The Novels of Kazuo Ishiguro - (2010)

The Novels of
Kazuo Ishiguro
A reader’s guide to essential criticism
Matthew Beedham
READERS’ GUIDES TO ESSENTIAL CRITICISM
C O N S U LTA N T E D I TO R: N I C O L A S T R E D E L L
Published
Lucie Armitt George Eliot: Adam Bede – The Mill on the Floss – Middle-
march
Simon Avery Thomas Hardy: The Mayor of Casterbridge – Jude the
Obscure
Paul Baines Daniel Defoe: Robinson Crusoe – Moll Flanders
Annika Bautz Jane Austen: Sense and Sensibility – Pride and
Prejudice – Emma
Matthew Beedham The Novels of Kazuo Ishiguro
Richard Beynon D. H. Lawrence: The Rainbow – Women in Love
Peter Boxall Samuel Beckett: Waiting for Godot – Endgame
Claire Brennan The Poetry of Sylvia Plath
Susan Bruce Shakespeare: King Lear
Sandie Byrne Jane Austen: Mansfield Park
Alison Chapman Elizabeth Gaskell: Mary Barton – North and South
Peter Childs The Fiction of Ian McEwan
Christine Clegg Vladimir Nabokov: Lolita
John Coyle James Joyce: Ulysses – A Portrait of the Artist
as a Young Man
Martin Coyle Shakespeare: Richard II
Justin D. Edwards Postcolonial Literature
Michael Faherty The Poetry of W. B. Yeats
Sarah Gamble The Fiction of Angela Carter
Jodi–Anne George Beowulf
Jodi–Anne George Chaucer: The General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales
Jane Goldman Virginia Woolf: To the Lighthouse – The Waves
Huw Griffiths Shakespeare: Hamlet
Vanessa Guignery The Fiction of Julian Barnes
Louisa Hadley The Fiction of A. S. Byatt
Geoffrey Harvey Thomas Hardy: Tess of the d’Urbervilles
Paul Hendon The Poetry of W. H. Auden
Terry Hodgson The Plays of Tom Stoppard for Stage, Radio, TV and Film
William Hughes Bram Stoker: Dracula
Stuart Hutchinson Mark Twain: Tom Sawyer – Huckleberry Finn
Stuart Hutchinson Edith Wharton: The House of Mirth – The Custom of the
Country
Betty Jay E. M. Forster: A Passage to India
Aaron Kelly Twentieth-Century Irish Literature
Elmer Kennedy–Andrews The Poetry of Seamus Heaney
Elmer Kennedy–Andrews Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Scarlet Letter
Daniel Lea George Orwell: Animal Farm – Nineteen Eighty-Four
Sara Lodge Charlotte Brontë: Jane Eyre
Philippa Lyon Twentieth-Century War Poetry
Merja Makinen The Novels of Jeanette Winterson
Matt McGuire Contemporary Scottish Literature
Timothy Milnes Wordsworth: The Prelude
Jago Morrison The Fiction of Chinua Achebe
Carl Plasa Tony Morrison: Beloved
Carl Plasa Jean Rhys: Wide Sargasso Sea
Nicholas Potter Shakespeare: Antony and Cleopatra
Nicholas Potter Shakespeare: Othello
Nicholas Potter Shakespeare’s Late Plays: Pericles, Cymbeline,
The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest
Steven Price The Plays, Screenplays and Films of David Mamet
Andrew Radford Victorian Sensation Fiction
Berthold Schoene–Harwood Mary Shelley: Frankenstein
Nick Selby T. S. Eliot: The Waste Land
Nick Selby Herman Melville: Moby Dick
Nick Selby The Poetry of Walt Whitman
David Smale Salman Rushdie: Midnight’s Children – The Satanic Verses
Patsy Stoneman Emily Brontë: Wuthering Heights
Susie Thomas Hanif Kureishi
Nicolas Tredell F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby
Nicolas Tredell Joseph Conrad: Heart of Darkness
Nicolas Tredell Charles Dickens: Great Expectations
Nicolas Tredell William Faulkner: The Sound and the Fury – As I Lay Dying
Nicolas Tredell Shakespeare: Macbeth
Nicolas Tredell The Fiction of Martin Amis
Matthew Woodcock Shakespeare: Henry V
Angela Wright Gothic Fiction
Forthcoming
Thomas P. Adler Tennessee Williams: A Streetcar Named
Desire – Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
Pascale Aebischer Jacobean Drama
Brian Baker Science Fiction
Stephen J. Burn Postmodern American Fiction
Sarah Haggarty & Jon Mee William Blake: Songs of Innocence and Experience
Nicolas Tredell Shakespeare: A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Michael Whitworth Virginia Woolf: Mrs Dalloway
Gina Wisker The Fiction of Margaret Atwood
Gillian Woods Shakespeare: Romeo and Juliet
Readers’ Guides to Essential Criticism

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Th e Nove l s of Ka zuo
Ishiguro
MATTHEW BEEDHAM
Consultant editor: Nicolas Tredell

© Matthew Beedham 2010, under exclusive licence
to Springer Nature Limited 2019
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Contents
INTRODUCTION 1
Briefly introduces Ishiguro’s biography and notes its impact on how Ishiguro has
been perceived, then provides an alternative perspective for reading his novels and
a brief summary of the Guide.
CHAPTER ONE 5
Bad Memories: A Pale View of Hills (1982)
Surveys the reviews of Ishiguro’s first novel. After examining the tendency to read
Ishiguro as a Japanese author, the chapter outlines Gregory Mason’s work on the
influence of Japanese film on Ishiguro’s fiction and presents the debate between
those who read this novel as a sociological or historical primer and those who deny
this approach, including the role of Nagasaki in the novel. The chapter then turns
to the novel’s reticence, the various ways of reading the relationship between the
characters Etsuko and Sachiko, the novel’s connection of guilt and ghosts, and
the novel’s imagery.
CHAPTER TWO 25
A Troubled Artist’s Art: An Artist of the Floating World (1987)
Discusses the reviews of Ishiguro’s second novel. After investigating the response
to Ishiguro’s use of a Japanese setting, the chapter considers Barry Lewis’s work
on Ishiguro’s use of a filmic lens before focusing on the numerous evaluations of
Ono, his manipulations of the narrative, and their significance.
CHAPTER THREE 43
The Remains of the Day (1993): Reception and Narration
Considers the reviews of Ishiguro’s third novel. After discussing key investigations of
the narration by Margaret Scanlan and Deborah Guth, the chapter turns to Kathleen
Wall’s investigation of the unique nature of unreliability in the novel and James Phelan
and Mary Patricia Martin’s consideration of the ethics of unreliability before conclud-
ing with Andrew Teverson’s examination of occasions of reading in the novel.
CHAPTER FOUR 61
The Remains of the Day 2: Historical and Postcolonial Readings
Focuses on historical and postcolonial approaches to Ishiguro’s third novel,
including John Sutherland’s explanation of the Suez Crisis, John P. McCombe’s
v
vi C O N T EN T S
presentation of the Anglo-American tensions as they appear in the novel,

Bo J. Ekelund’s reading of the novel’s various genres, and James Lang’s com-
plication of historical interpretations. Postcolonial analyses of the novel include
Susie O’Brien’s contrast of the old values of England and the new values of the
United States and Molly Westerman’s attempt to extend the work done by narra-
tive theorists by adding a layer of postcolonial analysis.
CHAPTER FIVE 84
The Remains of the Day 3: Interdisciplinary Approaches
Surveys the various interdisciplinary responses to Ishiguro’s third novel, including
Lillian Furst’s use of the anatomy of memory errors proposed by psychologist Daniel
L. Schacter, John J. Su’s reading of nostalgia that leads to a discussion of the ethos
embodied in Stevens’s journey, Kwame Anthony Appiah’s use of the novel to make
a case for the moral power of individualism, David Medalie’s investigation of the
difficulty of discussions of dignity, and legal scholar Rob Atkinson’s comparison of
Stevens’s relationship with Lord Darlington to that of a lawyer and client to illustrate
the ethical difficulties in serving.
CHAPTER SIX 102

Who are The Unconsoled (1995) and Where Do They Live?
Investigates the powerful, and divided, response to Ishiguro’s fourth novel before
outlining the world that the novel creates and the propensity to respond to the novel
in terms of dreams and nightmares. After introducing Ishiguro’s ‘appropriations’
technique, this chapter turns to Cynthia Wong’s postmodern framing of the novel
and Pierre François’ psychoanalytic reading.
CHAPTER SEVEN 123

Detecting the Past: When We Were Orphans (2000)
Through a discussion of the varied responses to Ishiguro’s fifth novel, this chapter
highlights the novel’s similarities to Ishiguro’s earlier novels and his use of the ‘ap-
propriation’ technique. After outlining the discussions of the novel’s narrative and
prose and Banks’s character, the chapter considers the novel as a detective story,
Alexander M. Bain’s essay on the portrayal of the failure of the international com-
munity, and the roles of memory and children in the novel.
CHAPTER EIGHT 137

Questioning the Possibles: Never Let Me Go (2005)
Surveys the range of positive responses that greeted Ishiguro’s sixth novel, includ-
ing discussions of the novel’s instigation of ethical debates and its portrayal of
childhood. The novel then turns to two scholarly responses: Rebecca Walkowitz’s
reading of the novel as a critique of individuality, and Bruce Robbins’s consider-
ation of the ‘banality’ of Ishiguro’s themes.
CONTENTS vii
CONCLUSION 148
Considers recent work that has been done on Ishiguro’s novels and Ishiguro’s work
in film before turning to gaps in the response to his novels and a discussion of his
status as an ‘international’ writer.
NOTES 152
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY 169
INDEX 174
Introduction
O ne of the world’s most important contemporary writers, Kazuo

Ishiguro (born 1954) has produced a body of work that has been
rewarded with several top literary prizes and consistent critical praise.
His fi rst novel, A Pale View of Hills (1982) received the Winifred
Holtby award ‘for the best regional novel of the year’. Artist of a
Floating World (1986) received even more critical attention and won
the prestigious Whitbread Book of the Year award. It was, however,
his third novel, The Remains of the Day (1989), which received the
equally prestigious Booker Prize, that solidly established Ishiguro’s
reputation. He was 34 years old. Since then his reputation has con-
tinued to grow in both English-speaking and non-English-speaking
countries. His work has been translated into more than thirty lan-
guages. Additionally, he has screenwriting credits on three major
motion fi lms, including, most famously, The Remains of the Day, which
received eight Academy Award nominations. But he remains a novelist
and since Remains has produced three more novels, each demonstrat-
ing an artist pushing against the limits of what a novel can portray,
and each displaying his masterly control of prose and narrative. This
Guide examines the immense critical response to these six novels so
that readers can better understand how Ishiguro has been read and
what work remains to be done.
Ishiguro’s biography serves as an important starting point to the
readings of his work. Since the appearance of his earliest novels,
his ethnicity has been a prominent concern, addressed in an almost
standard paragraph in all reviews that notes that Ishiguro was born
in Japan but raised since the age of five in England. This issue of his
ethnicity is accentuated, and some might argue justified, by Ishiguro’s
use of Japanese characters and Japanese settings in his first two novels.
In an oft-quoted interview with Alan Vorda and Kim Herzinger,
Ishiguro offers a theory based on his ethnicity for the attention he
received early in his career. After Salman Rushdie (born 1947) had
won the 1981 Booker Prize with Midnight’s Children, the search was
on for ‘other Rushdies’. Ishiguro’s fi rst novel had the good fortune to
appear at this time: ‘I received a lot of attention, got lots of attention,
got lots of coverage, and did a lot of interviews. I know why this was.
1
2 T H E N OV EL S O F K A Z U O I S H I G U R O
It was because I had this Japanese face and this Japanese name and it
was what was being covered at the time’.1
Ishiguro has pointed out, repeatedly, how ill-conceived the
attempts to read his work as the work of a Japanese writer are. He
maintains that the calm surface of his fi rst two books was simply an
expression of his natural voice, and that he ‘wasn’t trying to write
them in an understated, a Japanese way’.2 Speaking with Dylan Krider,
Ishiguro explains what he does and does not know about Japan:
I was brought up by Japanese parents. I think I understood very deeply

how a Japanese family works and about parent/child relationships, mar-
riages, and so on. But I wasn’t qualified to comment on the economic
situation in Japan or what Japanese people did or didn’t do in the ‘80s.
These books were very much my own creations, and as a novelist, I was
wanting to write about universal themes, so it always slightly annoyed
me when people said, ‘Oh, how interesting it must be to be Japanese
because you feel this, this, and this’, and I thought, ‘Don’t we all feel like
this?’3
In an informative interview with Gregory Mason, Ishiguro notes

that his Japanese is ‘like a five-year-old’s’. On the subject of literary
tradition, Ishiguro replies, ‘I feel that I’m very much of the Western
tradition. And I’m often quite amused when reviewers make a lot of
my being Japanese and try to mention the two or three authors they’ve
vaguely heard of ’. When he mentions the Russian novelist Fyodor
Dostoevsky (1821–81), the Russian playwright and short-story writer
Anton Chekhov (1860–1904), and the English novelists Charlotte
Brontë (1816–55) and Charles Dickens (1812–70) as influences,
Mason, nevertheless, asks him about Japanese influences. Ishiguro
mentions the novelists Junichiro Tanizaki (1886–1965), Yasunari
Kawabata (1899–1972), Masuji Ibuse (1898–1993), and Natsume Soseki
(1867–1916), but then adds that the most relevant Japanese influence
in his work is probably the Japanese fi lms of directors such as Yasujiro
Ozu (1903–63) and Mikio Naruse (1905–69).4
Rather than basing discussions of his work on his biography,
Ishiguro’s work is better approached through an understanding of his
style and his narratives. For example, although numerous critics, such
as Rocio Davis5 and Mark Wormald,6 have connected Ishiguro to
Rushdie, it is a superficial connection of limited use. Ishiguro accu-
rately describes how dissimilar his writing style is from Rushdie’s:
My style is almost the antithesis of Rushdie or [Timothy] Mo [born

1950]. Their writing tends to have these quirks where it explodes in all
kinds of directions. Rushdie’s language always seems to be reaching
I NTR O DUCTI O N 3
out – to express meaning that can’t usually be expressed through

normal language. Just structurally his books have this terrific energy. They
just grow in every direction at once and he doesn’t particularly care if the
branches lead nowhere. He’ll let it grow anyway and leave it there and
that’s the way he writes. I think he is a powerful and considerable writer.7
The language that Ishiguro uses for his own writing takes the opposite
tack, hiding and suppressing meaning. He favours a ‘spare, tight
structure because I don’t like to have this improvised feeling’. The
possible similarity between Rushdie’s writing and his own, Ishiguro
proposes, is that the younger writers of the time are aware that
‘Britain is not the center of the universe’.8
Ishiguro’s introduction to Nobel Prize winner Yasunari Kawabata’s
short novels, Snow Country (1935–7) and A Thousand Cranes (1949–52), on
the other hand, offers a valuable starting point for reading Ishiguro’s
fiction:
Kawabata was a writer who quite deliberately aspired to a ‘classical’

tradition of Japanese prose writing pre-dating the influence of European
realism – a tradition which placed value on lyricism, mood and reflection
rather than on plot and character. Read either of these novels for a tan-
gible, developing plotline – adopt a ‘what-happens-next?’ attitude – and
one is bound to reach the end with the feeling one has missed the point.
Kawabata needs to be read slowly, the atmospheres savoured, the charac-
ters’ words pondered for nuances.9
One could hardly ask for better direction for reading Ishiguro’s own
fiction. Clearly in his signalling of aspects of Kawabata’s writing he
fi nds important, he has also signalled aspects that he cultivates in his
own work.10
The response to Ishiguro’s work has been not only voluminous but
also complex. Given this complexity and the variety of readings that
Ishiguro’s work inspires, a guide to the responses of reviewers and
scholars fi lls a necessary gap to help readers understand not only the
subtleties of Ishiguro’s writing but also the main lines of argument his
work generates. Consequently, this book aims to outline the initial
critical response to Ishiguro’s novels, the key critical positions that
have developed since, and the arguments that support these positions.
Each of this Guide’s eight chapters presents the response to one of
Ishiguro’s novels, although the response to Remains, due to its immen-
sity, is presented in three chapters. After introducing Ishiguro’s fi rst
novel, A Pale View of Hills, I summarise the influential reviews that
appeared following the novel’s publication. These reviews lead to a
discussion of the critical essays that tackle this novel. The primary
issues of discussion are Ishiguro’s relationship to Japan, his ability

to convey emotions through his manipulation of narrative, and the
role of memory in this novel. Ishiguro’s second novel, An Artist of the
Floating World, received much more attention than his first, and this
chapter charts the response of reviewers before discussing Ishiguro’s
relationship with Japan, his skilled handling of narrative, and his
investigation of the fallibility of memory. Chapter Three, the fi rst of
three chapters focused on Ishiguro’s third novel, The Remains of the
Day, notes the response of the reviewers before turning to work on
Ishiguro’s use of narration, perhaps most importantly, Kathleen Wall
in ‘The Remains of the Day and Its Challenges to Theories of Unreliable
Narration’ (1994). The fourth chapter continues the discussion of
Remains by following the trajectory of readings based on the historical
aspects of the novel, which, in turn, leads to discussions of the novel
by postcolonial theorists. Chapter Five, the third chapter dedicated to
Remains, begins with conversations about the role of memory in the
novel and continues by investigating one of the novel’s most important
themes: the ethics of service, an issue that has been approached from a
variety of angles.
Frustrated by critics who attempted to categorise him as a realist and
attempting to push his writing in a new direction, Ishiguro replied
with his fourth novel, The Unconsoled (1995). Almost as long as his
three previous novels combined and much more challenging to read,
the novel has divided critics. Chapter Six investigates this mixed
response and then outlines attempts to interpret this difficult novel.
Chapter Seven turns to Ishiguro’s fi fth novel, When We Were Orphans,
beginning again with an analysis of the novel’s reception based on the
reviews it received and using those responses to outline the themes
readers have found in the novel. The final chapter looks at the reception
of Ishiguro’s most recent novel, Never Let Me Go, and two of the early
scholarly responses the novel has inspired.
The novels of Kazuo Ishiguro demand that readers look honestly
at the past, to consider what they hold valuable, and to question how
they live their lives. Evaluating the responses to his work provides
insight into how critics have responded to these challenges, how they
have developed and extended his work, and what has yet to be dis-
cussed. These responses demonstrate, then, how Ishiguro, and other
writers, might best be read. Perhaps more importantly, however,
evaluating these responses reveals how readers can not only better
understand the intricacies of Ishiguro’s fiction but also gain a clearer
perception of the stakes involved in his fiction, nothing less than how
best to live life.
CH A P TER ONE
Bad Memories: A Pale View

of Hills (1982)
K azuo Ishiguro’s fi rst novel, A Pale View of Hills (1982), was well
received: it was greeted with almost universally appreciative
reviews and won the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize of the Royal
Society of Literature. Set in England during the early 1980s, A Pale
View of Hills recounts the meeting of a mother and daughter. The
mother, Etsuko, is a Japanese woman who at the time of the nov-
el’s present lives in England. Her daughter, Niki, is the product of
Etsuko’s second marriage to a now-deceased Englishman named
Sheringham. Niki’s visit repeatedly leads Etsuko to think back to the
time shortly after the bombing of Nagasaki when she was living with
her fi rst husband, a Japanese man named Jiro, and pregnant with her
fi rst daughter, Keiko, who committed suicide sometime after mov-
ing to England. Although this brief summary may suggest a tangled
narrative, the novelist and children’s author Penelope Lively (born
1933) found the novel’s style intriguing and thought the novel pow-
erful despite its simplicity. At the same time, she found it ‘unsettling
and a little baffling’. She sums up its effect as ‘one of extraordinary
tension, of implied griefs and evils’.1 Similarly, Edith Milton fi nds
Ishiguro’s novel dark and mysterious.2 Michael Wood calls it ‘a small
masterpiece’.3
A NEW WRITER WITH A JAPANESE NAME AND FACE
The critical reception of Ishiguro’s fi rst novel introduced several issues

to which readers continually return when responding to his novels.
In keeping with Ishiguro’s theory that he satisfied the desire for ‘other
Rushdies’,4 early reviewers were eager to concentrate discussions of his
fiction on his Japanese roots. As well, the detail with which Ishiguro
5
has described Japan in his fi rst two novels has led critics to another
prevalent concern with Ishiguro’s work: its value as social and histori-
cal commentary. Reviewers and critics have also directed considerable
attention to the reticence of Ishiguro’s protagonists. Finally, the issue
of memory, a topic seemingly present in all of Ishiguro’s fiction, is
another key issue in discussions of this novel.
Throughout the early reviews writers repeatedly return to Japanese
stereotypes to find language to discuss Ishiguro’s work. In one of
the first reviews of Pale View of Hills, the poet Anthony Thwaite
(born 1930) begins by pointing out how he wants to use a Japanese
term yugem, ‘a suggestive indefiniteness full of mystery and depth’,
to describe Ishiguro’s writing, but admits that given Ishiguro’s biog-
raphy, doing so does not seem appropriate, an inappropriateness that
he is apparently ready to overlook. For Thwaite the novel does seem
a Japanese novel although this assessment appears based on Ishiguro’s
setting the flashbacks in Japan and Ishiguro’s Japanese name and face.5
The novelist and short-story writer Francis King (born 1923) begins by
pointing out that Ishiguro has grown up speaking English; however, he
then describes Ishiguro’s work as typical of Japanese literature because
of ‘its compression, its reticence and in its exclusion of all details not
absolutely essential to its theme. It might, one feels, be some apprentice
work by Kawabata or Sushaki Endo [1923–96], its dialogue rendered
slightly stilted by translation’.6 In his ‘Two Worlds Japan Has Lost
Since the Meiji’ (1982), Jonathan Spence goes so far as to pair a review
of Ishiguro’s novel with a book that relies heavily on a Japanese woman
novelist Higuchi Ichiyo (1872–96), writing at the end of the nineteenth
century. The ‘two worlds’ that the title refers to are the periods of the
1880–90s, and then the time of Ishiguro’s novel, before and after World
War II. In the second half of the review, when Spence turns to Ishig-
uro, he finds that ‘The cadences of Ishiguro in the 1980s recall Ichiyo’s
of a century before’, and then offers a long well-chosen quotation of
Etsuko describing the dusk in pre-war Nagasaki (PVH 120).7 But the
penultimate paragraph of the review is a troubling one. Spence pro-
poses that Ichiyo would have appreciated Ishiguro’s novel: ‘She would
have noted how a whole society was being put together under her
eyes from sudden comments and apparently random phrases’.8 Spence
adds that she would have understood the suffering the novel portrays,
especially the suffering of young Mariko, a young girl often abandoned
and generally neglected by her mother, the only person the young girl
seems to have in her life. This speculated understanding, however, is
based almost entirely on the perceived ‘Japaneseness’ of the somewhat
unlikely pairing of the twentieth-century British male Ishiguro and the
nineteenth-century Japanese female Ichiyo. Ishiguro’s fiction, for many,
marked his Japaneseness, so much so that after the first two books, he
A PA L E V I E W O F THE HI LLS 7
was the person that the English media would call on when they needed
a comment on Japanese topics.9
On a similar note, in Kazuo Ishiguro (2000), Barry Lewis notes the
frequency with which reviewers refer to Japanese art in their efforts
to describe Ishiguro’s style.10 Lewis outlines the various stereotypes
Westerners associate with Japan and suggests that Ishiguro seems
caught between being Japanese and British. Ishiguro, Lewis sug-
gests, does not exaggerate any differences between the two cultures,
but at the same time, he does want to retain the distinction between
them. Lewis offers Ishiguro’s introduction to two novels by Yasunari
Kawabata as proof of the difficult balance Ishiguro maintains.11 There,
Ishiguro argues that although Kawabata’s context might be differ-
ent, his characters are similar to people everywhere and concerned
with issues that concern people everywhere. Lewis reads Ishiguro
as proposing that a different sort of reading is required, which leads
Lewis to a constructive distinction that distances himself from crit-
ics who have seized on Ishiguro’s Japaneseness as a shortcut to critical
discussion: ‘the interesting question about Ishiguro’s writing is not “Is
it Japanese?” but “How Japanese is it?”’12 One Japanese influence to
which Ishiguro admits is Japanese fi lms: ‘I’m probably more influenced
by Japanese movies. I see a lot of Japanese fi lms. The visual images of
Japan have a great poignancy for me, particularly in domestic fi lms
like those of Ozu and Naruse, set in the postwar era, the Japan I actu-
ally remember’.13
ISHIGURO’S JAPAN THROUGH THE LENS

OF OZU AND KUROSAWA
Mason has followed up on Ishiguro’s claim of fi lmic influence in his

essay, ‘Inspiring Images: The Influence of the Japanese Cinema on
the Writings of Kazuo Ishiguro’ (1989). It is one of the most impor-
tant and informative essays that has been written on Ishiguro’s first
two novels. While most references to Japanese elements in Ishiguro’s
work rely on vague resemblances and superficial understandings of
Japanese authors, Mason provides a detailed comparison that helps
illuminate Ishiguro’s unique and resonant style. Specifically, Mason
studies the narrative techniques Japanese cinema has offered Ishiguro,
a study which leads Mason to consider the influence of Yasujiro Ozu
and Akira Kurosawa (1910–98), directors who developed the domes-
tic genre, the shomin-geki, and thereby provided an alternative to the
previous tradition in Japanese fi lm, replete with militarism and ritual
suicide. A Pale View of Hills does share some remarkable parallels with
various Japanese fi lms from this era and genre. Mason sees Etsuko
‘embattled in her search for independence and dignity’, a familiar her-

oine found in fi lms such as Mikio Naruse’s When a Woman Ascends the
Stairs (1960). Alongside Ishiguro’s pairing of Sachiko (Etsuko’s double)
and a guilt-ridden Etsuko, Mason posits a parallel use of a double and
a central figure consumed with guilt in The Heart (1955), directed by
Kon Ichikawa (1915–2008). The novel’s ghostly atmosphere fi lled with
mothers, daughters, and old ladies suggests the influence of Ugetsu
(1953), directed by Kenji Mizoguchi (1898–56). So similar are the
atmospheres that Mason suggests the fi lm critic Basil Wright’s com-
ment on Ugetsu might be written by a reader of A Pale View of Hills:
that the reader of the novel might begin ‘to realise that it involves
things which are not what they seem’, and that ‘there may be mirror
realities in reflection or opposition’.14
Ozu and Ishiguro also make similar use of visual details to manipulate
plot. Citing various fi lm critics, Mason demonstrates that Ozu felt
that too much action prevented a fi lm from allowing full exposition
of its characters, and observes that ‘Ozu often attends to seemingly
irrelevant physical and spatial details such as passageways, hat racks, or
teakettles. He lingers on these spaces or objects to subvert the linear
trajectory of the narrative and to challenge its dominance as an
all-consuming focus of viewer interest’.15 Ishiguro’s f iction works
in a similar way:
Ishiguro employs analogous devices to retard and disperse the impe-

tus of his narratives in order to reveal subtle and surprising aspects of
character. In A Pale View of Hills, the narrative contains gaps, apparent
contradictions, and later emendations. Rather than proceeding in a hori-
zontal line, events appear to be vertically stacked.16
Mason’s work not only helps illuminate Ishiguro’s conception of the

Japan he depicts in his fi rst two novels, a place to which he had not
returned since leaving at age five; his detailed analysis also helps
readers better understand how Ishiguro’s fiction works.
Mason’s essay develops another thread from his interview with
Ishiguro by recalling that the shomin-geki, or domestic drama, is
Ishiguro’s primary Japanese influence. The characteristics of the
domestic genre are certainly present in these fi rst two novels in the
form of ‘the classic shomin-geki domestic configuration of confl ict
between parents and children in an extended family setting with cer-
tain comic overtones’. Specifically, Mason notes the predecessor to the
‘boisterous, sometimes disrespectful’17 Mariko in Ozu’s Good Morning
(1959); the tender relationship between Ogata and Etsuko recalls the
situation in Ozu’s Tokyo Story (1953); and the visit of Jiro’s drunken
colleagues and the scenes set in the noodle shop are similar to scenes
in his Early Spring (1956).18 Such scenes generate the mood and images
of the shomin-geki, an ambience aptly described by the Japanese phrase,
mono no aware (‘the sadness of things’). It is a mood present in many
Japanese fi lms, especially Ozu’s, and Mason fi nds evidence of it in
Ishiguro’s work and his take on the past:
More than just a setting, the cultural upheaval and reorientation of

postwar Japan furnishes Ishiguro a rich metaphor for a world in transition.
From a rare Western perspective, familiar with but removed from tradi-
tional Japanese experience, he is able to explore the psychological and
ethical dilemmas common to both cultures.19
This view of domestic life agrees with Ishiguro’s perception of Japanese

life as normal rather than extraordinary, or notably, that the quiet
endurance of the tribulations of life is not particular to Japanese only.
Both A Pale View of Hills and Ishiguro’s next novel, An Artist of the
Floating World, combine aspects of Eastern and Western world views:
‘Fortified by the textural realism of the shomin-geki, and sharpened with
Western irony, Ishiguro explores themes that possess a Japanese reso-
nance but with a Western incisiveness’. Remembering that Ishiguro
cites Dostoevsky and Chekhov as two of his most important influences,
Mason points out Dostoevsky’s influence in Ishiguro’s probing of ‘deep
psychological dissonances, the struggles between the urges to hide and
to rebel, to temporize and to confess’. Chekhov’s influence reveals itself
in Ishiguro’s portrayal of ‘strong currents of emotion moving beneath a
seemingly quiet surface, and an oblique forward movement of plot, to
reveal and confront moral issues’, and further in Ishiguro’s use of irony
‘that is both judgmental and humorous’.20 These subtleties, however,
are often overlooked given the ease with which Ishiguro’s work can
be appropriated by critics most concerned with his portrayal of society
and history.
ISHIGURO’S NOVELS AS SOCIOLOGICAL

AND HISTORICAL PRIMERS
Asked by Dylan Krider about the amount of research that he had

to do for the first two books, Ishiguro explains that he frequently
went to Japanese fi lms, but adds that he had to rely on memory.21
The exchange is notable for what Ishiguro’s answer omits: research.
Ishiguro’s reliance on Japanese fi lms and memory, rather than research,
defies the realist precision that some of his reviewers fi nd in the
novel’s evocation of social and historical contexts. James Campbell,
in a positive review, focuses immediately on the ‘confl ict between
the traditional and modern worlds’ as one of Ishiguro’s themes.22

Similarly, King, like Lively, emphasises the gap between generations as
one of the themes of the novel: not only are there difficulties between
mothers and daughters, but the Ogata-San and Jiro plot also reveals
a secondary confl ict between the generations.23
Reviewers have also noted the importance of the historical moment.
Spence reads the novel as a comment on the Japan of the time, explain-
ing that the ‘Pale Hills’ are not just the slopes that rise above Nagasaki:
‘they are also evocations of a fading life, of a Japanese world where
one’s own dead children and their sufferings blur with the impact of
other people’s dislocated lives’.24 Fumio Yoshioka, too, sees the novel
as tracing the difficulties of the historical period:
Ogata-San’s visit, which turns out to be much longer than he originally

contemplated, sets up another scene in which the fragility of spurious
dutifulness and decorum is mercilessly exposed to view. What should
be a heartwarming reunion for a war-torn family ends up in dissolution of
human bonds which are, once lost, unlikely to be regained.25
Peter Wain makes one of the more radical claims about the social and
historical aspects of the novel when he asserts that the subplot, which
focuses on the father and son, Ogata and Jiro, is ‘the core of the novel’,
a claim that Wain makes no attempt to support except to point out a
similar theme, presumably of an older man looking back on the past,
in Ishiguro’s next two novels.26 Cynthia Wong asserts that the novel is
about ‘exploring the peculiar atmosphere of a society reconstructing
itself’, a point she connects with the conception of a ‘common odyssey’,
propounded by the French thinker Michel Foucault (1926–84).27
The Japanese in the novel, she argues, seek solace in the institution
of the family, a connection supposedly supported by the Ogata-San
plot, but the novel reveals that the massive transitions of the post-war
period destabilise the family, ultimately leading the young away from
the family home. Consequently, the bombing of Nagasaki infl icts
not only physical destruction but also the destruction of perdurable
values serving as familial bonds, a destruction which in turn splits
generations.28 Edith Milton fi nds grounds for a similar reading. She
sees Sachiko observing the abandonment of ancient customs in the
rush to capitalist pragmatism and self-interest. Like many of those
around her, Sachiko veers away from the nationalism that led Japan
into the war, towards the American values of progress, a change that
leads her to the ‘pathetic illusion of the good life in the form of Frank
the American, a cruder and lesser version of poor Madame Butterfly’s
caddish Pinkerton’ (in the opera Madame Butterfly (1904) by the
Italian composer Giacomo Puccini (1858–1924)). But Ishiguro is not
just bemoaning the changes that have overtaken the old culture; the
past was not perfect, as the Ogata plotline demonstrates. The future,
Milton suggests, belongs to Niki, the hybrid who lacks attachments
or loyalties but is honest and free from prejudice.29 Such readings not
only provide interesting contextual glosses to the understanding of the
novel, they also enable a better understanding of Ishiguro’s characters
and their motivations.
ISHIGURO’S NOVELS AS SOCIOLOGICAL AND HISTORICAL

PRIMERS – COUNTERPOINT
Other critics have focused more directly on the individuals in the

novel. ‘Private Desolations’, a short review by the novelist Paul Bailey
(born 1937), counters those asserting the centrality of the novel’s
context. He begins by explaining his title: Ishiguro is not intending
to ‘do’ Nagasaki; instead he wants to lead the reader into the ‘private
desolations’ people feel. Rather than history or politics, Bailey points
out, ‘Ishiguro very cleverly shows a person exploring the unhappiness
of her own past by concentrating on other people’.30 Thwaite’s appre-
ciative review, ‘Ghosts in the Mirror’, also concludes that this story
is more about Etsuko than anyone else and in fact, Etsuko may be
transposing her story onto Sachiko.31 Even Nicholas de Jongh, despite
his interest in the bombing of Nagasaki, points out that the novel does
not make moral judgements. It just observes.32
Ishiguro has, in fact, claimed discomfort when his books are taken as
realistic, heavily researched accounts. When asked about the obligation
writers have to represent a place accurately, Ishiguro replies,
I’m not sure that I ever distorted anything major, but my first priority
was not to portray history accurately. Japan and militarism, now these are
big, important questions, and it always made me uneasy that my books
were being used as a sort of historical text.33
Responding to Mason’s questioning of the difference between

Etsuko’s apparent timidity in Japan and the actual boldness of her
actions, Ishiguro agrees that this is one of the gaps in the novel, but
adds that he is ‘not interested in the solid facts. The focus of the book
is elsewhere, in the emotional upheaval’.34
Lewis provides a compelling reconciliation of the novel’s his-
torical grounding and Ishiguro’s professed indifference to facts. He
describes some of the historical references, such as the kujibiki stand
where Mariko tries to win a basket for her kittens and sees the scene
as ‘evocative of a way of life fast disappearing under the post-war
onslaught of American colonisation’. Lewis, however, questions these
‘historical snapshots’, and claims that the novel ‘as a whole under-
mines its own authenticity’ by ‘echoing Giacomo Puccini’s Madam
Butterfly’,35 an opera which presents the usual kind of exotic Japan
complete with ‘exotic costuming, its sets of fake cherry blossoms
and sliding rice-paper screens’. 36 Shaffer also notes the connection
to Madame Butterfly and adds to Lewis’s comments by connecting
Ishiguro’s Frank to ‘Eveline’, one of the short stories in Dubliners
(1914) by James Joyce (1882–1941), which portrays another Frank
in a similar plot, adding the irony that neither Frank appears to be
frank.37 Shaffer’s additional note on these connections makes Lewis’s
argument even more convincing: ‘Its overt intertextual nods towards
Puccini hint at the novel’s constructedness, preventing the reader
from interpreting its depicted world too literally’.38 The socio-his-
torical position is a weak one, one that the novel may gesture towards
but in ways that reveal the position’s speciousness when the details are
taken too literally.
IN THE AFTERMATH OF THE BOMB
The falseness of the socio-historical position is particularly important

to acknowledge before turning to one of the novel’s largest peculiar-
ities: the absence of reference to the atomic bombing of Nagasaki in
1945. Since much of the novel is set in Nagasaki a few years after the
atomic bombing, many readers have assumed that it plays a large role
in the novel. Campbell, for instance, reads the bombing of Nagasaki
as the novel’s background. 39 Milton too suggests that the nuclear
bomb, although absent, lies at the nucleus of the novel visible only
in the shattered lives it has altered. While its absence is part of this
novel’s strategy that leaves its most important information unsaid,
‘those blanked-out days around the bomb’s explosion become the
paradigm of modern life’.40 De Jongh too reads the bombing as a
key part of the novel. Even though it is never discussed directly, the
consequences of the war ‘are like unseen or hidden protagonists’.
At the same time, de Jongh quotes Ishiguro as saying that he did not
want the novel to be about the horrors of nuclear destruction, but
about the recovery.41
Lewis observes that the bombing of Nagasaki is mentioned just
twice in the novel and that both of these mentions are unemphatic.42
The absence is made even more peculiar, Lewis adds, by Ishiguro’s
foregrounding of the bombing in an earlier short story, ‘A Strange
and Sometimes Sadness’ (1981).43 Yoshioka speculates that this perhaps
unexpected shift of emphasis alters readers’ perception of the narrative:
Emphasis is continuously placed on the days after, not the days of,
the atomic holocaust. Accordingly, the focus of depiction is fixed on people
and not on the horrendous incidents; on the devastated minds and lives
of the survivors and not on the colossal devastation of the war and the
atomic bomb.44
Michael Wood addresses this question by diagnosing the absent bomb

as a consequence of Etsuko’s repression:45 her denial, Lewis adds, of
what happened in Nagasaki and what happened to Keiko. Wood’s
explanation, however, does not go far enough in Lewis’s opinion.
Consequently, Lewis sets out to investigate the wider context of the
bomb, and after a perhaps too sweeping discussion determines that
Ishiguro, having been born years after the bombing and having grown
up far from Nagasaki ‘cannot be a spokesman for the unspeakable’.
Instead, Ishiguro has crafted ‘a silence more eloquent than words’.46
Shaffer confronts other critics, such as Wong and Milton, who
put too much weight on the bombing. He cites Wong’s argument
that ‘What begins for Etsuko as a personal post-mortem, inquiring
into her daughter’s death, evolves into a tale about Nagasaki after the
bombing’47 and suggests that Milton overreaches when she writes,
‘Sachiko and Etsuko become minor figures in a greater pattern of
betrayal, infanticide and survival played out against the background
of Nagasaki, itself the absolute emblem of our genius for destruction’.48
Shaffer concludes: ‘the focus of Ishiguro’s fi rst novel is more on
individual psychology – specifically, on the way in which people use
other people’s stories to conceal yet, paradoxically, to reveal their own
– than it is on national history and the role individuals play in public
affairs’.49 Shaffer’s comments lead to some of the most interesting
analysis of the novel, work on its narration and psychology.
RETICENCE
One aspect of the novel’s narration that has drawn the attention of
critics is its reticence. Readers have remarked on the novel’s ‘control
and economy’,50 called it ‘brief, elliptical, and spare’, and observed that
it works ‘largely by inference’.51 Wain, having surveyed the variety
of comments and interpretations the novel’s reticence has inspired,
concludes that the novel leaves ‘more questions unanswered than
answered’.52 For example, one of the key questions that readers want
answered is why Etsuko left Japan. At one point Etsuko addresses
this question but will only say that she left a long time ago and does
not want to spend any more time thinking about it. She believes that
her motives for leaving were just, so there is no point in revisiting
that move (PVH 91). Norman Page thinks that she does provide her
motives in a ‘persistent act of self-explanation and self-justification’.53 It

is a compelling argument, but he fails to provide the reasoning for it.
It is perhaps one of the novel’s symbolic lacunae that she does not literally
enunciate her motives. Wong acknowledges the reticence but places it
alongside the role of memory in the novel:
Ishiguro’s deceptively simple manner of presenting Etsuko’s retro-

spective narrative is complicated by the determination to let silence itself
speak. In turning toward the dreaded past, Etsuko conveys a tale that is
the disclosure not of a tangible secret, but of a private shame associated
with the memories now on the verge of becoming public.54
The novel’s reticence has bothered some critics, such as James

