experimentation 217

science fiction 200‘outsider’ 7, 236–46

SDP 250Sebald, W.G. 51

The Rings of Saturn 218second person pronouns 49–50, 72–3Second World War 5–6

Holocaust 108, 116Japan and 6, 87; responsibility

for 10, 74–80politics of appeasement 121–4post-war consciousness 5–6

self-centredness 56–61, 64self-deception 3, 4, 16–17,

110–13, 172, 241An Artist of the Floating World 89Never Let Me Go 63, 110–13The Remains of the Day 110–13,

117self-denial 96self-denunciation 37self-knowledge 214–15Semprún, J. 6, 7, 108–9, 116Seno, K. 10, 77sentence length 73–4sentimental education 20separation, rites of 31–2, 34–6, 38–9setting 244–5Shaffer, B.W. 84Shakespeare, W. 8, 26, 32, 252Shanghai 172, 213

International Settlement 182, 185Shelley, M., Frankenstein 42Sim, Wai-chew 177slavery 41–2

Black American slave culture 44Smith, A. 216–17Smith, M.M. 245

Spares 209, 242–3, 245Smith, Z. 263

Smollett, T. 253Snow, C.P. 226‘So Romantic’ 150social appeasement 122Social Darwinism 212social justice 20–5society, double binds in 187–9socio-historical context 261–2Sophocles 8Soviet Union 139, 140Spark, M., The Prime of Miss Jean

Brodie 21–2speculative spaces 242–5Stanton, K. 172, 175status anxiety 56status reversal, rites of 32, 36stereotypes 16–17Sterne, L. 201stoicism 4, 26, 51Stoics 19structural linguistics 54, 65su-ji writing system (Arabic

numbers) 70Suez Crisis 125surrealism 8–9, 133–43Suvin, D. 237, 238Swift, G. 6

Waterland 218symbolic violence 233‘Symbols of Monstrosity’

exhibition 140System UDS 140

Taisho, Emperor 78Tarantino, Q. 262Tarnas, R. 227terrorist bombings 255Teverson, A. 98–9Thackeray, W.M. 253Thatcherism 250

critique of 124–8time 136, 212

childhood and trauma in adulthood 9, 82–92

concertina effect 9, 199–210Tobita, S. 69, 70–4, 79–80Tokyo 213transcendance 215transition, rites of 31–2transitional object, art as 24


PROOF

288 index

trauma 16children and 9, 82–92

travel genre 98–9Tsuchiya, M. 50, 51Tsuruta, G. 78Turner, V. 32, 44

Ukiyo no Gaka see Artist of the Floating World, An

unadorned language 65uncanny, the 17

Central Europe 134–9unconscious 54, 66, 133

repressed 95–6Unconsoled, The 2, 6, 22, 26, 40, 51,

55, 65, 83, 201, 213, 215, 258, 259, 260–1

affective cosmopolitanism and 17–20

consciousness 259and Kafka 9, 157–9life as rehearsal 27–9linguistically proliferating

figures 164–7male narrator 57–61and minor literature 9, 157–68music 9, 60–1, 146–50, 154–5, 158surrealist poetics 8–9, 133–43time compression 201

understatement 249unease 55, 59United States 44, 75, 90University of East Anglia (UEA)

Creative Writing MA 1, 247unreliable narrators 52, 91, 241–2utilitarianism 23

verbal irony 174–5Vergangenheitsbewältigung 119, 124,

128Versailles Treaty 122verticality–horizontality

dynamic 220–2victimhood 190–1Victorian values 126–7violence, symbolic 233

vocational identity 7, 192–4Vonnegut, K. 6

Wall, K. 96war 5–7

between China and Japan 75, 91 Second World War see Second

World Warwar record paintings (war propaganda

paintings) 10, 75–8, 81warmth, human 109–10Waugh, E. 125, 176Webster, J. 209Weiss, T. 172Wells, H.G., The Holy Terror 120West Country 213When We Were Orphans 3–4, 6, 7, 55,

56, 59, 83, 213, 215, 241, 253, 256, 260

critical archaeology 171–4double binds 184–95irony 7, 171–83male narrator 56–7

White Countess, The 1–2, 6white-flannel dramas 126Williamson, H. 119Wilson, A. 217Wilson, E. 28Winterson, J. 238Wodehouse, P.G. 125

The Code of the Woosters 120, 121

Wong, C.F. 88, 90Woolf, V. 8, 14, 15–16, 252, 261Wormald, M. 166writing systems, Japanese 48, 53,

70–1Wyndham, J. 200, 238, 240

The Midwich Cuckoos 240

Young Urban Professionals (Yuppies) 125, 127

youth 257–8see also children/childhood

zig-zagging 221–2


PROOF

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