Campbell and Paul Bailey. Campbell’s review is appreciative although
he declares the one fault that ‘Some characters are rather faceless, and
the dialogue is vapid in places’, and he too sees a lack of ‘incidental
detail’.55 While Bailey obviously enjoyed the book, he did provide the
famous line, ‘at certain points I could have done with something as
crude as a fact’. Bailey, who calls the novel ‘bravely reticent’ and ‘cou-
rageous in its self-effacement’ also points out that Keiko’s withdrawal
from the family is the most traumatic event in the novel, and while
he fi nds it clever that Ishiguro has left it out, he wants to read more
about Etsuko’s deceased English husband, Sheringham, ‘who would
appear to have been a man of some intelligence’.56 Notably, there is
no support provided for this claim; in fact, if, as some have proposed,
Etsuko and Keiko are represented by Sachiko and Mariko, it could be
argued, as Petry does, that Sheringham is represented by the American
Frank,57 an equation that would cast doubts on Bailey’s speculations.
It appears that Bailey simply wants a different novel.
Lewis defends Ishiguro against the criticisms of Campbell and Bailey
suggesting that the absences may be Ishiguro’s deliberate narrative choices
rather than lapses, and that the two critics may have misunderstood the
novel’s silences:
Within the Japanese culture in which the book is set, indirect com-
munication is an important feature of everyday life. The dialogue, far from
being vapid, portrays the clipped spoken content of a typical discourse.
Its meaning is not simply in the words that are uttered, but in the pauses
and prevarications punctuating the exchange.
Additionally, Lewis notes, in passing, the similarity of Ishiguro’s use of

conveying meaning through the pauses with the dramatic technique
of Harold Pinter (1930–2008), a similarity of increased interest given
that Pinter wrote the fi rst screenplay of The Remains of the Day (even
if that attempt was ultimately discarded).58 On a similar note, Lively

is particularly impressed by Ishiguro’s rendering of the conversations
between Etsuko and Sachiko, an observation of style that forces readers
to look at the novel’s underlying structure.59
ETSUKO AND/OR SACHIKO
One of the crucial issues confronting the novel’s readers, an issue that
critics have queried since the earliest reviews, is the question of the
relationship between Etsuko and Sachiko. King, having noted that
Etsuko and Sachiko have acted in similar ways by forming relationships
with foreign husbands, reads the parallel literally: both have harmed
their daughters by pursuing Western lovers.60 Nicholas de Jongh also
sees the parallels between the two as markers of a past that cannot be
forgotten.61 Yoshioka’s comments on the novel’s dual structure help
to explain the difficulty of sorting out the relationship between the
two characters. He observes how the two are not parallel: they remain
distinct, but as the novel progresses their lives start to overlap each
other until by the novel’s end they become as ‘indistinguishable’ as
‘mirror images’. It is an accurate description of the subtle process to
which readers are subjected. Yoshioka is on less solid critical ground,
however, when he proposes that the blurring of the boundaries that
usually separate individuals lessens the severity of their personal
miseries, a difficult argument for which he can provide no support.62
Closely parsing the novel’s text, Shaffer fi nds that there are ‘hints’
to support the idea that Etsuko uses the parallel narrative to comment
on her own treatment of Keiko. Building on Yoshioka’s reading of
Etsuko and Sachiko as dissolving into each other, Shaffer identifies
the important slippages that mark the blurring and notes that eventu-
ally readers discover ‘that Sachiko and Mariko function less as “real”
individuals than as individuals onto whom Etsuko can project her
own guilt for neglecting and abusing Keiko’.63 Given Etsuko’s unreli-
ability, readers are compelled to ask if Sachiko and Mariko are real
people or manifestations of Etsuko’s guilt. Shaffer offers, ‘it is prob-
ably the case that Sachiko, like Mariko’s mysterious woman visitor, is
neither exactly as she appears to be nor “entirely imaginary”, (43)’ but
somewhere in between;64 however, his evidence is, at times, highly
suppositious. For example, in attempting to argue that Etsuko feared
becoming a parent, Shaffer asserts, ‘Etsuko may only be pretend-
ing “to be delighted” that a child is on the way (49); instead, like
Frank, she may actually be “scared of ” the child (86).’65 In such cases
Shaffer does not offer evidence but merely possibilities, and, somewhat
carelessly, does not consider the evidence to the contrary.
Shaffer is more persuasive in arguing that Etsuko uses Sachiko’s

story to comment on her own history when he turns to the novel’s
climax, the slipping pronouns scene when Etsuko at fi rst appears to be
speaking to Mariko, but after a shift of the pronouns, seems instead to
be speaking to Keiko (PVH 172–3). In the previous scene, Etsuko had
set out to find Mariko, so when she meets a little girl in the next scene,
readers are reminded of earlier scenes in which Etsuko went out and
found Mariko. After promising the little girl that her move will be suc-
cessful, Etsuko uses ‘we’ rather than ‘you’ which indicates that Etsuko
and the child will be going on the trip together, and suggests that the
child is not Sachiko’s daughter Mariko, but her own daughter Keiko.
As Shaffer points out, Ishiguro has proposed in an interview that this
slip of the pronouns is the point where the narrative reveals itself:
[T]he meanings that Etsuko imputes to the life of Sachiko are obvi-
ously the meanings that are relevant to her (Etsuko’s) own life. Whatever
the facts were about what happened to Sachiko and her daughter, they
are of interest to Etsuko now because she can use them to talk about
herself. So you have this highly Etsuko-ed version of this other person’s
story; and at the most intense point, I wanted to suggest that Etsuko had
dropped this cover. It just slips out: she’s now talking about herself. She’s
no longer bothering to put it in the third person.66
The scene presents Etsuko promising her daughter that they will
return to Japan if life in England does not work out. Keiko’s suicide,
the event that lies outside the narrative but serves as its impetus, sug-
gests that it is a promise that Etsuko did not keep. Shaffer follows
up on the stakes of this transformation by drawing a direct equation
between Etsuko and Sachiko, arguing that ‘it is now Etsuko who is
the mother guilty of negligent child rearing’,67 a statement that the
novel does not support if the negligence refers to Sachiko’s repeated
abandoning and poor treatment of her daughter, but one that might
apply if, as Shaffer goes on to suggest, Etsuko took Keiko to England
even though she knew her daughter would be unhappy there.
Although Shaffer does not cite it, this reading is supported by
Mason’s analysis of the Inasa Hills episode, a scene Etsuko recounts
near the middle of the novel. Etsuko, pregnant with her fi rst child,
Keiko, and looking for some respite from the dreariness of Nagasaki,
goes on a short outing with Sachiko and Sachiko’s daughter Mariko
(PVH 103–24). Near the very end of the novel, Etsuko describes
a photo of Nagasaki’s harbour with the Inasa Hills in the background
that is in a calendar that she has just given Niki and mentions a trip
she once took there. Asked to explain the trip’s importance to her,
Etsuko describes how happy Keiko was that day (PVH 182). Readers,
of course, had until that point been under the impression that Keiko
was still an unborn child being carried by Etsuko on the day of that
trip. Mason sums up the effect: ‘The disoriented reader is left to reor-
der the chronology of events, to reevaluate the actions, and to reassess
the very identities of the protagonists’.68 Instead of telling the story we
expect, Ishiguro explains, Etsuko ‘tells another story altogether, going
back years and talking about somebody she once knew. So the whole
narrative strategy of the book was about how someone ends up talking
about things they cannot face directly through other people’s stories’.69
Confronted by troubling aspects of her past, Etsuko can only tell her
story by telling the story of another.
Given Etsuko’s manipulations of her story, Shaffer embarks on a
psychoanalytic discussion of defence mechanisms of the ego: specifi-
cally, projection and rationalisation.70 Projection describes the uncon-
scious rejection of what is emotionally unacceptable to the self and its
attribution, or projection, onto another. Rationalisation, similar to its
everyday meaning, describes the creation of elaborate explanations
for one’s behaviour which allow one to escape anxiety about one’s
actions and continue with the behaviour. Etsuko, Shaffer argues, ‘is
clearly guilty of scapegoating – of using her “Sachiko narrative” to
deflect her personal guilt onto another. It is not she who has “sacri-
ficed” a daughter, who is guilty, figuratively speaking, of infanticide,
but someone else’.71 In this scheme, Niki is the ‘rationalizing voice,
explaining away the fact that Etsuko deserted her fi rst daughter’.72
But Shaffer does not provide support for the idea that Etsuko deserted
Keiko. Etsuko, he notes, feels guilty for taking Keiko from Japan,
but taking her from Japan does not equal the crime of deserting her.
Etsuko’s guilt does, however, require more analysis.
GUILTS AND GHOSTS
One approach to the novel, put forward not only by Shaffer but also
earlier by Gabriele Annan in her insightful review, ‘On The High
Wire’, is to read it as a ghost story, a reading that helps illuminate
Etsuko’s guilt. Annan, for example, reads Niki’s departure as based
in part on ‘Keiko’s unseen ghost’ keeping her awake. Although she
is careful to point out that Etsuko would not have behaved as cruelly
as Sachiko behaves towards Mariko, Annan proposes that Etsuko feels
guilty for having taken Keiko to England. Ishiguro, Annan argues,
has fitted Etsuko with a mask of self-deception that does not slip, and is
able to build tension by gradually revealing, ‘clue by clue’, the mis-
judgements she has made. Moreover, Annan adds, this plotline about
private guilt is complemented by a subplot on public guilt – the Ogata
story, where the artist with imperialist values is discredited.73
Shaffer expands on Annan’s reading. The ‘never-articulated fear

that Keiko’s ghost haunts’ Etsuko’s English house is proof for Shaffer
that Etsuko and Niki both feel guilty: ‘The reason for Etsuko’s buried
guilt is obvious’, and Niki’s guilt ‘may be attributed both to “survi-
vor’s guilt” and to the fact that she purposefully absented herself from
her sister’s funeral’.74 Unfortunately, the support for his claim that the
novel is a ghost story is not fully developed: he relies heavily for proof
on the discomfort the women feel in the proximity of Keiko’s room
and a small sound each hears coming from the room. Since he has
just argued that Etsuko’s observations are unreliable, this reliance on
her observations seems injudicious. Notably, he does not attempt to
incorporate Mason’s observation on the similarities of the novel with
Mizoguchi’s ghost story Ugetsu.75
Shaffer’s analysis is stronger, however, when he turns to the dreams
that Etsuko has of the little girl in the park (PVH 47). Etsuko later realises
that the dream is related not to the little girl, but to her remember-
ing Sachiko. Shaffer, in turn, postulates that despite Etsuko’s denials,
the dream is related to Keiko, and the little girl is not on the swing but
hanging from a noose.76 Shaffer puts together the ghost story idea and
the dream to lead to Ishiguro’s comment that the novel ‘is largely based
around her guilt. She feels a great guilt, that out of her own emotional
longings for a different sort of life, she sacrificed her own daughter’s
happiness’.77
Lewis, having determined that the novel’s topic is not what Japan
refers to in the text, but ‘how the text refers to Japan’, reads the novel
as based on displacement, as do Rocio G. Davis and Gary Corseri,
and in doing so, he adds another useful interpretive dimension.
Surprisingly, given his fondness for psychoanalytic readings, Lewis
does not use the term displacement to refer to a defence mechanism,
like projection and rationalisation, that describes the unconscious
process by which an individual refocuses the shameful feelings for one
entity to a more acceptable one (the classic example being the situation
in which the worker after being bullied by his boss, someone to whom
he cannot express his anger, returns home and becomes angry with
his family, a safer target for his anger). Rather, Lewis appears to use
the term more literally, as in things out of place. Consequently, he fi nds
‘geographical displacement’ in people being out of place, ‘cognitive
displacement’ brought on by Etsuko’s fractured memories, ‘psycholog-
ical displacement’ in the relationship between Etsuko and Sachiko, and
‘familial displacement’ due to Keiko’s suicide.78 Displacement, Lewis
argues, helps to contextualise the ghost story readings. Although there
is a strong tradition of ghost stories and suicide in Japanese literature,
Ishiguro’s work does not use that tradition; instead, Ishiguro’s work
is structured more like European literature, such as The Turn of the
Screw (1898) by the English-based American novelist Henry James

(1843–1916). To prove this claim Lewis examines A Pale View of Hills
using Gustav Freytag’s components of dramatic plot: ‘initial situa-
tion, confl ict, complications, climax, and resolution’.79 This analysis
leads him to the points in the novel where the identities of Etsuko
and Keiko blur with those of Sachiko and Mariko, and in these slips,
he fi nds ‘displacement between the outer and inner narratives’. Most
importantly, Lewis argues that this displacement destabilises the text
beyond the point of recuperation leaving readers with only shifting
interpretive possibilities:
Either: (a) Etsuko is confusing different sets of memories; or (b) Etsuko

is merging memory and fantasy; or (c) Etsuko is projecting her guilt about
forcing Keiko to leave Japan on to her memories of Sachiko in a similar
situation; or (d) Etsuko is projecting her guilt about the above on to a
fantasy of a woman called Sachiko and her child.80
This list serves as a useful map through other readings of the novel.
IMAGERY
Left with these interpretative difficulties, several critics have looked to

Ishiguro’s imagery for exegetic assistance. Milton, for example, asserts
that ‘themes and images echo and repeat in a contrapuntal arrange-
ment of increasing power’. Milton also points out the images to which
critics keep returning: the kittens drowned by Sachiko, the long-dead
woman who reappears throughout the novel, the small bit of rope
twisted around Etsuko’s sandal, and the girl ‘dangling from a swing’.81
Lively sees Mariko as ‘a premonitory symbol’ for Keiko and perceives
that the imagery around Mariko hints at ‘some macabre fate’.82
Yoshioka focuses on the images that cluster around the ‘two dominant
trains of death-imagery which thread through the story: one envisages
a girl hanging in the air, while the other is related with a river’. The
significance of the recurring rope imagery, he asserts, becomes greater
given the context of Mariko’s childhood:
The whole city of Nagasaki is alerted by a series of child murders, the

last of which has just recently left a little girl hanging dead from a tree.
The frightening sight is linked, in the chronological confusion of Etsuko’s
reveries, with her indelible vision of Keiko suspended in the air for days on
end in a desolate room.83
While Milton, Lively, and Yoshioka provide a start to understanding

the image of the rope, Lewis provides a more complete study.
For Lewis the rope is a motif that ‘binds together’ different parts
of the novel.84 Most obviously, the suicide of Keiko features the rope
she uses to hang herself. Less obviously, Etsuko’s guilt manifests itself
in the dream of the little girl on the swing, swinging on a rope (PVH
95–6). Lewis places the neglect of the oft-abandoned Mariko in the
same image bundle. On one occasion, when Etsuko finds her sitting
in the grass, Mariko is frightened by a piece of rope tangled around
Etsuko’s ankle (PVH 83–4). Perhaps most importantly, this incident
is repeated during the change-of-pronoun scene, prescient timing
because it is this scene that suggests that Etsuko was not talking to
Mariko but rather to Keiko (PVH 172–3). A little girl, who the reader
has been led to believe is Mariko but now seems instead to be Keiko, is
again frightened by a piece of rope around Etsuko’s ankle (PVH 173).
Most importantly, the child’s fear of the rope that Etsuko is holding
becomes apparent only after Etsuko promises the little girl that if the
move abroad is unsuccessful, they can return to Japan. The child’s
connecting of the rope and the promise, which seems to have been
broken, strongly suggests that the present-time Etsuko may retain a
considerable amount of guilt for Keiko’s suicide; thus, she cannot speak
of how she had forced Keiko to come to England but only of how
Sachiko may or may not have forced Mariko to go to America. Lewis,
therefore, sees the rope in ‘Etsuko’s guilt, the dream of the little girl on
the swing, the neglect of Mariko and the suicide of Keiko’.85
As is apparent from the earlier discussions of defence mechanisms,
the novel’s indeterminacy has served as a powerful lure for Freudian
readings. Shaffer, who provides one of the most extensive readings of
the novel’s imagery, perceives the novel as having roots in both the
ancient Greek myth of Styx and modern psychology, and in his trac-
ing of these roots he points out some of the more important image
clusters. First, he attempts to forge a connection between Ishiguro’s
river and the ancient Greek myth of Styx. It is an effort which not
only usefully parses the novel’s descriptions of the river and its
environs but also incorporates the image of the long-dead woman,
equating her to the river goddess Styx. Shaffer is certainly correct in
adumbrating the dark mood that Ishiguro has created around his river,
but given the precision of Ishiguro’s prose, readers might question
how much is added to the analysis by bringing in the comparison to
the myth of Styx. It seems an unnecessary critical step.
Shaffer then ties this equating of the river to death to modern psy-
choanalytic theory. He reads a character who fears the river as fear-
ing death, and a character attracted to the river, such as Etsuko, as
attracted to death.86 Freudian theory, Shaffer asserts, helps explain
this attraction: ‘Freud postulates the existence of a death-wish,
a sado-masochistic urge to self-destruction, that is triggered when an
individual’s aggression cannot find satisfactory outlet in the external

world.’ For Shaffer, Freud’s speculation helps to explain why Mariko
and Keiko are aggressive ‘towards themselves and their mothers’.87
Going further, Shaffer then introduces the concept of masochism to
explain the troubled relationship of Sachiko and Mariko. Mariko,
Shaffer avers, not only takes pleasure in pain, but also acts based on
her desire for punishment from Sachiko. Since suicide, in Shaffer’s
psychoanalytic reading, is the ultimate masochistic act, he surmises
that what he takes to be Mariko’s symbolic suicide, is really Mariko’s
desire to kill her neglectful mother. Shaffer’s reading also proposes
that Sachiko has ‘“murderous” intentions toward Mariko’: the proof
of which is in Sachiko’s drowning of Mariko’s cats.88 Shaffer then
carefully catalogues the connections in the novel between cats and
children, especially between cats and Mariko, before concluding, ‘Sachiko
treats Mariko less like her “baby” than like a “filthy little” animal or
a “dirty little” creature worthy only of abandonment or worse.’
Consequently, Sachiko’s drowning of the kittens is, for Shaffer, a
‘figurative murder of her daughter’89 (although he later calls it a ‘sym-
bolic murder’ which is closer to what he seems to mean).
While Shaffer’s investigation of an important set of images in the
novel is useful, his choice of psychoanalytic criticism is unfortunate.
It is a difficult path made more difficult by Shaffer’s previous argu-
ment that Etsuko has constructed Sachiko and Mariko so that she can
project her guilt onto them.90 In fact, once we are reminded of this
earlier argument, the psychoanalytic interpretation of Sachiko and
Mariko appears rather pointless: if Mariko and Sachiko are construc-
tions of another character’s imagination, what is the point of trying
to psychoanalyse them as though they were independent individuals?
Such an analysis would seem only to have value in an assessment of
Etsuko, although the value of such an assessment is debatable.
Shaffer’s next interpretive jump is a large one. Having constructed
Sachiko’s symbolic murder of Mariko, Shaffer casts about for a way to
transfer this dynamic to Etsuko and Keiko. The answer is, apparently,
the tomatoes that Etsuko was attempting to grow. Etsuko’s neglect
of the tomatoes is, for Shaffer, an indication of how she has treated
Keiko. Not content to draw the line at neglect, Shaffer next attempts
to demonstrate that Etsuko is ‘figuratively speaking, the murderer of
Keiko’. Notably, nothing in this paragraph relies on Freud. Here we
are back to basic images that others have pointed out: the variations
on a girl swinging by a rope and the rope around Etsuko’s ankle.91
It should be noted, however, that while Shaffer’s steps are often too
big and his conclusions too audacious given the reserve with which
Ishiguro writes, his close reading of the novel’s language provides
several useful glimpses into aspects of Ishiguro’s imagery.
Mark Wormald annotates another important image in the novel by

looking back to the scene of the daytrip to Inasa. He points out two
brief passages, watching the cable cars in the distance and Etsuko’s
buying of binoculars for Mariko (PVH 104), and suggests that both
offer ‘curious failures of perspective’.92 These failures, Wormald notes,
anticipate the larger confusion to come: a woman notices that Etsuko is
pregnant (with Keiko) (PVH 118), but in the novel’s frame, Etsuko has
told Niki that Keiko ‘was happy that day’ (PVH 182). Wormald
concludes,
[W]e glimpse through the quietly distorting medium of Etsuko’s prose

childhood and adult passions looming and losing themselves in each
other with primitive passion. Ishiguro is, of course, using those binoculars
too, to contrive a brilliant, eerie moment, in a novel that proved merely the
first layer in a palimpsest composed of similarly sliding perceptions and
perspectives.93
Seeing across vast distances, we are warned, is fraught with difficulty.

Undoubtedly, it is a particularly keen difficulty when surveying
temporal distances that can only be traversed through memories.
RECONCILING THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE COLLECTIVE
Cynthia Wong considers what Etsuko’s narrative, regardless of its fac-

tual shortcomings, offers readers. She contends that fi rst-person nar-
ration allows Etsuko to tell her story in order to forget the difficulties
of her past. She sees Ishiguro’s narrators, here and in other novels, as
remembering ‘in order to forget; they reconstruct the past in an effort
to obliterate it’.94 It is an argument that demonstrates the insufficiency
of readings that simply label Etsuko unreliable:
The reader cannot truly validate the incompatible details of Etsuko’s

past and future without undermining conventional aspects of the narrative
itself; only by casting doubt on Etsuko’s veracity can the reader probe the
veiled truth in a manner set forth by the narrative itself.
Instead, Wong argues, we have to allow ‘for complexities without

eradicating narrative authority’ and not overlook the obvious point
that Etsuko was not the only person damaged by war and its after-
math. To place so much emphasis on her unreliability, therefore, risks
overlooking the value of an account of a woman mentally harmed by
war. Rather than categorise her narrative as ‘one woman’s confused
ranting’, an assignation that downplays the bombing and its conse-
quences, her fractured memories remind readers of the ubiquity of the
suffering. The important point, Wong suggests, may not be fi nding

the boundary between Etsuko and Sachiko but observing that Etsuko
remembered Sachiko despite the turmoil in which they lived.95 Wong
counters readings that Etsuko is simply mad and reaffirms the mean-
ingfulness of the novel’s context, a context that reasserts itself in the
narrative by silencing any mention of the bombing. This silence,
which confi rms how unspeakable such events can be, is countered
with only one discursive event: Etsuko’s attempt to resolve the pain
of the silence between mother and daughter by talking with Niki, a
meeting which constitutes the entire present of the novel. Focusing on
the harm experienced by a few individuals allows Ishiguro to achieve
‘a fuller portrait than what factual records such as a body count, for
instance, might reveal’.96
Wong, consequently, offers a reconciling of socio-historical read-
ings with Ishiguro’s interest in individuals, thereby illuminating
the difficulty of Etsuko telling either aspect of the story. Etsuko can
make this painfully awkward attempt to address the incomprehen-
sibility of her daughter’s suicide only by telling the story of her life
in post-war Nagasaki. Her attempt to evaluate the recent history of
her daughter produces a larger historical backdrop, and while this
history includes unspeakable events, ‘it is in the effort to fi nd expres-
sion that one deflects the torment of life onto language’. The story
of Nagasaki is told through Keiko’s suicide, a death that suggests the
parallel of the meaningless deaths attributable to the bombing, but
‘Just as horrific in the tale are the shattered lives being salvaged amidst
the wreckage’. And amidst that salvaging, Etsuko’s shattered narra-
tive creates the novel’s effect: ‘its seemingly straightforward narration
compounded by the subtle suggestions of much deeper implications’.
Ultimately, it is a story that cannot be told unswervingly; Etsuko’s
narrative method, replete with abrupt shifts to the past, allows read-
ers to begin ‘to understand that what remains below the surface of her
speech and admission of pain struggles not for expression but silence’.
Sachiko’s story is not one that Etsuko wants to tell but, rather, has to
tell ‘to represent the grief enveloping her own life – and by extension,
the lives of those remaining after Nagasaki – as a silent and ineffable
tale’.97 Telling one’s story, Wong appears to argue, is not always a sim-
ple matter of reliable or unreliable narration, but involves fi nding the
available means to communicate.
CONCLUSION
Near the end of his interview with Ishiguro, Mason asks about Ishiguro’s
preoccupations and Ishiguro replies that much of what has previously
concerned him, ‘parental responsibility, or even exile’, no longer interests

him.98 He does return to those topics precisely in The Unconsoled and
When We Were Orphans, but he concludes this interview with a comment
that explicates much of A Pale View of Hills while also predicting each of
his following novels:
[T]hings like memory, how one uses memory for one’s own purposes,
one’s own ends, those things interest me more deeply. And so, for the
time being, I’m going to stick with the first person, and develop the whole
business about following somebody’s thoughts around, as they try to trip
themselves up or to hide from themselves.99
It is the psychology of his characters that interests Ishiguro who

while talking with de Jongh indicates the direction of the next two
novels: ‘I was concerned with how people evaluate their lives and
ask themselves what they have done with it and whether it’s been
worthwhile and whether they fell into self-deception and delusion’
[sic].100 Ishiguro’s concern here and in the novels to come is how his
characters respond to the lives they have lived. It is a comment that
looks back to Pale View, but equally, one that foreshadows the troubled
artist of Ishiguro’s second novel, Masuji Ono, who is forced to evaluate
a life lived in a floating world.
CH A P TER T WO
A Troubled Artist’s Art: An Artist

of the Floating World (1987)
I shiguro’s second novel, An Artist of the Floating World, looks back to

his first, A Pale View of Hills, and anticipates his third, The Remains of
the Day. While his first novel used Japan in the aftermath of World War
Two for its flashback sequences, in his second novel, this period serves
as the narrator’s present. The character Ogata, the father-in-law in the
subplot in A Pale View of Hills, assumes centre stage in An Artist of the
Floating World, although he is now the artist Masuji Ono (a character often
compared to Stevens, the narrator of Ishiguro’s third novel). Like the
narrator Etsuko in his first novel and Stevens in his third, Ono, the nar-
rator of An Artist of the Floating World, is compelled to look back on his
life, a look back that extends well beyond the build-up to World War
Two. Confronted by the marriage negotiations of one of his daughters,
Ono embarks on an evaluation of his career to ensure that it does not
prevent his daughter from marrying. Writing in the novel’s present,
Ono presents the reader with four entries – dated October, 1948; April,
1949; November, 1949; and June, 1950 – but as Ono relates this narra-
tive he is consistently drawn back into the past, to the difficulty that he
had with his father, to his apprenticeship in an art studio that features
cheap copies of stereotypical images of Japan, to his time in the ‘floating
world’, and to his success as a painter of nationalist propaganda. Always
floating on the edges of his life story, however, is the growing certainty
that Ono’s narration might be unreliable: more precisely, that Ono is
leaving some important information out of his account of his life.
The novel’s reception provides an important frame to interpretations of
the novel, revealing many of the issues that have since occupied the novel’s
readers. Again, the Japanese setting plays a key role in readings of the novel,
sometimes pulling interpretations towards a socio-historic reading. Some
have considered the novel’s structure, especially its cinematic qualities, while
25
others have investigated the language used in the novel and its odd ability to
convey what might seem like a Japanese sensibility by means of a peculiar
English. The narrator Ono, however, has received the most critical atten-
tion. Critics have investigated his manipulations, his faulty memory, and his
denials, and questioned his motives for what he does and does not tell us.
THE INITIAL RESPONSE
Nominated for the Booker Prize and winning the Whitbread Award,
Ishiguro’s second novel was very well received. Nigel Hunt’s favourable
review of the novel articulates the deep connection between the lan-
guage of the novel and its themes: ‘Beautifully written, Ishiguro’s book
presents his themes clearly but without sacrificing any of the integrity
of his story. The features of his system reach us in a way which enables
us to feel something of the place between the pages.’1 Though science-
fiction scholar Patrick Parrinder (born 1944) focuses primarily on the
social aspects of the novel – the Americanisation of Japanese culture and
the generation gap – he too calls it ‘beautiful and haunting’.2 Writer
Geoff Dyer (born 1958), while praising Ishiguro’s precise yet leisurely
prose, perhaps captures the novel’s intricacies most fully by discerning
how its ‘uncertain reminiscences’ coax ‘nuances out of hinted ambigui-
ties’, a strategy akin to the one Ishiguro used in his first novel. Dyer also
notes the compelling contrast between the artist in the novel and the
artist of the novel: ‘While Ono abandons the “fragile lantern beauty” of
the floating world for a strident, political art of thick black outlines and
bold calligraphy Ishiguro impresses by how much history he can contain
within – and between – his frail lines.’3 Kathryn Morton, equally appre-
ciative, notes the strong impact the book has on readers, observing that
it ‘stretches the reader’s awareness, teaching him to read more percep-
tively’.4 It is a comment that extends to the whole of Ishiguro’s oeuvre
but it was first noticed with this novel.
ANOTHER JAPANESE SETTING
As with his first novel, Ishiguro’s ethnicity commanded substantial atten-

tion in the reviews of this work. Michele Field, for example, spends
the first third of her review sorting out the question of his nationality.5
Anne Chisholm seems to think that Ishiguro is Japanese and reads the
novel as ‘instructive’ in presenting the change happening in Japanese
society.6 Such responses always run counter to Ishiguro’s own assessment
of his knowledge of Japanese society. Asked by film critic Christopher
Tookey (born 1950) why he writes about Japan, Ishiguro acknowledges
‘that Japan triggers off images, memories and thoughts in me’ but concedes
A N A RT I S T OF T HE F L O ATI NG WO R LD 27
a lack of concern about Japan’s reality and abdicates the responsibility of

explaining Japanese society to westerners. In fact, he sends an implicit
warning to those compelled to take his novels as accurate portrayals:
‘The Japan in my books probably more-or-less corresponds to post-war
Japan, but I’m not bothered if it doesn’t match exactly.’7 His intention
is not to produce a novel akin to the stereotypical Orientalist paintings
done in Master Takeda’s studio for tourists.
Despite Ishiguro’s consistent avowals in interviews that he is not
producing a socio-realist novel, critics have continued to construct read-
ings based on stereotypical understandings of Japan. Rocio Davis, for
example, attempts to compare Ishiguro’s narrative technique to Japanese
poetry, but offers no evidence in his analysis to support his generalities.
Davis also briefly looks at the dialogue in the novels before compar-
ing Ishiguro to Haiku poets.8 Bruce King, too, reads Ishiguro’s style as a
Japanese trait: ‘His instincts are for the nuanced, the understated, elegant
but significant gesture, similar to the deft brushwork of Japanese paint-
ings.’9 Asked about the setting of An Artist, Ishiguro replies that the city
is imaginary, that he did not want to do the research that putting it in
a real city would require because there was no point to doing so: he
wanted to work freely, not produce a documentary. Also, while Nagasaki
was the city that he knew best, he did not want it to become ‘another
bomb book’.10 Consequently, Ishiguro claims he did very little research,
putting the novel’s ‘Japan together out of little scraps, out of memories,
out of speculation, out of imagination’.11
Another problem Ishiguro faced was how to evoke a foreign lan-
guage in English. Norman Page suggests that one part of Ishiguro’s
solution is his use of ‘English dialogue that is quite unlike contem-
porary speech in the English-speaking world in its extreme and
sometimes archaic formality’.12 Ishiguro replies to this concern about
portraying Japanese voices in English, explaining ‘the prose has to
conform to the characterization of the narrator’, as in the case of Ono:
he’s supposed to be narrating in Japanese; it’s just that the reader is get-
ting it in English. In a way the language has to be almost like a pseudotransla-
tion, which means that I can’t be too fluent and I can’t use too many Western
colloquialisms. It has to be almost like subtitles, to suggest that behind the
English language there’s a foreign language going on. I’m quite conscious
of actually figuring these things out when I’m writing, using a certain kind of
translationese. Sometimes my ear will say: ‘That doesn’t quite ring true, that
kind of language. Fine if this were just English people, but not here.’13
For King, Ishiguro’s pseudotranslation works very well:
One of the delights of this novel is the notation of Japanese speech.

Ishiguro shows how conventions of politeness and fear of showing disrespect
lead to artificial behaviour, absurd conversation and failure of communication.

The characters avoid shaming each other by denying that anything of a criti-
cal nature is intended; yet their subtle hints can be the cause of suicide.14
This description needs to be balanced, however, with a story that

novelist Clive Sinclair (born 1948) tells about novelist Malcolm
Bradbury (1932–2000) meeting the Japanese translator of A Pale View
of Hills. Bradbury suggests to the translator that it must have been a
much easier book to translate because, in Bradbury’s mind, the novel has
intrinsic Japanese qualities. ‘“On the contrary”, replied the translator, “it
is very hard because it is such an English book.”’ Ishiguro responds to
this story by pointing out that he writes like a Western novelist: that his
books have ‘have strong plots and three-dimensional characters’; whereas
Japanese novels more closely resemble a diary with a hazy, ruminating
narrator, little plot, and underdeveloped characters. His books, then,
he claims, are Japanese in only a superficial sense: structurally they are
Western. His translator, a real Japanese, knew immediately that he was
not Japanese.15
The attempt to tie the novel’s themes too closely to the setting
misreads what Ishiguro is trying to achieve. When Gregory Mason
points out the dramatic parallel between Ono’s mentor’s treatment of
Ono, and Ono’s treatment of his own pupil, Ishiguro replies that this
similarity reveals a universal theme: ‘In a way, I’m using Japan as a sort
of metaphor. I’m trying to suggest that this isn’t something peculiar to
Japan, the need to follow leaders and the need to exercise power over
subordinates, as a sort of motor by which society operates.’ Ishiguro
is not asking readers to view this relationship of power as something
unique to Japan, ‘but as a human phenomenon’.16 For some critics
this invitation has obviously been overlooked, but it is readily found
in the novel’s conclusion, which as Mason deduces runs contrary to
stereotypes: Ono does not commit suicide. For Ishiguro, however, the
lack of a suicide does not render the ending ‘un-Japanese’. In fact, in
his early short story ‘A Family Supper’, (1983) he uses a similar ploy
to play with readers’ expectations. Ishiguro treats people as people, and
in his experience Japanese are ‘like everybody else. They’re like me,
my parents. I don’t see them as people who go around slashing their
stomachs.’17
NARRATION
The Japanese setting of the novel has also been invoked to discuss the
novel’s narration. Bradbury, for example, begins a useful commentary
by outlining the novel’s concealments:
The novel […] is a work of fine shadings, a novel of concealments in

which the hidden secrecies of a cunningly constructed narrative merge with
the practiced concealments of a mannered and civil culture. By choosing
to present the story as Ono’s own narration, Ishiguro sets the narrative in a
world of high stylization and complex aesthetic awareness.18
The structure of Ishiguro’s narrative leads Bradbury to connect his

description with generalised notions of Japanese culture:
The result is a world that is topographically designed and abstractified,

so that every instant of the verbal composition feels like a certain kind
of Japanese art. Ishiguro hence forces us to read exactly, aesthetically,
as few modern British writers do. The story hides behind itself, forcing
the reader persistently to unlock it, since the strange distances of polite-
ness, respect, deference and reserve that dominate Japanese social and
expressive practice allow little to be said but much to be implied.19
King finds a similar connection between the novel’s method of presenting

information and Japanese culture:
Explanation is usually indirect, glanced at, in conformity to the conventions

of Japanese politeness. At times Ishiguro parodies such conventions – even
the narrator claims to be uncertain what has been said to him – but the
basic method is the indirect polite circling around a subject, the significance
of which only becomes clear later. Did the narrator gain his house, of which
he is proud, through his prestige as an artist, or (as seems more probable)
through his political power?20
Notably, King pushes past the appearance of convention to see how

Ishiguro plays with this indirectness. Doing so leads King to an
important but almost always overlooked point: that Ono’s success
in the ‘auction of prestige’ for his home was almost certainly more a
matter of his political than artistic influence. It is a small point but
one with large ramifications because it helps us evaluate the ques-
tion that confronts Ono: is he released from the fate of the composer
Mr Naguchi or the President of Jiro Miyake’s company because he
was not really a famous artist at all or because he was a good artist
caught up in a bad movement? (AFW 55) To understand this dilemma
requires a closer look at what the narration provides and withholds.
Lewis presents the most useful reading of the novel’s narration, and he
does so by discussing the novel through a filmic lens. Lewis justifies this
reading by pointing out the narrative’s incompleteness, subject to Ono’s
editing of his tangled, fractured memories, and introduces several pages
of film editing terms, explaining how they are exemplified in the novel.
He begins with one of the most common methods of joining two

episodes: the flashback. Lewis offers the example of Noriko telling her
father about a chance meeting she had with Jiro Miyake, a man with
whom she had been involved a year previously. Hearing of this meet-
ing, Ono recalls his own meeting with Jiro one year earlier while the
couple were still involved with each other, and he begins to wonder if
the opinions he expressed during the conversation that day – regarding
the suicide of the President of Jiro’s company – were connected to
Jiro’s ending his relationship with Noriko. These paired flashbacks
put Ono’s contemplation of his role ‘within the context of Noriko’s
broodings about the Miyakes’, bringing together ‘the guilt and shame
of father and daughter’.21
Next, Lewis turns to flashback’s opposite, flashforward. To present
events from a future part of a narrative told by a first-person narra-
tor is not technically possible in a text bound by the terms of realism;
Lewis, however, sees a power similar to that invoked by the flashfor-
ward when characters or themes are introduced in an early part of the
narrative while their significance does not become apparent until later,
a kind of foreshadowing. For example, Ono’s account of a memory of
Kuroda at the end of the war introduces Kuroda (AFW 77), but the
significance of this character is not demonstrated until later.22
One of the less convincing translations of fi lm editing techniques to
narration is Lewis’s adaptation of the dissolve. Dissolve, the fade-out
from one scene into a fade-in to another scene, allows the fi lmmaker
to join two scenes regardless of how separate they are in time and
space. For example, Lewis offers the sequence in which Setsuko arrives
at Ono’s house leading Ono’s thoughts to return to his father’s house
and his father’s burning of Ono’s paintings before returning to Setsuko
and her request. With these transitions, Lewis claims, ‘Ishiguro […]
elides Ono’s determination – despite his father’s antagonism – to forge
a career as an artist.’23
Better is Lewis’s outlining of Ishiguro’s use of jump cuts. Lewis
focuses on jump cuts as the eliminating of extraneous action from
a continuous shot, as in the elimination of the middle part of a shot
of someone crossing a room. Jump cuts are part of elliptical editing,
shot transitions that omit parts of an event causing an ellipsis in the
plot. Lewis offers the example of Ono’s time at the Takeda studio, an
apprenticeship of several years which can be condensed into five short
scenes. Similarly, Ono’s stay at Mori-san’s villa can be divided into
two short sequences. Lewis uses these examples to demonstrate the
‘nimbleness’ of Ishiguro’s narrative.24
Lewis’s discernment of a cross cut is particularly insightful.
Although the cross cut is usually used to alternate between shots of
two or more lines of action occurring in different places, usually
simultaneously, Lewis uses it somewhat differently. He fi nds the alter-

nation between lines of action, but sees them as separated by time rather
than space. Consequently, he is able to find a cross cut in Artist when
the Migi-Hidari bar is portrayed during its period of popularity and
matched with a portrayal of the bar in the state of decline that it has
undergone in Ono’s present (AFW 74–5 and 76). The significance of
this cut, Lewis claims, is its role in portraying the accrual of ‘resonances
by the accumulation of Ono’s experiences’.25 Lewis continues his exam-
ination by turning to the match cut: the matching of two shots by their
visual similarity. The most famous example of this type of cut occurs in
2001: Space Odyssey (1968) by Stanley Kubrick (1928–99) when a bone
thrown up into the air by a prehistoric man is matched with an orbiting
space craft, a reference, Lewis proposes, to the advance of technol-
ogy. Lewis indicates a few of these matches: for example, the boys in
the shanty district of Nishizuru are matched with the figures in Ono’s
painting ‘Complacency’, although their looks change from the criminal
to the samurai, and then the boys appear again in the painting ‘Eyes to
the Horizon’, but now as soldiers (AFW 168). Lewis suggests that these
matched cuts illuminate ‘the regression of Ono’s views from humanitar-
ian concern to hostile nationalism’.26
Lewis also fi nds the equivalent of establishing shots in the novel.
Usually establishing shots are long-range shots that establish the loca-
tion of the action, commonly a shot of the skyline of a city before the
camera moves into the city’s streets. In a novel, Lewis suggests, its rep-
etition ‘can act as a girding for the rest of the narrative’, and he finds
this repetition in scenes at the Bridge of Hesitation.27 In fact, three
of the four parts – October, 1948; April, 1949; and June, 1950 – open
at the bridge. This repetition leads to the fi nal fi lm technique that he
considers, overlap: when the sound from one scene overlaps with the
next scene. Lewis fi nds overlap in the scenes that portray Ono as being
unable to recall the exact participants and words in various conversa-
tions (for example, Artist 56).
Part of what makes Lewis’s use of film editing terms in a discus-
sion of Ishiguro’s work so useful is that Ishiguro does seem to eschew
linear plots: instead, he relies heavily on the kind of meaning created
by juxtaposing two scenes. Asked by Mason about the digressions in
the plot, Ishiguro replies that he does not believe that a plot has to
be linear. On the contrary, he believes that there are other criteria,
such as tone, that can determine the order in which elements of the
story can be presented. This, he adds, is how people talk and think,
drifting from one point to another. He later asserts, ‘What’s impor-
tant is the emotional aspect, the actual positions the characters take
up at different points in the story, and why they need to take up these
positions.’28
These rhetorical considerations remind us that this novel is entirely

composed of a fi rst-person narration, and as Hunt points out, this
narrative method allows Ono to reinterpret his memories and pro-
hibits readers’ access to ‘incidents and their relevance which he does
not wish to consider at the moment’.29 Rebecca Walkowitz notes
especially Ono’s repetition of phrases and the difficult questions that
are raised by what Ono omits. For example, Ono is surprisingly reti-
cent on the topic of his late wife and son. These omissions lead to an
important characteristic of the novel’s narration:
The telling of stories turns out to be the subject as well as the strategy
[…] As ‘reliable’ and ‘unreliable’ narration is usually distinguished, one is
either the master of a narrative, one who possesses knowledge, or one
is the narrative, the object of knowledge itself. In Artist, however, the nar-
rator’s inability or unwillingness to maintain these distinctions, to make it
clear for the reader whose experiences he is describing, produces a life
of several histories and several perspectives.30
To consider the narration further, then, requires an investigation of

the novel’s narrator, the painter Masuji Ono.
Masuji Ono: An Artist of the Past
Most commentators on the novel focus their efforts on Ono. Brian

Shaffer, Cynthia Wong, and Margaret Scanlan all dedicate extensive
commentary to an evaluation of the artist. Shaffer provides an impor-
tant introduction to Ono that examines his shifts and his motivations
for those shifts. He begins by suggesting the Bridge of Hesitation as an
expression of Ono’s psychological state: ‘[H]e is a “conscience-troubled”
man, though he would deny it, who hesitates between owning up to
his past mistakes and covering them up; between moral responsibility
and psychological expedience; between uncovering and further hid-
ing his lingering guilt.’31 This psychological state is reflected in Ono’s
storytelling, which Shaffer views as ‘a series of defense mechanisms
in order to avoid his past. In particular, he exhibits repression and
projection to the extent that he lies to himself, rationalizes past activi-
ties, comments upon himself (through others), and selectively fi lters
the past’.32 Ono has constant troubles with his memory: for example,
he admits to being unable to recall what happened with Jiro Miyake
only a week after the meeting (AFW 54) and frequently notes that the
words he is quoting are probably not the ‘precise’ words used (AFW
69, 72).33 Ono displaces and projects his fears and wishes as when he
insists that Ichiro wants to go to the cinema although it is clearly his
own wish to go (AFW 37–9).34 He also suffers from denial: he denies
his role in the failure of Noriko’s marriage negotiations.35 Instead he

readily believes that the Miyakes have pulled out of the marriage to
his daughter because the Miyake family’s status wasn’t high enough
(AFW 18–9 and 80). Shaffer also argues that Ono denies he is an
artistic ‘has been’, based on his refusal to show Ichiro his paintings;
but while this detail and Shaffer’s subsequent examination of Ono’s
use of ‘tidying’ does support the argument that Ono denies that his
role as a propagandist was wrong, it does not support the idea that he
is a ‘has been’. Finally, Ono also denies the changes going on in Japan,
changes apparent in the novel’s provision of the Hirayama boy’s sad
situation as a comparison to Ono:
[L]ike the Hirayama boy, Ono is exposed as lacking in vision, opportunistic,

pandering to crowds, and incapable of changing his tune. Like the boy, he is
shown to mimic patriotic themes and slogans, and to be incapable of under-
standing why his message no longer falls on sympathetic ears. Thus, Ono
is depicted as closely resembling the boy, even if he sees himself in starkly
opposite terms, as the quintessential freethinking, critical artist-citizen.36
After outlining the conflicts of which Ono is a part – conflicts between

teacher and student, Ono and his father, Ono and Mori-san37 – Shaffer
separates Ono’s career into three artistic stages: the early stage in which
he produces stereotypical Oriental paintings for tourists at the Takeda
firm; the crucial seven years with Mori-san; and his time as a painter of
propaganda posters for the nationalists. From his final stage, Ono looks
back on the earlier two periods as ‘shallow and decadent’.38 He evolves
within his third period, moving from social concern to unquestioning
fascism. Encouraged by Matsuda and bolstered by his experience in
the Nishizuru district, Ono begins to believe that painting should not
serve commercial or aesthetic ends but rather political ones:
Ono’s shifting conception of art’s proper engagement with worldly con-

cerns is revealed no more clearly than in his evolving portrait of Japan’s
current crisis and triumphal destiny. The first version of this painting is
entitled Complacency and the second is called Eyes to the Horizon.39
It is just such a conceptual shift, however, that leads to the betrayal

of his student Kuroda, a key scene in the novel often alluded to but
never depicted. Ono’s refusal to discuss this scene, a part of his fi lter-
ing, is the one shift in point of view that Ono does not make. Ishiguro
explains the changes in his narrator:
[T]he structure […] is dictated less by plot than by the changes in the
main character’s state of mind. For example, in the opening section, his
position is that he’s not ashamed of anything he’s done; but gradually his
point of view shifts and he starts owning up.40
In the end, the novel is sceptical of all three periods of ‘art in the service
of purely commercial, aesthetic, or political ends’.41
After the war, when Ono realises that the tide of thought has turned
against him, he suggests ‘that even if he was wrong, at least he was
influential: that it is more important to have made one’s mark than to
have been a right-minded nonentity’.42 Ono pretends that he is not con-
cerned about prestige,43 but he admits to being wrong in supporting the
Nationalists as long as he can be thought of as influential. His influence,
however, is put into question by slips in his narrative which reveal that
his reputation was not as large as he has led readers to believe.44 Ishiguro
expresses his interest in such characters: ‘I’m very interested in people
who have a great desire to do something of worth, something to distin-
guish themselves, but who maybe in the end find that they don’t have it
in them to be more than ordinary.’45 Ono was, in fact, ordinary.
Ono’s narration is replete with manipulations and elisions that seek to
belie this ordinariness. As Ishiguro has pointed out, Ono’s diary entries
allow Ono to make slight changes he can modify as he goes.46 One of
the best examinations of Ono’s techniques is provided by Wong. Ono’s
focus, Wong argues, is on his struggles to become a prominent artist and
maintain his position as family patriarch. The story is not the document
of an artist coming to understand his life, but the adjustment of facts
that will allow Ono to see himself as the person he believes he is:
[W]hat occurs instead of discovery is the narrator’s own version of life

made more palatable in the very act of telling it. Indeed, though he does
not ‘lie’ about his past in any conventional sense, he is anxious that some
details from that period do not emerge.47
Ono may profess to want to understand his life but he is deceiving

himself and, Wong claims, unaware that he is deceiving himself,
although this claim that he is unaware seems specious. Wong bases it
on Ono’s admissions of his faults as a storyteller:
At the same time he proclaims to be telling the truth, he calls atten-

tion to his own distortions; Ono’s slips may be read as accidental, or as
moments when his façade shows through. Literally, Ono leaves traces
for the reader’s detection of his insincerity, while he remains ambiguous
about his own knowledge of those slips.48
For example, Wong points out how Ono opens his account with an
effortful foregrounding of his status but then pretends that it is not
important and attempts to push the information he has just presented

into the background. Scanlan perceives similar qualities in Ono’s
opening, reading his descriptions of struggles with his businessman
father as his attempt to become ‘the hero of a Western portrait of the
artist’.49 Wong sees Ono, initially, as attempting to be objective and
forthcoming, but then, referring to the instances in which Ono breaks
off his narrative and blames his bad memory, suggests that he might be
trying to suppress rather than reveal uncomfortable details. She quotes
Ono on self-portraiture (AFW 67) suggesting that this is one of Ono’s
revealing slips:
Intent on preserving his reputation now that the war has tarnished it,
Ono unwittingly reveals that he does not truly recognize himself as the
person he is reconstructing. Whether he accepts the futility of convey-
ing to others the same fictionalized self that he envisions, Ono warns the
reader that his own accounts may be questionable and may not corre-
spond to the way others saw his character.
Wong suggests that when Ishiguro lets his characters unknowingly

reveal their flaws, those characters are able to salvage dignity, ‘a qual-
ity important to the author’s vision of how people accept and deal
with failure in their lives’.50 When readers meet Ono, Wong argues,
Ono is starting to understand that the daughters are talking about
him, so he begins to look at his past to reassure himself and his audi-
ence of his status. The motivation for Ono’s reconstruction of his past
is not, however, to protect his family but to bolster his pride. She
notes that when Ono takes ‘precautions’ it is ‘to remember the person
he felt he was and had become’.51 Seeing that he no longer fits the role
that he remembers playing, Ono mourns his lost self.
Wong finds some proof for her reading of Ono in the strategies he
uses to tell his story. Ono has put his story together in non-chronological
fashion with himself at the centre, but it is a divided centre. Ono tells
Shintaro that he ought to own up to the past, but Wong asks, what
would owning up to the past mean? As the title of the novel suggests,
‘Ono is suspended between two states, one that denies causing shame
to Japan and one that responds to the effects of misguided principles.’52
For example, Ono finds the suicides of men acknowledging their
wrongdoing during the war a wasteful gesture. In reference to Ono’s
fractious relationship with his daughter Noriko, Wong points out that
Ono can discuss only his interactions with her: she might be entirely
pleasant with everyone else: ‘The gaps in the narrative, then, may be
read as Ono’s blindness to other people’s dimensions at a time when he
is so desperate to salvage his own dignity.’53 Wong does not, it seems,
consider that the gaps may be part of Ono’s manipulation of the reader.
As it is for other readers, for Wong the key scene is Ono’s betrayal of
Kuroda. Given the many allusions to Kuroda, readers can deduce that
Ono thinks about Kuroda all the time, but he apparently does not feel
remorse for his betrayal, a lack evident when after seeing Kuroda in a
rundown neighbourhood Ono blandly observes that his former student
has aged. Wong reads Ono’s attitude towards Kuroda as a salvaging
of his dignity, for ‘Also unspoken is Ono’s jealousy that his own student
has far surpassed him in his artistic career. Confronting him again
under the guise of smoothing over the past for Noriko’s sake represents
another moment when Ono acts as if he is the wronged man.’54
Ono cannot, in fact, acknowledge how the nationalist movement
he served is implicated in the deaths of his wife and son. He devotes
very little space to his dead wife and son: their deaths are mentioned
only in passing. This omission, Wong argues, protects him from con-
necting his advocacy of war with his son’s death while fighting that
war, and from connecting his pride in the Sugimura house with his
wife’s death from a bomb that struck the house. Surprisingly, Wong
does not point out that Ono’s support for the war plays a more direct
part in his wife’s death through the plain connection that it was
because of the war that the house was bombed, but this omission does
not mitigate her point that, ‘given Ono’s seeming commitment to
family, failure or refusal to say more about their absence is in accord
with Ono’s narrative strategy’.55 Wong concludes by stating that Ono’s
story might draw us in and cause us to sympathise with him, but we
have to see all the lies he tells and thus he cannot be redeemed.
On a similar trajectory, King reads Ono’s manipulations as Ono
protecting himself from accusations regarding his behaviour during
the war. King, however, sees Ono as a skilled rhetor:
He pretends to be an old fool, but this is a protective mask – many

of his nationalist acquaintances commit suicide as a form of apology to
society – which allows him first to avoid, then adapt to the attitudes of
postwar society. Eventually and with subtlety he indicates his sorrow for
past behaviour in such a way as to lose nothing.56
Moreover, King suggests that Ono has craftily followed whoever is in

power by adapting. Given Ono’s control over the narrative, this analysis
certainly demands attention. As Peter Mallet points out, one of the ways
that Ono differs from Stevens, in The Remains of the Day, is in how the
narrators reveal their characters: we learn about Ono not through what
he tells us about himself, as Mallet proposes we do with Stevens, but
through ‘the reactions of other characters to him’.57 While this compari-
son seems to underestimate vastly the degree of Stevens’s dissembling,
the imperative here is to recognise that Ono’s is the only voice we
hear directly. One area for future analysis, consequently, is to determine

whether or not Ishiguro has allowed Ono to misspeak in ways that
might support King’s argument for a more Machiavellian Ono.
The comparison of Ono and Stevens is noted by a few critics, such
as Page, who begins by citing how much Stevens and Ono have in
common. Page finds ‘responsibility for past actions in both the private
and public spheres’,58 the main theme here and in Remains. In fact, he
finds many similarities between Ishiguro’s second and third novels.
The difference, he asserts, is that one is in English and one in Japanese.
Margaret Scanlan, however, develops the comparison over the length
of her essay. Framing her analysis with a discussion of ‘the death of
humanism’, Scanlan focuses on the instability of Ono’s identity. She
begins her examination of the significance of Ishiguro’s narrative
method by comparing Ono and Stevens:
[Ishiguro’s] narrators, both old men looking back from the postwar period
to their involvement with fascism in the 1930s, in some ways resemble
the unreliable narrators of older fiction. But Ishiguro uses them to explore
the extent to which identity is socially constructed, and the consequent
instability of selves formed in a traditional culture when that culture dies.
Identity in these novels is not an essence but instead depends on a social
context that has changed so radically as to leave characters floating in an
unfamiliar world. Through his first-person narrators, Ishiguro dramatizes the
connections between public history and an ‘I’ dependent for definition on its
circumstances, suggesting that the unconfident and marginalized self of the
posthumanist world view is drawn to find authority in totalitarian politics.59
Both narrators acknowledge that their stories might be marred by the

distortions imposed by uncertain memories. Memory may fail because
of age, but it may fail so that Ono does not have to remember betray-
ing Kuroda.
Scanlan, however, points to another possible reason for the failure
of memory: society has lost its memory: ‘Ono is especially conscious
that Japan seems to have lost its own memory, that people around him
are wilfully discarding values maintained proudly during the war.’60
Scanlan then switches from the novel to an analysis of Japanese lin-
guistics, citing anthropologist Dorinne K. Kondo on the instability of
the fi rst-person singular pronoun (the ‘I’) in Japanese, and this insta-
bility of the pronoun leads Scanlan to William Bohnaker’s assertion
of the flexibility of the Japanese psyche.61 Ono too demonstrates this
flexibility. His training has been rigidly controlled to ensure that he
stayed within the approved styles:
These structures of authority are the structures of his identity as a

painter – his success in following one style, his courage in breaking with
another; the maxims of his great teacher and their transmission, with a
few necessary emendations to his own students; his teacher’s praise; his
students’s [sic] adulation; his winning of the Shigeta Foundation award.
Indeed, he is well aware that much of what might seem to constitute his
personal identity has been acquired from other people.
As the novel opens, readers fi nd that Ono must look back and evaluate
his past against the values of the present society:
Now most of the people around him are adopting American values:
His grandson plays at being the Lone Ranger, until recently a forbid-
den activity; corporate presidents and once-famous musicians commit
suicide to apologize for their part in the war while the occupiers execute
generals and a mentally retarded man is beaten up by neighbors tired of
hearing him shout old fascist slogans. His paintings are hidden away; he
has no students; no one cares for the prizes he regards as uncontami-
nated measures of worth.62
The instability of Ono’s identity is seen when he collapses scenes

together as he does with the scene of Moriyama (AFW 177–8) and his
memories of a parallel scene with Kuroda.63 Ono uses what Scanlan
labels ‘a trick of attributing to his teacher words that might actually
have been his own’.64 Scanlan notes the larger significance: ‘Repetition
of situation and even words blurs these scenes together, not only in
Ono’s mind, but in the reader’s.’65 As well, Scanlan reads the presence
of more than one character nicknamed ‘the Tortoise’ as proof of the
loss of fi xed identities. Ono is able to use this loss to deceive.
Confronted with a painful situation, he is likely to abstract it, general-

ize about it; when he talks about other people, he frequently appears to
be talking about himself. This trick, of course, is a familiar psychological
defense, but in Ono’s case it seems to point to a more fundamental con-
fusion of himself with the people he discusses.66
Ono is never more confused than in regards to his contribution to the

militarisation of Japan. We read Ono making insincere self-depreca-
tions but are led to believe that Ono was an important artist, a belief
which becomes increasingly dubious as the novel progresses. Late in the
novel, after the miai, a meeting between a potential couple and their
parents, the unreliability of his memory cannot be overlooked. Lewis
unpacks the consequences of Ono’s admission at the miai, the bewilder-
ment of those present, and the success of the event:
It could be that Ono’s guilt is not registered by the others at the miai
for the simple reason that he reveals no specific names or crimes. He
assumes, almost certainly incorrectly, that Saito is familiar with the

propaganda work that he did in support of the militaristic regime imme-
diately before and during the war. He also does not mention the betrayal
of his former pupil Kuroda, the unwholesome facts of which are with-
held from the reader, too, until after the miai. Given this vagueness, it is
little wonder that Ono’s listeners are underwhelmed by his revelations.
Another option is that Ono has vastly overestimated his importance in
the scheme of things. There are many signs that he is a vain, self-serv-
ing man who is desperate to be admired by others for having made a
contribution to something.67
Scanlan outlines the critical moment when Ono’s contribution is put in

doubt:
[A]t the end, his daughter tells him that all of this self-dramatization is
unnecessary, for his contributions to the war effort were scarcely on the
scale of the composer Mr. Naguchi’s: ‘Father’s work had hardly to do
with these larger matters of which we are speaking. Father was simply
a painter. He must stop believing he has done some great wrong’ [AFW
193]. In this speech, Setsuko undermines the one point on which many
readers may have been willing to take Ono at his word, his view that his
propaganda paintings played a key role in militarizing Japan.68
Lewis concurs, concluding that Ono has exaggerated his part and that
‘ultimately he was just a minor functionary who is now burdened
with an inappropriate sense of guilt’.69 Mallett too deduces a much
more ordinary ending:
Ono may not always have the correct perception of reality and truth,
but he does show everything, including incidents from his past and reac-
tions of others to him which are far from favourable, so that at the end of
the novel we see the truth: that he was, like Stevens, just an ordinary man
who was trapped into behaving in the way he did by the times in which
he lived and the values that were current.70
Rather than the sly rhetor that King fi nds narrating the novel, Mallett
proposes that Ono is so forthcoming that he allows us to see a truth
that may not even be recognisable to himself, an irony enabled by the
use of the unreliable narrator.
For Mallett and Scanlan, there is no epiphany here. Ono simply
moves on and ‘back into life’.71 Ono recalls his happiness thinking
about how he had succeeded and Moriyama had failed, and by the
end of the novel, Ono ‘has learned to appreciate Americanization and
hence to merge his perspective with that of the group’.72 Scanlan’s
point is well observed. One of the novel’s key sequences is Ono’s
slow realisation of the reversal that has occurred around him. The
weight of this realisation, however, is only fully recognisable when
one understands Ono’s character. Mason helps with this understand-
ing by connecting Ishiguro’s work to the fi lmmaker Yasujiro Ozu.73
Like Ozu, Ishiguro’s choice of characters is derived from the tradition
of a type of domestic drama fi lm, the shomin-geki. Lewis defi nes the
shomin-geki and connects it to Ishiguro’s work.
Although essentially realistic in tone, this type of film often has comic
overtones and a desentimentalised mix of smiles and tears. The typical
hero or heroine is someone who is ready to give up at the intractability of
the world, but then finds the strength to continue by compromising with the
way things are. They do so with passive acceptance, and not through the
grand emotions of valour and rapture. This concentration on the small
victories and defeats of ordinary people as they grapple with their every-
day lives is also mirrored in Ishiguro’s work.74
This description fits Ono well. He too grapples with what he sees as
a new perception of the behaviour of the nationalists during the war
and a new outlook on the suddenly ubiquitous American culture.
Ono continually confronts the realisation that he was simply a prod-
uct of his time, and that that time is now over, a reading supported
by Ishiguro: when Mason asks the identity of the reader that Ono
addresses and the narrative situation, Ishiguro replies that the opening
was simply a device to create a mental world. He was trying to show
Ono’s parochial perspective, which of course leads to his downfall. It
is an important facet of this novel to examine ‘the inability of nor-
mal human beings to see beyond their immediate surroundings, and
because of this, one is at the mercy of what this world immediately
around one proclaims itself to be’.75 The novel provides further sup-
port for this conclusion. King, for example, outlines the importance of
change in the novel:
The theme of change is expressed throughout the novel in descriptions

of the growth and decay of various urban areas, changes in painting and
building styles, as well as in the career and attitudes of the narrator. The
novel reflects Japanese culture over half a century, from the supposed
decadence of the early 1900s through the nationalism of the thirties to
the Americanised new society of the postwar years. Changing notions of
art mirror politics and manners.76
This theme of change, suggested in the novel’s title, provides the

deepest insight into the novel’s world.
CONCLUSION – THE FLOATING WORLD
Most critics have read Ono, as Mallet does, as similar to Stevens: ‘a man
trying to justify the life he has led and find some dignity in it’.77 The
justifications are, however, hard for Ono to find, as is the dignity, in part
because of the shifting terrain on which Ono takes his stands. Ishiguro
alludes to this state, positioning Ono as caught between historical peri-
ods and between generations: ‘It’s the story about the old man who’s
overtaken by history, so that the things he was once proud of become
things he’s ashamed of; and about his relationship to the younger gen-
eration, how he doesn’t fit in.’78 A few years later, Ishiguro supplements
this idea with a comment that could be explaining Stevens or Ono:
I’m interested in people who, in all sincerity, work very hard and perhaps
courageously in their lifetimes toward something, fully believing that they’re
contributing to something good, only to find that the social climate has done
a topsy-turvy on them by the time they’ve reached the ends of their lives.79
The shifts that Ono encounters seem diametrically opposed. King

lays out the binary nature of the world in which Ono finds himself:
‘If the old order is tyrannical and unrepentant, the younger genera-
tion is necessarily selfish. The choice seems to be between the living
death of the past, which provides protection and guidance, and the
new American democratic way, which offers opportunities and inse-
curity.’80 Ono floats from the old perspective to the new.
The shifts that Ono must negotiate should not, however, suggest
that Ishiguro has developed a realistic portrayal of Japan and its shifting
values at the conclusion of World War Two. The instability of the
novel’s world, its flux, does not narrow the novel’s locale to Japan, as
many critics have supposed. Instead the instability allows the difficulty
of the novel’s moral order to be floated elsewhere. Asked by Mason
about Ono’s mood at the end of the novel, Ishiguro offers a long,
detailed reply proposing that Ono realises the mess Japan has made
but believes that in a few years it will recover because a nation’s life is
longer than a man’s, and that Ono has used various strategies to save his
dignity; so although he is constantly stripped of this dignity, in the end
he somehow holds onto it. One of these techniques is Ono’s making
concessions that he himself cannot see. Ishiguro points out that he used
the diary method to allow Ono to write from four different emotional
positions, a range, Ishiguro notes, which has created some irony:
[T]here are no solid things. And the irony is that Ono had rejected that
whole approach to life. But in the end, he too is left celebrating those
pleasures that evaporated when the morning light dawned. So the

floating world comes to refer, in the larger metaphorical sense, to the fact
that the values of society are always in flux.81
The difficult questions that the novel raises about values remain
underdeveloped areas in the criticism of this novel. Morton’s series of
questions provide a glimpse into the difficult work to be done on this
issue and perhaps the best way to conclude the discussion of this novel:
What do the superlatively polite but insistent elder daughter and the
sassy younger one see when they look at their father? To what are his
former friends and colleagues reacting when on the one hand they flatter
and on the other snub him? Which honorifics are – or were – deserved,
which were merely formal and which may even be a means of avoidance?
What does life add up to when society’s values change? Is it enough to
have meant well at the time? And what course does the honourable man
take whose well-intentioned actions as a war propagandist have led
others to suffer?82
The critical response to Artist supplies the critical scaffolding to answer

these questions, but the novel’s delicate ambiguities and ironies require
further investigation and discussion. The response does, however,
prepare readers for Ishiguro’s next protagonist, the English butler
Stevens, a character subject to turns of fate similar to those endured by
Ono and pursuing some of the same questions.
CHAPTER THREE
The Remains of the Day (1993):

Reception and Narration
I shiguro’s third novel, The Remains of the Day, was both a change
and a repetition of his previous novel, An Artist of the Floating World.
While his protagonist, Stevens, an English butler, might seem at first
glance to be completely incomparable to his earlier protagonist, the
artist Ono, and while Darlington Hall is around the world from Ono’s
floating world, the two novels, at their cores, are similar. Both follow a
man in the latter stages of his life looking back and trying to reconcile
his past with his present. As well, both novels draw on first-person nar-
ration to tell their stories and to reveal narrators unwilling to tell their
stories fully. This chapter, the first of three focused on Ishiguro’s third
novel, evaluates the responses of the reviewers before turning to the
key essays that have addressed Ishiguro’s use of narration in the novel.
The novel received an excellent reception. Michiko Kakutani of the

New York Times calls it ‘an intricate and dazzling novel’.1 Terrence
Rafferty begins by pointing out that it seems to be by a veteran nov-
elist and then expands on the novel’s craftsmanship: ‘Modest in tone,
ironic, reflective, and utterly precise in its effects […] a novel that
fulfi lls its author’s intentions as flawlessly as a “classic” short story
from the college anthologies’, but is most interested in ‘the whiff of
melancholy that rises from its formal brilliance – an intimation of
the futility of perfection’.2 Philosopher Galen Strawson (born 1952),
writing for the Times Literary Supplement, expresses similar admiration
for Ishiguro’s prose style: ‘It is a strikingly original book, and beauti-
fully made. Reading it, one has an unusual sense of being control-
led by the author. Each element is unobtrusively anticipated, then
43
released in its proper place.’3 Several critics noted the novel’s ability
to mix what William Hutchings has called the ‘comic and poignant’.4
Finally, Merle Rubin begins to match the prose style to the story that
it tells: ‘Delicate, devastating, thoroughly ironic, yet never harsh, this
is a novel whose technical achievements are matched by its insightful-
ness.’5 There is a resounding critical agreement on the masterfulness of
Ishiguro’s prose. In fact, three critics point to similarities with Henry
James, especially, James’s ‘The Beast in the Jungle’ (1903).
Other critics sought comparisons with Ishiguro’s earlier work.
Geoff Dyer fi nds Remains less impressive than Artist ‘whose scheme
and form it repeats almost exactly’.6 Mark Kamine remarks on the
similarity with the two earlier novels, but in terms of technique: he
points out how they all take their time and build towards grand dis-
closures, demonstrating ‘Ishiguro’s narrative deftness’: ‘Slowly and
carefully he lays bare the butler’s inner thoughts, intertwining past
and present, truth and evasion, seeming at times to meander yet inevi-
tably closing in on the series of admissions at the novel’s heart.’ 7 Other
critics, however, clearly wanted Ishiguro to write about Japan. Annan,
who sees Remains as more naïve and more flawed than the fi rst two
novels, describes Stevens as having a ‘Japanese soul’. This is apparently
because ‘the butler runs on loyalty, devotion, propriety, and pride
in his profession’. What Annan really wants is for Ishiguro to write
about Japan, and she ends by returning to her fi xation: ‘Compared
to his astounding narrative sophistication, Ishiguro’s message seems
quite banal: Be less Japanese, less bent on dignity, less false to yourself
and others, less restrained and controlled.’8 There is, unfortunately for
Annan, no mention of Japan in the novel. She has captured some of
the themes – although her construal of a message of honesty, warmth,
and openness as banal is worrying. Hermione Lee too cannot read the
novel without connecting it to Japan. Although she begins by point-
ing out what an unlikely topic the butler is, she then turns to the ideal
qualities of a butler before showing how everything turns against
Stevens, as it does with Ono. She mentions the historical setting and
how the Suez crisis, like the bombing of Nagasaki, is never directly
mentioned and then, oddly, argues that the novel is really a Japanese
novel in disguise, that Stevens is a kind of ronin or faithful servant
left without a master. Anthony Thwaite also reads Stevens as a ronin:
‘the masterless retainer who is still tied by fi rm bands to the master’.9
It is a suggestion that no one would make if the author’s name were
Beedham or Thwaite, a point supported by Gurewich when after trac-
ing the possible connections to Japan he adds, ‘Yet – the proof of his
mastery – had he chosen to publish the book under an assumed Anglo
name, one would never suspect.’10 Interestingly, Thwaite goes on to
make a more apt comparison, revealing more of Stevens by putting
T HE R E M A I NS O F THE DAY 1 45
him beside another character who broods over his muddled dignity
and what the past might have offered had one made better choices, the
deferential Prufrock of T. S. Eliot (1888–1965):
Politic, cautious, and meticulous; Full of high sentence, but a bit

obtuse.11
While the more mischievous might then ask if Thwaite also sees
Prufrock as a ronin, the comparison of Stevens and Prufrock is
suggestive.
The early reviews were quick to establish Stevens’s difficulties.
Lawrence Graver is able to read Stevens as Stevens, not as some sort of
Japanese double:
Ishiguro’s command of Stevens’ corseted idiom is masterly, and nowhere

more tellingly so than in the way he controls the progressive revelation of
unintended ironic meaning. Underneath what Stevens says, something
else is being said, and the something else eventually turns out to be a mov-
ing series of chilly revelations of the butler’s buried life – and by implication,
a powerful critique of the social machine in which he is a cog.12
Strawson concisely describes Stevens’s inability in love, his inability

to even acknowledge the love between himself and Miss Kenton: ‘He
avoids it by brilliant inconsequentiality, by the perfect inarticulateness
of irrelevant wordiness.’13 Kamine continues this discussion by further
describing Stevens’s emotional state: ‘He has been unprotestingly
obedient throughout his life, and he now finds himself full of regret
and struggling to give voice to his feelings. His tale is an account of
Stevens confronting his moral and emotional emptiness.’14 Rafferty
adds another dimension by briefly suggesting that the background
holds more than is suggested in the early reviews: ‘we’re never free of
the uneasy feeling that he’s intended to represent something about the
English soul – its repressive decorum, its love of order and authority,
its cozy self-regard, its reverence for the past.’15 Graver understands
that while Ishiguro’s novels are set during momentous historical times,
Ishiguro’s concern is for the people of his fictions and what they discover
about themselves. He quotes Ishiguro:
What I’m interested in is not the actual fact that my characters have
done things they later regret. […] I’m interested in how they come to terms
with it. On the one hand there is a need for honesty, on the other hand
a need to deceive themselves – to preserve a sense of dignity, some sort
of self-respect. What I want to suggest is that some sort of dignity and
self-respect does come from that sort of honesty.16
Alice Bloom makes an interesting distinction on this point. She con-

siders whether Stevens has trouble writing about what has happened
or whether Stevens knows what has happened: ‘In the painful review
of his long life, he faces telling about (not knowing; I disagree with
the reviews that claim he never faced up to things) his beloved Lord
Darlington who conspired with the Nazis.’17 These early comments
are suggestive of the critical debates that later scholars have developed.
The earliest reviews were also attuned to the novel’s language.
Stevens’s contortions of language are particularly profitable. Kamine
sees them as illuminating Stevens’s rationalisations: ‘The novel is
rich with examples of the contortions it is possible to go through to
rationalize past errors.’18 Rafferty notes Stevens’s inexpressiveness and
neutrality: ‘his verbal style is elaborately inexpressive, or means to
be: we recognize immediately the contorted language of rationaliza-
tion, the studied neutrality of someone taking great pains to avoid the
truth’.19 And again, Kamine, connects the secretiveness and deceitful-
ness of Ishiguro’s narrators to Stevens’s self-deceit, concluding ‘Stevens
labours to construct a wall against his regrets by imagining himself
one of the world’s greatest butlers – but in the end it is self-deceit he
serves more than any proprietor of Darlington Hall’.20 Ishiguro’s use
of the deceitful fi rst-person narrator leads to extensive comment on
Ishiguro’s narration.
NARRATING REMAINS
Ishiguro’s use of first-person narration in his first two novels was cru-
cial in allowing him to achieve the powerful effects of those novels,
and as several reviewers have pointed out, in Remains his narrative
strategy allows him to develop a character and novel with depth and
power. Critics have made extensive use of Remains to introduce dif-
ferent modes of narration and in doing so have exposed layers of the
narration that might otherwise have escaped notice. Margaret Scanlan,
in ‘Mistaken Identities: First-Person Narration in Kazuo Ishiguro’,
demonstrates Ishiguro’s new use of unreliable narration and how the
narration helps reveal aspects of Stevens’s character. The novel’s struc-
ture, language, and play with knowledge is introduced by Deborah
Guth in her ‘Submerged Narratives in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains
of the Day’ (1999). Perhaps the most useful of the essays on narra-
tion, Kathleen Wall’s ‘The Remains of the Day and Its Challenges to
Theories of Unreliable Narration’, through a close analysis of the
narration, demonstrates the originality of Stevens’s narration and
its constricting of attempts to find one true account of events. Like
Wall, James Phelan and Mary Patricia Martin in ‘The Lessons of
“Weymouth”: Homodiegesis, Unreliability, Ethics, and The Remains

of the Day’ (1999), also examine the uniqueness of Ishiguro’s narration
but extend their analysis to include a discussion of Stevens’s ethics.
Finally, Andrew Teverson, in ‘Acts of Reading in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The
Remains of the Day’ (1999), provides an excellent analysis of Ishiguro’s
narrative by focusing on moments when characters are observed read-
ing. As in all these essays, Teverson makes a strong case for the careful
textual analysis of Ishiguro’s work.
Margaret Scanlan: A New Use for an Old Narration
As noted in Chapter Two, Scanlan connects Ishiguro’s narrative

method to the social context of his narrators Stevens and Ono, from
An Artist of the Floating World, ‘both old men looking back from
the postwar period to their involvement with fascism in the 1930s’.
Despite the similarities they may have with unreliable narrators of
old, Scanlan reads Ishiguro as putting them to a new use.21 That is,
the traditional cultures provide so much structure that the individual
is not able to form a strong identity, so when that traditional culture
breaks down, the individual has nothing left on which to base his
identity. Ishiguro’s fiction allows readers to see individuals such as
Stevens, who is always following someone else’s rules, encounter this
abyss and the shelter they take in totalitarianism.
Unreliable narration also helps Ishiguro develop his character.
Scanlan notes that Stevens, like Ono before him, does not have much
confidence in his story: he has uncertain memories and knows that he
may distort as he narrates. Maybe his memories fail because of age, but
they may also fail so that he can let go of painful memories. Stevens
also has techniques for avoiding painful memories, such as his use of
the fi rst person: ‘he transforms the fi rst person into the third person,
disguising a painful assessment of his life as an abstract exploration
of the question “What is a great butler?”’22 Scanlan notes Stevens’s
pronoun use: ‘Stevens indeed frequently avoids the fi rst person, sub-
stituting an evasive one when his emotions are in danger of breaking
through. The great heartbreak of his life, his estrangement from Miss
Kenton, hides behind this locution, as when he describes how, mean-
ing to condole with her for the loss of her aunt, he ended by rebuking
her for failing to supervise the new maids’.23 Finally, Scanlan points
out how the use of the unreliable narrator allows for a mocking of
epiphanies:
Stevens’s epiphany occurs at the end of his reminiscence about the

evening his father died, when he had kept away from the deathbed for all
but a few minutes to pass his tray and attempt to placate a hypochondriacal
guest complaining about his infected blisters. Ignoring the tears that sug-
gest the survival of some inner emotional self, he recalls only his success at
keeping up the role. Remembered, this evening evokes joy, seems a victory
rather than the defeat his narrative suggests it was.24
Scanlan fails, however, to see Stevens’s reading of his own unreliabity.
Deborah Guth: Distortions Reflected Clear
In one of the most helpful discussions of the novel, Deborah Guth

argues that Stevens does eventually see what he has lost. She begins,
however, with an analysis of what the novel says without actu-
ally saying, how Stevens’s own narrative slips away from his grasp.
This explanation of Ishiguro’s technique begins with his introduc-
tion of the two concepts Stevens uses to discuss his life’s work:
greatness and dignity. After establishing these key terms, however,
Ishiguro surreptitiously establishes a gap between Stevens’s defini-
tion of these terms and their illustration by the events of the novel:
‘the hidden narrative dismantles those very terms Stevens is trying
to justify and progressively undermines the basis as well as the pur-
pose of his life’. Guth is particularly interested in the technique that
allows this deconstruction: ‘by realigning apparently insignificant or
unexplained details, [the narrative] uses the same events to generate
quite different meanings, clearly at odds with Stevens’ own narrative
agenda’.25 For example, Stevens presents Lord Darlington as a great
humanist, but also tells us about Darlington’s dismissal of the Jewish
maids, Darlington’s meetings with fascists, and his own denials of
Darlington. Consequently, the ‘greatness’ of his employer is cast into
doubt.
At the beginning of his journey Stevens reflects on the greatness
of the English landscape (RD 28) and connects this greatness to the
greatness of English butlers. Guth describes the unnaturalness of
Stevens’s conception of dignity, pointing out how it encompasses
Stevens’s ignoring the death of his father and even counting the
evening of his father’s death a great success. Parallel to this evening
is Stevens’s encounter with Harry Smith who is forthright and chal-
lenges Stevens’s views. This challenge causes Stevens to respond
fi rst like the gentleman he is pretending to be, but when he remem-
bers how he was mocked by Lord Darlington’s guests he is better
able to see himself as Harry Smith’s ordinary man being humiliated
for his lack of opinion: ‘And if a large part of this humiliation lies in
his having repeatedly to admit his inadequacy, its real bitterness – and
his own true slavery – derives from his collusion in this game’. 26 His
‘dignity’, Guth proposes, is merely the ability to suffer indignity.
Alongside the meditations on greatness and dignity, a second major

narrative begins to emerge: his unacknowledged love affair with
Kenton. Guth distinguishes a critical difference in how these narra-
tives function, focusing primarily on their handling of memory. In
the greatness and dignity narrative, ‘the interaction between appar-
ent and latent levels follows an arc leading first the reader and later
Stevens himself to awareness’. In contrast, in the Kenton narrative,
‘the text enacts memory as an ongoing act of repression, repeating in
recall the same erasure of emotion that characterised the relationship
itself, and cunningly allowing one aspect to emerge in order better
to camouflage the other’.27 It is a relationship that emerges through a
latent narrative, ‘shaped mainly through a series of “clues”: ambigu-
ous comments and silences which cumulatively imply the presence of
unexpressed emotion’.28 These clues form a plot line though they are
not presented objectively to the reader: ‘the completely submerged,
in fact absent narrative of Stevens’ feeling for her is characterised by a
series of enigmas, gaps and dislocations: ripples on the surface of the
text’. This narrative is further complicated by Stevens’s description of
a series of four turning points which, Guth points out, do not initially
make sense to the reader. Despite his thoroughness elsewhere, Stevens
does not articulate ‘the central point around which the information
is organised’. The reader, consequently, can only acknowledge these
incidents unable to comprehend exactly what Stevens is referring to
and its larger significance. This difficulty is worsened by Stevens’s
constant questioning of whether these incidents should even be classi-
fied as turning points.29 It is only, she proposes, when they say good-
bye at the bus stop that the turning points make sense.
Guth also extrapolates from the scene in which Kenton and Stevens
observe Stevens’s father practicing his walk over a spot where he
had fallen (RD 50) to examine the importance of repetition in the
novel. While the father replays his failure physically, Stevens repeat-
edly returns to his failures mentally, ‘trying to discover how or when
he alienated Miss Kenton and pushed her into the arms of a man she
didn’t love’. These repetitions, however, are repeatedly blocked, ‘for
even as he narrates his search he suppresses the key to its significance
and ends up with a text that exists to hide the meaning he is trying to
prise from it’.30 But it is in the repeated return to memory that Stevens
creates meaning: ‘Stevens’ memories imaginatively repeat his former
life in order to recreate its meaning, weaving and unweaving as he
simultaneously re-enacts the suppressions on which that construction
was based.’ Guth provides a long list of the cases of repetition support-
ing her claim that ‘repetition emerges both as the structuring principle
of Stevens’ life and as a textual strategy for its exposure’. The reader,
therefore, is left with the job of ‘going back over Stevens’ text in order
to unscramble the clues, reconstruct the hidden narrative and arrive at

an integrated understanding’.31
Contrary to Scanlan’s claim that the novel mocks epiphanies,32
Guth argues that at the end Stevens does see what he has lost. The
ending’s tragedy is his, perhaps, too late a discovery, after a life of
dedication and self-denial, of what has been missing from his life: ‘the
individual self he thought had no value, the ability to love a woman,
to sit on a common bench and watch the sun go down without ritual
or ceremony attached, without ennobling purpose or grand rhetorical
flourish’.33 Guth’s essay, then, is crucial for readers of the novel inter-
ested in a close analysis of its language and structure and awareness of
how knowledge is attained. Through Stevens’s restraint, she realises,
Ishiguro has developed a narrative that tells itself through inflection
and subverts its narrator. It is, she proposes, ‘an endless jeu de miroirs
in which reflection and repetition reveal distortion and distortions are
reflected clear’.34
Kathleen Wall: A New Kind of Unreliable Narration
Kathleen Wall also focuses on the novel’s narration to provide an

excellent reading of Remains. She explains the challenges of under-
standing reliability and describes how Stevens is trying to comprehend
his situation. She begins by noting the unique nature of the unreliable
narration in this novel:
the novel challenges our usual definition of an unreliable narrator as

one whose ‘norms and values’ differ from those of the implied author,
and questions the concept of an ironic distance between the mistaken,
benighted, biased, or dishonest narrator and the implied author, who, in
most models, is seen to communicate with the reader entirely behind the
narrator’s back.35
Earlier conceptions of unreliable narration, Wall proposes, were not

clear about how the reader could close the distance between what the
author could be ascertained as believing normal or valuable and the
narrator’s language and actions. Remains, Wall proposes, compels readers
to consider why Stevens is unreliable and how his motives condition the
implied author’s choices about the narration. Wall argues, then, that the
novel demonstrates unreliability ‘in the structural elements controlled by
the implied author and in the ways that Ishiguro expects us to interact
with the text’.36 Specifically, by investigating the narrative discourse, dif-
ferences between scenes and Stevens’s commentary on those scenes, the
order of the narrative, and the tendency of readers to naturalise texts,
Wall focuses attention on the narrator’s mental processes, demonstrates
the difficulty of terms such as ‘reliable’ and ‘unreliable’, and ultimately,

reveals the difficulty of sorting out the truth.
First, Stevens’s use of language reveals his unreliability. Wall points
to his highly elevated diction which she proposes separates him from
the modern reader although it is unclear how she connects this point
to Stevens’s unreliability. Her argument is stronger when she, like
Scanlan, notes that Stevens often refers to himself as ‘one’ rather than
‘I’, especially when he attempts to distance himself from an emo-
tion or judgement.37 This distancing is readily evident when Stevens
speaks of his father: ‘I realize that if one looks at the matter objec-
tively, one has to concede that my father lacked various attributes one
may normally expect in a great butler’ (RD 34). Wall cites ‘profes-
sional’ as another instance in which Stevens’s language use betrays
‘unreliability’, claiming that he uses the word to excuse actions that
seem devoid of emotion or to mask actions that are not professional
but the result of his feelings.38 For example, he repeatedly refers to
his trip to see Kenton as a professional venture, only slowly allowing
himself to perceive his personal interest in seeing her again. Wall also
seizes on Stevens’s defensiveness as evoked in phrases such as ‘“Let
me be perfectly clear,” “I should say”, “I should point out”, “let me
make it immediately clear”, “I feel I should explain”’. The connection
between such phrases and Stevens’s unreliability is evident: Stevens
is defending against questions that he thinks the narratee might ask,
questions that hint at anxieties that he has not expressed and has possi-
bly repressed.39 These various verbal markers reveal some of Stevens’s
preoccupations, and from them readers can determine the issues on
which he may be biased.
Second, Wall investigates the difference between how we read a
scene and Stevens’s interpretation of that scene. He reports feeling
one way, but he behaves as if he felt differently. Sometimes we have
to deduce his emotions from observations that other characters make
because Stevens fails to report them. He sees himself and others as
having particular motives but those motives do not match the way
he and others act or behave. These discrepancies are largely due to
Stevens’s construal of dignity. It is a somewhat odd topic, Wall asserts,
for a travel narrative, especially since Stevens seems to have defi ned it
to mean repressing any non-professional feelings, a defi nition that so
privileges the professional over the personal that even though he wants
to comfort Kenton after hearing the news of the death of her aunt, he
ends up upbraiding her for some work done by maids in her charge.40
He simply has no language for the personal topics such as love and
grief.41 We see a similar response to the death of his father: Stevens
tries to withhold emotion but readers are alerted to the confl ict when
Cardinal and Lord Darlington are both compelled to ask Stevens if
he is all right. In fact, Stevens is asked if he is all right three times

within fi fteen lines, a scene that is repeated somewhat when Stevens
receives the news of Kenton’s engagement and Cardinal, again, notes
that he looks ‘unwell’ (RD 220). Notably, Wall points out, in both
cases Stevens turns these sad events into triumphs (RD 110 and 227).
Moreover, readers intending to grasp Stevens’s psychological state
must learn to privilege the pattern formed by his responses to these
repeated moments of confl ict over Stevens’s own reporting. In doing
so, readers acknowledge the implied author, the agent in charge of
developing these discrepancies and manipulating these patterns.42 It is
through these scenes that Ishiguro lets us better see Stevens’s psycho-
logical state rather than through what Stevens says about his situation.
Wall also uses the idea of ‘Naturalization’,43 a term she defines as
‘using what we know about human psychology and history to evaluate
the probable accuracy of, or motives for, a narrator’s assertions’.44 For
example, we use our historical knowledge to see that Lord Darlington’s
recommendation of Italy and Germany is ill-fated. Here the author
is speaking over the voice of Stevens although we have to remember
that Stevens is looking back and able to comment with the benefit of
hindsight. We also use psychology to understand Stevens’s motives and
behaviour: Wall offers the example of Stevens remembering the warn-
ing of his father’s demise as coming from Kenton rather than Lord
Darlington, a mistake that protects him in the short term because he sees
Kenton as biased against his father. Perceiving her bias, he can discount
her warnings and, in turn, the realisation that his father’s health is failing.
These are all somewhat standard tactics of the unreliable narrator,
but Wall then makes the connection that while it is Stevens who mis-
remembers, it is also Stevens who figures out his mistakes.45 Wall finds
another interesting nuance when Stevens is thinking over the letter he
received from Kenton (RD 48): Stevens attributes disappointments to
Kenton that are probably his own.46 The text supports this supposition
when Kenton denies the assertions he makes about her life (RD 236).
Wall also points out that we cannot totally trust Kenton either, for she
might also be guilty of accusing Stevens of behaviour that actually
describes her own: her accusation on the evening of Herr Ribbentrop’s
visit that Stevens has been stomping about because he objects to her
leaving for a date with Benn (RD 215–16) might instead reflect her
own displeasure in dating Benn or in Stevens’s lack of response. And
thus Wall arrives at a critical point in her commentary on this novel:
‘In creating a text that is, at some points, thoroughly indeterminate,
Ishiguro foregrounds the problem of “truth”, perhaps challenging us
never to figure out “what really happened”, and hence to take only an
ironic pleasure in reaching what few conclusions come our way.’47 The
novel is, in part, an investigation into what it means to know.
‘Order’ and ‘Duration’ provide readers with more information with

which they can assess the narration. Wall cites Seymour Chatman to
point out that authors are revealed by the way they structure a work
and by the events their characters encounter.48 For example, Wall notes
the time frame of the novel: it is supposed to be a travel narrative, but
Stevens keeps getting pulled back into the past. This imbalance is so
great that we can see the narrative as ‘a re-examination and justifica-
tion of his life as Lord Darlington’s butler and of the values that to a
large degree determined and constructed that life’. Stevens, of course,
does not return to just any event in the past; readers need to attend to
the motivations for and order of his flashbacks because it is in these
places that the implied narrator helps us see the events that trouble
Stevens, those that lack resolution, and the conclusions that he avoids.49
Our understanding of the past is not fully revealed by what Stevens
says about the past: we must also consider why Stevens looks back
to the past and the order in which he looks back. Stevens himself
sometimes admits that he has digressed (RD 67). Wall provides an
example from the third day of his travels when Stevens is in Mursden.
Because Mursden was the source of silver polish, Stevens is led to
think of how the excellent state of the silver helped put Lord Halifax
in a better frame of mind leading up to an important meeting with
von Ribbentrop. This memory, in turn, leads to Stevens saying ‘a few
words concerning Herr Ribbentrop’, (RD 136) words that are meant
to defend Lord Darlington against charges of anti-Semitism. Realising
that he has drifted, Stevens tries to bring himself back to the silver,
but in an absolute non-sequitur, he goes on to discuss how butlers
judge their employers to assess their own standing. He again notes
that he has deviated from his original point and acknowledges that the
past is difficult given the small errors that have crept into his work.
Wall reads through the associations and explains the drift of Stevens’s
thinking, a sequence that Stevens himself may not have charted:
Made uncertain about his current value as a butler by the number of
small mistakes, he must justify his past value by recalling the impact of his
silver polishing on international affairs and by asserting, further, that his
value as a professional is assured by that of the master he has served. Yet
because Stevens offers such a justification even when he knows that Lord
Darlington’s career has been a ‘waste’, he merely reveals here his ten-
dency to compartmentalize his knowledge into bearable segments and,
further, the strength of his drive to protect himself from any contradictions
that will undermine the values on which he has constructed his life.50
By tracing the connections between Stevens’s reminiscences, Wall

demonstrates not only the subtlety of Ishiguro’s narrative, but also
another facet of Stevens’s defence against the onslaught of the past.
Narrative order also emphasises events in the scene in which

Stevens runs out of gas. During this scene he continually returns to
the time Lord Darlington dismissed the two maids and his conversa-
tions at that time with Kenton. This fl ashback is interrupted by his
returning to the present to talk about his difficult evening at the
Taylor home (RD 159), but he then retreats to the past to discuss the
time Kenton caught him with a sentimental romance and the period
a month earlier when she started to date. This recollection leads him
to consider the events leading up to that change and the realisation
that perhaps he should not have cancelled the evening cocoa meet-
ings. He concludes he is being so introspective because of the dif-
ficulty of the day, but these digressions are all a prelude: the main
act is an account of the conversation with Harry Smith who argues
vehemently for a conception of dignity radically opposed to the one
that Stevens has used to guide his life. Ishiguro uses narrative order
and Stevens’s admission of his avoidance to emphasise the impor-
tance of the conversation with Smith. The unreliability here is, Wall
argues, ‘mixed’. Stevens seems to be starting to become aware of his
manipulations as is seen in his admission that he is avoiding the meet-
ing with Smith, although he still does not explain why he would do
so. Despite Stevens’s lack of awareness of his motives, Wall detects in
the progression from the previous example to this one that Stevens is
becoming slightly more reliable.51
This slight improvement in reliability, in fact, marks a major
change in Stevens. He begins to see that which he previously could
not, and ultimately, the meeting with Harry Smith causes a decon-
struction of Stevens’s concept of dignity. In contrast to Stevens’s
silence and blind faith in his employer, Harry Smith construes dignity
in terms of having the right to speak one’s opinion.52 Initially, Stevens
tries to defend his notion of dignity (RD 201), but Wall’s exegesis
of this monologue demonstrates Stevens’s defensiveness and unease:
Stevens notes Darlington’s failures and must recognise that he cannot
justify his own life by praising the man he served. Stevens’s question-
ing of Lord Darlington suggests his questioning of himself.
This progression of Stevens’s thinking over the course of the trip has
been nicely demonstrated by Karl Jirgens who juxtaposes a series of quo-
tations by Stevens from different parts of the narrative.53 Although Jirgens
offers these quotations in support of a logically flawed effort to demon-
strate how Stevens was duped by the Nazis, this contrasting of quotations
does reveal the changes through which Stevens’s thinking progresses:
Stevens begins satisfied with the work he has done for Lord Darlington
(RD 126); a day later he qualifies his satisfaction to point out that while
Lord Darlington’s efforts may have been a waste, Stevens did his best
(RD 201); next, Stevens sees that while Lord Darlington may have been
mistaken, at least he made his own mistakes, while Stevens must ques-
tion his dignity after acknowledging that he has not even made his own
mistakes (RD 243); and finally, moments later, Stevens consoles himself by
suggesting that men such as he have very little choice (RD 244).
The concept of unreliable narration is not straightforward in this
novel. The narration is complicated by aspects of Stevens’s character
which have not received much critical attention: for example,
Stevens is not an entirely unreflective man, merely one who has found
it necessary to bracket off large areas of feeling, experience, and desire
because of the huge investment he has made in a certain image of him-
self and of his place in life.
Wall supports this claim by recalling his reassessment of Kenton’s let-

ter.54 First, he proposes that he cannot possibly be misreading the letters
(RD 48), but later he acknowledges that he may have exaggerated (RD
140), and finally, he sees that he reads meaning into the letters that the
text does not support (RD 180). In his return to the past, Wall argues,
Stevens learns, and this learning helps him better evaluate his past and
allows him to attempt to close ‘the critically ironic distance between
implied author and narrator, between narrator and implied reader’.
Stevens is not trying to deceive and blithely ignore the contradictions of
his account. He is trying to get at the truth of his life. The novel’s narra-
tion is significant, then, in its reconfiguring of the role of the unreliable
narrator and challenging our conception of the truth unreliable nar-
rators offer. Particularly important for Wall is the challenge this novel
issues to the ‘approach to unreliable narrators that focuses on a fixation
with an authoritative version of events that the implied reader cleverly
constructs in spite of the narrator’s purposeful or unconscious obfus-
cation’. Ishiguro banishes hopes of ‘one true account’ with a narrator
whose awareness of his contradictions and missteps is hard to determine,
a narrator whose lack of self-knowledge precludes a more accurate tell-
ing of his story. Stevens may want to tell his story accurately but the
attempt at absolute reliability is futile here: ‘The Truth’ is not always an
easy matter. Consequently, Wall concludes by suggesting that analyses
of unreliable narrators grounded on the project that readers have not
been given the truth ‘and that our task is to figure out “what really hap-
pened”’ require re-evaluation. As Wall point out, there are ‘“fashions” in
unreliable narration’: what was a ‘norm and value’ of James or Joseph
Conrad (1857–1924) is not necessarily a norm today.55
James Phelan and Mary Patricia Martin: Beyond Unreliable Narration
James Phelan and Mary Patricia Martin also look back to Wayne
Booth’s work in The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961) as a point of departure.
Like Wall they supply another catalogue of narrative techniques and

in doing so provide readers with further insights into the complexi-
ties of Stevens’s unreliability. Phelan and Martin, however, focusing
for the most part on the meeting between Stevens and Kenton near
the novel’s conclusion, also consider the ethical dimensions of unreli-
able narration. Stevens, they propose, may be realising the problems
with his ideals and the sacrifices he has made, and this creates a chal-
lenge for Ishiguro: ‘Ishiguro’s difficult task is to communicate the
psychological complexity, emotional richness, and ethical difficulty of
Stevens’s climactic realisation by means of Stevens’s generally reticent
and often unreliable narration’.56 They begin to explain how Ishiguro
overcomes this obstacle by examining why a passage from Stevens’s
meeting with Kenton (RD 233–4) is unreliable but quickly add the
interesting distinction that ‘unreliable’ is not an accurate representa-
tion of Stevens’s narration: ‘Stevens’s narration here is an accurate
and honest report of his motives as he understands them. Or to put the
point another way, the passage is reliable as far as it goes; the problem
is that it doesn’t go far enough.’57 Reading the passage as both reliable
and unreliable, Phelan and Martin note that ‘unreliable’ is not subtle
enough to capture the passage’s complexity.
To address this lack, Phelan and Martin provide distinctions to
‘unreliable’. Stevens could be ‘underreporting’ or ‘underreading’.
Underreporting would mean he is not admitting what he and the
reader know to be true, an unreliability related to ethics. Underreading
would mean he does not read what we do about his personal interest,
not an unreliability of ethics or events but a previously unnoticed axis
of knowledge and perception. For example, we could suppose that his
denial of his emotions, part of a career-long commitment to dignity,
has left him unaware of what he is feeling. However, once we acknowl-
edge Stevens’s admission of a broken heart, we must also acknowledge
that he does have awareness of his feelings for Kenton: ‘Because Stevens
the narrating-I speaks in the present tense – that is, at the time of the nar-
ration, after the anagnorisis [the moment of the self-discovery of the true
identity] of Stevens the experiencing-I – the standard approach would
now lead us to conclude that he is not underreading but underreport-
ing. Although he says, “I am aware”, he clearly leaves out much that
has entered his awareness by the time of the narration’.58 At this point
of the narrative, then, Stevens appears to be ‘underreporting’.
Given the deep discrepancy between what Stevens says in response
to Kenton and what he feels, Phelan and Martin discuss ‘the eth-
ics of reading’. This consideration of ethics leads Phelan and Martin
to question whether or not Stevens should have told Kenton what
he was feeling. On the one hand, doing so would show him acting
honestly. On the other hand, it would have been an abuse of his new
self-knowledge – it is not possible to return to the earlier days of their

relationship. Interestingly, each co-author reads this complex scene
differently, a difference that underlines ‘the multifarious relations
among the narrative texts and our responses to them’.59
Phelan and Martin look back, momentarily, to the scene in which
Stevens corrects an earlier account about standing outside Kenton’s
room (RD 226–7). His previous misremembering is clearly a repres-
sion of feeling and that he can now recall this episode correctly
demonstrates that his journey is leading him to admit where he has
gone wrong in the past. Phelan and Martin stress how close Stevens
and Kenton are at this time to becoming romantically involved and
how this scene activates our desire for Stevens to act. Understanding
the scene in this way ‘allows us to regard the fi nal meeting in
“Weymouth” as Stevens’s finally deciding to knock on Miss Kenton’s
door, a recognition that in turn increases our desire for them to make
a satisfactory emotional connection’. At this point the co-authors
diverge to produce two readings. First, Martin argues that Stevens
should have shared his feelings with Kenton in Weymouth and that
his failure to do so ‘frustrates our desire’:
Kenton has again opened herself to Stevens, and he ought to reply in

kind; his feelings would not be a burden for her; she would welcome – and
he owes her – the acknowledgment of their mutual regret for the life they
now realize might have been. Consequently, the pain of Stevens’s broken
heart is doubled. And Miss Kenton’s tears as she boards her bus are the
objective correlative of the reader’s unfulfilled desire.60
This call for Stevens to act is contrasted with Phelan’s reading that
Stevens does enough:
Stevens’s knocking and Miss Kenton’s answer give a twist to the read-
er’s desire: although the emotional connection is not complete, something
new has happened between them. Although Miss Kenton does not know
all that Stevens is feeling, she does understand what it means for him to
knock, however tentatively, and she can feel the tenderness with which he
treats her throughout the scene. Her tears, then, signify her own recogni-
tion that if he’d acted this way twenty years before, her life would be differ-
ent. In that important respect, her knowledge catches up with ours.61
The important similarity in the readings, they realise, is that in both,

our hopes for Stevens are crushed and he is left heartbroken. Phelan
and Martin do, however, fi nd consolation for Stevens and readers in
the novel’s conclusion.62
Following the meeting with Kenton, Stevens meets a retired but-
ler on the pier at Weymouth. It is a meeting that Phelan and Martin
fi nd highly unlikely, and one that highlights our role as readers,

readers unsatisfied with Stevens’s ending. Phelan and Martin sug-
gest that the scene is ‘apart’ from other scenes in the novel, point out
that it is told in the present tense, and argue that the conversation
is unusually intimate for Stevens. Phelan and Martin connect these
observations to their observation of Stevens’s addresses to his narra-
tee at various points in the novel63 leading them to propose that the
retired butler Stevens encounters ‘is a figure of the narratee’.64 The
butler, ‘minimally characterized’, assumes the role of ‘stand-in, fi rst,
for the authorial audience, and, second, for the flesh-and-blood read-
ers’. Since the butler is standing in for us, we can feel some satisfac-
tion when Stevens seems to take the advice the butler offers, advice
that we readers might also like to offer.65 Unfortunately, Phelan and
Martin seem to have overlooked the novel’s last paragraph in which
Stevens looks forward not to the rest suggested by the retired butler
but to getting back to the work of bantering, an important distinc-
tion. They do, however, point out that Stevens’s newfound belief in
bantering as the essential skill in establishing human warmth dem-
onstrates that he still needs to improve his ability to share emotions:
‘Bantering can convey warmth but it does not equal the warmth gen-
erated by the intimate and frank disclosure of thoughts and feelings
among people who trust each other’.66
Like many readers, Phelan and Martin ultimately arrive at
Ishiguro’s humanity. Through Stevens’s realisation of the need for
human communication, such as bantering, Ishiguro illustrates the
value of human warmth. As in the earlier novels, Ishiguro uses
his protagonist to share ‘his concerns about lives not lived, sacri-
fices made for the wrong reasons, whole dreams irredeemably lost’.
Notably, however, it is a sharing that requires readers to work through
Ishiguro’s narrative strategies to read his characters more fully and to
sort through their ethical dilemmas.67
Andrew Teverson: Acts of Reading
Taking a different focus, Andrew Teverson adopts a more specific

stance to unreliable narration by examining occasions of reading
within the novel to demonstrate that Ishiguro forces us to become
good readers, so that we do not make the mistakes that Stevens makes.
This is necessary, he argues, because in works such as Ishiguro’s ‘the
reader is given greater freedom to interpret the situations for himself
or herself: feeling textures, analysing moods and shaping events’.68
He begins with two examples from the prologue: Kenton’s letter and
Stevens’s reading of his travel guide. Stevens, at this early stage of the
novel, reads Kenton’s letter fi nding what he hopes to find:
He is, in this sense, a ‘bad’ reader, because he is not willing to use the
text to get outside of himself and see things from another perspective,
but only uses it to strengthen his own biases and confirm what he wants
to believe.69
Stevens first reads the travel guide, he claims, to see the country with-
out having to travel it, but in particular, to get a sense of the place
where Kenton has gone (RD 11–12). Teverson points out that
Stevens is reading this guide in an insincere manner by refusing to

admit the true intentions behind his act of reading. Stevens is evidently
motivated to read about Devon and Cornwall because he misses Miss
Kenton and wants to feel closer to her.
Stevens’s travel guide is also significant because it is approximately

twenty years out of date, and Teverson proposes that Stevens does not
understand the changes that may have occurred in England:
The England of ‘great houses’ that Mrs. Symons’ book reflects and
that Stevens has founded his identity upon has passed away, and it has
been replaced by an England characterized by men such as Harry Smith
whose democratic political ideals are inimical to Stevens’ way of life.70
On a related note, Lord Darlington is also a bad reader.71 He fakes read-

ing the Encyclopaedia Britannica, (RD 60) an act of not reading which leads
Teverson to two important notes on the history of this encyclopaedia:
first, that it was founded for Brits to capture the immensity of British
knowledge; and second, that by 1899 the encyclopaedia had been bought
by Americans. To fake reading this encyclopaedia, then, signals Lord
Darlington’s lack of understanding of ‘exactly what Britain has become or
what its status in the world is. It also suggests that he is hiding behind out-
dated and unexamined notions of British ubiquity and British power’.72
Reading also provides one of the key moments of the novel:
Kenton’s interruption of Stevens while he reads a romantic novel.
Kenton, Teverson proposes, has a vested interested in Stevens being
a better reader. If he were a better reader, he would perhaps better
understand her advances. Stevens does not comprehend the strange
mood that ensues in this scene, and this failure leads Teverson to his
larger point in this section: the reader of this novel is encouraged to
‘abandon conventional generic expectations of satisfactory romantic
outcomes’.73 (It is a point that has been alluded to elsewhere: Jirgens
reads the novel as parodying the eighteenth-century novel.74 In a
much earlier review, David Gurewich is surely closer to the right time
period when he notes that the ‘deliberate plotting is strictly in keeping
with the nineteenth-century genre that Ishiguro studiously follows’.75

Unfortunately, Gurewich misses out on Ishiguro’s parodic intentions.)
Similarly, if one were to understand Stevens as on a quest, the reader’s
expectations of this genre would be dashed as well.76 The crushing of
expectations is particularly important in Teverson’s argument:
Because the meaning of Stevens’ narrative […] is only available to the

reader if the reader reads around his words, and because the reader has
to be prepared to eschew Stevens’ narrative position in order to gain a
greater perspective upon events, he or she is forced to adopt a much freer
relationship with narratives that is not blindly dependant upon formulaic
and generic precedents. As a result, he or she is much less likely to accept
any narrative viewpoint as ‘normal’ or ‘natural’ but is more likely to inter-
rogate and investigate narrative viewpoints to discover what kind of buried
mythologies they contain. In addition, he or she is also less likely to believe
that any singular perspective will suffice as a full explanation of events, but
will conclude that events can only be explained in many different ways,
from several different perspectives.77
Ishiguro’s playing with readers’ expectations is part of a training of

the reader to better understand his novel. Teverson demonstrates how
his analysis of these small scenes of reading is tied to the novel’s larger
themes and interests. Notably, his argument for an ongoing investigation
of narrative viewpoints arrives at a position similar to Wall’s dismantling
of authoritative accounts but by an entirely different route. It is a reading
useful not only to Ishiguro scholars but to all aspiring literary scholars.
CONCLUSION
In his fi rst novel with no reference to Japan, some reviewers found

Ishiguro’s past content and ethnicity impossible to resist. Fortunately,
most reviewers were able to recognise the achievement Remains repre-
sents, and several initiated discussions on key moments and questions
of the novel. Reviewers’ praise of the novel’s craft, for example, has
been confi rmed by excellent criticism such as Guth’s teasing out of the
novel’s structure and language and work that reassesses and refi nes the
concept of the unreliable narrator as in essays by Scanlan, Wall, and
Phelan and Martin. Teverson not only demonstrates good scholarship
in his tight analysis of moments of reading but also urges us to read
better and provides some indication of the stakes involved in doing
so. Issues such as the novel’s approach to history and memory received
little critical attention when Remains fi rst appeared; however, as the
next chapter will show, scholars have recently found these topics
particularly fruitful.
CH A P TER FOUR
The Remains of the Day 2: Historical

and Postcolonial Readings
S et in England in 1956 with flashbacks to a grand English estate in the

years between World Wars One and Two and replete with appear-
ances by key political figures of the time, The Remains of the Day plainly
invites historical discussion. Several commentators have responded to
this invitation, providing useful background information and interpreta-
tions that read the novel through a historical lens. This second chapter on
the responses to Remains follows the trajectory of these readings, a trajec-
tory that begins with the unsaid. As in A Pale View of Hills, a novel that
despite the setting of its flashbacks amidst the aftermath of the atomic
bombing of Nagasaki, mentions the bombing only twice, in Remains,
the Suez Crisis, a major international conflict that dominated newspa-
per headlines in England, stays hidden in the background of the novel’s
fictional present, unnoticed by its first-person narrator, Stevens. The
crisis erupted on 26 July 1956 when Egypt’s President Nasser (1918–70),
frustrated by the withdrawal of funding by Britain and the USA for
the Aswan Dam, nationalised the Suez Canal, leading the USA and the
co-owners of the canal, France and Britain, to first, impose economic
sanctions, and shortly thereafter, conceive a plan for international con-
trol of the canal, which Nasser duly rejected. When further negotiations
failed, France and Britain secretly backed an Israeli invasion of Egypt,
which began on 29 October 1956, then joined the war themselves the
next day. Although a military success, public condemnation of the war
and American pressure rendered it a diplomatic failure, and on 9 January
1957, British Prime Minister Anthony Eden (1897–1977) resigned. John
Sutherland’s short chapter on the novel provides a clear and compre-
hensive explanation of this crisis and its timeframe. After outlining the
Anglo-American context of the crisis, John P. McCombe, in a widely
cited article, investigates the role of these strained tensions as they
appear in the novel. Taking a much broader view of the novel’s history,
61
Bo J. Ekelund’s provocative, but flawed, reading focuses on the various

genres that Ishiguro uses to allow Stevens to relate his narrative and
argues, consequently, that the failure to understand the connotations
that these genres import into the novel constitutes a misrecognition
of the history portrayed in Remains. James Lang, in perhaps the most
compelling of these readings, complicates historical interpretations by
introducing the distinction between public and private histories and the
theory of historical ‘backshadowing’. Each of these readings, then, offers
a unique perspective on the role of history in the novel, providing read-
ers with a sense of the novel’s rich historical texture.
Alongside these historical readings, postcolonial theorists have
also found an entry point to readings of Remains in its historical ele-
ments and sought, with widely varying levels of success, to develop
postcolonial analyses of the novel. In the two most useful such essays,
Susie O’Brien addresses the contrast the novel establishes between the
old values of England and the new values of the United States while
Molly Westerman begins well by continuing the work done by nar-
rative theorists but falters when she attempts to introduce a layer of
postcolonial analysis. These theorists provide suggestive readings that
occasionally advance the scholarship on Remains, but their failures in
reading are equally suggestive, pointing as they do to the difficulty of
interpreting Ishiguro free of preconceptions concerning his ethnicity.
HISTORICAL READINGS
John Sutherland, What Stevens Doesn’t See
John Sutherland’s short chapter from his collection, Where Was Rebecca
Shot?: Curiosities, Puzzles, and Conundrums in Modern Fiction (1998),
clearly details the connections between the Suez Crisis and Stevens’s
motoring trip. Sutherland works out the date of Stevens’s trip by
starting with the subtitle to the prologue which puts the date at July
1956, then adding the information in Stevens’s fi rst paragraph on the
months of Farraday’s proposed five-week trip, August and September,
and fi nally, looking at the novel’s end, subtracting the one week that
Stevens tells us remains before Farraday returns: ‘Stevens’s six days,
therefore, are at the end of August or the beginning of September,
1956.’ Many have pointed out that England at this time was in the
midst of the Suez Crisis and that Stevens’s failure to mention these
events is an unimaginable oversight, especially in light of his boast-
ing in Moscombe of his connection with foreign affairs. Readers
of Ishiguro’s fi rst two novels, however, might not be surprised by
this oversight given Ishiguro’s previous choices to set stories near or
against large historical events and then not mention them. As Norman
Page observes, he ‘foregrounds private experience and allows domestic
and even trivial events to represent, by synecdoche, historic happen-
ings on a world stage’.1 Having collated the details of the Suez Crisis,
Sutherland observes an important irony:
Eden was driven in his mad Suez adventure by the demons of Munich –
the sense that there must be no ‘appeasement’. His favourite rallying call
was that Nasser was Hitler all over again. But, unlike 1938, this was an
occasion on which diplomacy, international co-operation – ‘appeasement’,
if you like – was exactly the right policy to have adopted. Lord Darlington’s
policies of discussion and détente, so tragically wrong in the 1920s and
1930s, would have been precisely right in autumn 1956.2
Sutherland does not follow up on this point, but it is important to

note that his observation of Eden’s motivation does help contextualise
Darlington’s error. Like Eden, Darlington was, according to Senator
Lewis, ‘decent, honest, well meaning’ (RD 102). It is an important
contextualisation that refutes the one-dimensional characterisations
of those scholars who quickly categorise Lord Darlington a ‘crypto
Fascist’3 without understanding the complexities of the situation and
the benevolence behind Lord Darlington’s motivation (RD 73–5, 87).
For readers of Ishiguro, to assign characters to basic categories is to
miss some further understanding of human character, an argument con-
sistently illuminated by scholarship on Ishiguro’s work.
John P. McCombe, ‘Anglo-American Tensions’
Despite Ishiguro’s insistence on his lack of interest ‘in researching

history books’,4 in this essay McCombe investigates Ishiguro’s use of
history, intending to ‘explore the ways in which Stevens’s journey
illuminates a particularly tense moment in Anglo-American relations’.
He reads ‘the implications of the crisis for Britain’s changing relations
with the United States’5 as similar to the changes that Stevens is going
through and determines that ‘Understanding the political and cultural
tensions that existed at this time between Britain and America helps
us to understand the ambivalence toward US political and cultural
hegemony that is central to Ishiguro’s narrative.’6
The strongest part of McCombe’s paper is his connecting of events
of the novel’s fictive present to the Suez Crisis. After providing a con-
siderable amount of background on the crisis, he summarises how the
crisis illuminated Britain’s geo-political standing:
Britain was far from a major player in the day’s simmering Middle East
tensions. Before the canal’s nationalization, […] both Egypt and Israel
were seeking to secure arms from abroad to prepare for a military

showdown. When Egypt appealed to the US for weapons, it became
increasingly clear that Britain was no longer the primary international
force in the region. In the subsequent negotiations, the US attached
conditions to the arms deal. Nasser, fearing that these terms would
undermine his influence at home, rejected them and announced that
Czechoslovakia would supply the necessary weapons. But this move
jeopardized another arrangement with America: a loan to finance the
Aswan Dam, which was designed to provide both electricity and irriga-
tion to a massive and previously underdeveloped region of Egypt. When
the US reneged on the loan, Britain also withdrew its financial support,
and Egypt responded by dismissing British forces from the Suez region,
compensating foreign canal shareholders at the current market price and
nationalizing the canal.7
McCombe adds to this characterisation of Britain’s decline in power

by turning to Prime Minister Anthony Eden, who came to power
just as Farraday took over Darlington Hall in the spring of 1955.
Moreover, Eden shares some similarities with Lord Darlington. As
Sutherland pointed out earlier, the two are certainly put in compara-
ble positions, a parallel McCombe develops:
In August 1956, Anthony Eden made a ministerial broadcast to the

nation, the second ever televised, and his rhetorical appeal was grounded
in two principal concerns […]: the commercial importance of the canal
to Britain and the dangers of appeasing ‘dictators’ such as Nasser.
Ishiguro’s novel cleverly highlights and juxtaposes two discourses of
appeasement, one concerning a genuine threat in post-Weimar Germany
and the other serving as a farcical justification for a British military action
opposed by much of the world community in the mid-1950s.8
Initially Eden was supported, support illuminated by one of the rural

villagers in Tavistock who seeks confi rmation from Stevens of the
Prime Minister’s good character (RD 188).9 In fact, Eden even found
support in the opposing Labour Party: Hugh Gaitskell (1906–63;
Labour Party Leader 1955–63) ‘compared Nasser to Mussolini and
Hitler and invited comparisons with the 1936 German occupation
of the Rhineland’. The American response, formulated with Dwight
D. Eisenhower (1890–1969; US President 1953–61) campaigning for
reelection on a platform of peace shortly after the Korean War (1950–3),
was not so supportive: ‘In Remains, at the time when Mr. Farraday
departs for several weeks from his new English home – August and
September 1956 – the US eschewed gunboat diplomacy and aban-
doned its longtime ally Britain.’10 This abandonment led to charges
of American self-interest, a response for which McCombe fi nds an
allusion in the novel’s flashback to the conference: ‘the American “duplic-

ity” during the Suez affair connects with the “deceitful” thinking of
the American senator, Lewis, whose desire to relax the terms of the
Versailles Treaty is related to the repayment of American war loans’,11
an accusation made in the novel by the Frenchman Dupont (RD 101).
Finally, McCombe looks at the consequences of the Suez campaign,
calling it ‘a military success but a political and economic disaster’.
Another strong connection to the novel is the portrayal of the British
government’s decision-making. The government’s attempt to deceive
the public, as well as the rest of the world, ‘was apparent when British
explanations for the military strike shifted over time. Tory officials
initially claimed to have been merely separating Israel and Egypt and
denied any foreknowledge of the Israeli attack’.12 McCombe quotes
historian T. O. Lloyd on the consequences:
This shows what was really to be condemned about the British

government’s attitude toward Suez: it knew that what it was in fact doing –
going back into Egypt to recover control of the canal – could not be
defended in public but nevertheless it went ahead. As nobody outside the
country believed its story, it gained the discredit of being dishonest as well
as imperialist.13
Although McCombe does not note it, this is one of the more menac-
ing parallels to the novel: an elite part of society attempts to make
decisions without going through the proper decision-making process.
Surprisingly, McCombe seems hard-pressed to provide evidence of
the anti-Americanism that he reads permeating the novel.14 For exam-
ple, McCombe offers Stevens’s reaction to Farraday’s desire for banter
as proof of anti-Americanism. He cites Stevens’s preference for the
English landscape over that of Africa and America, then suggests it is
evidence of anti-Americanism (but not anti-Africanism). But readers
clearly need to question why incidences of anti-Americanism would
turn up in Stevens’s writing. McCombe is asking us to accept that
Stevens, who McCombe describes as ‘a walking anachronism’,15 and
who has not heard of the Suez Crisis, has been biased by the resulting
anti-American sentiments even though his journey is in late August
or early September 1956, the period during which those sentiments
based on the Suez Crisis are just being seeded, as McCombe himself
indicates.16 If anti-Americanism is to show up in Stevens’s fictive
present, it is most likely to do so without his conscious awareness. Not
surprisingly then, the only place that McCombe can fi nd real anti-
Americanism is in the delegates’ reaction to Mr. Lewis in March 1923,
not 1956. McCombe is more capable of demonstrating the opposite:
that Anthony Eden’s successor Harold Macmillan (1894–1986; Prime
Minister 1957–63) understood the need to maintain strong diplomatic

ties with the US.17
McCombe’s essay usefully illuminates this historical background
and social upheaval, ‘And although Ishiguro might insist that he
“wasn’t so interested in history per se”, those political, economic, and
cultural changes are very clearly reflected in The Remains of the Day.’18
G. Bo Ekelund, ‘Complicitous Genres’
G. Bo Ekelund examines the novel’s history from a broader perspec-

tive. While he acknowledges that the narrative’s primary effect is
to reveal its characters, his interest is in ‘the cultured forms’ of the
revealing. He questions, that is, the ideological implications of the
genres used to convey the narrative, and argues that the failure to per-
ceive the implications that these genres surreptitiously import into the
novel constitutes readers’ misrecognition of history. Thus, he intends
to ‘investigate how the novel deals with a complicity that is inherent
in the very forms it relies upon for its disclosure of the theme’.19
Ekelund begins by pointing out the variety of genres that constitute
Remains. Although the novel begins like a travelogue, the account
is riddled with digressions that Ekelund fi nds substantive enough to
constitute separate genres.20 Ultimately, he distinguishes five genres:
‘travelogue, political memoirs, country house romance (which, as
we will see, is related to the detective genre), farce, and an essay on
values’.21 Each of these disparate genres that make up the whole of
Remains, he contends, is complicit in ‘a less visible history’.22 Generic
conventions have both histories and effects, and Ekelund’s original
contribution to the study of the novel is his teasing out of the ways
that these histories and effects operate: for example,
The political memoir has not always and in every case sought to cover
up crimes of omission or commission […] but the particular political
memoirs that belong to the range of historical references established in
Remains did use the conventions to gloss over such misdeeds.
The different genres also reinforce one another, their interrelationships

preventing analysis of them from ever being ‘given a comprehensive
treatment at any one point. Rather, all issues are subject to the “drift”
that takes us from one strand to another’. By understanding the novel
‘as a literary construct rather than a psychological representation’,
Ekelund argues, the novel’s reliance on what he calls the ‘complicity of
genres’ becomes apparent.23
Ekelund is led to two points: fi rst, ‘although it is Stevens who
introduces the narrative’s themes, it is Ishiguro who manipulates
the genres, which carry sets of meanings in themselves’ (a point that

overlooks that it is technically Stevens, not Ishiguro, who provides
Stevens’s account); second, ‘these meanings are not easily controlled or
automatically subverted by a strategy of generalized irony’.24 Ekelund
contests the postmodern commonplace ‘that the undermining of
genre is a structural function of any incorporation of other genres
into the novel’.25 Instead, he suggests that ‘What remains unexposed
by the irony of the narration […] is the structural complicity of cul-
tured forms that narrativize and defuse guilt even as they perform the
service of exposing it.’26 Consequently, ‘the postmodern irony may
even tend to conceal cultural patterns that may legitimately be held
to account by a less postmodern sort of critique. The ironic, post-
modern staging of history in my view amounts to a misrecognition of
history’.27
Ekelund works through the different genres explaining how each
works, how each carries ‘particular burdens of meaning and subver-
sion’. For example, elements of Stevens’s narrative that mimic travel
writing at the time imports another assumption:
that landscape is a key to national or regional values of a less concrete

nature. The title of the work Stevens consults, Mrs. Jane Symons’s The
Wonder of England, echoes other titles that hold out to tourists the prom-
ise of having a share in the extraordinary properties of a nation or region.
The English landscape comes to stand for Englishness.28
As is often pointed out, Stevens’s reading of England’s greatness,

undercut by his lack of political judgement and put up against the
historical backdrop of the never-mentioned Suez crisis, is ironic.
Although the travel narrative as a cultural form is not invoked ironi-
cally, it does expose the ironies of Stevens’s story.29
The novel’s invocation of political memoirs functions similarly
in the novel. It reveals the irony of ‘the servant of the public servant
[…] shut off from the most important deliberations, not least by his
own ignorance concerning the policies that are being deliberated’.
That irony introduced by the political memoir aspect of the novel
keeps readers focused on the irony portrayed and prevents them from
investigating ‘the way reader expectations are guided by the conven-
tions established by such memoirs: the focus on pivotal moments, the
character sketches of famous statesmen, the anecdotes, the post hoc
[after the event] explanations for less successful initiatives’. Ekelund
illuminates this point further by comparing The Remains of the Day
to the memoirs of E. F. L. Wood, First Earl of Halifax (1881–1959),
The Fulness of Days (1957). Not only are the titles similar, both men-
tion numerous similar names, and in general, ‘the novel captures a
familiarity with the memoir genre’.30 Ekelund’s discussion of how

Lord Halifax was viewed reveals generic conventions seen in Remains:
‘The image of a wrongdoer despite himself, one caught up in a web of
deceit of someone else’s doing, good intentions paving roads to hell,
are certainly part of Ishiguro’s picture, and Remains actually repro-
duces this aspect of the political memoir genre.’ The political memoir,
Ekelund asserts, has a large role in the novel, one that illustrates his
principle of genre complicity:
[T]he genre exists as a cultured form that, on entering the novel, brings
a complicitous history in its baggage. This complicity relates to the his-
torical theme of the novel in a general way, but in the genre predecessors
that pertain to that epoch we can see a deeper involvement in the com-
plicity of appeasement and, more importantly, a more profound invest-
ment in the formal maneuvers of evasion, distortion, and self-justification
that characterize the genre.31
The generic conventions of the political memoir have histories and

effects that make it complicit in a history that is often obscured.
Several genres, in fact, are present in the novel – Ekelund also
details the presence of farce and the detective story – but they are
twisted by the presence of others. So, on the one hand we recognise
their conventions, but on the other hand, we ignore their ‘ideological
premises, much the way Stevens, for the longest time, treats the implica-
tions of his history. The complicitous genres are servants of a plot whose
effects of mastery absolutely depend on them while its recognition of
guilt – private, individual, even sentimentalized – demands that they
remain smoothed over by the surface discourse’.32 Stevens continually
returns to ‘the essay on values’ giving it a predominant position among
the other genres. The novel gets either theoretical or practical whenever
one of the other genres predominates:
On the level of genre orchestration, the discourse on professional-

ism installs itself whenever the sentimental romance threatens to take
precedence. In terms of psychology, Stevens’s need to explain the
professional background for his actions so as not to be misunderstood
by his narratee is also a need to defend himself from properly under-
standing his interest in the letter. In the complicity of genres, the essay
on professional values dominates the other genres by its constant
euphemization of other contents, its appropriation of other narrative
energies.33
Ekelund sees the novel as a discussion of values, as in Ono’s discussion

of his career, aesthetics, and politics in An Artist of the Floating World,
and the discussion on portering in The Unconsoled. The world of serv-

ants portrayed in Remains serves as a metaphor for the world of artists
and critics:
Stevens’s meditations of the subject of greatness are certainly naïve,

but at the same time they shrewdly point out the impasses of traditional
accounts of literary value: the relativity of judgments made even within
the profession itself, the tautological dead ends of inherent value (dignity
reduced to its etymological root, worth; good literature proven by its com-
plete literariness), and the problematic reliance on ‘employers’ – patrons,
publishers, the general public. The attachment to progressive ends then
appears a reasonable solution to Stevens’s question. And there lies the
rub, of course, since the relation of benevolent intention to ends is com-
plicated by structures – ‘unacknowledged conditions and unanticipated
consequences’ [in the terminology of the British sociologist Anthony
Giddens (born 1938)].34
The labelling of a quality as ‘progressive’ or ‘moral’, that is, requires

a lot of assumptions of what is progressive and moral, the sources of
which, Ekelund claims, are obscured.
Ekelund turns in the end to Ishiguro. While acknowledging
the widely held idea that Ishiguro’s writing of a ‘historiographical
metafiction’ absolves him of complicity and that Ishiguro’s use ‘of
historically contaminated genres’ dispels ‘their ideological charge’, 35
Ekelund thinks that the question of complicity is not solved by
Ishiguro’s subversion of genres. Although Remains transforms the
genres that have come before, the difference between Stevens and
the many servants previously depicted who manipulate their mas-
ters (many examples are given) troubles Ekelund. Consequently,
he is dissatisfied with the novel’s politics: ‘the theme of complicity
extends to the historical complicity of forms incorporated into the
novel, but as a novel it obliterates those concrete mediations of his-
tory in favor of the purely literary ironic subversity that is conferred
on postmodern fiction by default, thus keeping its revelations safely
within the profession.’36
Ultimately, Ekelund’s examination is most valuable for its discussion
of the novel’s mix of genres and the associations that the different
genres bring to readings of the novel. Ekelund fails, however, to sepa-
rate the implied author, Ishiguro, from the narrator, Stevens. And this
failure leads him to see the mix of genres as a product of Ishiguro’s
authorship rather than an aspect of Stevens’s narration, a misattribution
that causes him to overlook the mix of genres as products of Stevens’s
reading and imagination, as noted earlier by Andrew Teverson.
James M. Lang, ‘Public Memory, Private History’
James M. Lang recognises the roles played by public and private histories,
a preoccupation of Ishiguro’s, Lang asserts, in each of Ishiguro’s first four
novels. It is a reading first proposed by Cynthia Wong (‘The Shame of
Memory’) in her work on A Pale View of Hills. The truth these narrators
discover,
is complicated by the self-interest of the narrators. As the narrators

seek to reconstruct, through private memories, a public historical con-
text which they have experienced, they do so at least in part in order to
excuse their own behavior in that public context. Hence the recapturing
of that ‘missing version of the truth’ must continually be tempered by the
reader’s awareness of the potential self-interests of the narrator.37
Stevens, for example, attempts to justify and explain his loyalty to Lord
Darlington: he ‘struggles to reconcile his own private memories of
Lord Darlington (and what seemed to Stevens, in historical context, as
Darlington’s noble and virtuous – though perhaps naive – intentions)
with the subsequent public vilification of Darlington after the war’.38
Lang acknowledges that confl icts between private memories and public
understandings are always present in historical fiction, but argues that
they are even more important in Ishiguro’s work:
[T]hey explicitly thematize it and interrogate what the differences

between public and private memories mean for our understanding of
history itself. Most importantly, Ishiguro suggests that public historical
accounts carry with them an inevitable tinge of determinism, one which
private memories can help to resist.39
Ishiguro foregrounds the small private history, and in doing so,

demonstrates how readily it is able to revise the traditional grand
narratives.
This foregrounding follows the changing focus of historiography in
the twentieth century. Lang discerns a parallel between ‘The compet-
ing strategies of historicization in The Remains of the Day – official,
public, diplomatic history in contrast with the private memories of the
diplomat’s butler’ and the change in historiography in the twentieth
century, the drift ‘away from the grand narratives and grand charac-
ters of earlier historiography toward the lives and experiences of the
ordinary, the mundane, the marginalized, and the dispossessed’.40 The
new focus is on the everyday as in the method of Michel de Certeau
(1925–86): ‘“metonymic” glimpses of ordinary men and women,
snapshots which will illuminate the character of public and private life
as narratives of military strategy and court intrigues and international

diplomacy never could.’ This focus is evident in the historical novels
of the late twentieth century, which ‘like their historiographical coun-
terparts, reflect an interest in the ordinary and the dispossessed – those
traditionally dispossessed by posterity, as well as those dispossessed
materially and politically’.41 Ishiguro’s characters, Stevens especially,
clearly fit such a description: not only is he dispossessed, he argues
‘that individuals like himself are incapable of contributing intelligently
to the governance of the country’.42 Stevens, by virtue of his posi-
tion, also allows us to see contrasting histories. Through him readers
are offered two perspectives on the important political meetings at
Darlington Hall:
[O]ne sketched by Stevens in his narration, and one laid out for the
public record in the form of postwar perceptions of Darlington’s role
in the war. As readers of the novel, we receive a less full version of the
public record, and that only through Stevens’s reaction to it, but we
see enough to understand how vastly different the two sets of histori-
cal accounts – Stevens’s version and postwar accounts of Darlington’s
role – really are.43
The contrast between public and private memories ‘produces a feeling

of unease in the reader, caught between confl icting sets of impulses:
on the one hand, feeling narrative sympathy for Stevens, and the
external and internal restraints imposed on his character; on the other,
feeling repugnance at the thought of the willing association he and his
employer made with the Nazis’.44
Most compellingly, Lang introduces into the discussion of Remains
the concept of ‘backshadowing’ developed by Michael André Bernstein
(born 1947). Bernstein defines ‘backshadowing’ as ‘a kind of retroac-
tive foreshadowing in which the shared knowledge of the outcome of a
series of events by narrator and listener is used to judge the participants
in those events as though they too should have known what was to
come’.45 Applied to this novel, Lang argues, ‘backshadowing would
critique Stevens and Darlington for not foreseeing the Holocaust in
the 1930s, and consequently for facilitating dialogues with Nazis’.46
Although historical backshadowing reflects a deterministic view of
history, events could, of course, have turned out differently. The most
important point here is that Remains offers a critique of backshadow-
ing: ‘in part by drawing out our sympathy for Stevens, and letting
that sense of character identification interfere with our initial, perhaps
thoughtless, urge to condemn him for his association with the Nazis’.47
The novel’s appraisal of backshadowing is also effected in ‘its
insistent critique of the discourse of, in the novel’s phrase, “turning
points”’. In contrast to the perception of turning points ‘as marking a

significant development or transformation’, Lang proposes that retro-
spectively interpreted
Turning points are inseparable from backshadowing, because we can

only identify moments of development or transformation in light of the
narrative’s next or final stages. The discourse of turning points, like the
practice of backshadowing, encourages us to see history as a static field,
one which we observe, rather than construct.48
Thus we see Stevens attempting to reconcile the gaps, nota-

bly that between his perception of Darlington and the
public’s condemnation of him. Stevens ‘focuses upon the admi-
rable qualities of Lord Darlington’s character: he is a gentle-
man, he has noble instincts, he feels compassion for a defeated
foe.’ This assessment is juxtaposed with ‘the backshadow-
ing critiques of Lord Darlington’s behavior in this novel –
namely, the criticisms of his behavior which stem from the postwar
public knowledge of how events surrounding the war unfolded’.49
One of the ways that Stevens attempts to forge this recon-
ciliation is in his reporting of Lord Darlington’s conversations.50
Consequently, readers should not be too surprised to read Stevens’s
depiction of ‘Senator Lewis as a crass boor, while Lord Darlington
has the grace and aplomb of a gentleman diplomat’. In contrast to
Stevens’s depiction, however, Cardinal confi rms Lewis’s description
of the need for professional diplomats: ‘Both […] suggest that Lord
Darlington is holding on to a lost historical ideal, one in which men
of power can settle their international affairs with informal and hon-
est deliberations.’51 While Lord Darlington is portrayed espousing an
idealism whose time has passed, Stevens, by providing the fuller con-
text, enhances sympathy for Lord Darlington.
Stevens’s project, however, clearly has its difficulties. The most
obvious problem is Stevens’s unreliability. As well, Stevens’s recon-
textualisation can neither excuse nor justify Lord Darlington and
himself for actions such as the dismissal of the two Jewish maids;
‘while Stevens certainly helps us to construct a more accurate histori-
cal context for Darlington’s decisions, he also is interested in excusing
both Darlington and himself through that narrative construction’.52
Alongside the story of the dismissal of the Jewish maids, Stevens
points out how highly perceived Herr Ribbentrop was, and how he
visited the very best houses: ‘Stevens cleverly and explicitly links this
critique of the forgetfulness of public memory, especially as it pertains
to Ribbentrop’s visits to Darlington manor, with the more sensitive

issue of the dismissals of the Jewish girls.’ Stevens, however, compro-
mises the value of his history with ‘His narrative unreliability and his
evident interest in using his critique of backshadowing to justify his
and Lord Darlington’s actions’.53
The same problem complicates Stevens’s discussion of ‘turning
points’. Stevens selects two: his performance at the conference the
night his father died (RD 110), and his cancelling of the evening
chats with Kenton (RD 175). These turning points, of course, ‘are a
narrative mechanism for imparting a coherent line of development
to a sequence of events’.54 We can only see turning points after the
fact as Stevens himself acknowledges (RD 176). Once Stevens begins
to understand how many different moments could serve as turning
points, he sees the difficulty of his attempt to reconcile his private
memories with the public:
While Stevens recognizes some truth in that grand narrative, he also

wants to counter it with his personal narrative, one which resists the clumsy,
broad brush strokes of collective history. […] While Stevens’s personal
redescriptions of Lord Darlington do suggest convincingly that we should be
cautious in simply ascribing Darlington his fixed place in the public account,
they also give evidence – through the vehicle of the unreliable narrator – that
might cause us to doubt the reliability of his own narrative.55
Ishiguro has given the reader reason to question Stevens’s memories.

Stevens’s account is undercut by his unreliability and his desire to
exonerate Lord Darlington and himself. While the counterpoint to
public memories that Stevens’s private memories offer, through the
‘countering of backshadowing and the retrospective illusion of fatality’,
give readers a more complete historical reading, Lang asserts that ‘in
order to contribute to a fuller understanding of the past, these memo-
ries must engage in dialogue with the grand narratives of public mem-
ory and history’.56 The past is not the static field that public narratives
would have us believe; consequently, Lang urges for an approach that
would offer ‘what Ishiguro has called [...] “the texture of memory”’.57
POSTCOLONIAL READINGS
Susie O’Brien, ‘A New World Order’
Susie O’Brien begins her discussion of the politics of Remains by citing

a 1994 GQ article by poet John Ash (born 1948) ‘Stick It Up Howard’s
End’ in which he develops a definition of Merchant Ivory Syndrome
(MIS): ‘a form of cultural necrophilia, a slavering delectation of things
we are (or should be) well rid of ’ and a ‘symptom of a lingering

colonial mentality’.58 Ash appears puzzled by the fact that American
culture ‘founded in opposition to the stodginess of British tradition’
should be so infected, but O’Brien counters ‘that the Merchant Ivory
phenomenon has found a captive American audience not through the
denial, but through the amplification of the mythic opposition’; that is,
these fi lms are popular because of the ‘contrast to the image of a liber-
ated, “postcolonial” America’ that they provide.59 She never supports
her supposition about the response of American viewers, and although
Farraday is of an earlier time, his fascination for genuine Englishness
(RD 124) suggests the opposite, as O’Brien herself later notes.60
Instead, she points out that the novel establishes a contrast between ‘the
colonial ambience’ of British tradition and ‘a liberated, “postcolonial”
America’. Notably, she employs the language of postcolonial theory,
but she is still writing about the contrast in the traditions of the two
countries: that Remains
is thematically constructed around an opposition between what are

commonly regarded as Victorian values – formality, repression, and self-
effacement, summed up under the general heading of ‘dignity’ – and
those associated with an idea of ‘America’ that has expanded, literally
into a New World – freedom, nature, and individualism.61
Ishiguro’s claim that he intended to ‘rework a particular myth about

a certain kind of mythical England’ adds support to O’Brien’s argu-
ment.62 O’Brien glosses Ishiguro’s statement, connecting it to her
position:
One significant strand of the myth which Ishiguro attempts to subvert

is the notion of benevolent paternalism which was invoked to legitimate
the deployment of power by the British ruling class, both at home and
abroad. The coercive terms of this myth are exposed ironically through
the narration of Stevens, whose failure to find personal fulfilment is directly
proportional to his commitment to the ideal of the faithful servant.63
While the novel reveals a society progressing towards new ideals,

Stevens, much to his misfortune, remains focused on dignity. O’Brien
cites the example of dignity in the story told by Stevens’s father about
the butler who, while working with his employer in India, calmly shot
a tiger, a story she links with the story about Stevens’s father serving
a man responsible for the death of Stevens’s brother, before conclud-
ing, ‘The suggestion here, and throughout the rest of the novel, is that
dignity, like the Empire it served, is predicated on surrendering the
dictates of individual conscience and “natural” human feeling to the
authority of a rigidly (if arbitrarily) stratified social hierarchy.’ It is an

opposition, O’Brien continues, based on traditional legitimisations of
hierarchies: that is, the ways that one’s social position is established as
a given. O’Brien perceives this legitimisation of hierarchy as operating
similarly in ‘the model of fi lial devotion deployed by empire to mask
the enforced servitude of its colonies’, as well as in Stevens’s devotion
to Lord Darlington.64
Filial devotion, in turn, leads O’Brien to consider the odd relation-
ship of Stevens and Stevens Sr. It is a devotion that leads Stevens to
violate his professionalism when ‘he colludes in the old man’s attempts
to conceal signs of his increasing disability from his employer’,65 an
important qualification of Stevens’s dedication to Lord Darlington
that previous scholars have overlooked. While Stevens does, seem-
ingly unconsciously, collude with his father, he remains reliant ‘on an
anachronistic social order’ as evidenced in his adherence to ‘the law of
“natural” succession’. The shift of power from father to son is paral-
lel, O’Brien argues, to the larger power shift in the novel, the shift
of power from Lord Darlington to the American Senator Lewis who
explains the shift in his postprandial speech on amateurs and profes-
sionals (RD 102). This speech is obviously prophetic in relation to the
manipulation of Lord Darlington, but O’Brien sees it as prophesying,
as well, the end of British colonialism: ‘the decade following the war
saw Britain divest itself of most of its colonies, a tangible acknowledg-
ment of its diminished role on the world stage.’ While this is true,
Lewis does not suggest that British power will wane, so this reading
of prophecy is somewhat ambitious. The more important prophetic
element in the speech is surely in the yielding of Lord Darlington’s
‘code of honor […] to a new professionalist ethic’. This professionalist
ethic, O’Brien claims, reduces the value of ‘knowing one’s place’, sup-
planting it with ‘a new emphasis on social and economic freedom’.66
Although she does not explain the logic of this chain whereby the
adoption of a professionalist ethic leads to this emphasis on freedoms,
her citing of Farraday’s quite different approach to running Darlington
Hall serves as a compelling example.
Stevens’s steadfast cultivation of dignity gives way to the need to
banter. But Stevens has trouble with this switch, seeing it as a duty
rather than play and by the end imbuing it with gravity when he sug-
gests it to himself and his readers as ‘the key to human warmth’ (RD
245). Citing the suggestion of Pico Iyer (born 1957), that ‘Stevens’s
great tragedy lies in his inability to speak “the language of the
world”’,67 O’Brien reconfigures Iyer’s use of ‘world’ to mean ‘the
new world order represented by Farraday’, a connotation not evident
in Iyer’s review. Nevertheless, for O’Brien, Farraday’s penchant for
bantering, now a trait of ‘the new world order’, becomes ‘a liberation
from the tyranny of dignity’. From this questionable manipulation

of Iyer’s quotation, O’Brien argues that in opposition to its playful
and liberating qualities, bantering not only has rules but also often
conceals power relations: ‘almost invisible structures of class and gen-
der privilege’.68 The observation of this hierarchy clearly contradicts
O’Brien’s construal of New World values as associated with values
such as ‘freedom, nature, and individualism’, but it is a contradiction
of which she is seemingly unaware.69 Regardless, her observation pro-
vides an extremely important and highly original contribution to the
discussion of bantering that the novel has inspired.
O’Brien continues her attempt to outline the novel’s portrayal of a
contrast of values by examining the different conceptions of ‘country’
supported by Stevens and Farraday (RD 4): for Stevens it is a ‘socio-
political construction’ composed of the nation’s important people, but
for Farraday, it refers to nature. However, it is Stevens’s meeting with
Harry Smith that most clearly establishes an opposition to Stevens’s
initial value system. Smith outlines dignity in a way diametrically
opposed to Stevens’s ‘model of self-effacement’ 70 by describing a
‘democratic vision [that] invokes the possibility, indeed the urgency,
of speaking for oneself ’. Stevens is thereby exposed to the possibil-
ity of not living his life based on the narrative of another. As Iyer has
pointed out, however, Stevens does not know ‘the language of the
world’ and although Iyer has not precisely described the characteristics
of this language, ‘Stevens’s failure to grasp them is implied through
his consistent violation of the “natural” logic of the romance plot of
the novel’, violations that mark not only his failure, O’Brien claims,
but also the failure of his ‘social order’.71 (Stevens’s failure to adhere
to the conventions of genre was noted in Rushdie’s review72 and later
taken up by Teverson.73) Additionally, Stevens’s failure has a larger
sphere, ‘for he violates the terms not only of the narrative of romance,
but also of the narrative of history, whose consummation may be read
in the vision of democracy described by Harry Smith’ (O’Brien’s
emphasis).74
In the playing out of these contrasts, Stevens’s romantic progress is
tied to the progression of history in the novel because it is the latter
which allows the expansion of individual freedom. His tie to politics,
through his serving of Lord Darlington, on the other hand, is pre-
sented as a critical obstacle to romance because he is always focused
on the important matters taking place in the house. O’Brien notes
Stevens’s constant deferrals of romance and proposes that their purpose
is to enhance the reader’s desire that these global matters might be

quickly dispensed with […] so that Stevens and Miss Kenton can con-
summate their relationship. Thus the goals of freedom and individual
fulfilment, invoked as political no less than personal ideals, ultimately

converge on a single romantic image against which the political recedes
from view.
Consequently, Farraday’s new world is not characterised ‘by universal

participation in history’ as proposed by Smith, but by history’s end
‘symbolized by the unlimited play (or banter) of human desire’, its
terms ‘subordinated to and concealed within the universalist logic of a
love story’.75
Molly Westerman, ‘Splitting the Subject’
Molly Westerman begins with a provocative interpretation of the

novel. She argues that Stevens’s ‘painful emotional life manifests itself
in narrative pecularities – struggles on the page – which form not
merely the narrative structure of the story but the story itself ’.76 It
is a remarkable thesis that looks back to narratologist Kathleen Wall
and to elements of the narrative: ‘the novel’s frame structure, implied
audience(s), temporal structures, repetitions, inconsistencies, gaps,
and ambiguities’. Westerman perceives Stevens’s identification with
Darlington Hall as both home and workplace as the source of his dif-
ficulties because with this identification he ‘objectifies himself and
internalizes a deep divide’. His identification, Westerman proposes,
can be read in terms of Homi Bhabha’s conception of stereotype so
that England is signified ‘by its “big houses” and their butlers’, thereby
stabilising both the social narrative and the narrative of Stevens’s life.
Consequently, by fi xing Englishness in place and assigning butlers as
markers for Englishness, Stevens devises a ‘single identity category of
“butler”’ that allows him to understand his world. It is obviously a
fragile endeavour buffeted by not only the outside world but also by
his own desires, and his ‘conspicuous failures pull reader and narrator
out of the imaginary sense that all is well’. That ‘these attempts and
failures occur at the level of the text’ is Westerman’s starting point.
She reiterates her argument: ‘The attributes often taken as proof of
Stevens’s narrative unreliability are actually the very mode by which
The Remains of the Day inscribes Stevens’s ever-confl icted subject posi-
tion and the processes through which it is created and maintained.’77
One of the questions the novel raises but that has not been
addressed is the identity of Stevens’s audience: to whom is he writ-
ing? Westerman begins to answer this question noting the unidenti-
fied ‘you’ to whom Stevens sometimes addresses his account and the
incongruity of someone who professes the importance of maintain-
ing the appearance of professionalism at all times ‘unless completely
alone’ writing to a ‘you’ about ‘his feelings, memories, and flaws’.78
The novel, she observes, does not explain how Stevens comes to be
writing in this mode, one that in some respects recalls the style of a
journal or diary, but in other ways, such as the heavy reliance on dia-
logue, resists this categorization. On the identity, or identities, of his
audience, she fares slightly better: from Stevens’s assumptions about
their knowledge and interests, she deduces an audience ‘of servants
in big houses, arguably only butlers’.79 His inclusion of his audience
with himself while describing other nationalities, such as Americans,
suggest his audience is, like himself, English. Much of his narrative,
including his justifications for his actions, ‘suggests that the text works
at least in part as internal dialogue’,80 but at other moments, he refers
to the audience in the plural. Furthermore, his refusal to name partic-
ular individuals because his audience might still remember them (RD
37) implies ‘a close and contemporary audience beyond himself ’.81
This inability to pin down the audience is in keeping with the other
irresolvable aspects of the narrative in which ‘Uncertainty, revision,
pretending, and lying figure prominently’.82 It is a claim that has been
established in a variety of contexts, and here Westerman supports it by
pointing to Stevens’s lying to the Taylors and Harry Smith which he labels
a ‘misunderstanding’ (RD 193), his inability to track down the source of a
comment followed by his construction of a story with Lord Darlington as
the source (RD 62), his denials of Lord Darlington (RD 120, 123) and the
subsequent explanations (RD 125–6), and his eavesdropping and report-
ing on the conversation between M. Dupont and Senator Lewis (RD
94–6) followed by his strenuous disavowals of any ‘subterfuge’ on his part
(RD 94). So prevalent are these anomalies that Westerman proposes they
‘constitute the story’,83 and ‘Stevens can be a reliable narrator of that story
only by including contradiction’.84 It is a point derived from Wall’s asser-
tion that unreliability ‘saturates both form and content’,85 but Wall, who
posits Stevens’s inability to reconcile the conflicting values by which he
wants to live as the source for his unreliability, does not, in Westerman’s
estimation, take the issue far enough. Consequently, Westerman pushes
Wall’s point about unreliability saturating ‘form and content’ further,
arguing that ‘What Stevens enacts on the page is a personal utterance.
It is an expression of his life within, creating, and created by a symbolic
structure – language, texts, mythology, an internalized father’86 all in the
midst of vast societal change.
The text itself is a demonstration of Stevens’s working out of the
confl icts in his life. It may appear that Stevens, the diligent worker
pegged into place by ‘his national identity and the service system
(which masks and yet is part of the class system)’,87 endures no con-
fl ict of values. For example, Renata Salecl, using the terms Marxist
philosopher Louis Althusser (1918–90) develops in ‘Ideology and
Ideological State Apparatuses’, (1970) calls Stevens ‘the prototype of an
“ideological servant”: he never questions his role in the machinery, he

never opposes his boss even when he makes obvious mistakes, that is,
he does not think but obeys’.88 But Westerman asserts the contrary: ‘as
the world around him changes (over time and, as he travels, spatially),
he begins to suspect the internal tensions and contradictions of his
subjecthood. Stevens does think: he thinks every word of the text, and
these tensions are the content of this novel.’89 One of these tensions is
Stevens’s repeated return to the question of English greatness. Notably,
he shifts abruptly from his extended description of the English land-
scape (RD 28–9) to the question of what constitutes a great butler (RD
29), a move that ‘associates butlering (and himself ) with Englishness’.
Similarly, when Farraday remarks that Stevens has been unable to see
the country and Stevens counters by stating that he has seen the coun-
try because he has worked in the houses where the greatest people in
the land gathered, Stevens is investing butlers with the role of con-
structing and ordering ‘the houses that take on the whole meaning of
England’. Stevens’s definition of Englishness, however, cannot be held
together, and ‘begins to split open at the level of the text’ because, in
his scheme, ‘England is its “greatest ladies and gentleman”, its ruling
class, and at the same time England is butlering, dignity-as-obedience,
knowing one’s place’.90 Similarly, Stevens must find a way to cover
the disparity between the mythic father he has constructed, one who
achieves dignity, in part, by serving a man responsible for the death of
Stevens’s older brother, and the real father with whom he has a difficult
relationship.91 As the world around him shifts, as portrayed in the fall
of Lord Darlington and the purchase of Darlington Hall by a wealthy
American, the contradictions cannot be maintained.
Stevens does, however, have patterns of thought that shield him
from these contradictions, such as his ‘amazing ability to think in
binaries when he imagines the public and private spheres’.92 Similarly,
Stevens takes a kind of solace in the rigid structure of his professional
life: ‘He ignores and denies his emotional life almost out of exist-
ence. […] Instead of telling himself that he fears the intimacy, risk,
and change associated with acting on his desire, Stevens produces a
mythology for his constraints and congratulates himself for his con-
stancy to them.’93 The freedom inherent in Stevens’s fi rst motor-
ing trip, however, issues a substantial challenge to his mythology of
constraint, one that the mythology cannot withstand, and the road
to Kenton becomes a path of ‘melancholy introspection’. It is an intro-
spection that pierces the shield protecting him from his contradictions,
leaving him scrambling for new armour:
He seems driven both to understand and to ignore his life’s schisms.

As changes of time, place, and employer disrupt the systems he has so
carefully constructed, it becomes more difficult for Stevens to patch over

the cracks as they widen, and he anxiously repeats, revises, and explains
in excess.94
This drive ‘to understand and to ignore’ structures the text that
Stevens produces.
At this point, Westerman’s essay falters. Having established
Stevens’s mindset, Westerman introduces Bhabha’s concept of ‘the
stereotype’, ‘a complex, ambivalent, contradictory mode of representa-
tion, as anxious as it is assertive’95 representing the situation in which
‘the subject fi nds or recognizes itself through an image which is simul-
taneously alienating and hence potentially confrontational’.96 Here she
fi nds a connection between Bhabha’s theorising on racial stereotype
and the white English butler:
Stevens stereotypes himself, living on inertia, unable to progress

toward any other goal. Even as he attempts to plant himself in a golden
past and cling to its ethic of loyalty, Stevens almost compulsively paints
for us a portrait of Darlington as political and moral failure ([RD] 146). He
cannot control his language, his story, himself. Stevens attempts to make
a manageable object of himself, to narrate himself into stillness, but the
meaning of Stevens’s image of himself slips constantly away, as in the
chain self – Darlington Hall – England, and Stevens faces the image with
identification and repulsion.97
It is a reading that adds to the interpretation of the novel only in its

fi nal claim, but that claim remains unsupported by textual evidence.
Westerman briefly recalls O’Brien’s arguments for considering
Stevens as colonised but only, in the first instance, to point out the
fault in O’Brien’s attempt to read the difficult relationship between
Stevens Sr and Stevens as a metaphor for the strained relationship
between the old power (Britain) and the new (U.S.A.). The metaphor
breaks down, Westerman observes, when readers detect Stevens’s own
decline. Westerman agrees with O’Brien’s argument that ‘Stevens’ fi rst
person account [sic][…] ironically comments on the pathology of colo-
nial nostalgia without ever completely disavowing it’,98 but disagrees
with how it does so. Rather than in ‘a straightforward alignment of
Stevens with American values’, she perceives the account’s comment
on ‘the pathology of colonial nostalgia’ in the ambivalence Stevens
expresses. In fact, part of this ambivalence is that Stevens does accept
some American values, such as those that reject ‘traditional British
snobbery regarding recently acquired wealth’. Her attempt to demon-
strate the opposing view, Stevens’s support for the ‘traditional British
ideas of Empire’, is less convincing.99 It consists of citing Stevens’s
willingness to work for Mr George Ketteridge (a figure scholars have

not identified) who despite his humble beginnings contributed ‘to the
future well-being of the empire’ (RD 114), and connecting this use of
the term ‘empire’ to a previous sentence to conclude that Stevens is
proposing that ‘To contribute to the British Empire is to “further […]
the progress of humanity”’.100 Stevens, however, says no such thing:
Westerman has simply spliced together quotations to make it appear
so. In the previous sentence, which Westerman uses as the predicate
of her conclusion, Stevens explains how his generation of butlers were
ambitious to serve those ‘furthering the progress of humanity’ (RD
114). He offers George Ketteridge as an example of such a person. The
quoted passages only prove that Stevens uses the term ‘empire’ accord-
ing to its meaning at the time. While it is certainly possible to develop
the claim that Stevens supports traditional British ideas about empire,
Westerman does not do so here.
Westerman returns to O’Brien’s noting of ‘colonial nostalgia’ to
argue that it ‘operates within the disorienting temporality of Stevens’s
unhomeliness’.101 Again, the concept of ‘unhomeliness’ adds nothing
to her argument: she is simply making the claim that Stevens moves
quickly between the past and the present and in doing so uses a large
variety, or ‘multiplicity’, of tenses. Unfortunately, she does not look
at any specific instances where ‘In less than a page, Stevens […] nar-
rates events of the five-minutes-ago past, the continuing present,
and the decades-ago past’, but to carry out such a detailed analysis of
Stevens’s use of tense would surely lead to interesting results. Instead,
Westerman determines that Stevens attempts ‘to stabilize his world’:
that is, to focus on the present and resist the allure of the past. And
apparently, Westerman finds that he has been successful because
she reads Stevens at the end of the novel as resolving the doubts he
expresses about the value of his life’s work by turning to bantering (RD
243): ‘Bantering will fi x everything. It will let the world make sense
again. Ultimately, Stevens returns to the house and all it means to him,
leaving his symbolic structures more or less in place.’102 To suggest that
Stevens’s symbolic structure, what Westerman defi ned earlier as his
‘language, texts, mythology, an internalized father’ is unchanging is a
shockingly erroneous assessment that she has not directly addressed and
that has been repeatedly disproved by narratologists such as Deborah
Guth, Kathleen Wall, and Westerman herself in the early stages of her
paper.103 Stevens’s change is not linear, but he does change. His resolve
to improve his bantering is worrying, but we need to note that it was
inspired by Stevens’s desire for ‘human warmth’, and that his trip is not
yet over when he makes this resolution. Thus, the glaring mistake in
Westerman’s statement, ‘Stevens returns to the house’, becomes more
than just a failure to attend accurately to the novel’s plot: although
viewers of the fi lm see Stevens return home, readers of the novel do

not, an important point briefly noted by Ryan Trimm104 and developed
by John Su.105 The novel ends with Stevens on the pier contemplating
going home the next day, but we cannot know that he does so, and
if he does start the drive home, we cannot know where his thoughts
on the drive will lead him. As Westerman previously argued, the trip
has caused cracks to appear in his façade. The trip has led him to see
aspects of himself that he had not seen before, and readers might take
comfort in the hope that he will soon see that it is ‘human warmth’
rather than ‘banter’ that is the key. Ultimately, Westerman’s response
is valuable for the excellent analysis of narration that helps explain
Stevens’s text, but then, in the attempt to add a layer of postcolonial
analysis, it loses its way.
CONCLUSION
The historical readings of Remains illuminate the novel’s rich back-

ground to the point that one might begin to doubt the sincerity of
Ishiguro’s claim ‘of not being so interested in the history per se’.106
Most importantly, these studies provide an impetus for further study
of this aspect of the novel. Specifically, while McCombe’s noting
of Anglo-American tensions is compelling, more work needs to be
done to explicate more carefully the relationship between the two
countries, especially as portrayed in the novel. On a related note,
leaving aside the work on the Suez Crisis, there is a dearth of scholar-
ship connecting Remains to its historical context: what connections
exist between the historical settings of the novel, for example, 1956
England, and the novel? For instance, no one has addressed the ques-
tions that Mr Spenser puts to Stevens (RD 194–6). How prominent
at the time were the issues on which he questions Stevens? Knowing
whether or not Stevens knew, or could know, the answers to these
questions plays a part in discussions of the reliability of the narra-
tion and the larger theme of ‘having one’s say’. Similarly, although
Ekelund’s work on genre is original and important, especially in his
uncovering and analysis of Lord Halifax’s memoir, it also suggests
the further work required. Notably, Ekelund has overlooked that it is
Stevens, not Ishiguro, who narrates this story, and thus it is Stevens’s
use of these various genres that demands attention. This qualification
suggests the need for an investigation of Stevens’s reading influences.
At the very least, Ekelund has demonstrated the need for a closer look
at the historical genres that constitute the novel. Lang’s essay, fi nally,
demonstrates the value of applying the methods of contemporary
historiographers to the novel’s detailed portrayal of history.
The postcolonial approaches to this novel, so far, are frustrating

in that while they occasionally highlight useful interpretive angles,
the insights that are gained are almost never a result of applying the
methods of postcolonial theory but always by-products of the attempt
to make the novel fit a postcolonial reading, a fit usually achieved by
overlooking or manipulating the text. They are almost all readings
that are, at their roots, not postcolonial at all but interpretations based
on class, psychoanalysis, and narratology.
Against this mass of work that attempts to take Stevens as like a
colonised subject, and Ishiguro as a postcolonial writer, it has seem-
ingly been challenging for theorists to take the opposing view. While
Remains does not seem a promising text for postcolonial analysis, if
such a study is to be attempted, one possible issue to be addressed is the
novel’s portrayal of a society at the end of its imperial career. For exam-
ple, what are the values that the world of Darlington Hall espouses
which led to Britain’s surrender of its colonies? Similarly, rather than
taking Ishiguro as a postcolonial writer, he is surely better read as a
British novelist (he has been a British citizen since 1982); however,
even this conception of his identity is too simple. Although Ishiguro
was never a citizen of a colonised country, he has emerged from a
complex, albeit increasingly common, cultural position. He may be
most firmly entrenched in the Western literary tradition, as evidenced
by the clear influence on his work by writers such as Henry James and
Anton Chekhov, and his continual play with forms of the Western lit-
erary tradition, such as his play here with the work of P.G. Wodehouse
(1881–1975); however, his childhood, influenced by the idea of a future
return to Japan, and his familiarity with Japanese fi lm (best illuminated
by Mason) and literature, as seen in his preface for Yasunari Kawabata’s
Snow Country and Thousand Cranes, reveals a complex identity that
escapes easy categorisation. The vague label ‘International’ may well
emerge as the most suitable description of Ishiguro as writer. But it is
not only his influences that are varied: Remains has captured the atten-
tion of writers who have found a variety of applications for his work,
and these applications, of the work of psychologist Daniel L. Schacter
(born 1952), of philosopher John Stuart Mill (1806–73) and of legal
theory, are the subject of the next chapter.
CHAP TER FIVE
The Remains of the Day 3:

Interdisciplinary Approaches
W hile several scholars have used responses based on standard inter-

pretive approaches, such as those resting on the narrative and
historical elements of Remains, to extend readings of the novel in new
directions, others have developed responses using interdisciplinary
methods. In doing so, they not only add to our knowledge of the novel
but also illuminate previously unforeseen sites for discussion. This final
chapter on Remains traces these varied and compelling responses starting
with the role of memory in the novel. Lillian Furst uses the anatomy of
memory errors proposed by psychologist Daniel L. Schacter to power a
useful investigation into problems in Stevens’s narration resulting from
his faulty memory. John J. Su, in one of the most penetrating readings of
the novel, starts with a look at nostalgia but then investigates the novel’s
portrayal of a shift in ethos embodied in Stevens’s journey.
Despite its tightly focused narrative, Remains has proven of
immense interest to scholars concerned with applying socio-political
approaches to the novel. In particular, Stevens’s role as a butler has
continually attracted notice. His reconciliation of dignity and service
serves as a starting point for analyses of the decisions he has made and
the principles that he has used to guide his career. Kwame Anthony
Appiah fi nds Stevens’s dignity problematic but ultimately uses the
novel to make a case for the moral power of individualism. Likewise,
David Medalie uses Remains to investigate the difficulty of discussions
of dignity and to highlight the role that literature can serve in exam-
ining ethics. Finally, legal scholar Rob Atkinson compares Stevens’s
relationship with Lord Darlington to that of a lawyer and client to
illustrate the ethical difficulties in serving, a comparison which not
only supports the claim for the value of the novel in highlighting
ethical issues but also adds valuable insight into Stevens’s character and
actions. It is an impressive range of response for what is, on its surface,
84
the story of an aging butler reviewing key moments of his career

during the course of a short motoring trip.
MEMORY AND NOSTALGIA
L. R. Furst, ‘Memory’s Fragile Power’
Lillian Furst approaches Remains by examining the flaws in Stevens’s

memory. Citing the work of psychologist Daniel L. Schacter on the
imperfections of memory, Furst outlines seven specific problems: tran-
sience, absent-mindedness, blocking, misattribution, suggestibility,
bias, and persistence.1 Memory problems are frequently explored in
literature, and works that employ a frame narrative pose particular
problems: readers have no access to the real evidence, and must, there-
fore, consider the narrator’s susceptibility to the flaws of memory.
Although inconsistencies in the narrator’s account alert the reader,
they still create ‘an uncertainty often amounting to unease’, an unease
that leaves readers ‘unsure of the truth quotient of the events as
recounted’.2 The large amount of time between the fictive present of
the frame and Stevens’s flashbacks provides ‘the opportunity for the
exercise of memory and the revelation of its quintessential fragility’.3
Like all of Ishiguro’s novels, Remains thematises memory by constantly
reminding readers that the narrator is attempting to recall the past:
So a kind of chorus frames and punctuates the entire action, as

memories are dredged up – vividly, tenuously, or perhaps mistakenly – in
accordance with the fluctuations of the mind’s fragile powers. Stevens
not only constantly resorts to the words ‘remember’ and ‘recall’ but even
elaborates on such moments [RD 73, 83, 96, 150, 151, 152, 165, 173].4
Moreover, Stevens admits to memory problems: ‘inadvertently, as it

were, Stevens discloses chinks of uncertainty about some of his memories.
The appearance of the particle “as” – “as I recall” ([RD] 145, 157) –
insinuates a small amount of doubt.’5 Elsewhere, Stevens plainly
acknowledges his memory’s limitations as when he admits, ‘I cannot
recall precisely what I said’ (RD 167; see also 87, 95, 212). Furst
acknowledges the ordinariness of an elderly man having trouble recall-
ing events that occurred over thirty years ago before adding, ‘these
sporadic defects in Stevens’s memory do have the effect of casting a
shadow over what he claims to recall well. How much credence can
be invested in his version of the happenings at Darlington Hall?’ In
Remains memories ‘can never be wholly trusted; they may unexpect-
edly prove to be correct but generally are unmasked as patchy, partial,
tainted – in short, shaped by at least some of Schacter’s “sins”’.6
Furst matches Schacter’s list of seven flaws of memory with

Stevens’s account. She begins with transience:
The interplay of sharp remembering with phases of fuzziness or

forgetfulness reflects the oscillation between transience and persist-
ence. Transience is most forcefully exemplified in the disjointed design […]
constructed as mosaics which the reader has to cobble together. The
narration jumps disconcertingly from one period to another, drifting asso-
ciatively in a discontinuous movement that is the literary correlative of a
mental stream of consciousness. The effect is one of fragmentation, as the
time-line leaps between the various segments of Stevens’s memories.7
Furst notes, however, that Stevens appears to have covered up much

of the effect of transience on his memory, which ‘may in itself be
deceptive, a product of the patina of self-assurance and unremitting
control of every situation that is the core of the professional profi le he
foregrounds’.8
Persistence, ‘the continued graphic recall of salient experiences’, plays
a larger role in Stevens’s memory, especially with regards to Darlington’s
important conference in 1923. Stevens continually foregrounds the
significance of his position:
The entire sequence is carnivalesque in its indiscriminate jumbling of

the trivial and the consequential, as well as the comic and the tragic. For
it is not only time that is scrambled in this set of memories but also levels
of significance. Stevens regards the luster of the silver as a matter of the
utmost seriousness.9
While Stevens introduces many names of important political figures of

the time, he does so seemingly without any knowledge of their rank:
What persists in Stevens’s memory is the importance of polishing the

silver to perfection. An even more gross disproportion is evident in his
recall of two problems that occur simultaneously on that evening: the
blisters on the feet of M. Dupont, the cantankerous French delegate, and
the death of [Stevens’s] father.
Furst sums up the effect of Stevens’s recollections of the conference: ‘per-

sistence is allied to transience to a disturbing, indeed grotesque, extent.’10
Having discussed flaws of memory that ‘define the incidence of
memories’, Furst turns to flaws that affect the content of memories.
Stevens is particularly susceptible to bias and misattribution, ‘perhaps
because he has always worked in a group setting where he is likely to be
exposed to and influenced by others’ opinions’. While other critics have
reflected at length on the content of Stevens’s disquisitions on greatness,

Furst investigates the context of Stevens’s discussions, noting that he
usually discusses it with his colleagues working at other homes, and
proposes that they reveal his ‘openness to suggestibility’. Furthermore,
Stevens thinks about the great butlers of the time and compares himself
to them:
He thereby engages in stereotyping and in what Schacter terms

‘congruity bias’ (Seven Sins 156) in his sustained endeavor to conform to
the paradigm of the great butler. So his actions, his conduct, his bearing
are all geared to his preconceived notion of how a great butler should
behave.11
Stevens’s ideals, therefore, are based on ‘memories of the past’,12 an

‘exclusively retrospective posture’13 that marks Stevens as somewhat
of an anachronism, as heard, for example, in his stilted speech. Stevens
is entrenched in the previous era, and for this reason, Furst asserts, is
disoriented by Farraday’s bantering (a rather simplistic explanation of a
complex dynamic that includes class issues).14
While these examples of suggestibility indicate some of the lesser
defects in the formation of the content of Stevens’s memories, Furst
turns ‘to the graver [defect] of misattribution’, by investigating
Stevens’s dismissal of two Jewish maids.15 Here, ‘misattribution takes
the form of misinterpretation. His devotion to Lord Darlington is
such that he fundamentally misinterprets his secret negotiations with
the Germans.’16 Again, however, Furst’s analysis elides the depth of
the situation, and one cannot help but wonder if Stevens can be said to
do anything as active as ‘interpret’ in this situation.
Furst is on more solid ground when she considers the use that
Stevens makes of blocking. For example, Stevens’s memory is playing
a trick on him by highlighting Dupont’s blisters rather than his father’s
death, ‘foregrounding the trivial as a self-protective means to displace
the more grievous loss’.17 Furst overlooks Stevens’s failure to describe
his emotional state accurately, a failure indicated by Lord Darlington
and Cardinal’s repeated questioning of his condition, ‘Are you alright?’;
but the scene does provide further support for Furst’s position. Stevens’s
need for blocking is intensified by ‘his active condoning of a course
of action that has proven to be mistaken. His stance illustrates the
possibility of our blindness to the fundamental truths of our lives’.
There are, however, ‘two mitigating factors for Stevens’s behavior’:
ignorance of what’s going on in the outside world18 and total loyalty
to Lord Darlington.19 Despite confronting Darlington’s misguided
efforts (RD 201), Stevens ‘has shut his mind, blocking out all that
was uncomfortably in confl ict with his creed of loyalty’. Eventually,
however, readers find evidence of Stevens’s denial of Lord Darlington:

‘He conceals, even denies, his connection with him. However, in his
heart of hearts he continues to try to defend him.’20 When Stevens
does try to defend him his rhetoric becomes ‘overblown’.
Stevens’s memory problems also reveal themselves in his account
of his relationship with Kenton. Again, blocking is a problem leading
him to convince himself of the exclusively professional nature of their
relationship and construe the nightly meetings over cocoa as work:
So he recalls her in a highly selective manner that repeatedly empha-

sizes her outstanding competence as the housekeeper. […] In his
concept of her, as of himself, he follows what Schacter calls a stere-
otypical self-schema that privileges certain aspects to the exclusion of
others. His perception of Miss Kenton is as biased as his attitude to Lord
Darlington; in both instances he projects a unidimensional image.
What Furst does not fully acknowledge is that if Stevens was blocking,
the trip begins to chip away at this block. She does, however, observe
that when Stevens rereads Kenton’s letter, ‘he begins to realize that
his interpretation may be an exaggeration, an expression of what he
wants to hear – in other words, misattribution, as indeed it turns out
to be’.21 But what Furst is describing here is really the correcting of a
misattribution: an important point that complicates the static portrayal
of memory that Furst has described.
Stevens also represses feelings for Kenton. After noting that Stevens
has what might be called a ‘fi xation’ on having her back to work for
him, Furst proposes that
he adamantly represses any other way of thinking about her. This is

where he repeats the position of victim and victimizer that he enacted
toward Lord Darlington; by blocking the possibility of a human relation-
ship between them, he shortchanges himself as well as Miss Kenton.22
What is most clear about Stevens’s memories is that ‘the persistence

and vividness of his memories of Miss Kenton more than twenty years
after she has left Darlington Hall betray a deeper attachment than he
can allow himself to acknowledge’.23
It is a useful reading although occasionally Furst’s specific
suggestions are clumsy or too simple. For example, she exaggerates
when she characterises Stevens as interpreting Darlington’s actions,
which misconstrues Stevens’s mindset of blind acceptance;24 on
Stevens’s problems bantering with Farraday, she overlooks the class
dynamic in play (as noted by O’Brien); she sees Stevens’s failure to
answer Mr Spenser as evidence of his limitations, but that scene is not
nearly so straightforward (RD 194–6).25 Her work here, however, is
an excellent introduction to the topic. Perhaps most importantly, it

provides a starting point for readings of Ishiguro’s fiction based on
cognitive poetics.
John J. Su, ‘Refiguring National Character’
John J. Su’s essay picks up several lines of argument previously

suggested in an earlier essay by M. Griffith,26 and subjects them to a
more thorough investigation. His thoroughness leads to a powerful
reading of nostalgia in Remains as essential in the forming of national
character, but a national character that is refigured through the
novel’s dismantling of the ethos of expertise and the replacing of it
with the interaction of conversation. Contrary to those who would
emphasise irony but deny the nostalgia in Remains, Su wants to argue
for nostalgia as essential in reenvisioning ‘what constitutes “genuine”
Englishness’. Through the contrast of the estate in its time of glory
with its time of neglect, Ishiguro establishes ‘an “originary” set of
national ideals whose betrayal is indicated by the condition of the
estate’.27 In turn, this betrayal ‘is specifically a moral failure’ because
national identity in the novel has been cast in ethical terms. Arguing
that ‘the diminished condition of the estate is taken to be emblematic
of the nation as a whole’, Su suggests that, like the estates, the English
character ‘has been neglected, uncultivated, and left to decay in the
postwar period’.28 The disappointment brought on by decline leads
to ‘an ethical critique that insists upon a return to the “true” ethos or
spirit of nation. This ethos, however, is constituted in the process of
remembering it’. Consequently, Su suggests ‘that only in the midst
of decline can the purportedly true ideals of Britain be recognized’.
Nostalgia, then, is a crucial aspect of the novel’s vision: articulating ‘a
vision of nation couched in terms of restoration through imagery and
language resembling that employed by British postwar politicians’.
But rather than the essentialist national identity aimed at in the
nostalgia of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (born 1925; Prime
Minister 1979–90), Ishiguro aims ‘ to redefi ne key terms associated
with national character: dignity and greatness. This refiguration
of national character is mapped spatially as the novel ultimately
associates British ethos with the pier at Weymouth rather than with
the estate’.29
While Ishiguro revives the estate novel tradition, he also worries
about the ways nostalgia is used and rejects an essentialised national
identity. In an interview, Ishiguro positions himself contra the
‘enormous nostalgia industry’ in Britain30 and notes the ubiquitous
use of nostalgia as a political tool, a note from which Su extrapolates
Ishiguro’s understanding ‘that the myth of England was invoked to
justify the Falklands Islands confl ict [April–June 1982], union busting,
and immigration quotas during the years leading up to the [novel’s]
publication’. Similarly, Thatcher’s references to national ‘greatness’
in her 1979 campaign suggests that her use of ‘greatness’ ‘represented
a tacit but widely recognized code for white England’ (a reading for
which Su, unfortunately, offers no support).31 By pairing Thatcher and
Stevens’s interest in the topic of ‘greatness’, Ishiguro compels readers
to consider the speciousness of Thatcher’s call by juxtaposing it with
Stevens’s fumblings with the topic. For example, the characteristics of
this greatness, for Stevens, are merely ‘the very lack of obvious drama
or spectacle’ in the landscape; consequently, ‘In an unconsciously ironic
deflation of Thatcherite rhetoric, Stevens defines greatness as a purely
negative quality, a “lack”.’ In this way, Ishiguro allows readers to
probe what is assumed in Thatcher’s essentialisms, suggesting that they
‘depend upon a tacit understanding that race, class, and religion define
a set of unchanging characteristics’.32 In Remains, for example, greatness
reproduces and reinforces hierarchies based on class structures: ‘virtue
comes from serving the virtuous.’ On the estate, however, all of the
values are dependant on the ethical judgment ‘of the “great gentlemen”,
creating a social hierarchy of experts and nonexperts, where the latter
are understood to be dependent upon the former for ethical insight’.33
This idea, that on the estate, the top of the hierarchy has
special expertise, is ‘at the heart of the British estate novel’.34 Lord
Darlington, in fact, ‘claims to speak on behalf of the nation, “We
English”’ (RD 87), and as Griffith points out, Darlington has defi nite
antidemocratic leanings.35 Furthermore, Darlington ties his perceived
expertise to ethics by suggesting that those lacking it ‘hinder ethics’.
As Su observes, ‘ethics becomes the fi nal ground from which the priv-
ileged lay claim to their “entitlement” and assert their right to gov-
ern the nation’.36 Clearly, Remains challenges these claims to ethical
expertise. Most obviously, Darlington’s expertise is cancelled by his
blindness to events in Germany. Along with Senator Lewis’s bungling
of his mission with the French delegate, the novel presents a number
of more mundane failures of expertise: the letdown of Stevens Sr who
fails to live up to his reputation; the failure of the Hayes Society to
provide a clear definition of ‘greatness’, rather than vague principles
(to which one might add its failure to maintain its membership); and
the disappointment of Stevens’s guidebook, which in the pursuit of
fi nding the beautiful and the moving, is always outdone by locals.
The experts shun the opinions of the populace, but they fail, failures
that connect the novel to its larger historical background, for dur-
ing Stevens’s trip, Prime Minister Eden with consultation of neither
the public nor the majority of the parliament is pushing the country
into the Suez Crisis.37 The point is not that Stevens’s journey parallels
Eden’s; the point is that the story that Stevens tells about Darlington,
the story of an expert perceiving himself above democracy and being
led by that perception to betray the nation, parallels Eden’s story.
As Stevens gets closer to the Pier, he gets further from believing in
Lord Darlington’s expertise. The novel’s rejection of expertise is embod-
ied in the spatial shift of its action, and this move from estate to pier
‘suggests an attempt on Ishiguro’s part to relocate the ethos of England
and to challenge the primacy of the estate as its representation’. Similarly,
‘The revision of ethos depends upon the narration of personal disap-
pointment […] for the betrayal of trust drives Stevens to question ethical
identity and thereby national identity.’38 In this questioning, Stevens Sr’s
narrative, in which he tries ‘to convey desired virtues’, becomes crucial,
for it is the role of his story that indicates the need to shift from a model
based on expertise to one based on debate and discussion:
The absence of an essentialized ethical foundation or national charac-

ter denies the basis of expertise – principles, such as national character,
are constituted not given. Hence a story such as the one that Stevens’s
father tells acts as a proposition regarding the defining terms of moral
and national character, a proposition that is subject to scrutiny, debate,
and revision. In this sense, storytelling opens up the conversation on
Englishness.
With this change from relying on expertise to relying on storytell-

ing and the discussion it initiates, the significance of the novel’s key
terms shift: ‘greatness’ and ‘dignity’ ‘become thick ethical concepts
that provide a common vocabulary for debating and envisioning
ethical action. They remain crucial to a conception of ethos because
they provide a basic vocabulary for conversations about ethics’. And
as Stevens revises his terms, he revises ‘his vision of ethical duties’.
Retelling his father’s story, he realises that his father was telling the
story of the person that his father wanted to become: ‘The nostal-
gia for ideal butlers felt by both Stevens and his father represents
neither an unguarded praise of the past nor an unqualified sense of
present decline; it seeks to project into the past particular charac-
teristics that are longed for in the present’. What existed in the past
could exist in an improved form in the future. Rather than relying
blindly on ‘expertise’, Stevens is able to assess what was desirable in his
father’s generation and redefi ne ‘the role inhabited by his father and
himself ’.39 Notably, Su does not attempt to distinguish when Stevens
enacts this shift. It appears that the shift is a part of the slow churning
through the past that occupies Stevens over the course of his trip.
Significantly, this conversation that challenges the assumptions of the
estate can only come from outside of it. The hierarchy of the estate
does not permit challenges: ‘Within Darlington Hall, we see all man-
ner of requests, demands, and inquiries made, but little conversation’.
Su asserts that on the estate
conversation itself is structured and delimited so that it challenges nei-

ther the authority of nor the terms associated with ethos. It is only when
Stevens steps outside of the estate space that his foundational premises
are questioned and his own actions made to appear suspect.40
One of the key conversations inspiring this questioning is Steven’s

discussion with Harry Smith. As has often been pointed out, Smith’s
ideas about dignity and freedom do ‘not extend to those living in
the colonies’,41 a limit that sets up an intriguing conundrum. On the
one hand, Smith, in contrast to Stevens, serves as a figure of political
advancement who attempts to draw more voices into the conversa-
tion. On the other hand, Smith espouses a retrograde opinion on
the colonies and even looks to Stevens for his perceived expertise to
counter Dr Carlisle’s opinion on the matter. The seeming contra-
diction in Smith’s politics surely suggests that the conversation Su
has described has no scripted end; national character is not decided
by an expert; but through ‘ongoing conversation. And despite his
unwillingness to heed the voices of working-class people, Stevens
fi nds that his conversations with them alter his experience and
understanding’.42 With nostalgia as the impetus, conversations lead
Stevens to reinterpret the past: ‘Nostalgia guides Stevens to redefi ne
his ethical concepts, for the act of concretely representing these
concepts through stories begins a communicative circuit with an
imagined audience that resists foreclosure by the teller.’43 At the same
time, however, the role of conversations in reproducing hierarchies
of power must also be acknowledged, a caveat Susie O’Brien explains
when she accurately determines the power relations concealed in
bantering.44 As well, the centrality of dignity ‘to a British ethos is
never disputed’. Smith demands ‘a notion of Englishness that accom-
modates a wider class spectrum’ but ‘remains blind to his own rac-
ism toward colonized subjects’.45 This blindness is crucial, because
its diagnosis and remedy is in conversation, and it is the pier that the
novel presents as ‘the space most associated with the open interactions
necessary for genuine conversation’. That the novel ends with Stevens
on the pier, therefore, is a recognition of ‘the need for, and inevitably
of a shift in, representative national spaces’.46
Arguing for the close relationship of ethics and morals in the
concept of the nation, Su asserts nationalism’s need for collective
imagination: ‘Nationalisms depend upon the ability to merge nation
and ethos in the collective imaginations of their putative communities.’
Although Ishiguro appeals to national character, it is a different

national character than the one defined by Empire:
The image of the people collected together on the pier waiting for
the lights to come on represents an imagined national community that
preserves the incompatibilities and conflicts that are effaced or willfully
forgotten in nationalistic narratives. This Britain might accommodate
those who, like Ishiguro, sense themselves outside history.
It is a reconfiguration expressed by the spatial terms the novel

develops: ‘the final pages concern not the English estate but the pier.’47
England’s future, in Su’s reading, is not in the ‘elitist isolation’ of the
estate: the future requires embracing what is met ‘on the pier’. It is
a vision that Su suggests ‘lacks grandeur’, but one that ‘offers some
future for a nation preoccupied with its own recent decline and
concerned for what might constitute its own “remains of the day”’.48
THE DIGNITY OF SERVICE AND ITS ETHICAL DIMENSIONS
The novel’s portrayal of service, one of its most prominent plot

elements, has attracted a number of commentators working from a
variety of angles. In particular, they have found Stevens’s representation
of professionalism and his attempts to define dignity particularly fruitful
areas for discussion.
Kwame Anthony Appiah, ‘The Moral Good of the Individual’
An analysis of the complexity of dignity in Remains appears in the

middle of Kwame Anthony Appiah’s ‘Liberalism, Individuality,
and Identity’, an excellent essay that uses Stevens as an example in
Appiah’s attempt to understand the importance of individualism in
liberalism. While reading Mill’s On Liberty (1859), Appiah arrives at a
distinction about the value of self-creation for the individual, propos-
ing that ‘reading Mill can lead you to think that sometimes something
matters because someone has chosen to make a life in which it matters
and that it would not matter if they had not chosen to make such
a life’.49 Citing Ishiguro’s Stevens as an example, he offers a fuller
understanding of Stevens’s individuality and motivations.
Appiah first reveals the flaw in Stevens’s attempt to fi nd dignity.
Stevens had found meaning in serving Lord Darlington because of the
latter’s public role, and now, under the employ of Farraday, Stevens
finds meaning in improving his bantering skills. While readers might
not see Stevens’s desire to improve his bantering skills as valuable, it is a
valuable pursuit for Stevens and fulfi ls his concern for dignity. Despite
this value, however, Appiah perceives Stevens an example of a failed
life because of his acceptance of servility, not the servility of a serv-
ant, but the servility of a slave: ‘Servility isn’t just happily earning your
living by working for another; it’s acting as an unfree person, a person
whose will is somehow subjected to another’s.’ Appiah’s distinction
reveals one of the novel’s difficulties because ‘Ishiguro’s depiction of
Stevens obscures the relationship between dignity and individuality
by conflating servant and slave; he prevents us from seeing that it is
servility, not service, that is undignified.’50
Still, Appiah believes Stevens helps demonstrate his argument for
the moral power of individualism. In fact, Stevens ‘exemplifies it even
though he doesn’t himself believe in liberty, equality, and fraternity.
Even someone as illiberal as Stevens, that is, demonstrates the power
of individuality as an ideal’.51 Individuality has value because it allows
individuals the freedom ‘to make the best of themselves, to cultivate
their higher natures, and attain their full moral and aesthetic stature’.52
Only by allowing individuals the freedom to follow their own plans
do we get the best results from people. Consequently, when indi-
viduals, such as Stevens, choose a particular course for their lives, the
key aspects of their course acquire value simply because those aspects
represent part of a course the individuals have chosen to take. Appiah
notes that this equation ‘applies to Mr. Stevens even though he has
chosen a life that makes sense only if dignity is not (as he wrongly
believes) something everyone shares equally’.53
There are, Appiah acknowledges, two problems with this recommen-
dation of individualism: the problems of the arbitrariness of basic choices
and the unsociability of individualism. The first problem is that it is dif-
ficult to accept someone’s individual choices if they have not thought out
their path (as Mill would have expected). The important choices that
constitute one’s individuality should not be made arbitrarily. The second
problem is that Mill’s work here can lead to unattractive individualism: a
life in which one’s individualism overshadows family, friends, and public
service, aspects of life that Mill would include in a plan of life, suggesting
that ‘self-cultivation and sociability are competing values, though each
has its place’. Given the importance of these problems, Appiah sets out ‘to
reframe Mill’s understanding’ using Stevens as an example of how ‘unso-
ciability and arbitrariness need not be involved in self-creation’. Stevens
has chosen to be a butler, a social role as Stevens asserts throughout the
novel, and a role with an established tradition required by a particular
element of society. It was not an arbitrary decision.54
Given the importance in this argument of Mill’s idea about a ‘plan
of life’, Appiah aims to define it more closely. It is not like an architect’s
blueprint. Instead he describes it as ‘a set of distinctive organizing aims,
aims within which you can fit your daily choices and your long-term
vision’.55 This distinction leads Appiah to a crucial observation about
Stevens: ‘what structures his sense of his life is less like a blueprint and
more like what we nowadays call an identity’ (Appiah’s emphasis).56
Stevens’s plan for his life is to inhabit fully his role as a butler. It is,
Appiah asserts, his identity.
Individuality, Appiah concludes, is a requirement for a dignified
human life: it ‘gives us our dignity, our distinctive human worth’.
It is a conclusion that provides readers with a better understanding
of Stevens whose slave-like qualities can be disturbing. His failure
of individualism exemplifies why we so value it, for ‘his servility
reflects false beliefs and leaves him unable (or dissuades him from
trying) to understand Lord Darlington’s attempts to reconcile the
English government to Hitler’.57
David Medalie, Defining Dignity
In his investigation of representations of dignity in Remains, David

Medalie attempts to trace the political and philosophical lineage of dignity
breaking it into two categories: ‘qualities which the personality reveals in
and of itself ’ and the ‘relationship between individuals with the obligations
imposed by the recognition that other people have a right to dignity’.58
Stevens provides an excellent example for exploring such complexities,
for in Remains dignity ‘is presented […] neither as an uncomplicated
virtue nor as an absolute good. Instead, it becomes a problem, a crisis
and a site of contestation, implicated in and inseparable from awkward
questions of power, race and class’.59 Medalie quotes Aurel Kolnai’s sum-
mary of the characteristics of Stevens’s dignified character: ‘composure,
calmness, restraint, reserve, and emotions or passions subdued and securely
controlled without being negated or dissolved’,60 but cites the further
complication in the novel: the attempt to reconcile dignity with service
and professional conduct. Stevens looks to the Hayes Society and their
criteria for professionalism, the most important of which is that ‘the appli-
cant be possessed of a dignity in keeping with his position’ (RD 33). For
Stevens, the Society’s depiction, with dignity as the mark distinguishing
the great from the competent, is the defining description.
The Hayes Society’s phrase ‘in keeping with his position’ is a
particularly important part of Medalie’s argument because it implies that
where servitude is concerned, there cannot be an intrinsic dignity,

but only one that is maintained in the context of one’s position and the
conditions of service. From this perspective, dignity is neither inherent nor
the mark of an evolved self; it emerges instead from the nexus of social
relations, class and economics.61
Dignity is not defi ned here for the free-acting individual. It can only
be distinguished based on one’s situation. Stevens reinforces this view
when he asks and answers his question ‘of what is “dignity” com-
prised?’ (RD 33) His analysis reveals that he does not see dignity as
innate, like a woman’s beauty, but as something towards which one
can strive. He contradicts himself, however, by arguing that only the
English can summon up the necessary emotional restraint, an argu-
ment that depends on innateness. Medalie takes this one contradiction
as proof ‘that as a character [Stevens] is a site of contradiction’. Because
he is inconsistent on this matter, ‘by extension, it will not be possible
to regard the kind of dignity he represents as free of contradiction’.
Although the logic here is weak (one mistaken view does not prove
that all of one’s views are mistaken), Medalie’s larger point illuminates
the difficulty of discussing the role of dignity in the novel:
The butler holds within himself the problem of dignity, not its solution.
The reason for this is that the ‘egalitarian’ ideal of dignity will of necessity
always be compromised if the context in which dignity is obliged to
express itself is not ‘egalitarian’ – and there is nothing remotely ‘egalitar-
ian’ about Darlington Hall.62
An important distinction here, however, is that Stevens does not

narrate from Darlington Hall, and outside its walls Stevens encounters
a new context.
In an earlier essay Michael Meyer has proposed that Stevens has
dignity ‘in accord with the complex social hierarchy of his day’ and
that Stevens fully inhabits his role.63 Medalie, however, argues that
Meyer does not grasp the complexity of the situation. Stevens’s trip to
the West Country, for example, renders Stevens out of place, and as a
consequence, ‘The novel shows what a great struggle it is for Stevens
to remain within his own set of self-defi nitions, arising out of and in
keeping with his position.’64 Similarly, society has changed:
The changes in society which [Darlington Hall] represents make

Stevens seem an anachronistic figure, and his conception of dignity
begins to seem similarly anachronistic: this is because his definitions of
self and service have not been flexible enough to adapt to ‘the complex
social hierarchy of his day.65
And as the Harry Smith scene demonstrates, ‘a complete identification

of the man with the role that he plays requires the suppression of the
critical faculty.’66 Although Stevens initially believes that one cannot
provide good service while questioning one’s employer, he too even-
tually fi nds it impossible to suppress his critical faculty and believe that
Lord Darlington did not make mistakes. By the end of the novel, he
realises that at least Lord Darlington made his own mistakes, unlike
himself. He has realised that dignity is comprised of something more.
This outlining of the complications of dignity leads Medalie to
conclude that dignity’s status and meaning, continually influenced
by ever-changing socio-political relations, is constantly changing.
This change, moreover, is visible in the novel’s presentation of ‘two
diametrically opposed conceptions’. On the one hand, the Hayes
Society prescribes a dignity correlated to one’s position (RD 33), and
consequently, one’s position in the social hierarchy. Directly opposed
to this view is Harry Smith, urging political activism and social
change, insisting that dignity is not the exclusive property of gentle-
man, but something for all (RD 186), and advocating dignity as ‘an
instrument in the quest for a free society’.67 Smith’s conception of
dignity, however, is prescriptive rather than descriptive, and equality,
Medalie observes, is not so easily achieved. Dignity, he concludes,
is a concept available to ‘disparate ideologies – one determined to
keep things as they are, the other to change them for the better’. It is
a protean concept, ‘conservative or radical as the case may be, in the
service of vastly discrepant moral and political imperatives’.68 Medalie
ends by suggesting that Stevens’s response to Dr Carlisle – that dignity
involves not taking off one’s clothes in public (RD 210) – defi nes the
concept so generally that it would meet with almost universal accept-
ance. However, once beyond such a simple conception of the term,
consensus evaporates.69
Rob Atkinson, Stevens as Lawyer
Like Appiah and Medalie, Atkinson, writing for the Yale Law Journal,
also uses Remains, but he uses it as an analogy rather than an example.
In an early review, Gurewich notes that while the firing of the two
Jewish maids is Lord Darlington’s decision, ‘it is Stevens who has to do
the firing, and thus cross the line between the loyalty that is the essence
of his professionalism and the blind obedience of “just following
orders”’.70 Atkinson picks up on this inequity. Having noted Stevens’s
attempts at professionalism, he evaluates the responses of Stevens and
Kenton to Lord Darlington’s command in order to explore their differ-
ent moral stances through the lens of legal theory, and, like Medalie, to
cite the value of narrative in understanding ethical behaviour.
Lord Darlington’s command to dismiss the Jewish housemaids
leads to two responses: Stevens’s compliance and Kenton’s outrage
(RD 24–5). Atkinson outlines the legal application: if Darlington had
consulted his solicitor, the professional might have determined the
dismissal to be legal but still repulsive, a situation which leads to an
interesting ethical question: ‘Should a professional always do all that
the law allows, or should the professional recognize other constraints,

particularly concerns for the welfare of third parties?’ There are two
broad schools of thought among legal scholars: one, exemplified by
Stevens, that argues that anything within the limits of the law is per-
missible; and in contrast, a school, exemplified by Kenton, that argues
that there are constraints, such as morality, other than what the law
deems permissible that limit one’s actions.71 Both approaches lead to
moral difficulty, and to further moral analysis.72
Atkinson evaluates the reactions of Stevens and Kenton by applying
two contemporary theories of lawyer professionalism: Stevens’s ‘neu-
tral partisanship’ and Kenton’s ‘moral activism’. The former Atkinson
defi nes as ‘advancing client ends through all legal means, and with a
maximum of personal determination, as long as the ends are within
the letter of the law’. Because the theory is based on neutrality, the
professional can keep personal opinions and morals separate from the
client’s case: even if the professional fi nds the client’s proposed course
distasteful, the professional need not feel morally accountable for ful-
fi lling the duties of a professional.73 This defi nition aptly describes
Stevens’s response to Lord Darlington’s command (RD 146–7).
Although this approach might seem to introduce the notion of
moral scepticism – the position that no one has moral knowledge, or
more extremely, that moral knowledge is impossible – Stevens is not
exactly a moral sceptic. His reaction is based on his understanding of
his role in the house and his belief that Lord Darlington knows best:
he believes that people in his position are not capable of understand-
ing the subtleties of such matters, a belief that he expresses to Kenton
in what she clearly takes as a defence of Darlington (RD 149), and one
that he illustrates in his failure to answer Mr Spencer (RD 194–6).
Stevens focuses his attention on his clearly defi ned duties. Here
Atkinson is again able to chart a similarity between Stevens and the
legal profession because adherents of the neutral partisanship theory
argue that lawyers need to allow their clients to be able to pursue their
own ends: the lawyer advises the client and helps untangle the law’s
complexities. Not to explain the client’s full range of legal options
would be to assume the role of judge and jury.74
In contrast to Stevens’s ‘neutral partisanship’ is Kenton’s ‘moral
activism’. Atkinson provides a thorough description of the tenor of her
response to the dismissal of the Jewish housemaids: ‘She recoils from
the technocratic, antiseptic attitude of Stevens.’ While Stevens dis-
tances himself from the girls with the terms ‘contracts’ and ‘employees’,
Kenton uses their first names and describes her personal relationship
with the girls. Rather than avoid her values or dismiss them as ‘foibles
and sentiments’, she indicates her outrage and the obvious immorality
of the dismissals (RD 149). What Atkinson finds most significant is that
she does not hide behind her position but assumes moral responsibil-
ity for her part in the situation. Unlike Stevens, she cannot support an
immoral action by adopting a professional neutrality when she herself
opposes that action. Kenton acts in agreement with critics of neutral
partisanship who believe that ‘lawyers should not merely decline to
assist in such acts; they should also act affirmatively to promote justice
in their representation of private clients’.75
Moral activists find support in societal and professional norms. Most
basically, they support their position by looking to ordinary morality: for
example, Kenton’s assertion that the dismissal would be simply wrong.
Knowing that society has moral norms, such as ‘our common obligation
not to harm the innocent’, professionals incorporate this morality into
their professional ethos. Kenton can also draw on norms of her profes-
sion, which Atkinson discerns in her defence of the girls. They have
demonstrated what Kenton sees as the important attributes required
for the position: they are loyal, honest, and skilled.76 Consequently,
dismissing them would violate the norms of the profession.
There is, Atkinson proposes, an alternative to this rather bleak
binary: they could raise their moral concerns with the client in an
effort to persuade him to follow the moral path.77 Neither Stevens
nor Kenton has done so; in fact, not only do they fail to talk to Lord
Darlington, they also fail to talk to each other, an example of moral
isolationism, the view that we ought not to be morally concerned
with people outside our immediate group. Had they been able to
overcome their moral isolationism, Stevens may have been able to
lead Darlington to a much better outcome. Furthermore, it could be
seen as one of the professional’s duties to raise concerns, a particularly
intriguing point since Darlington later realised his error in ordering
the dismissal. In fact, Stevens may be guilty of an oversight here, for
had he remarked on his concerns, perhaps Lord Darlington would
have seen his error earlier.78
Atkinson proposes that two dialogues are missing from this
situation: the dialogue between professionals and principals, such as
Stevens and Lord Darlington, and the dialogue between professionals
and their friends, such as Stevens and Kenton. To understand better
what such dialogues might reveal and the ethical imperative of hav-
ing such discussions, Atkinson takes the highly unusual critical step
of providing hypothetical dialogues. He suggests that Stevens might
respond to Lord Darlington by indicating Stevens’s duty to dismissed
employees to provide feedback so that they might better themselves
and his duty to his employer to ensure that others do not think his
employer has acted improperly. Even further, Stevens could suggest
that the dismissals seem contrary to the English sense of fair play.79
Atkinson sees the possibility of success in his hypothetical dialogue,
10 0 T H E N OV EL S O F K A Z U O I S H I G U R O
in part, because it rests upon the importance of fair play, a lesson that
Darlington himself cites in his criticism of the treatment of Germany
following World War One. Furthermore, it was possible for servants
to voice opinion as seen in the story of Stevens’s father who refused
‘to chauffeur a carload of his employer’s rowdy house guests after their
drunken insults blundered onto the character of their host’.80
Turning to the dialogue that might have occurred between Stevens
and Kenton, Atkinson notes that Kenton was trying to develop a
deeper dialogue with Stevens, and had Stevens been open to her, she
might have helped him develop a proper response to Lord Darlington.
A discussion between Kenton and Stevens may also have helped
develop solidarity between the two. Consequently, in conjunction
with keeping Stevens and Darlington from moral error, it may have
lightened the moral burdens each had to carry: ‘it might have helped
[Stevens] bear a potentially greater burden: not the burden of choos-
ing the lesser evil with open eyes, but that of making a serious moral
misjudgment about the right thing to do.’81
Stevens fails to have such a dialogue with Lord Darlington,
Atkinson proposes, because of his flawed notion of dignity. Stevens’s
dignity, he suggests, has two aspects: the substantive – whom and
what one serves – and the procedural – how one performs. The sub-
stantive aspect of his dignity fails Stevens because he conceives dignity
to mean that he must defer to his employer’s wishes, a conception
described by the neutral partisanship model of legal theory. Atkinson
qualifies this point by discerning that neutral partisanship does not
prohibit ‘bringing moral qualms to the employer’s attention’.82 It is
the procedural aspect of his notion of dignity that is the real problem:
‘Stevens tends to conflate expressing outrage with being outrageous.’
He takes pride in his success at concealing his reaction and in his
concise discussion of the incident with Kenton although he does not
seem to comprehend what the concealment and concision will cost the
three of them.83 Furthermore, the dialogue that Atkinson proposes
would not have meant acting without dignity.
Kenton fails to establish a dialogue with Stevens because Stevens
resists a life outside of his work: he appears to believe that a fuller per-
sonal life has nothing to offer him. Stevens’s keen desire for professional-
ism leads him to limit discussions of professional values to high levels of
generality, to resist Kenton’s attempts to shift their talks from the profes-
sional to the personal, and to leave his trip towards self-discovery until
late in life.84 Stevens acts, Atkinson proposes, based on the model offered
by his father. Theirs is a relationship exemplified by the episode in which
Stevens has to reduce his father’s household duties (RD 64–6), a terse
exchange that seems to exclude human emotion and in which the son
observes the father as professional rather than person.85 For Atkinson,
T HE R E M A I NS OF THE DAY 3 101
this scene answers Kenton’s pleading question, ‘Why, Mr. Stevens, why,
why, why do you always have to pretend?’ (RD 154: Ishiguro’s empha-
sis). Stevens follows the paternal example despite its flawed insistence
on the denial of a person inside the professional. His belief in ‘the suit’
of professionalism denies him the life and conversations of a person,
dialogues that might save both his personal and professional lives.86
In contrast to the general theorising of his generation, Stevens notes
the stories of professional excellence that his father’s generation told. But,
Atkinson argues, Stevens’s story demonstrates the need for both types
of discussion. Atkinson concludes, therefore, by arguing for the impor-
tance of stories in the study of virtue. Stories, as this analysis of the novel
suggests, give their readers and listeners an opportunity to work through
these difficult ethical issues. Moreover, ‘Stevens’s signal lapse was his failure
to interpret adequately the stories from which he derived his fundamental
values, to apply those values in the moral dilemma he faced, and to see
how they fit into a coherent whole, a viable whole – in a word, a life’.87
Atkinson sees the importance of our stories in figuring out how to live.
CONCLUSION
The varied and thorough response to Remains instigates a rewarding

questioning of the novel on several fronts. Furst’s work on memory
recommends itself not only by contributing to the understanding of the
novel’s narration, but also by suggesting an original interpretive path. Her
essay illustrates the value of sifting through Stevens’s cognitive processes
to understand better his decision-making patterns and motivations. John
J. Su also provides a starting point for further research. His argument
that the novel illustrates a switch from an expert-based ethos to one based
on conversation is provocative and recommends, among other lines
of inquiry, the value of close textual analysis of the role, context, and
substance of the novel’s dialogue. Responses to the novel’s portrayal of
service have also been suggestive. While Appiah and Medalie provide
crucial groundwork studies on the portrayal of dignity in Remains and
Atkinson demonstrates the value of literature in understanding legal
theory, all three readings suggest that research still needs to be done
in narrative ethics. Although the readings discussed in this chapter use
varied interpretive lenses, they can be seen to coalesce in the larger issue,
the dominant issue of Ishiguro’s oeuvre, of how we live our lives. They
investigate the institutions and social structures that govern our lives, and
the mental constructs we employ in our ongoing attempts to negotiate
life’s hardships. In his next novel, The Unconsoled, Ishiguro’s concern with
how we live our lives remains, but his investigation of how to represent
our mental constructs takes a fascinating leap.
CH A P TER SIX
Who Are The Unconsoled (1995)

and Where Do They Live?
I n his fourth novel, The Unconsoled (1995), Ishiguro attempts a

work that at fi rst glance differs from his earlier novels in almost
every conceivable respect. Ostensibly, it recounts the visit of an
internationally acclaimed concert pianist named Ryder (as with
Stevens in The Remains of the Day, his fi rst name is never given)
who is visiting a city (that is not named but seems to be somewhere
in the middle of Europe) to perform at a concert aimed at resolving
a cultural crisis in the city (although the specifics of that crisis are
never made clear). The specific details that so carefully located ear-
lier novels in time and place are gone, but Ishiguro’s precise prose
and keen ability to capture details are not. The switch in style was
a deliberate artistic choice. Frustrated by critics who attempted to
categorise him as a realist and who continually sought to ground
his novels in their historical context, he introduced a radically new
structure that has had a sharply polarising effect on readers: some
fi nd the novel baffl ing and boring while others have recognised its
unique contribution to the representation of consciousness. Almost
as long as his three previous novels combined and much more chal-
lenging to read, The Unconsoled encountered readers unable or
unwilling to follow Ishiguro’s new path. Many tried simply to link
the novel’s style to Franz Kaf ka (1883–1924) or Samuel Beckett
(1906–89). Other critics have discussed the novel’s dream-like qual-
ities and its playful representation of space and place. This chapter
reviews the novel’s critical reception before moving on to describe
the structural components that critics have discerned, to investigate
Ishiguro’s experimental form, and to try to answer the question
on the minds of most readers at the end of the novel: who are the
unconsoled?
102
T HE U NCO NSO LED 103
Critics who expected a novel similar to Ishiguro’s three previous

novels were often disappointed by The Unconsoled. Brian Shaffer,
in the middle of an excellent summary of the response to the novel
suggests, ‘A probable reason for this cooler critical reception is that the
book follows in the tradition of the “baggy monster” school of novel-
writing while the earlier three books are far shorter, far less “messy”
novels.’1 Ishiguro, in 1989, describes wanting to move from Chekhov
to Fyodor Dostoevsky,2 while philosopher Richard Rorty (1931–2007)
reads the novel as representing a change from James to Kaf ka.3 Despite
Ishiguro’s reference to Dostoevsky, there has been no published work
that considers this influence; instead, it is the comparison to Kaf ka that
reviewers and scholars have seized upon.
Many critics were quick to indicate the challenges they found. Pico
Iyer describes it as ‘a book that passes on the bewilderment it seeks to
portray’;4 Alan Wall calls the novel ‘a phantasmagoria of frustration,
irritation, and presumption’;5 and Rorty sees that Ishiguro is ‘trying
to do something nobody has ever done before’6 but does not appear to
know what has been attempted or achieved. Interestingly, the reviews
started to become a subject of other reviews and very soon the mixed
response to the novel became a standard part of any new review or
critical article. Just six weeks after the fi rst reviews appeared, Booker
Prize-winning novelist Anita Brookner (born 1928) summed up the
response fi nding in it a demonstration of ‘The short attention span of
readers and critics in the electronic age’ suff used with ‘impatience and
bafflement, as if the task of reading the novel were too onerous, too
“boring”’.7 Unexpressed but readily apparent in Brookner’s comment
is that it is a difficult novel to read, a point on which there is consid-
erable agreement. Richard Eder writes that ‘It is a book that is not
given but has to be earned.’8 ‘Frustration’ is another word that appears
repeatedly throughout the reviews. Lucy Hughes-Hallet captures just
a faint sense of the emotional stir when she writes, ‘The form, a story
of a man repeatedly failing to do what he sets out to do, is as frustrat-
ing for the reader as it is for the fictional character.’9 Other readers
would surely agree with Charlotte Innes’s diagnosis: that the novel
‘feels like a nervous breakdown waiting to happen’.10
Confronted with such difficulty, many reviewers did not even try to
understand the new style that this novel offers. Negative reviews of the
novel often reveal a critic who has not understood the radical newness
of Ishiguro’s project. Wall appears to believe that the novel must either
subscribe to the tenets of realism or Kaf ka or Beckett: he refuses
to see that Ishiguro is attempting a representation of consciousness
different from fiction written before.11 Many seem simply to want

the Ishiguro they had grown to know, and perhaps appreciate, in the
first three novels. Few reviewers reveal this atavism as thoroughly as
novelist Amit Chaudhuri (born 1962). Chaudhuri focuses primarily
on Ishiguro’s three earlier novels, which he obviously appreciated, but
finds The Unconsoled lacking, at least in part because it is ‘ahistorical’:
‘it is a novel without any discernible cultural social or historical
determinants (surely fatal to any novel).’ Similarly, he finds an absence
of ‘compelling women characters’. He is content to point to some
‘echoes of Kaf ka’ but fails to acknowledge the technical challenge that
Ishiguro has set for himself.12 Chaudhuri obviously wants a particular
kind of novel and, consequently, cannot accept this novel for what it
is. Film critic Stanley Kauffmann (born 1916) begins his review by
explaining why he so highly values Ishiguro’s first three works before
noting some of The Unconsoled’s techniques, some of its images, and
its apparent debt to Kaf ka. Kauffmann, however, laments the new
technique Ishiguro has used to portray his characters, dismissing it as
lacking in character development, leaving readers with only ‘charade
figures’.13 In his perceptive review, cultural historian Louis Menand
(born 1952), proposes that ‘If no one had ever heard of Kazuo Ishiguro,
if he had never published a word before, it would have been much
easier to see how singular the vision behind The Unconsoled really is.’14
One of the most strident of the early critics is literary critic and
novelist James Wood (born 1965) who opens his review, ‘Kazuo
Ishiguro’s new novel has the virtue of being unlike anything else;
it invents its own category of badness’ and goes on to call the novel
‘ponderous, empty, and generally unaffecting’.15 His criticisms, however,
reveal his refusal to read the novel on its own terms, as this novel and not
some other. Like Chaudhuri and Wall, Wood complains that though the
book has Kafkaesque elements, Ryder, the protagonist of The Unconsoled
who is known only by his family name, behaves differently than Kafka’s
Joseph K. Wood seems to ignore the possibility that the novel might
have similarities to Kafka but still be attempting a different project. He
expresses how difficult he found the novel to read, although he did not,
evidently, read too carefully: he notes that Brodsky uses an ironing board
as a baton, but this is not so. (He uses it as a crutch).16 It may seem like a
small slip, but if we observe that Brodsky’s ordeal with the ironing board,
necessitated by a recent amputation, is an episode that spans three pages
and a range of emotions, Wood’s careless misreading begins to look like
a plain refusal to adjust his reading to fit the novel.
These reviews point to one of several places in the novel where the
novel seems to comment on itself. Innes remarks that ‘people cannot
handle complexity’,17 an observation based on the novel’s reception
but a judgement that can be matched with Christoff ’s remark on the
townspeople of the unidentified city in which the novel is located:

‘The people here, they were out of their depth, they were breaking
down. People were afraid, they felt they were slipping out of control’
(Unc 190), a remark that reads rather like a comment on some readers.
Many, however, did see the challenge that Ishiguro was taking
on and attempted to understand the project for the original venture
that it is. Writer Brooke Allen (born 1956) writes that ‘Its melding of
conscious and subconscious is effective, and the novel is entirely fresh,
with no old-fashioned surrealism or Freudian cliché.’18 Similarly, nov-
elist Rachel Cusk (born 1967) describes knowing that Ishiguro has
undertaken something interesting, which ‘achieves coherence only at
such great length that the novel’s remarkably sustained and complex
inner order and direction remain opaque for an inordinate amount of
the time required to read it’. While praising its originality, ‘the scope
of its intentions’, and its precision, Cusk also sees that ‘it is above all a
book devoted to the human heart’.19
THE WORLD OF THE UNCONSOLED
Some reviewers proclaim the originality of the difficult form that

Ishiguro has created, what Shaffer calls Ishiguro’s stretching of the
conventions of prose fiction.20 Their reviews also reveal some of the
‘quirky’ spatial world 21 or what Menand describes as the strange ‘spa-
tiotemporal medium’ of this novel.22 Vince Passano, in one of the most
insightful reviews, perhaps sums up the novel’s world best when he
writes, with some exaggeration, there is ‘no basis in anything resem-
bling real time, real behaviour, or real manner’.23 Passano’s observation
is based on the novel’s obsessive play with space and time. Ishiguro
sends Ryder out of the city and through the countryside and allows
him to come back through a door that inevitably leads to the next
place he needs to go, the atrium of the hotel, or the back of the café
where Boris, who may or may not be his son, is waiting for him. Lewis
attempts to read the novel’s playing with space through psychoanalysis
and art, reading the play as a displacement of space and seeing in the
town’s geography ‘a painting by Giorgio di Chirico [1888–1978] and
the impossible geography of a print by M.C. Escher [1898–1972]’.24
Wong turns to science to describe this world, writing that Ishiguro
manipulates ‘reality by altering a physics of space’.25 Conceptions of
space are further complicated when Ryder is able to see and hear things
outside his range. He is able to put himself in the minds and spaces of
others. For example, as several reviewers have noted, Ryder occasion-
ally knows more than a first-person narrator should,26 or as Wong
writes, he can ‘read minds’,27 a point reiterated by Pierre François.28
He sees things outside his perceptual range. Similarly, ‘sometimes

Ryder becomes privy to what other people are saying about him.’29
Lewis too notes Ryder’s unusual extrasensory perceptions and offers
the example of Ryder accompanying Stephan Hoffman to the home
of Miss Collins: Ryder waits inside the car but is still able to hear the
conversation that takes place inside the home and evaluate the thoughts
and feelings of the participants (Unc 56–61).30
Michael Wood has identified three features of this ‘strange terri-
tory’ that Ishiguro has created.31 Wood points out the tendency of
characters to appear at the moment that Ryder thinks of them or that
they are mentioned and uses the appearance of Miss Stratmann in
the elevator to support his claim (Unc 9). Second, Wood notes that
everyone Ryder meets begins their encounter with a retelling of his
or her life. At the very opening of the book, for example, the porter,
Gustav, takes several pages to tell Ryder his story (Unc 3–9). Wood
complicates this second characteristic by noting how parts of Ryder’s
past are transposed to the town that he initially seemed to be visit-
ing.32 Finally, Wood proposes that every scene is inconsequential.33
No matter what has transpired previously, Ryder continues on almost
obliviously. This is an element that is most important to note at the
novel’s ending, which Wood uses as his example: although Sophie has
taken Boris away from Ryder, apparently breaking off their relationship
forever, Ryder sits on the tram taking comfort in the improbable buf-
fet located at the end of the car (Unc 533–35).
Manipulations of time complicate the novel further, a point
that Iyer picks up when he notes that ‘Time and space is weirdly
exploded’.34 Pointing out how time is dislocated, Lewis describes
Ryder’s elevator ride early in the novel, a ride of only a couple of
floors which takes over four pages to narrate.35 Shaffer adds that read-
ers are not able to get a ‘concrete grasp of time’:36 there are no clocks
or watches. Wong writes that the novel lacks ‘clear referential real-
ity’37 while Rorty points out that the background is not of real history
and that Ryder demonstrates almost no long-term memory.38 Francis
Wyndham (born 1924), however, makes the distinction that although
the town’s buildings and parks are minimally described, they are no
less real: ‘in their conformity to symbolic fundamentals they are sub-
liminally recognizable.’39
The terrain is recognizable enough that most reviewers have
determined that the novel is set somewhere in Europe. Ishiguro,
however, has been careful to strip his setting of any marker that would
allow critics to comment on the socio-historical context of the novel.
Iyer has observed that there are no points of reference except North
Road, South Road, and Old Town.40 However, in one of the stronger
critical responses to The Unconsoled, Richard Robinson argues, fi rst,
that ‘an idea of a particular space can be recovered from an ostensibly

anti-realist novel’, and second, that the novel’s ‘Central European
shadings’ should not be ignored.41 Robinson, while aware of
Ishiguro’s assertion that the novel could be set anywhere, demonstrates
how Ishiguro has eliminated much of Europe by indicating where the
novel is not set: for example, if Gustav’s family went to Switzerland
on holiday (Unc 5), the novel cannot be set there. Using this logic
Robinson eliminates France and England (Unc 379), Germany (Unc
65), Scandinavia (Unc 165, 199), Hungary, and Italy (Unc 321).42
Robinson then divides critical responses of the novel into three cat-
egories based on their response to the unnamed city: fi rst, those who
did not attempt to place it; second, those who wanted the place named
(a category that coincides with those who thought the novel was not
Kaf kaesque enough); and third, those that felt the Central European-
ness was critical for understanding the novel. It is those last two
groups that Robinson investigates. He cobbles together what the novel
does offer as a place and makes the important distinction that ‘the city
setting of The Unconsoled is only depicted insofar as it might release its
metaphorical potential’.43 Ishiguro, he acknowledges, has avoided a
realistic representation but has left readers some recognizable details:
‘trams, hotels, high-sided streets, monuments, housing estates, an Old
Town, a Hungarian café’ and suggests that these details come from
a variety of places although that variety is ‘circumscribed in an area
which signifies “Central Europe”’.44 These slight references help read-
ers place the novel, vaguely, but Robinson argues, ‘It is inevitable that
in a text that avoids “out-and-out fabulism”, the mists clear, and some
sense of historical and cultural target comes into focus’.45
After sketching out the political scene in Central Europe and its
difficulties and connecting Ishiguro to other writers who have used
‘nowhere’ – Alfred Jarry (1873–1907), Robert Musil (1880–1942),
Hermann Bahr (1863–1934), and Jan Morris (born 1926) (but not
Beckett) – Robinson argues
that many of the characteristics familiar to cultural historians of Central

Europe, its teeming microcosms, its spectral borderlands including the
confusion, facelessness and indifference of which Foucault speaks
– suggest an allusive historical space in The Unconsoled, a potential terri-
tory where atopia can be imagined.46
This atopia, however, is part of the larger history of twentieth-cen-

tury Central and Eastern Europe, and it is Robinson’s position that
this history helps us understand the novel not by matching the details
of Middle Europe to the novel but by acknowledging the historical
inferences:
The reader may profitably think of one allegorical potentiality – the

Central European anxieties of the novel – while at the same time plac-
ing them, in Derridean terms, ‘under erasure’. This single historical locus
does not explain the hyper-sensitivity of the citizens to their identity – how
to memorialize or forget their pasts, to decide between them, and how
to present a new face to the world; nor does it account for the strange
mixture of Old European custom (the Porters’ Dance) and New European
modernism (the post-Schonberg music programme, the huge housing
estates) – which converge in the passive-aggressiveness of some of the
characters, like Hoffman. But it cannot help but act – pace Chaudhuri – as
a historical paradigm which at least the European reader, coming to the
novel at the end of the twentieth century laden down with that continent’s
‘culture and horror’ (Kauffmann), may validly bring to the novel.47
Once readers have discerned that the novel’s setting is Central Europe,
they will start to make associations based on Central European history.
Readers will bring their responses.
Having identified this latent content, Robinson sets out to trace the
effect it might have on our reading. He begins this part of his argument
by connecting the fantastic to the real. In an earlier review, Rubin
Merle alludes to the labyrinth elements of The Unconsoled, suggesting
that the novel’s claustrophobic atmosphere is reinforced by the ‘physi-
cal layout of the city’.48 Robinson has also noticed the city’s tangled
layout and traces the labyrinthine city back to myths and fantasies, such
as the labyrinth of Theseus, before carrying the idea of the labyrinth
forward to ‘more recent configurations of European political space:
the materialisation of geopolitical stalemates which have led to surreal
but nightmarishly concrete urban topographies’.49 The wall that Ryder
encounters on his way to the concert hall (Unc 388) enhances the
connection to the nightmare aspects of the novel because it reminds
us of how communities have been divided by larger political forces;
consequently, ‘We bring to our reading of The Unconsoled the knowl-
edge that the twentieth-century sequestering of political territory has
contributed to the “nightmarish quality” of absurdly divided cityscapes
in Central Europe.’50 Similarly, Robinson connects the novel’s oneiric
qualities to Central European history: ‘When the space-time of dreams
is given a hybrid European, Germanic backdrop […] an old literary-
cultural inheritance emerges – that of Central European modernism.’51
Ultimately, Robinson argues that Ishiguro’s placing The Unconsoled
nowhere, ‘into the pure realm of the metaphorical’, establishes the
novel even more strongly as Central European. That is, rather than
representing one city in Europe, the unnamed city of The Unconsoled
takes on the attributes of the whole region.
Although Robinson has developed a useful and compelling
interpretation based on the novel’s setting, readers need to be careful
about trying to read specific characterisations of place into The

Unconsoled. Ishiguro seems to be writing to prevent comments such as
Kauffmann’s:
Previously, he dealt with the psychological and spiritual aftermath of

WWII in Japan, then with English confusions and self-betrayals in that
war. Now he moves to the continent, to the involuted psyche and spirit
that was the root of much of that war, that bred most of our culture and
also of our honour.52
Although Kauffmann’s nod to the individual appears appropriate, the

more dominant leaning of this reading is unhelpful and creates a tinted
vision of the text. That is, when all the shifts this novel depends on start
to get fastened into place, the cognitive freedom readers need to follow
this ride, or odyssey, that is, to accept its logic, starts to get bogged down.
An example of one such misreading is Shao-Pin Luo’s ‘“Living the
Wrong Life”: Kazuo Ishiguro’s Unconsoled Orphans’ (2003) which
provides several careful compilations of some of the novel’s image
clusters while trying, unfortunately, to read The Unconsoled to agree
with a reading of Orientalism by literary theorist and cultural critic
Edward Said (1935–2003). Luo argues that Ryder, like Banks in When
We Were Orphans, encounters disillusionment when he realises ‘that
the “wound” of the loss of parents and home will never really heal’.53
She begins by unpacking the evidence of Ryder’s unhappy childhood:
Ryder’s recognition of his childhood bedroom at the beginning of
the novel and the sounds of his parents fighting that accompany that
memory (Unc 16); Ryder’s need for ‘training sessions’ to deal with the
intense emotional strain to which his parents subject him (Unc 171–2);
and Ryder’s desperate response to the remains of the old family car
(Unc 260–4). Like Stephan Hoff man, Ryder is consumed with the
desire to win approval from his parents. Luo presents two contrasting
scenes that describe the arrival of Ryder’s parents and notes his despair
when he realises they will not be coming.
Luo’s analysis does help readers understand Ryder. She begins her
discussion of space in The Unconsoled by proposing that ‘there is only
profound disappointment, disillusion, and desolation in the bleak land-
scape of The Unconsoled’. Although her constant references to Ryder as
‘an exile’ overlook the novel’s complex approach to space and time,
Luo provides useful catalogues of the novel’s imagery, as when she
supports her claim that ‘Ryder is essentially a solitary traveler’:
The novel is full of descriptions of rainy, dark, deserted streets (64–5,

88–9, 289–90) and solitary lamps (51, 119, 389, 413) that exist as if only
to accentuate the complete darkness that surrounds them. He is forever
‘walking around in slow circles’ (125), ‘wandering aimlessly around’ (133),

or ‘walk[ing] in circles indefinitely’ (212), and losing himself ‘in the network
of narrow little alleys’ (389). Thus he repeatedly gets lost in the labyrin-
thian streets of the city, misses appointments and breaks promises, liter-
ally runs into walls and goes in circles on a tram, and eventually leaves for
Helsinki, ‘just another cold, lonely city’ (107).
Like Lewis before her, Luo connects the novel’s landscape to the
paintings of de Chirico but does not develop the connection further.54
She dedicates more space to a connection she perceives with French
philosopher Gaston Bachelard (1884–1962) and uses his analysis in
‘The Significance of the Hut’ (1957) to make a superficial connec-
tion to the importance of the house in The Unconsoled. Again though,
Luo provides a useful catalogue of motifs which demonstrates how
Christoff (Unc 188), Brodsky (Unc 309), and Ryder and Sophie (Unc
34, 224) are all in search of homes. Ryder may be in search of a house,
but he is also determined to keep travelling, ‘in search of not only
fame and recognition, but also a meaningful role and standing in soci-
ety’.55 For the travelling Ryder, the home not found has distinct costs:
The house, a symbol for settled life, familial affiliation, community

connection, is never found. Feeling betrayed, disappointed, and even
destroyed, all women characters abandon their search for house/cha-
let/farmhouse: thus Sophie leaves Ryder, Rosa leaves Christoff, Christine
leaves Hoffman, Miss Collins leaves Brodsky. In the end, there is neither
reconciliation nor consolation.56
Luo has provided some important analysis of the novel’s space, but her
attempt to make the novel into something it is not – about foreignness –
again betrays her: ‘most importantly, [the novel] is about a foreigner’s
traumas and anxieties associated with dislocation and disorientation.’57
Labelling Ryder a foreigner fails to recognise the shifting territory
Ishiguro has created. Luo ventures further away from the novel when
she writes that it ‘particularly addresses the loss of the orphan and con-
nects this loss to the pain of the exile as a never-healing “wound”’.58
But Ryder is neither orphan nor exile. His parents may treat him badly,
but he does seem to have parents, unlike the protagonist of When We
Were Orphans, Christopher Banks, the character Luo wants to connect
to Ryder. Moreover, a term like ‘exile’ in connection with a city that
cannot be located is obviously problematic. Moreover, since Ryder
seems to be a resident of the city, referring to him as an exile seems
similarly misguided. Luo’s craving to tie the novel down to this theme
of foreignness means establishing boundaries of place, between domestic
and foreign, that the novel rejects.
Finally, Luo connects The Unconsoled to Alice in Wonderland (1865)

by Lewis Carroll (1832–98) and with the help of Bachelard proposes
that Ishiguro has created an alternative world:
Ishiguro has constructed in The Unconsoled, as in Alice in Wonderland,

an alternative world, with its numerous mirrors and doorways, with
alternative rules and random possibilities. This is a world where the
landscape takes on a dreamy quality. As if to remind the reader that all
is not what it seems, each section of the novel is framed with a scene in
which Ryder invariably wakes up in panic or is roused from sleep by an
insistently ringing telephone (18, 117, 155, 293, 413).59
To support this claim she adds references to instances when Ryder

dozes off (Unc 38, 44, 79, 147, 191, 209, 263, 357) and points out the
novel’s imaginative elements:
The fairy tale qualities of the novel, with its imaginary castles, horse
and carriage, Boris’s and the young Ryder’s imaginary games and bat-
tles, magnificent sunsets and pastoral grassy fields, are juxtaposed with
scenes of urban traffic and carparks, identical apartments and artificial
lakes, as well as deserted city squares and night streets. Unhappy mem-
ories of the past, the weariness and anxieties of traveling, the pressures
and demands of society are also in contrast with enticing fantasies of
rest, comfort, tranquillity.
Ultimately, Luo attempts to demonstrate that ‘by providing

a “fantasy” world, Ishiguro shows that the “real” world is forever
shadowed by the possibility of alternative worlds and alternative
lives’.60 It is in this imaginative conclusion that Luo’s analysis is
most useful in understanding the method and themes of the novel,
a usefulness more readily observed by attending to the novel’s oneiric
characteristics.
MORE THAN DREAMS
Discussions of the novel, faced with this shifting and disputed geog-
raphy, often respond with language such as ‘dreams’ and ‘nightmares’.
Perhaps most dismissively, Richard Eder, failing to read much of
the novel’s complexity, sees the novel only as a ‘long nightmare’.61
Similarly, Paul Gray, who starts his review with an appreciative look
back to The Remains of the Day, fails to adjust his reading strategy for
this novel and calls this work ‘the literary equivalent of an endless bad
dream’.62 Allen points out several events in Ryder’s account that seem
like events from nightmares:
He addresses a formal gathering with his genitalia exposed; trying to

identify himself, he is unable to articulate his own name and can only
strain and grunt; an unbreachable brick wall separates him, just before
curtain time, from the concert hall; he is borne away on a tram by bossy
journalists, having left a small child alone in a café.63
Like Allen, Lewis describes the many dreamlike features in the late-
night reception to which Hoffman takes Ryder (after waking him up):
There are the outlandish, illogical events, such as the visit to a recep-
tion in the middle of the night, and the exaggerated grief about the dog.
Then there is Ryder’s fear of public exposure, signalled by the wearing of
the dressing-gown, which is undercut by the neglect he receives at the
function. And there is a noticeable degree of wish-fulfilment in the suc-
cess of Ryder’s eight-word speech.64
Michael Wood is often quoted as pointing out that at the beginning of

all three sections after the fi rst, Ryder wakes up after a nap (for exam-
ple, Unc 18). However, Wood is not proposing that the novel is the
record of a dream:
It’s more like a long metaphor for deferred and displaced anxiety, and
the point about anxiety is that it doesn’t occur only in dreams. […] the
novel takes the opportunity that fiction so often resists and pursues the
darker logic of a world governed by our needs and worries rather than
the law of physics.65
Passano too points out that ‘dreamlike’ is insufficient as a description

of the novel’s events because the term does not evoke the anxiety and
fascination that the novel stirs in us.66
Several critics have, in fact, noted the novel’s fi rm grounding in
details. Brookner observes that while ‘Delay is the stuff of nightmare’,
the ‘agonising flow is punctuated with surreal detail’,67 an observa-
tion supported by Kauff mann68 and Menand.69 Lewis, however, adds
that ‘buildings and landscape keep melting into something else in a
Daliesque way’.70 ‘Melting’ is not an apt description, and the Cubism
of Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) might be a more helpful reference than
Salvador Dali (1904–89), especially Synthetic Cubism which saw
Picasso attaching wallpaper and newspapers to works, but Lewis
has captured the transitory nature of Ishiguro’s landscape. François,
who fi nds a ‘blend of objective reality and subjective wish fulfi l-
ment’ expands on this idea, noting how the novel alternates between
the mundane and the ‘recognizably alien and mystifyingly familiar,
depending on the degree of magic or mimesis prevalent at any given
stage of the novel’. It is a delicate balance for Ishiguro because while

he continually reminds the reader of how time and space are being
manipulated, he does so without ever ‘alienating the reader suf-
ficiently from sensory data to suggest that he has been allowed into
another dimension’.71 In an interview with Sylvia Steinberg, Ishiguro
recounts ‘working out the rules that might apply in the alternative
landscape he was creating’,72 and writing a series of short episodes ‘in
which time is distorted in the manner of a dream where events occur
in slow motion or with dizzying swiftness’.73 These shorts were not
written for publication but as ‘tryouts’. Lewis notes three examples:
when Ryder demands a practice room and is shown fi rst to a toilet
stall and then to a small hut; when Ryder and Brodsky encounter
a funeral and Ryder becomes the centre of attention; and the scene
which takes place in the aftermath of a car accident that leaves
Brodsky badly hurt.74 Ishiguro wanted, he recalls, ‘to have a go at
creating a dreamlike landscape’.75
This idea of a ‘dreamlike landscape’ is an important one for
understanding the novel. Writing on A Pale View of Hills, Michael
Wood points out that Nagasaki comes to mean not the politics or
morality ‘but the landscape of feeling created by the bomb’ (emphasis
added).76 Wong, meanwhile, points out that Ishiguro’s interest in
The Unconsoled is ‘in the unfamiliar world evoked by what the author
calls “the language of dreams”’.77 ‘The landscape of feeling’ Wood
fi nds in A Pale View of Hills helps readers understand the unfamiliar
world of The Unconsoled created through Ishiguro’s ‘language of
dreams’. François describes this landscape as a ‘near magic beyond of
telepathic eavesdropping, uncanny blending of events past and present,
expansion of temporal sequences and distortion of spatial referents’.78
These characteristics give Ishiguro ‘a certain episodic freedom – to
open the book up and allow himself to experiment – but also to render
a certain condition of consciousness’.79 Cusk, for one, has understood
the immense potential of this openness: ‘once accustomed to
his strange landscape, with its tricks and reversals, its sudden
transparencies, its possibilities and humiliations, it soon becomes clear
that one is in a place one knows better, and more intimately, than any
other.’80 Readers, then, must learn to respond to this condition of
consciousness, to what Kauff mann has perceived as ‘a kind of interior
cubism’.81 Allen, in her review, sees that Ishiguro is after a more
challenging expression of experience: ‘Imagine an alternate world
in which life is not a dream but in which the dream is your life – in
other words, where you must live your life by the inexplicable logic
and ever-changing rules imposed by the dream itself.’82 The novel
requires the reader to accept a different kind of logic, a different kind
of realism.
RYDER’S APPROPRIATIONS
One of the most important concepts required for understanding the

logic of this novel is its use of appropriations, or extensions. Shaffer
provides the earliest explanation of this idea:
Of the major characters, three clusters of three people each are most
germane to an understanding of Ryder’s situation. These characters,
while ‘real’, are mainly to be understood as extensions, versions, or varia-
tions of Ryder himself – individuals, like Sachiko for Etsuko in A Pale View
of Hills, through whom he projects his own story. While these characters
should not be regarded as mere fabrications of the protagonist’s [sic],
then, they should be understood as conduits for Ryder to remember and
forget, judge and censor his own past.83
To his fi rst cluster, or triangle, he assigns Brodsky, Miss Collins,

and Brodsky’s dog Bruno; in the second, Hoff man, Christine, and
Stephan; and in the third triangle, Gustav, Sophie, and Boris (although
he later substitutes Ryder for Gustav in this triangle). Having set up
these triangles Shaffer then works through each cluster pointing out
the similarities and connections among the various characters.
Carlos Villar Flor adds two family triangles to this scheme: one of
Ryder, Sophie, and Boris, and another of Ryder and his parents. He
does so to support his argument that one of the novel’s major themes is
‘the neglect of family relationships, with special emphasis on the plight
of children deprived of the love of one or both parents, and the after-
math in adult life of such emotional injuries’.84 To summarise briefly,
Villar Flor proposes that the Hoff mans’ neglect of Stephan creates a
young artist who is desperate for his parents’ approval and who believes
that by giving a superlative performance at the concert he might actu-
ally earn their love. Boris is a victim of the lack of communication
between his mother and his grandfather. Understanding these rela-
tionships and taking note of Ryder’s allusions to his childhood and his
parents allows readers to see that Ryder ‘like Stephan, or Boris, must
have been severely hurt in his childhood by being a witness of constant
parental fighting and by suffering a subsequent neglect’.85 Ishiguro
claims that he had such a scheme in mind: ‘I wanted to have someone
just turn up in some landscape where he would meet people who are
not literally parts of himself but are echoes of his past, harbingers of his
future and projections of his fears about what he might become.’86
Citing this interview, Gary Adelman argues that ‘Psychological
complexity is built up through the use of doubles’. Adelman does not
explain how his theory differs from Shaffer’s earlier work (he does not
even cite Shaffer) but proposes a similar scheme:
Primary characters, including Ryder himself in different relationships,

represent Ryder’s original family situation at different times of his life.
Increasingly, Ryder plays his own father, re-creating his family of origin in
his relationship to his wife Sophie and to his nine-year-old son Boris. The
relationship of Stephan Hoffman to his parents reenacts Ryder’s life until
his mid-twenties, when his career takes off.87
Adelman continues on through some of the subordinate characters

attempting to establish a one-for-one relationship: Stephan is Ryder at
a younger age. Adelman, however, later suggests that ‘Every encounter
is Ryder encountering ego projections of himself ’,88 a slight shift from
his earlier position. In effect, he suggests a simplified form of Shaffer’s
theory, one that does not account for Ryder’s manipulations of the
narrative.
Lewis uses the Freudian concept of displacement to understand
some of these relationships. (Freudian displacement, briefly put, is
the substitution of an insignificant element for the significant. Lewis
cites Freud’s example of the single person who transfers his or her emo-
tions to a hobby or the care of animals.) After pointing out dream-
like aspects of the novel, Lewis proposes that ‘Each of the musicians of
the town – Stephan, Hoff man, Christoff, and Brodsky – represents
displaced versions of Ryder as he has been in the past or as he may
be in the future.’89 Hoff man, who is not a musician but the organiser
of Ryder’s concert, does not appear to fit into this category, nor does
Lewis indicate how he represents Ryder. It is certainly likely, however,
that the Hoff mans’ unhappy marriage and poor treatment of Stephan
parallels the poor treatment a younger Ryder received from his par-
ents. Brodsky, a conductor who has assumed the role of town drunk
and who is consequently separated from his great love Miss Collins,
is possibly ‘an image of what Ryder might become in later years – a
Ghost-of-Ryder-Future’.90 Lewis proposes that ‘Brodsky’s relation-
ship with Miss Collins and his music is a displacement of Ryder’s own
marriage and commitment to art’.91 In fact, Ryder’s troubles with
alcohol do surface in the novel. When Ryder returns to the family’s
old apartment, the neighbour’s reference to the previous tenants, who
argued in part because the father drank heavily, could be a reference
to Ryder: ‘The musician’s shame at his own behaviour is displaced,
dreamily, on to someone else.’92
Lewis expands his theory of displacements to account for other
characters as well. The weight of the favours constantly requested of
Ryder is displaced onto Gustav who at the very beginning of the novel
gives Ryder a long talk about luggage and later performs the bizarre
ending to the Porter’s dance. Gustav’s death leads Lewis to a discussion
of absent fathers in Ishiguro’s work, a motif found throughout Ishiguro’s
oeuvre.93 The relationship between Ryder and Boris is not good: the
two do not often speak and Ryder often ignores Boris, most crush-
ingly in Chapter 18 when Sophie has promised Boris and planned
a special family evening. Boris’s fantasy of fighting off a gang of thugs
suggests the extent of the unhappiness in the family home: it is the
thugs, in Boris’s fantasy, who have been causing Sophie to be irritable
and Ryder to be away for long periods (Unc 220–1). Lewis connects
Boris’s unhappy situation to Ryder by proposing that Boris func-
tions as ‘a Ghost-of-Ryder-Past’. Ryder too experienced an unhappy
childhood as is revealed in the flashbacks to his friendship with Fiona
Roberts where he describes his ‘training sessions’ (Unc 171–2).94
While Adelman assumes that Ryder faithfully represents his reality,
Lewis reads Ryder as displaced onto the other musicians so that they
represent him as past and future versions of himself. Ryder, however,
is not as easy to read as Adelman suggests and takes more of a con-
scious role than the term ‘displacement’ implies. To some degree this
is a novel about manipulating reality, a point that is illustrated by three
important moments that have received little discussion. First, near the
very opening of the novel Ryder explains how he used to manipulate
the truth when, as a child confronted with an irritating tear on a mat
that he used for his toy soldiers, he devised the solution of using the
tear as a type of rough terrain:
This discovery – that the blemish that had always threatened to

undermine my imaginary world could in fact be incorporated into it – had
been one of some excitement for me, and that ‘bush’ was to become a key
factor in many of the battles I subsequently orchestrated (Unc 16–17).
Ryder changes the circumstances with which he is confronted to

make them better fit his needs and to help himself. Notably, he makes
this discovery while his parents are in the midst of a ferocious argu-
ment, thereby linking his manipulation of reality with the pain of the
outside world. Later, he explains his ‘training sessions’ (Unc 171–3): He
trains himself to want to be alone, to resist the unpleasant reality that
exists in his home. Third, the DIY manual (Unc 92) which explains
how to tile and wallpaper is critical to understanding the novel; as
Boris asserts, ‘It shows you how to do everything’ (Unc 287). Indeed it
does, because it shows Ryder how to tile over and wallpaper over the
painful moments of his past. Confronted by difficulty, Ryder selects
an episode and wallpapers over it.
In her difficult but useful essay, Cynthia Wong connects this
method with the novel’s meaning. She begins by framing the novel as
postmodern, which leads her to note Ryder’s difficulty understanding
his own identity, and his inability to ‘effect any meaningful connection
to what readers might determine as significant other people in his life’.

It is also a difficulty, she notes, that connects Ryder to previous char-
acters in Ishiguro’s fiction. Wong begins, then, by grounding Ryder’s
difficulties at the level of the individual: he cannot connect. She finds
here the themes of this novel, ‘confusion and ostracism’ and helpfully
locates them in Ishiguro’s earlier work.95 Unlike Etsuko, Ono, and
Stevens who look back and distort elements of their pasts to make their
lives manageable, Ryder appears unaware of the need to look back.
Ryder, consequently, is not offered the chance for atonement given the
earlier narrators: Ishiguro has created for him, ‘a murkier life; Ryder’s
existence is grounded in a profound insistence that reason is fallible,
speculation unnecessary, and chronological unfolding with clearly
established causes and effects a plausible premise’.96 Ishiguro has cre-
ated a hazier, more difficult world for Ryder to negotiate, and Ryder’s
response is simply to ride out the difficult journey he is on.
The contemporary world, Wong asserts, relying on her framing of
the novel as postmodern, is a more complex one, with people more
obligated to matters outside their personal sphere, and in turn, more
nomadic.97 Ryder’s difficulties, ordinary as they are, are greater than
those faced by Ishiguro’s earlier narrators. He is not forced to respond
to the devastation of a nuclear bomb or the lesions left by fascism;
‘Ryder’s confl icts also seem to lack transcendence of meaning, which
makes the narrator’s purpose more puzzling: how can contemporary
readers celebrate the ordinary and usual?’ 98 Wong answers this question
by making an important connection to the method Ishiguro employs
in this novel:
[M]ethod of discourse, not description of situation, becomes the impor-

tant metaphor for understanding myriad existence. In other words, not what
Ryder struggles against, but rather, how he goes about it will reveal the
meaning of Ryder’s character and the implications of that character.99
As with the test to which the tragic hero is subjected, readers must
look beyond the subject matter to the method. The appropriations are
not just a layer of difficulty that Ishiguro has impressed on the reader’s
experience but an expression of Ryder’s experience.
Wong recognises Ryder’s use of what Shaffer has called the
‘appropriations’ strategy. Although she does not cite it as such, she
describes Ryder’s strategy in similar terms, such as ‘Using Stephan’s
presumed past to access aspects of his own,’ and sees the strategy in
previous Ishiguro protagonists who look back to address the state
of their lives. Specifically, she proposes, ‘by remembering events of
other people’s lives, they begin to assess the meaning of their own.
This approach both reflects and deflects their own pained pasts onto
the present narrative’. Not only are these fabrications made by the
narrators one of Ishiguro’s master themes, Wong asserts that it is
Ishiguro who developed the technique of having a character remember
‘one’s own painful past in context of another person’s’.100 More to the
point, she also sees how the strategy helps transform The Unconsoled
into a deep psychological investigation. Noting Ryder’s manipulations
of space and time, she suggests Ryder’s constant encounters with his
murky past, ‘cast in intentionally absurd situations or conditions [,]
further strengthen Ishiguro’s view that one’s dreams and imagination
have great potency’.101 Ryder’s solitary perambulations through the
unnamed city give readers an insight into postmodern existence: ‘deep
loneliness and isolation are at the heart of the flurry of social activity for
us contemporary nomads. What comprehension we might seize of life’s
meaning is as fleeting and disconnected as it is unfulfi lling.’102 This
novel, like Ishiguro’s earlier fiction, demonstrates Ishiguro’s concern
for ‘how people console themselves through necessary emotional
manipulation’,103 a conclusion that must lead readers to ask who the
unconsoled are and for what wound they need consolation.
WHO ARE THE UNCONSOLED?
Ishiguro’s use of appropriations marks a new method for represent-

ing consciousness, and one important benefit of this method is that
Ryder’s wound can be examined through its reflection in Boris,
Stephan, Hoff man, and Brodsky. But these characters are not the only
ones who remain unconsoled. The category of the unconsoled can be
expanded to include the wider public. Cusk makes this connection in
her early appraisal of the community in which she sees ‘the specters
of human unhappiness, a community of woes whose attempt to form
a secure collective consciousness is continually sabotaged by personal
failure’.104 Lewis too concludes his discussion by suggesting that
virtually every character in the novel is looking to be consoled, either by

loved ones, through the satisfaction of a demand or in the pursuit of a valued
activity. Yet it is the fate of the citizens of this nameless town to remain uncon-
soled, unsatisfied, and unceasingly chasing goals they cannot reach.105
Pierre François perhaps dedicates the most attention to this element

of the novel. He reads it as revealing ‘the crisis of culture in our post-
modern times from, paradoxically, a modernist vantage point’. He
argues that Ryder’s condition represents a larger
collective crisis, for the artist as potential ‘saviour’ turns out to be the
carrier of a bug that has arguably undermined western societies for more
than a century. In this deeply disturbing vision of a civilization turning

infantile, depths have gone and have been replaced by persona, time has
become the alienating factor per se, and the sense of community has
made way for scapegoating.106
This crisis is embodied in Brodsky and his conducting: his ‘leg/thigh

wound is a metaphor for the city’s sterility, and […] the old man
would parodically be hailed as the city’s “saviour” if his performance
as a conductor were to re-instil vigour and strength into the cultural
wasteland’.107 But Brodsky is an egoist who cannot step outside his
personal desires. As he does with Ryder, François labels his longing to
return to prominence and win back Miss Collins’s love ‘infantile. He
is the old man fi xated on his youth, hankering for the phallic pleni-
tude that ageing has deprived him of and fleeing the real in alcoholic
addiction’.108 For Miss Collins, this egocentrism is abhorrent: she is
dedicated to service and social well-being, but Ryder and others lean,
like Brodsky, towards less desirable qualities.
Ryder, François points out, blames others for his problems. Although
he has come to heal some unnamed problem of the city, he indulges
in scapegoating. He too is an egotist, only able to communicate with
those around him in his dream-like versions of public transportation.109
François picks out two ‘scenes of community’ on public transport, the
bus ride that Ryder and Boris take on their way to the artificial lake (Unc
206–9) and the tram at the end the novel (Unc 528–35), because of the
ideal representations of social life they provide. Unlike the representa-
tions of social life throughout the novel, both of these cases present posi-
tive portrayals of life in the community. The people on public transport
are kind and say the right things to console Ryder. The tram at the nov-
el’s end even offers a buffet breakfast: ‘All this is parodic and exemplifies
Ishiguro’s use of “oneiric realism”, which, in this instance, transmutes
scapegoating into its dialectical opposite through the swaying magic of
public transportation.’ François parses these scenes to support his claim
that Ryder has paired scapegoating with wish fulfilment. The private
counterpart to public transport is the old family car (Unc 262) which
Ryder finds outside of the Karwinski Gallery and which Ryder acknowl-
edges served him as a ‘sanctuary’ during his childhood: ‘The tram, the
bus and the old car are childish substitutes for the womb, shelters in
which Ryder as a child and Ryder as an adult sought/seeks asylum in the
face of parental/social enmity.’110 He stretches this point, connecting it to
the work of psychologist Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961), to suggest that
Ryder’s success comes at the expense of a normal maturing personality:
The novel can be read as a novel of masks in which the first-person

narrator prances around in bright sunlight, but his persona gradually
fizzles under social pressure and an inner chasm opens ‘down’ to

glooms that have become even murkier since early childhood.111
For François, Ryder’s wound is, in part, a ‘father complex’, a term

that he borrows from Jung but does not defi ne beyond pointing
out that complexes are constellations of unconscious associations or
strong impulses. Specifically, François appears to argue that Ryder is
uncomfortable as a father figure: consequently, he panics whenever he
is expected to act as a father (Unc 90, 176, 258),112 childishly retains
his passion for football which he shares with son, and turns the DIY
manual, a symbol of what fathers are supposed to do in homes, over
to Boris. Although it seems certain that Ryder’s childhood was trau-
matic, François’ diagnosis of a Jungian father complex is weak and an
unconvincing element of his reading. It lacks the critical robustness of
the appropriations strategy and overlooks François’ own arguments on
infantilism and the specifics of Ryder’s childhood that the novel pro-
vides, specifics supplemented by the experiences of Stephan and Boris.
Ishiguro is not writing about Ryder’s relationship with his father here;
he is writing about the relationships between parents and children.
Ryder’s wound is a product of the flaws of the unhappy childhood
that others, such as Luo, have described: his need for ‘training sessions’
(Unc 171–2), Stephan’s need for parental approval (for example, Unc
520–1), and Boris’s need for his fantasy of overcoming the street thugs
that have beset the family (Unc 218–22). These are the symptoms of
the wounds that demand consolation.
François finds the larger significance of the wound suffered by the
entire community in the Sattler episode, which François suggests as
‘an alternative for the individual and collective retreat from profun-
dity’.113 Sattler’s project, local councillor Karl Pedersen explains to
Ryder, was to invigorate the city by transforming it into a major cen-
tre: consequently, Sattler has become an almost mythic figure because
he signifies the rejection of ‘“timidity”, for the social-cum-psychic
ailment fictionalised in The Unconsoled’. And it is this ‘timidity’ which
François perceives as ‘the cultural crisis in the western world round
the end of the twentieth century’. The novel’s fi nal three chapters are
particularly important in François’ reading for they ‘show that our
civilization is experiencing the end of depths on the psychic plane and
the end of community on the social plane, and blames either woe on
cultural infantilism’. In contrast to the introspective modernist artist’s
attempt at ‘a new mental order on the shambles of cultural apocalypse’,
Ishiguro presents Ryder who, with his artistic powers at their peak,
can only long for a lost childhood that was never his. Ryder does not
investigate ‘what “made him”’ or, like Sattler, try to devise a bright
new future. Instead, he is consumed by the dream that some day his
mother and father will acknowledge him.114 While acknowledging

Ishiguro’s wariness of having his novels stand in for socio-political
commentary, François expands the significance of the story: ‘“his”
city and “his” visiting pianist are respectively “our” world and “our”
psyche, albeit at some removes from mimesis.’115
Some early reviewers did pick up on this theme. Hughes-Hallett
and Cusk both perceive Ryder’s anguish over his inability to reconcile
his private and public lives. Hughes-Hallett describes the problem as
a lack in one’s own personal space: that Ryder, like many of us who
spend years ‘responding unthinkingly’ to multifarious demands ‘come
to ourselves, in the middle of our lives, in a dark wood, with only the
haziest understanding of how we arrived there or what is next to be
done’.116 Similarly, Cusk sees the confl ict as between inner and outer
human relationships, between, that is, the families and friends that are
so important in the development of an individual and the society in
which that life takes place. The private failures of his characters leave
them with the outer society as the destination for ‘their desires for
control, success, admiration and normality; in short, for consolation’.117
CONCLUSION
The Unconsoled reveals Ishiguro working in a style extremely different

from his three earlier works, but as noted by critics such as Shaffer118
and Wyndham, the novel also bears similarities to his three previous
novels. Shaffer notes one of the most important similarities: its use of
first-person narration by a narrator who, seemingly unintentionally,
reveals his past life. Wyndham describes the novel as a ‘variation on
the themes of bewilderment, shame and regret which [Ishiguro] has
previously and more gently presented as dominant strands throughout
human existence’.119 In the differences, however, lie one of the most
exciting aspects of this novel: its attempts, through Ishiguro’s use of
appropriations, to create a different ‘representation of consciousness’.120
This different representation of consciousness, however, does not lend
itself to easy reading. The Unconsoled is a challenge; moreover, Ishiguro’s
decision to not provide a name for the city in which it is set seems to
have been taken as a puzzle to be solved, and many critics who have
written on the novel have felt compelled to locate the unnamed city.
The technical aspects of Ishiguro’s work here have received very little
attention. It is a technique replete with risks, which Wyndham outlines
in one of the best reviews of the novel. He describes how the design
and atmosphere of the novel require repetition to create effect,121 and
the risks of characters giving long speeches.122 Kauffmann has pointed
out Ishiguro’s use of disproportion, by which he appears to mean
inappropriateness: the instances when, for example, Ryder is asked to

perform some small favour or embarks on some minor undertaking
even though he is required for some much larger duty.123 Misreading
Ishiguro for Ryder, Hughes-Hallett adds that ‘Ishiguro has chosen
to express himself in stilted, non-colloquial prose’.124 If ‘Ishiguro has
mapped out an aesthetic territory that is all his own,’125 more analysis
of that territory is needed. There is certainly much more work to be
done on this novel, particularly in the study of its cognitive poetics.
Given that the novel provides a new representation of consciousness,
the efficacy of that portrayal needs to be questioned.
Ultimately, however, the critical response to The Unconsoled dem-
onstrates that Ishiguro’s work is about people. In an interview Ishiguro
outlines his intention in this novel:
I wanted to show that sort of hopeless, slightly pathetic kind of

optimism, which in the end is something that we all have to resort to
in order to keep going. […] In a sense all my books end on that same
note – after the character discovers how empty life is. Here Ryder
is trying to gain something profound from what normally would be a
superficial contact with other human beings. He’s looking for some
kind of consolation.
Fortunately for his readers, ‘Though Ishiguro fi lls his fictional world
with self-deceiving people trying to surmount failed lives, in the end he
grants them the dignity to endure their sorrow.’126 In The Unconsoled,
as elsewhere, Ishiguro writes about the difficulties we all have getting
along in life, the broken tools we have to address those difficulties, and
the dignity that we must cobble together to respond to life’s challenges.
His next protagonist, the famous detective Christopher Banks, appears
more than ready to take on these challenges and uncover the truth in a
case that takes him around the world.
CH A P TER SE VEN
Detecting the Past: When We

Were Orphans (2000)
F or many readers, Ishiguro’s fourth novel, The Unconsoled, had

failed to communicate. Aware of this failure, Ishiguro set out
to try again,1 an attempt that produced When We Were Orphans, the
notebooks of purportedly celebrated detective, Christopher Banks,
born and raised in Shanghai until being sent to England follow-
ing the mysterious disappearances of, fi rst, his father and, then, his
mother. Of all Ishiguro’s novels, Orphans has instigated the most puz-
zling response. While most reviewers responded positively, citing, for
example, the novel’s originality,2 power,3 and ‘surpassing intelligence
and taste’,4 there has been considerable dissent, a situation most easily
recognised in the vastly differing opinions of the two reviewers from
The New York Times. While Michael Gorra, in a thoughtful review,
describes the novel as Ishiguro’s ‘fullest achievement yet’,5 Michiko
Kakutani begins by calling the novel ‘disappointing’.6 In her useful
review, novelist Alice McDermott (born 1953) captures this bipolar
response all on its own, referring to the novel as ‘by turns, brilliant
and dull, absorbing and unfathomable, fascinating and a bit of a mess’.7
The scholarly response to the novel has been equally enigmatic, but in
this regard, the most surprising aspect is simply the dearth of scholar-
ship on such a complex novel. Highlighting the novel’s key critical
issues, this chapter unpacks these varied responses and offers possible
directions for further critical readings.
SIMILARITIES TO EARLIER NOVELS
Despite the disagreements on other issues, readers have agreed that

Orphans shares several similarities with previous works in Ishiguro’s
oeuvre. Gillian Harding-Russell finds a similarity based on the search
123
for truth in the third and fourth novels (although her comments seem
to apply to the first two novels as well):
The wonder of these tales is that the reader does not finally uncover
the whole truth […] as a sort of holy grail to be pursued and then known
completely. And the narrative of this truth is never a straight line, nor even
a serpentine one, but is found piecemeal, among the unstable memories
of everyone concerned.8
There are also several technical similarities with the earlier works.
As with earlier narrators, ‘Christopher’s memories are unreliable; he
unwittingly reveals his self-delusion as he represses painful memories
or lies to himself to make them more palatable’.9 Shaffer connects the
ending to all of Ishiguro’s previous work:
Banks, now fifty-three years old and rheumatic, is settling into late mid-
dle age and attempts to sum up his life. All of Ishiguro’s novels end in this
poignantly understated way, leaving the reader to grapple with the ques-
tion of whether the protagonist’s life has been as successful or complete
as he or she would have us believe.10
Perhaps most important, however, is the novel’s reworking of ‘the

innovative technique of The Unconsoled – dubbed “appropriation” by the
author – where, as in a dream, other characters feature as projections of
the narrator’s fears and desires, people from his past or himself at different
stages of life’.11 The bipolar response to this novel can, in fact, be largely
attributed to readers’ varying abilities to negotiate this technique.
By working in a mode closer to realism in Orphans, Ishiguro
removed the appropriation technique from the novel’s foreground.
That is, while Banks’s story appropriates Sir Cecil Medhurst’s just as
Ryder’s story appropriates Brodsky’s, because Orphans is so much more
closely aligned with realist modes, it does not so forcefully compel
readers to perceive the connection. In Ishiguro’s shifting of the appro-
priation technique out of the foreground, however, some readers fail
to see its use. This failure often appears in responses that attempt to
split the novel’s mode into two, as when novelist Benjamin Anastas
(born 1971) finds ‘profoundly mixed’ results in Ishiguro’s reconcilia-
tion of ‘the cloistered technique of his early works with the liberties of
The Unconsoled’,12 or when Kakutani describes the novel as ‘an uneasy
composite of his last two novels’ that ‘lacks the experimental ambitions
of The Unconsoled’.13 Novelist Joyce Carol Oates (born 1938), however,
suggests that ‘The Unconsoled would seem to be a groping precursor of
the much superior When We Were Orphans’, a judgement she supports
by noting that in Orphans ‘the Kaf kaesque compulsion to question,
WHE N WE WE RE O R PHANS 125
to puzzle over, to analyse is given a dramatic urgency that makes psy-

chological sense, for Christopher Banks is an orphan who as a school-
boy is fascinated by the “connectedness” that is taken for granted by his
non-orphan classmates’.14 The development of this theme of ‘connect-
edness’, embodied in the appropriation technique, suggests the further
work required to understand Ishiguro’s fiction more fully.
NARRATIVE AND PROSE
Critics were also largely in agreement lauding Ishiguro’s ‘stunning

exhibition of narrative skill’,15 especially in regards to Banks’s recollec-
tion of ‘his charmed boyhood in China’.16 Similarly, Ishiguro’s prose
is described as ‘at once rich and taut’,17 ‘gorgeous, perhaps match-
less’,18 and ‘extraordinarily seductive […]: precise, controlled, cau-
tious’.19 Novelist and biographer Andrew Barrow (born 1945), more
specifically, adds an insightful observation on Ishiguro’s ‘narrative
tricks’: ‘New characters are slipped into the story by sleight of hand
and readers are enticed into new sections with rambling remarks’.20
Likewise, Brian Bouldrey fi nds Ishiguro’s use of omission rewarding:
‘Somehow, Ishiguro has achieved a disturbing balance between omis-
sion and intense, immediate action as seen through the wrong end of a
telescope, where details, however complete, are misunderstood.’21
Novelist and journalist Philip Hensher (born 1965) provides
a unique dissension. Agreeing with those who detect Ishiguro’s narra-
tive skilfulness, he contends that Ishiguro’s ‘virtues are all architectural
ones. His timing and orchestration of events is practically unrivalled’.
But despite Hensher’s admiration for the novel’s structure, he judges
Ishiguro’s prose lacking, particularly in what he perceives as its failure
to provide ‘the particular concrete detail which pins down a scene to
a locality and a time’. Picking up on the novel’s allusion to Dickens’s
Great Expectations (1860–1) (noted by Henry Carrington Cunningham,
III22), Hensher claims that ‘a less Dickensian novelist can hardly be
imagined’, for while Dickens revels in details, for Ishiguro details are
‘impeding and irrelevant’.23 Tova Reich’s description of Ishiguro’s use
of details, however, establishes an opposing view: she acknowledges
the novel’s failure to describe ‘what the main character looks like or
of what he eats’, and acknowledges that ‘some of the scenes, such as
the quest through the warren, are as dark and dreamlike as a descent
into the underworld’, but finds ‘the total effect is concrete and vivid’.24
Hensher finds another problem with Ishiguro’s prose in his ‘avoidance
of phrasal verbs […] it gives his narrator a circumlocutious, cautious air
which isn’t really very helpful. More than that, it gives him a particular
tone of voice which is not that of his social setting’. The problem here
for Hensher is Ishiguro’s choice of ‘depart’ over the phrasal verb ‘set
off ’, but Hensher has failed to separate Ishiguro’s authorial voice from
Banks’s narrating of his story.
Once readers distinguish that the notebooks, the text of the novel,
are not Ishiguro’s, but Banks’s, Hensher’s criticism can be understood
to point to one of the themes of the novel, the difficulty of being
English. His simplification that ‘Phrasal verbs are, in a way, at the
heart of English’,25 should be connected to Banks’s trouble being
English, fi rst in Shanghai and later in England:
Englishness – in fact, human interaction of all kinds – will remain for him
a form of learned behaviour, in which he compounds the simulacrum of a
character from both the gestures of the people around him and his read-
ing in The Wind in the Willows [1908] or Sherlock Holmes.26
Thus, an explanation for Banks’s language emerges: ‘Ishiguro has been

not deaf but bold in his gaucheish use of the RP of the time. The
reason he screwed it quite so tight is that Christopher is putting him-
self under the most deadly control’.27 James Wood develops an even
stronger case for the appropriateness of Banks’s language based on
Banks’s need to conform to English society.28 Consequently, Banks
speaks to us – and thus the novel is written – in a style of English that

seems, more even than in Ishiguro’s previous work, almost a spoof, some-
thing between a pastiche of Conan Doyle [1859–1930] and a parody of the
kind of gossipy, metropolitan, highly ‘English’ prose written by Anthony
Powell [1905–2000].
Wood provides a short passage from both Orphans and Powell to

illuminate his point before concluding, ‘Most of When We Were
Orphans is set in the 1930s, and Christopher seems to be using the
artificiality of upper-class language to upholster his own artificiality.’29
Alongside the superlatives, then, Ishiguro’s prose in Orphans binds
together his narrator’s estrangement and motivations.
BANKS’S CHARACTER
Although Banks is a complex character under immense pressure, his

character has not generated much response. Aside from Harding-
Russell’s conclusion that ‘this is a psychologically subtle novel, and it
presents Banks as a character at once sympathetic and flawed’,30 most
discussions of Banks have focused exclusively on the question of his
reliability. Like others, Gorra understands the significance of the early
reference to the narrator as ‘rather an “odd bird” ’, a point from which

Ishiguro ‘begins to orchestrate an ever-growing dissonance between the
detective’s own judgements and those the book presents as “normal” ’.31
Shaffer describes the unreliability of Banks’s account of his childhood:
It slowly emerges […] that Banks’s golden childhood in Shanghai before

the Japanese bombing campaign and before the mysterious disappear-
ance of his parents was far less happy or stable than he would like (and
like us) to believe. This is hinted at not only in the hesitantly revealed facts
about his parents’ less-than-ideal relationship but also in the details of the
other marriages depicted in the novel, all of which are failures, and all of
which, we come to understand, mirror that of Christopher’s parents.32
Banks blusters on, but his ‘veneer of self-confidence is paper-thin.

Though Christopher never allows it to crack, Ishiguro’s hand lies con-
fidently behind the text, showing us far more than our narrator thinks
he has been shown’.33 Shortly after he gets to Shanghai, readers are
compelled to consider if ‘his inflated sense of his own importance in
the worldwide fight against evil suggests that he is also suffering from
severe delusions’.34
In contrast to readings focused on Banks’s unreliability, Wood’s
reading focuses on the difficulties that Banks experiences. He begins,
however, by noting the artificiality that marks Banks:
Christopher’s world seems to have been borrowed from an English

novel, and this is surely Ishiguro’s intended effect. Christopher is produc-
ing a masquerade of a style that is already something of a masquerade;
he is not entirely real – not to himself, not to those who encounter him,
and not to Ishiguro’s readers.
The intent here, Wood suggests, is not simply
to suggest that this kind of ‘Englishness’ does not exist, though the
stability of the entity is certainly a casualty of his novel. It is more, I think,
that he wants us to see Christopher as a man deformed by the effort of
conformity – deformed into genre, into unreality, and, if necessary, into
falsehood.35
Wood’s reading, then, allows readers to see behind the role Banks has
assumed to the man who was once an orphan. Other reviewers provide
further support for this reading: ‘Like other Ishiguro heroes, Banks is
crippled by politeness, cursed by the fear of doing something “inappro-
priate” or “unworthy”. On a superficial level, he admits to being “quite
fatigued” and “somewhat overwrought” while underneath he remains
confused and angry.’36 Similarly, Maya Jaggi connects Banks’s drive for
conformity with his motivations: ‘Christopher and Sarah are orphan
outsiders striving to belong – the man through a brilliant career, the
woman vicariously, through men – in a viciously exclusive society,
where being well-connected bestows the crucial leg-up in life.’37 Here,
however, Jaggi seems to have misread Banks. Banks’s fi xation on ‘con-
nections’ does not seem motivated by the thought of a ‘leg-up’ so much
as it does by his need to connect, no longer to be an orphan.
It is perhaps the difficulty involved in understanding Banks’s
character that has put the efficacy of the second half of the novel into
doubt. Readers who fail to perceive how the appropriation technique
connects what might be read as the realist mode of Remains in the fi rst
half to the hallucinatory nightmare mode of Unconsoled perceive an
awkward switch, a difficulty most clearly expressed by Anastas:
It’s one thing to create a fictional world with a skewed sense of logic,
and quite another to change a novel’s guiding force midstream. Banks is
just-about-human one moment and shadow the next; his investigation is
emptied of significance and becomes a novelist’s lark.38
While many readers have responded positively to Banks’s description

of his journey through the warrens, what novelist Candia McWilliam
(born 1955) describes as ‘the tightest and neatest description I have
ever read of swarming hell’,39 Oates calls ‘This protracted, dogged
sequence […] the weakest part of the novel’.40 The strongest defence
of this sequence is to see the connection of landscape and psycho-
logical state, that the sequence ‘dramatises Christopher’s inner battle
between perceived duty and the love he has momentarily allowed to
lift a “massive weight” from him’.41
The novel’s ending has also instigated criticism. McDermott fi nds
that despite the seriousness of the ideas Ishiguro incorporates into his
novel, he undermines his intent in ‘The novel’s denouement, a parody
of the detective story’s summarizing fi nale, [that] features a full con-
fession by an all-but-moustache-twirling evildoer’.42 James Francken
laments that ‘Banks’s mistakes […] aren’t shown to have had any con-
sequences’,43 but the more interesting criticism is outlined by writer
and physician Phil Whitaker (born 1966) who fi nds that ‘Having
taken us on a voyage into a mind unhinged by loss’ the novel’s
return ‘to a rational perspective’ is its one misstep. Like McDermott,
Whitaker sees the possibility here of ‘a pastiche of the detective genre’
or ‘an attempt to illustrate the “calm” that flows from seeing “through
our missions to the end” ’, but suggests that ‘while some readers may
fi nd it satisfying, the sudden reversion of tone and the neatness of
the resolutions leave the ending rather flat and prosaic’.44 Although
Whitaker’s dislike of Banks’s ‘sudden reversion’ merits notice, Oates

provides another interpretation: ‘Christopher Banks is a public figure
whose celebrity seems to be increasing, until at the novel’s end, he
is awakened from his deluded sense of mission. We last see him in
old age, retired to private life, accepting his “ordinary” status.’ It is
a retreat, but one closely tied to the struggles the novel portrays, a
retreat ‘with dignity, after having heroically struggled. If [Ishiguro’s
protagonists] don’t succeed in solving the mysteries that confront
them, they solve other, lesser mysteries’.45 The ending, then, is perhaps
the right one for this detective.
DETECTIVE STORY
Readers have been keen to scrutinise the novel’s reference to detective

fiction, especially the novel’s play with the rules of detective fiction.
Gorra reads the novel’s first sentence as belonging ‘to the world of John
Buchan [1875–1940], to the guilty pleasures of such thrillers as The
Thirty-Nine Steps [1915]’, but qualifies his first impression: ‘This isn’t
a detective novel, it only looks like one.’46 Orphans establishes generic
conventions and thwarts them. Barrow labels the theme of detection
and Banks’s ‘bizarre belief in the ‘very best’ detectives […] a typical
Ishiguro tease’ and notes the novel’s refusal to conform to the detec-
tive genre: ‘The final chapters may contain some unexpected twists but
there are no clues to ponder over and no descriptions of the great detec-
tive at work. As in all Ishiguro’s novels, many events happen off-stage or
between the lines.’47 Not surprisingly then, appropriately categorizing
the genre of this novel has provided grounds for some discussion, with
some referring to it vaguely as ‘a new kind of detective story’,48 or, more
commonly, finding it a generic hybrid: ‘a curious amalgam of detective
mystery, period romance, and fictional memoir.’49
One obvious difference marking this novel’s resistance to the
conventions of detective fiction is Banks’s narration of his work.
Although ‘The story is structured like the notebooks of a detective’,50
as Boyd Tonkin, among others, observes, ‘What Christopher never
does, in any detail, is close a case. Mostly, this detective simply doesn’t
detect.’ (Notably, Tonkin reports that in an earlier draft of the novel
he did: ‘Ishiguro devised a Golden-Age story-within-a-story to show
the sleuth in cracking form. Then he “threw away about 110 fi nished
pages”.’)51 Particularly important in this discussion is Banks’s failure,
sometimes ascribed to Ishiguro, to provide the details of his work:
[O]ur hero modestly alludes to such triumphs as the ‘Mannering case’

or the ‘Trevor Richardson affair’, allusions that, in proper Holmesian fashion,
remain unencumbered by details. We never see him follow a case to what

I am sure he would call its denouement.52
Oates reads this omission as evidence ‘that the detective is an allegorical

savour-figure, whose true mission is to “combat evil” at its source’.53
For others, the novel’s failure to satisfy genre conventions has led
them to read it as ‘a parody of a British detective novel in which Banks
imagines himself the hero’,54 a reading that Gorra argues against:
Ishiguro stops just short of parody, and though he won’t let his readers
surrender to the genre, he doesn’t condescend to it either. For by placing
its clichés in Banks’s mind, Ishiguro makes their slight pomposity an
essential part of the man’s character, a mark of both his limitations and of
the psychic necessity that moves him.55
The novel’s failure to maintain the conventions of the detective

novel, particularly Banks’s failure to detect, has an obvious parallel
in the detective’s personal failures. Readers have noted Banks’s lack
of insight,56 noting in particular that ‘Banks remembers that detec-
tives were called in to investigate when his father went missing, but he
makes no conscious connection between that event and his own choice
of a career, stating that “my intention was to combat evil” ’.57 Similarly,
Bouldrey notes that while ‘Banks’ descriptions and immediate reflec-
tions on very important occurrences [are] faithfully and accurately
rendered, [they are] never fully digested by an otherwise brilliant man’.
Consequently, while Banks is a detective who ‘can fi nd subtle patterns
and piece together the confl icts that tear apart other lives, he is aston-
ishingly clueless about some very obvious aspects of his own life’.58
This lack of insight into his own life is one of the novel’s key ironies:
[T]he very skills that make him such a successful detective – his
extraordinary attention to detail, his unwillingness to distinguish between
the incidental and the momentous, his childlike single-mindedness – lead
him astray as he struggles to understand the tragedy that disrupted his
childhood and the currents of his mind.59
It is a theme that Ishiguro has portrayed before. Gorra’s comment that

‘Ishiguro’s real concern is with his main character’s unerring ability
to miss the call of freedom, in the blindness that his sense of obliga-
tion imposes upon him’60 reads just as accurately as a statement about
Stevens as it does about Banks. The difference is that in Orphans
Ishiguro more prominently foregrounds the novel’s irony by portray-
ing a detective who does not realise that ‘the real case is himself, and
its resolution involves self-knowledge’.61
The novel’s foregrounding of a detective in a novel that frustrates

the generic conventions of detective fiction leads readers into the
novel’s primary subversion. Ishiguro demonstrates the hopelessness
involved in the reliance on a single hero charged with setting every-
thing right again: ‘The hand-me-down conventions of detective fic-
tion are shown to be too neat: brilliant feats of detection don’t work
in a wider, messier world.’62 It is a theme that originated in Ishiguro’s
reading of detective fiction from the 1930s that he did in preparing the
novel. In contrast to ‘the American hard-boiled tradition of an urban
purgatory’, Ishiguro found English detective fiction presented a more
innocent world: for example, ‘In a sleepy little Dorset village, the vicar
has poisoned someone. And all that is required is for the detective to
come along, go click, and everything is beautiful again. Everyone is
happy, all the subplots are resolved.’ Ishiguro finds poignancy in this
ease of resolution by connecting its affect to the era of these read-
ings, the period directly after World War I: ‘The people who read
those books in such great numbers had experienced darkness and evil
in all its modern form. They knew better than we do the uncontain-
able aspect of evil.’63 These readings, from ‘the “Golden Age” inves-
tigative school of Agatha Christie [1890–1976] or Dorothy L. Sayers
[1893–1957]’, are the foundation of Christopher’s beliefs ‘in the evil-
genius theory of crime and disorder. Nail the culprit, and peace reigns
again’.64 Ishiguro’s structural use of detection, at first, signals the pos-
sibility of such resolution:
Just as the detective story genre offers readers the consolations of an

orderly narrative in which reason and logic will triumph, so detective work
offers Christopher the illusion that he is using his acumen to restore order
to the world around him.65
However, as the novel progresses, it reveals the falsity of this order. The
detective’s task, to find ‘potentially revelatory’, meaning everywhere, is
beyond one person:
[T]he burden of that kind of vision is a weight of responsibility no man

could endure. The disconnection between Banks’s careful narration and
his increasingly skewed interpretation of events creates a harrowing sense
of tragedy that only the most extraordinary author could carry off.66
Like Remains, then, Orphans presents ‘a man who thinks he has

touched on the centre of important events, only to discover that the
real sources of power lay elsewhere’. In Remains and Orphans, William
Sutcliffe proposes, Ishiguro demonstrates the falsity in believing that one
individual can change history.67
In contrast to Banks’s attempt to carry out the role of the detective

who single-handedly solves the case and restores order is the passivity of
the international community in Shanghai which places its ill-founded
optimism in Banks’s ability to resolve their situation. Not only does
Banks portray their failure to respond to the Japanese shelling of the
Chinese sector of the city, he also does so in terms that prompt readers
to see them as part of the problem, a problem already introduced
into the novel through Banks’s mother’s description of the complicity
of Morganbrook and Byatt, the employer of Banks’s father, in the
importation of opium into Shanghai (WWWO 62). Jaggi connects
this complicity to postcolonial concerns by linking Banks’s guilt to
the guilt of England, ‘which fuelled opium addiction as a matter of
policy and abandoned the Chinese to Japanese invasion in their abject
‘warren’ dwellings’. She finds the proof of this link in Banks’s disgust
with the international community in Shanghai, ‘its European elite
clutching cocktails during the Japanese bombardment of the Chinese
quarter as though watching a cricket match’. Notably, to accept this
argument readers are required to accept this unreliable narrator as
reliable, a complication that has not yet been addressed in the response
to the novel. (Similarly, we should believe that he really is a celebrated
detective.) The novel does, however, appear to sanction this reading
with its weaving of ‘a deft parable of colonial immoral earnings, through
a life built on tawdry spoils. “You see how the world really is – what
made possible your comfortable life in England?” Christopher is asked’.68
Surprisingly, postcolonial critics have not investigated this argument.
Alexander M. Bain provides the one essay to inquire into Ishiguro’s
portrayal of the failure of the international community. After noting
that the novel was written during the same period that Western
countries failed or chose not to intervene in the Balkan, Somalian, and
Rwandan crises, Bain reads the novel as exploring ‘the consciousness
of an “international community” haunted by its recent failure to
protect and by the prospect of a future in which unlimited obligations
to intervene prompt endless self-examination about “values” and
“interests” ’.69 Bain’s reading, although marred by its failure to
acknowledge the elusiveness of Banks’s narration, provides a useful
start to comprehending this element of the novel. It asks us to consider
how our memories of the past interrogate our present.
ON MEMORY
In all of his novels, Ishiguro foregrounds the role and processes of

memory. Shaffer perhaps summarises memory’s role best: ‘Ishiguro’s
novels are psychological mystery-voyages into the protagonist’s
problematic or compromised past’,70 but in portraying these voyages,

Ishiguro also demonstrates memory’s ‘stratagems, its selectivity, its
obsessional quality, its refinements, its expedience and use’.71 As in his
first three novels, Orphans foregrounds memory through the method
of narration and the narrator’s admissions of uncertainty in the veracity
of his recall. The events of the novel ‘are told in retrospect – sometimes
from the distance of only hours, sometimes from a great many years’.72
Additionally, the structuring of Banks’s account in notebook format,
established in part by the detailed dates and places provided at the
beginning of every chapter, is continuously overrun by the narrator’s
memories: ‘despite this superficial fixing of time in his work, the narrative
frequently spins wildly through different eras. The dates Ishiguro likes to
fix are merely the dates of recall’.73 Memory is foregrounded as well by
the narrator’s trouble with them: ‘Banks makes it clear again and again
that he is well aware of the fragility of recollection.’74 Ishiguro’s focus, in
fact, appears to be the struggle that memories impose on the individual,
the insistence of the past in a character’s present: ‘His narrators, all of
whom have suffered a deep psychological rupture in their lives, are often
fighting a long-standing battle to relate their past to a present with which
it does not seem to fit.’75
Additionally, as John J. Su has argued in relation to Remains,
Ishiguro uses memory to trigger nostalgia, an emotion he then uses to
reconfigure the present.76 He refers to nostalgia as ‘a much-maligned
emotion’ and suggests that the English undervalue it ‘because it harks
back to empire days and to guilt about the empire’. Ishiguro argues,
however, that ‘nostalgia is the emotional equivalent of idealism.
You use memory to go back to a place better than the one you fi nd
yourself in.77 This harkening back to a previous time is not unprob-
lematic, a point that the novel emphasises most clearly in its portrayal
of Shanghai’s International Settlement but also in Banks’s failure of
memory: ‘Banks’s growing amnesia, which arouses panic in him, is
symptomatic of a generalised cultural amnesia regarding British and
European exploitation of China.’78 Rather than forget, the novel pro-
poses, better to incorporate the positive qualities of the past into our
lives in the present. The nostalgic desire, then, can lead ‘us imagina-
tively to create a better world’.79
ON CHILDREN
Memory’s role is most prominent in the novel’s portrayal of chil-

dren. The novel’s title points readers to this connection: the ‘When we
were’, indicating a reference in the present to a time in the past, and
‘orphans’, taken literally, indicating children. It is also this intersection of
memory and childhood that most touches readers’ emotions: for Wood,
‘The novel’s highest achievement is the gentle way it offers Christopher’s
tale as a surreal allegory of the ways in which we are the prisoners of our
childhoods, the criminals of our pasts, always guilty with memory’.80
Shaffer, similarly, reads the novel as exploring ‘the awful burden of guilt
that such children take on to correct or undo their orphaned states’ and
sees this guilt in characters’ ‘need to “rescue” their parents and others […]
all, apparently, to no avail. In instance after instance, such attempts at res-
cue are “betrayed” ’.81 Banks’s pursuit of memories back to his childhood
‘is only an echo of a more universal “chasing of the shadows of vanished
parents”, in which we all, in one way or another, engage’.82 He looks to
his childhood past trying to solve its difficulties, but here Ishiguro has
equipped him with a different set of tools: ‘Relying on the detective’s
tools of deduction and rationality, Banks tries to heal the wounds of his
childhood.’83
The nature of these wounds has not been well articulated. Notably,
Wood, while trying to reason out the title, provides a provocative
attempt to locate them in one of the novel’s largest omissions. Having
noted that the ‘we’ in the title suggests the presence of another orphan
alongside Banks that the novel does not provide, Wood points to
a further problem that a literal reading of the title enjoins:
Nor does the novel, in defiance of its title, really describe any moment
when Christopher was an orphan: we see him as a happy child, and then
as a successful adult. The time when he was an ‘orphan’ (at St. Dunstan’s)
is precisely the book’s and presumably Christopher’s painful lacuna.84
The novel provides some support for this reading. While the most
obvious source of proof, the few scenes that Banks recounts from this
period, provide some clues, most obviously, his desire for ‘connections’,
further evidence might be deduced from the possible foreshadowing
provided by Akira’s unhappy time at school in Japan and the possible
backshadowing provided by Jennifer’s time at St. Margaret’s and her
later unhappiness, and as well, the larger theme of the difficulty of being
English (for example, WWWO 76, 79–80). Ishiguro provides a more
general origin for the wound while discussing the origin of the novel in
‘the metaphor of orphans’. It is a metaphor that marks a crucial moment
in life, as Ishiguro puts it, ‘that moment in our lives when we come out
of the sheltered bubble of childhood and discover that the world is not
the cosy place that we had previously been taught to believe’. Moreover,
not only is it a universal experience, Ishiguro suggests that ‘Even when
we become adults, something of this disappointment, I think, remains.’85
As in The Unconsoled, one of the novel’s key images instructing
readers how to understand the narration appears near the novel’s
beginning. In Ishiguro’s previous novel, it was the tear in the carpet

documenting Ryder’s manipulations of reality (Unc 16–17); here the
novel’s use of the detective genre, its reliance on memory, and its
investigation of childhood are joined in the image of the magnify-
ing glass for which ‘a second magnifying glass is needed to read the
inscription saying that it was made in Zurich in 1887’ (WWWO 9).86
The magnifying glass does not appear again until near the novel’s
conclusion when it provides the ‘surreal mismatch between the society
sleuth’s myopic mind and the oceanic misery around him – “using
a magnifying glass to look at corpses in a war-zone”, as [Ishiguro]
says’. As Tonkin suggests, this myopia ‘effectively stops the hero from
achieving much of an adult inner life until the book’s final pages’.87
Reich, too, picks up on the absurdity of Banks looking through his
magnifying glass at the large wounds of the little Chinese girl’s dead
mother, and proposes that for Banks the glass’s limiting of details
‘makes the unbearable, at least for a moment, bearable. For the reader,
viewing the accretion of detail that constitutes and transcends mem-
ory through the prism of Ishiguro’s ordered larger vision reveals the
truth’.88 But the earlier appearance of the magnifying glass, in which
the instrument built for detecting requires another to detect itself, pro-
vides readers with a model for reading Banks’s narrative, in particular
his need for another to detect himself. This model is most valuable for
interpreting his fi nal meeting with his mother, for ‘From her brief dis-
located words, Banks discovers that his mother never expected him to
rescue her, and that her love for him remains unconditional.’89 Banks,
the great detective, has been unable to solve the case of himself, but
his mother, looking through a lens that magnifies her memories, reads
the word ‘Puffin’ on the detective and provides him the information
that allows for the case’s resolution.
CONCLUSION
While it exhibits themes and elements featured in Ishiguro’s earlier

work, Orphans remains a complex and original novel. The response
to the novel provides a particularly fascinating perspective on reader
subjectivity and interpretive instability, and the paucity of scholarly
response to the novel offers several opportunities. One of the tasks
awaiting scholars is to elucidate the various moments of critical con-
tention. Further examination of Ishiguro’s innovative appropriation
technique might better illuminate how it functions in the novel and
how its functioning aids our understanding of the novel. An examina-
tion of Banks’s narration might also improve our understanding of his
character. As well, theorists working from a postcolonial perspective
have been largely silent on this novel despite the power imbalances it
portrays and despite its thorough questioning of identity, both personal
and national. Finally, but far from conclusively, the novel’s play on our
expectations of mystery and its resolution and its probing of truth and
knowledge suggest the work awaiting in studies based on genre analy-
sis and cognitive poetics. Ultimately, however, the novel’s power lies
in our recognition of and response to its meditations on identity, loss,
and childhood. In doing so we can understand the novel’s value in its
continuing of Ishiguro’s investigation into how we create and deny
meaning in our lives. His next novel, Never Let Me Go, returns to issues
of identity, loss, and childhood, but adds a range of new concerns,
including medical research and individuality. He does so through a
voice entirely new to Ishiguro’s work, the voice of a young woman
named Kathy, a carer.
CH A P TER EIGHT
Questioning the Possibles: Never

Let Me Go (2005)
W hile the response to When We Were Orphans was often puzzling,

Ishiguro’s sixth novel, Never Let Me Go, met with almost unani-
mous critical approval and immediate scholarly interest. Critics have
praised every aspect of the novel: it is ‘A masterpiece of craftsmanship
that offers an unparalleled emotional experience’.1 Set in a parallel
Britain, in a parallel 1990s, the novel, like all of his previous novels,
uses a fi rst-person narrator, Kathy H., who combs through memo-
ries of her past. Readers eventually realise that Kathy H. is a clone
living in a boarding school with other clones who will all graduate to
become ‘carers’, then ‘donors’, and after four ‘donations’, at the most,
they will die. Amidst her recollections of childhood and adolescence,
Ishiguro layers a story that demands a questioning of our values and
ethics, and what we take for granted as truth.
Readers begin the book unaware that the narrator is a clone but,
repeatedly confronted with perplexing details and language, are led
by ‘the shadows of things not said, glimpsed out of the corner of one’s
eye’ to deduce Kathy’s situation.2 Consequently, as James Wood points
out, ‘Reviews of this singular novel have tended to stress the fi rst-
stage detection involved in reading it; whereas Ishiguro, as ever, is
interested in far foggier hermeneutics.’ Wood acknowledges Ishiguro’s
pacing, but makes the distinction that Ishiguro’s ‘real interest is not in
what we discover but in what his characters discover, and how it will
affect them. He wants us to inhabit their ignorance, not ours’.3
We inhabit their ignorance through Ishiguro’s fidelity to a narrating
voice that shuns the literary. Rather than the enriched vocabularies
137
of some first-person narrators, Kathy tends to cliché: ‘“I know for a

fact”; “it means a lot to me”; “a complete waste of space”. She begins
sentences with “actually” and “anyway”. She does not exactly have
an impoverished lexicon: she readily uses words like “languorous”,
“ambivalent” and “trammelled.”’4 Frank Kermode (born 1919)
recognises that her ‘familiar, chatty style’ suits the character, but adds,
‘Whatever the virtues of this authorial decision, the texture of the
writing becomes altogether less interesting.’5 Sarah Kerr, however, goes
beyond Kermode’s standard, based on ‘interest’, to contend Ishiguro’s
matching of Kathy’s voice to her experience ‘is a feat of imaginative
sympathy and technique. He works out intricate ways of showing her
naïvete, her liabilities as an interpreter of what she sees, but also her
deductive smarts, her sensitivity to pain and her need for affection’.6
Despite this heroism and Ishiguro’s fantastic, almost sci-fi, premise,
the novel’s power is in its connection to the everyday and the human.
Rather than ‘a panoramic dystopia’, Ishiguro ‘remains fixed on intimate
things – on the small social groupings within a school, on the nuances
of personal relationships’.7 His creation of ‘horror […] in the mun-
dane’,8 is made more chilling as readers are led to focus on questions of
human existence: ‘Ishiguro’s dark answer is that the modern desperation
regarding death, combined with technological advances and the natural
human capacity for self-serving fictions and evasions […] could easily
give rise to new varieties of socially approved atrocities.’9 Wood finds
the novel’s power in ‘its picture of ordinary human life as in fact a cul-
ture of death. That is to say, Ishiguro’s book is at its best when, by ask-
ing us to consider the futility of cloned lives, it forces us to consider the
futility of our own’.10 Wood’s emphasis on futility was also recognised
by reviewers who detected Beckett’s influence on Ishiguro:
As in Beckett, Ishiguro’s characters, in their detached world, show us a

version of our own minute preoccupations and piddling distractions, and
raise life’s largest questions for us all. Is this all there is? Must it end so
soon? Why strive? Why persist? What is it all for?11
Alongside such questioning, the novel’s portrayal of clones used as

organ donors until death guarantees responses invoking ethical debates.
Novelist Margaret Atwood (born 1939) describes the moral context:
The outer world wants these children to exist because it’s greedy for
the benefits they can confer, but it doesn’t wish to look head-on at what
is happening. We assume – though it’s never stated – that whatever
objections might have been raised to such a scheme have already been
overcome: By now the rules are in place and the situation is taken for
granted – as slavery was once – by beneficiaries and victims alike.12
NE V E R LET ME G O 139
Questions of ethics and morality permeate the novel: novelist Joseph

O’Neill (born 1964) likens these to the issues raised by the German
philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900): ‘one of the many
Nietzschean insights of the novel is that successful crimes produce
mutations in morality.’13 Ishiguro acknowledges the value of his clones
to establish such discussions, discussions that suggest some of literature’s
most persistent questions: ‘which in recent years have become a little
awkward to raise in fiction. “What does it mean to be human?” “What
is the soul?” “What is the purpose for which we’ve been created, and
should we try to fulfi l it?” ’14
Reviewers have also realised the novel’s connection to contemporary
debates. Gary Rosen describes the novel’s intersection with debates on
medical research:
What’s upsetting about Kathy isn’t her existence as a clone but

rather the fate that has been assigned to her: to die young, used up for
the medical benefits of others. She is at once a literary protest against
research cloning and, by virtue of her strength as a character, a quiet
suggestion that reproductive cloning may not be so troubling after all.15
Daniel Vorhaus also focuses on the novel’s contribution to ethical dis-

cussions of cloning: ‘Whatever our other concerns about the inevitable
emergence of reproductive cloning, to continue to imagine the clone as
a soulless non-human entity is the mark of a scared and close-minded
society.’16 As M. John Harrison points out, however, ‘there’s no science
here’. The novel’s primary concern, he proposes, is not cloning but
what keeps us from exploding, ‘why we don’t just wake up one day and
go sobbing and crying down the street, kicking everything to pieces
out of the raw, infuriating, completely personal sense of our lives never
having been what they could have been’.17
Not surprisingly, then, reviewers have called the novel ‘an existen-
tial fable’18 and ‘a parable about mortality’19 and noted the immensity
of its themes: ‘Inescapable death, loss, the destruction or dissipation
of what once was valued, love and life reduced over time to detri-
tus cast on the wind.’20 While Tim Adams describes it as ‘Ishiguro’s
most profound statement of the endurance of human relationships’,21
Atwood calls it ‘a thoughtful, crafty, and finally very disquieting look
at the effects of dehumanization on any group that’s subject to it’.22
Peter Kemp, similarly, picks up on the novel’s theme of exploitation,
noting that it ‘never hardens into anything as clear-cut as allegory
but it resonates with disquieting suggestiveness. Slowly uncover-
ing an appalling system, Ishiguro uses it to stir emotions – shock,
compassion, shame, guilt – that exposés of brutally callous social or
global injustices might evoke’.23
Finally, Ishiguro’s reliance on the everyday and foregrounding of

questions of human existence allows him to return to the portrayal
of childhood. His naming of the children’s school, Hailsham, ‘As in
“sham”; as in Charles Dickens’ Miss Havisham [in Great Expectations],
exploiter of uncomprehending children’, immediately suggests the
difficulties the children face.24 Ishiguro describes the boarding school
as a metaphor for childhood: ‘as a physical manifestation of the way
all children are separated off from the adult world, and are drip-fed
little pieces of information about the world that awaits them, often
with generous doses of deception – kindly meant or otherwise.’25 It
is an idea to which critics repeatedly return: ‘[the children’s] hesitant
progression into knowledge of their plight is an extreme and heart-
breaking version of the exodus of all children from the innocence in
which the benevolent but fraudulent adult world conspires to place
them.’26 Similarly, Theo Tait describes the novel’s reflections on ‘the
uncertainties of adolescence: a time, after all, when we all feel outsid-
ers yet try to blend in […] and when we all struggle with questions
about the purpose of our existence.’27
THE SCHOLARLY RESPONSE
In addition to the numerous reviews, two critical readings address

some of these issues and extend the understanding of this novel.
Rebecca Walkowitz, within a larger argument, reads the novel as
a critique of individuality, one that offers a provocative view on
unoriginality. Bruce Robbins uses what some critics have referred to
as the ‘banality’ of Ishiguro’s themes to introduce a new paradigm for
reading Ishiguro.
Rebecca L. Walkowitz, a New Reading of Originality
Walkowitz’s discussion of Never Let Me Go is situated within an excel-

lent article that responds to arguments suggesting translation leads to
cultural and political homogenisation. Questioning the assumption of
homogenisation’s undesirability, she argues that new world literature’s
many variables compel ‘us to consider not only the global production
and circulation of texts but also our ways of thinking about cultural
and political uniqueness’.28 Ishiguro’s work provides a compelling
example because his entire oeuvre implies ‘that it is inadequate, and
even unethical, to treat uniqueness as the defi ning quality of art,
culture, and human life’. Instead, she reads his fiction as using com-
parison to create a different sort of uniqueness: ‘the uniqueness of
a translation, the uniqueness of a cassette tape’.29
Never Let Me Go, she argues, ‘is a book about the value of unorigi-
nal expression’, replete with ‘bad copies and eccentric interpretations’,
a characterisation she supports with a useful catalogue of examples
that reveals the pervasiveness of this theme:
there is a cassette tape that plays a monotonous pop song called

‘Never Let Me Go’ whose lyrics the narrator adapts to her own story (70,
271–2); there is a mediocre television program whose sitcom relationships
the adolescent characters take as role models for adult behavior (121);
there is a magazine insert whose glossy image and cheerful rhetoric (‘Are
you the dynamic, go-ahead type?’) the narrator’s friend appropriates for
her ideal future (144); there are the drawings of metallic animals, which
are said to look ‘laboured, almost like they’d been copied’ (241); and
there is of course the narrator and her friends, all of whom are human
clones brought up to be organ donors for – what shall we call them?
– non-cloned, original humans.
Walkowitz provides both further evidence for this reading and a riposte to
the criticisms of Kathy’s narrating voice by discerning that it ‘seems to be
a carrier of the unoriginal expression that Ishiguro wants us to value’.30
A critique of individuality also appears in the novel’s ‘critique of
anthropocentrism’. Tommy’s drawings, in particular, ‘suggest that strat-
egies of abstraction allow us to see some bodies as mechanisms and oth-
ers as individuals’.31 This distinction of individuality allows the donation
system to function because while the humans value individuality above
all and are able to distinguish individuality in themselves, they per-
ceive the clones as lacking that highly valued individuality. The clones,
moreover, ‘lack interiority, which is measured, according to all of the
characters, by the capacity for genuine love, authentic expressivity, and
artistic originality’.32 Throughout the novel, then, ‘copied’ things are
portrayed negatively, an economy made clear early in the novel when
Kathy explains that when students like the poem of another student,
they want the original, not just a copy (NLMG 17). The contrast to the
copy is provided, for example, by Miss Emily’s belief that the clones’
production of original art work will demonstrate their sensitivity and
intelligence (NLMG 261). It is this privileging of individuality, a value
to which every character in the novel, human or clone, appears to have
been indoctrinated, that the novel critiques:
Seeing clones as humans is not the point. Instead, we are urged to see
humans as clones. That is, we are urged to see that even humans pro-
duced through biological reproduction are in some ways copies; and that
human culture, full of cassette tapes and television programs and rumors
and paperbacks of Daniel Deronda [(1876) by George Eliot (1819–80)],
is also unoriginal. It is by seeing the likeness between human originality
and the novel’s unoriginal objects – Kathy H., the cassette, the song, the
television program, the narration – that we recognize the large networks
of approximation and comparison in which individuality functions.33
The primacy of uniqueness in demonstrating individuality is reduced

and supplanted by a reconceptualisation of the idea of ‘unoriginal’ that
sees the object in its various relationships and contexts.
Interpretations are, likewise, portrayed as flawed. Most obvi-
ously, the eponymous song, ‘Never Let Me Go’, is interpreted twice
in the novel, once by Kathy and later by Madame (NLMG 70, 272).
Walkowitz connects these faulty interpretations with her model of
the network: ‘For Ishiguro, the point is not simply that art can mean
anything – that it is what you say or see – but rather that the content
of art will be transformed by expansive circulation and by the local
interpretations that readers impose.’ Given the significance of these
two interpretations, Walkowitz suggests that the novel’s title refers
not just to the name of a song or the characters’ interpretation of
the song, but to the cassette-tape recording itself, ‘one of the novel’s
pre-eminent “copies” ’.34 The two copies of this one recording play
an important role in the novel, revealing two models for consider-
ing uniqueness: one for people and art work, another for objects. In
the fi rst, ‘individuals have an ontological existence that defi nes what
they are and what they will be; copies simply inherit that existence.
The second model attributes uniqueness not to a prior existence but
to social embeddedness and the capacity for new contextualization’.35
Walkowitz offers the example of Kathy’s four similarly designed, but
differently coloured desk lamps (NLMG 208):
Kathy doesn’t value the desk lamps for what each one normally
does (shed light). Instead, she values them because they constitute
a group, because they allow her to contemplate similarities and
differences, and because they provide an occasion for new
comparisons. Kathy’s desk lamps are part of a group, but that group
is incomplete, and each desk lamp has the potential to join other
groups – those defi ned by, say, color rather than by design.36
Similarly, the Norfolk version of Kathy’s cassette tape connects her

not only to memories of Norfolk, and the afternoon when she and
Tommy found it, but also to her childhood memories of Hailsham
when she had the fi rst copy of the tape. In both cases, Walkowitz
contends, the tapes take on value through ‘social experience – we
might say the network – forged by the tapes’ circulation’. 37
The novel’s privileging of the second model of unique-
ness, Walkowitz proposes, is better seen by considering the cover
of the Japanese version of the novel. Unlike the covers of almost every
other edition, the Japanese edition does not feature a young woman,
in whole or part, or children playing, but an image of a cassette tape
the same size as the book. Considering this foregrounding of the
image of a tape rather than a person, Walkowitz interprets the novel’s
conceptualisation of art:
In Ishiguro’s novel, the work of art has no ‘deep down’: its meanings
are collaborative and comparative, and thus affirm, instead of a soul,
various social networks of production and consumption. Ishiguro sug-
gests that a song or a novel or a person can be a singular object as
well as a multiple-type object. In so doing, he proposes that uniqueness
depends not on an absolute quality or a predetermined future but on
the potential for comparison and likeness: all art is a cassette tape, for
better or for worse. Only by appreciating the unoriginality of art, Ishiguro
suggests, can we change the idea of culture itself.38
With this emphasis on comparison, collaboration, and networks,

Walkowitz provides a new paradigm for reading Ishiguro. It is a
model that looks past the old descriptions based on nation, culture,
and Englishness to read his work amidst the complexities of globalisa-
tion. In doing so, she not only demonstrates the frailty of many of the
attempts to categorise him, but also offers a new method for under-
standing his fiction. Finally, it is a model that allows readers to see the
extent to which Ishiguro writes about the attempts we all make to
construct meaning in our lives.
Bruce Robbins, ‘Cruelty is Bad’
Having found moments of cruelty throughout Ishiguro’s fiction and

interested in what he perceives, simultaneously, as their power and the
difficulty critics have had in articulating that power, Bruce Robbins
unpacks the complicated context of two moments of cruelty in Never
Let Me Go. Doing so, he addresses the tendency of critics, confronted
with the difficulty of these moments, to downplay and challenge the
usefulness of Ishiguro’s ethical vision. It is a complex but thoughtful
reading in which Robbins suggests that Ishiguro offers a context for
cruelty that may not explain the cruelty but reveals its necessity.
The language of the novel’s opening, in which Kathy introduces
herself, provides starting points for two important trajectories that the
novel follows. In her very fi rst sentence, she notes that she is a ‘carer’,
one who cares for others. Readers returning to this passage, know-
ing the fate of carers, recognise that Kathy’s off hand remark that she
will soon become a donor omits the more relevant point that she will
soon be dead. As Robbins notes though, Kathy’s language does not

foreground this information; instead, she focuses on her job perform-
ance with language that suggests her belief in the ideology of upward
mobility, a belief that the novel complicates further by setting her
‘professional ambitions […] within a bureaucracy that resembles the
welfare state both in its rationale and in its total penetration of the
private lives of those in its care’.39 For the cloned children, however,
the idea of upward mobility is a sham. The path of their lives, as Miss
Lucy tells them, is fi xed: care, donate, die (NLMG 81).
The genre, however, is not fi xed. Its modification, from the ‘bland,
squeaky-clean idiom of the middle-class boarding school novel, with
its beguilingly motivational assumption that the world is just and that
effort will eventually be rewarded’, to ‘dark, late twentieth-century
punk or slacker vision of “no future” ’,40 demonstrates the confl ict of
individual and collective. The narrative choices are similar to those
found in earlier Ishiguro works: ‘we look at the world through the
eyes of a character of limited consciousness, immersed in concerns and
anxieties that one cannot confidently call trivial, who prefers not to
contemplate the Big Picture.’ Such narration leads, Robbins proposes,
to feelings of sympathy for Kathy, Stevens, and Ryder and questions
how our own happiness depends ‘on a blinkering of awareness’ we
might at other times fi nd ‘outrageous and repulsive’. It provokes this
questioning by examining ‘the partly existential desire that sustains
the upward mobility story’. In our identification with the uncloned,
‘the absolute peremptoriness of the practical’, our desire and need to
assert our individuality, overrides collective justice. Collective jus-
tice only reappears when we are driven to contemplate ourselves,
‘coldly and impersonally’, as part of the mass of individuals, and here
the novel equates our focus on individuality as ‘literally trying to
get away with murder’, to live using the organs of those who died
providing them.41 The alternative is to identify with the carers and
donors and be murdered. Here Robbins fi nds a possible argument
for arousing social aspiration, if that aspiration leads to changing the
system. Alternatively, Ishiguro might be demonstrating that we need
to see ourselves, not as individuals, but as units of a mass: ‘This is
the demand for an impersonal coldness that, by the usual standards
of proximity-fi rst, could only register as ethical deficiency, even as
cruelty.’42 It is, then, in the emotionless shifting of the perception of
the individual from sovereign to member of a collective that Robbins
fi nds a type of cruelty.
While Miss Lucy’s speech exposes the hopelessness of the clones’
situation (NLMG 81), it does not change their outlook. They break
the rules only in the myth they create about deferrals; otherwise,
their hope for recognition and rewards, evident in Kathy’s opening
self-introduction, distracts them from their horrible futures. Reading

Ishiguro as concerned with what makes action unthinkable, Robbins
ascribes the clones’ inaction to ‘the ideology of the welfare state, which
gives a grateful semblance of meaning and legitimacy to the stopgap
efforts of every day’.43 Only late in the novel does Tommy question the
importance of Kathy’s work, an exchange in which Robbins detects
the collusion of the welfare state with upward mobility. While Kathy
excuses her devotion to her work through her belief that its social
good justifies it, the social good involved allows her, Robbins suggests,
the credit or advantage valued in the ideology of upward mobility. In
fact, Robbins proposes that Ishiguro’s ‘characteristic effects’ can be
seen as a questioning of the welfare-state vision, ‘a vision centered on
that bittersweet compromise between social justice and the injustice
enforced by capitalist competition’.44 For example, Kathy’s remark
on the small size of the recovery rooms is immediately qualified by
her acknowledgement of the quality of their design and comfort, a
response that quickly obscures the point that the recovery rooms are
only necessary because of the required donations and that they signal
‘a suffering that is beyond any possible compensation’. Citing Kathy’s
claim to prevent ‘agitation’ in her donors, Robbins concludes, ‘Blank
and bureaucratic, cravenly accepting of monstrously limited expecta-
tions, dedicated to suppressing all “agitation” at the deep injustice that
underlies the system as a whole: this is the voice of the welfare state
much as its severest critics understand it.’45
One response to the welfare state is anger, as Tommy demonstrates.
However, when Miss Lucy, visibly angry, tells Tommy not to worry
about his artistic difficulties and that they are not his fault, his
agitation lessens. Consistent with the critical view of the welfare state
that permeates the novel, his change reveals how bribery with small
compensations aims to occlude the larger causes for anger. Miss Lucy
curtails his anger and artistic aspiration, but since aspiration is only
meant to distract the Hailsham students, effacing anger by effacing
aspiration leaves only his truth, and Tommy’s truth should make him
angry. Consequently, effacing anger by effacing merit leads back to
anger. Since Tommy is again angry, years later when told deferrals are
a myth, it is possible that Miss Lucy does not eliminate his anger, but
suspends it. Perhaps Tommy somehow understood the inequity of his
situation, ‘knowledge of a general social injustice to which anger was
an entirely appropriate response’.46
Miss Lucy’s advice on striving is equally complicated. She can only
advise Tommy by contradicting herself: she wants him to aspire, but
aspiration is only reasonable in a system that rewards it. Before leav-
ing the school, then, she reverses her position, a shift ‘from reassurance
to what might appear to be another of those moments of gratuitous
emotional violence’.47 She tells Tommy his art is ‘rubbish’ and she is, in
part, at fault (NLMG 108). Her criticism, Robbins contends, is an act of
cruelty, explained, however, as an attempt to protect him: with no way
out of his situation, perhaps self-delusion betters hopelessness. With her
admission of fault, Miss Lucy, a representative of the system, reveals a
fault in the system. With her demonstration of anger, she presents the
possibility of ‘angry aspiration, a goal that would require maintain-
ing rather than eliminating the anger that seems to block the passage
upward’.48 Robbins, consequently, posits the possibility of a system able
to see merit in those who seek to change it.
Kathy too tells Tommy his art is ‘rubbish’. It is her cruelty Robbins
reads as ‘the paradigmatic […] scene of inexplicable cruelty between
people who love each other’.49 Ruth, ridiculing Tommy, lies and tells
him that, like her, Kathy also finds his artwork ridiculous. Kathy,
knowing that she has to tell Tommy that Ruth is lying, does not: ‘an
act of omission forces us to ask how a character can be so cruel to the
one person she has always loved.’50 While Kathy accounts for her silence
thinking, ‘let him think the absolute worst’ (NLMG 195), Robbins
wonders if this means the ‘worst about her, or the worst about himself?’
The latter meaning would duplicate Miss Lucy’s final statement to him,
but Robbins (making a claim not particularly well supported) suggests
she is pronouncing ‘a larger judgment about things in general: let him
think the absolute worst about his own situation, about what awaits
them all, about the system to which they belong’. Either interpretation
suggests ‘cruelty is indistinguishable from caring’, for only with cruelty
can she ‘lovingly hold open the possibility (however theoretical) of an
aspiration that he would be allowed to enjoy’.51
Kathy’s response is to a particular situation. She has the ability to
understand the emotions of those around her, and she is reliable. In
fact, Robbins suggests, she is so reliable that Ishiguro might be sug-
gesting readers question her, question whether her reliability does not
depend on her ignoring the desperateness of their futures, question
whether her calmness does not signal her acceptance of the validity
of the system. But if her ‘inexplicable cruelty toward Tommy is a sign
of anger against the system […] then the cruelty would of course no
longer be inexplicable. Nor would it be simply what it seems: cruelty.
It would also be, like Miss Lucy’s, an oblique expression of ethical
generosity’. Robbins emphasises this point because some have read
Ishiguro as ‘making only the most banal and uncontroversial ethical
statements’. But as Robbins has demonstrated, cruelty here is ‘part of a
more expansive and counter-intuitive political vision’, which requires
us ‘to consider caring here as possibly confl icting with caring there,
that allows us to consider the welfare state as a distanced, anger-bearing
project in which the anger is a necessary part of a genuine concern
for people’s welfare’. It is a vision requiring a look beyond the welfare

of those right around us, even if that is cruel, a vision that sends us
back to Ishiguro’s fiction to consider ‘whether what seems to be an
ethical platitude […] might turn out to be a loud warning against
ethical platitudes, and in particular against the easy ethical comfort
with which Ishiguro is so often associated’.52
CONCLUSION
Like the clones who might fi rst be considered copies but quickly
reveal their complexity and humanity, the simplicity of Never Let Me
Go masks a complex novel that questions our ethics and existence.
Responses to the novel have risen to the challenge of this complexity
and provided numerous starting points to initiate its discussion.
In particular, Walkowitz’s reading distinguishes a new frame for
unoriginality. With her emphasis on comparison and networks, it is
a reading that might also lead to a better understanding of the issue
of ‘connectedness’ that suff uses Ishiguro’s work, a suggestion made
much plainer by recalling Christopher Banks, the narrator of When
We Were Orphans, and his desire for connections, and Ishiguro’s
development of the innovative appropriation technique which allowed
him to write novels, such as The Unconsoled and Orphans, that embody
connections. Robbins develops a careful reading of Ishiguro’s vision
that compels a return to the earlier novels for possible reassessment.
More importantly, he reminds us of the primary complexity of
Ishiguro’s fiction: the difficulty of negotiating our lives with ourselves
and others.
Conclusion
This guide has aimed to include the most important readings in

English of Kazuo Ishiguro’s novels, a goal constantly challenged by the
continuing and theoretically diverse scholarship on his work. Recently,
several more analyses of Ishiguro’s work have appeared demonstrating
this sustained critical interest. Three such recent essays that merit
further study are by Natalie Reitano, Leona Toker and Daniel
Chertoff, and Lisa Fluet. Reitano provides a useful reading of The
Unconsoled, arguing that it ‘fitfully interrogates the idea of a founding
traumatic rupture by rethinking the relation between the memory
and promise that structure any present’.1 Toker and Chertoff, while
attempting to explain the effect of the narration of Never Let Me Go on
readers, discuss the features that align it with other dystopian fictions.2
Perhaps most intriguingly, Fluet examines the narrators of Ishiguro’s
four most recent novels to conclude that they ‘give us access to feelings
– often ugly, if not always strong – that convey not a comfortably
agreed-upon idea of humanity, but rather what it might feel like to
lose one’s individual sense of “me” in an impersonal, collective “we”’.3
These are promising efforts which respond to questions established in
earlier responses with original arguments that extend the discussion of
Ishiguro’s fiction.
It is not within the scope of this Guide to cover criticism related
to Ishiguro’s ever-developing career as a screenwriter. However, his
work on the adaptation of The Remains of the Day, and his two original
screenplays, The White Countess (2005), produced with Ismail Merchant
(1936–2005) and James Ivory (born 1928), and The Saddest Music in
the World (2003), produced by experimental fi lmmaker Guy Maddin
(born 1956), certainly merit attention, as does the adaptation of his sixth
novel, Never Let Me Go. Earl G. Ingersoll has written an informative
essay on the differences between Remains as novel and fi lm4 while
Edward T. Jones has written an equally entertaining essay comparing
the screenplay produced by Merchant and Ivory’s long-time collaborator
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (born 1927) with the unpublished screenplay
produced by Nobel-prize winning dramatist Harold Pinter.5 Since the
release of The Saddest Music in the World and The White Countess, both
fi lms have received numerous positive reviews: A. O. Scott lauded the
former as, ‘a strangely joyful spectacle of lamentation and misery’;6 Mick
LaSalle described the latter as ‘Measured and meticulous, with […] rich
performances.’7 The White Countess, however, was generally reviewed
less enthusiastically. Peter Bradshaw’s review captures the tone of others
148
C O NCLUSI O N 149
calling it, ‘interminably long, ploddingly paced’.8 Despite such criticisms

and the lack of any scholarly criticism published on either fi lm, each
presents compelling possibilities for understanding Ishiguro’s work.
Most obviously, by setting The White Countess in Shanghai at the start of
the Sino-Japanese War (1937–45), Ishiguro invites a direct comparison
to When We Were Orphans. Despite this similarity, however, the fi lm
and novel bear little resemblance to each another. More importantly,
the fi lm’s wounded protagonists faced with the challenges of their daily
lives remind readers of Ishiguro’s earlier statement about his choice
of settings for his first three novels: ‘I tend to be attracted to pre-war
and post-war settings because I’m interested in this business of values
and ideals being tested, and people having to face up to the notion
that their ideals weren’t quite what they thought they were before the
test came.’9 It is hard to imagine a film as different from The White
Countess as The Saddest Music in the World, yet this movie, too, has clear
connections to Ishiguro’s fiction, although its most obvious connection
is to Ishiguro’s fourth novel, The Unconsoled. While at first glance,
the fi lm and novel appear to bear few similarities in plot and setting,
both foreground the purported healing power of music in the midst
of surreal settings. An original and provocative fi lmmaker, Maddin
shot the fi lm ‘in a deliberately anachronist[ic] style – tinted black-and-
white with color inserts, gauzy glamour, halated backlighting’,10 and
this style provides possibly the only fi lmic portrayal conceivable of the
strange peregrinations of Ryder, the narrator and protagonist of The
Unconsoled. The many connections linking the fi lm and the novel, such
as the portrayal in both of a car crash leading to a mistaken amputation,
offer scholars of Ishiguro’s works interesting comparisons and new paths
along which to investigate his art.
Despite the numerous responses to Ishiguro’s fiction described in
this book, much more remains to be done. Most recently, Ishiguro has
published a collection of linked short stories, Nocturnes: Five Stories of
Music and Nightfall (2009), that requires a response. It is important to
reiterate that When We Were Orphans, in particular, has not received
the scholarly attention it demands: it is a complex novel using an
innovative narrative technique that embodies the meaning of the
text. Although many gaps in the scholarship have been noted while
discussing the novels, these gaps, for the most part, can be grouped
into three categories. First, although Ishiguro is continually referred
to as a master prose stylist, there has been no major stylistic analysis of
his writing. Discussions of his style have been limited to brief episodic
analyses, or comparisons to other writers, in the service of some other
purpose. It is a glaring omission in the collective response to the
work of a writer so adept in conveying nuance and detail. Second,
while Toker and Chertoff ’s recent essay provides a start to cognitive
readings of Ishiguro’s work, further readings based on cognitive

studies of poetics and narrative hold the promise of providing valuable
instruction on the psychology of Ishiguro’s work. This promise can
be understood, in part, by reviewing the propensity of earlier critics
to rely on Freudian readings; however, such readings almost always
attempt to explain some aspect of a character’s motivation (while
the most horrendous attempt to read the novels as documents of
Ishiguro’s motivations). Cognitive readings would, most certainly,
provide revisions to those earlier readings, but also offer a better
understanding of how the novels connect with their readers. Lastly,
the ethical dimension of Ishiguro’s novels, particularly The Remains
of the Day, has received some attention, but given the weight that
Ishiguro’s fiction places on the missteps of his characters, their often
problematic responses to these missteps, and the settings within which
these missteps occur, more analysis of the ethics of these stories, not
only ethics-based analysis of the depicted events but also the ethics of
their narration, is required. The addressing of these omissions and the
further development of the engaged scholarship that has characterised
much of the response to Ishiguro’s novels promises to provide much
more fascinating reading and illumination of Ishiguro’s fiction.
Following the publication of each of Ishiguro’s fi rst three novels,
it was easy to fi nd critics who wrote about Ishiguro as though he
were Japanese or only writing about Japanese topics. This trend has,
thankfully, abated, and Ishiguro’s work is now greeted, for the most
part, with more involved, critically sound analyses that focus less on
his biography and more on the novels that he writes. Although some
scholars do still attempt to read Ishiguro as a postcolonial writer,
Chu-chueh Cheng’s thoughtful overview of Ishiguro’s oeuvre might
put an end to such simplifications. After contrasting Ishiguro’s fiction
with the terms postcolonial, ethnic, and immigrant and finding each
of these terms inaccurate for describing his work, Cheng observes,
‘in addition to his Japanese heritage, Western literary traditions,
monumental events, and personal innovation have collaboratively
informed his distinctive authorship.’ Moreover, such terms elide
‘other equally formative factors and subsequently displace the novelist
to an imaginary margin without an actual center. Although demo-
graphically a Japanese minority in Britain, the novelist has never been
a minor figure in the contemporary literary scene’. In agreement with
Malcolm Bradbury, Nobel Prize winner Kenzaburo Oe (born 1935),
Cynthia Wong, and novelist A.S. Byatt (born 1936) (a list to which
she might add Rebecca Walkowitz and many others), Cheng proposes
‘that Ishiguro ought to be categorized as an international novelist
writing in English’.11
C O NCLUSI O N 151
The readings of Ishiguro’s novels discussed here provide a critical

introduction to his status as an international writer. Notably, Ishiguro
has said that ‘international books are rooted in a very small place’,12
a statement that explains much of his fiction. He is not an interna-
tional writer because his works have been set in Japan, the United
Kingdom, Europe, and China, but because of his ability to peer into
the very small spaces of the characters that inhabit those settings. He
investigates what it means to be human. While Ishiguro’s novels are
set during momentous historical times, his concern is for the people of
his fictions and what they discover about themselves:
What I’m interested in is not the actual fact that my characters have
done things they later regret […] I’m interested in how they come to terms
with it. On the one hand there is a need for honesty, on the other hand a
need to deceive themselves – to preserve a sense of dignity, some sort of
self-respect. What I want to suggest is that some sort of dignity and self-
respect does come from that sort of honesty.13
His characters compel his readers to question what it means to plod

our way through lives replete with challenges and failures, standing
like Kathy at the end of Never Let Me Go, ‘thinking about the rubbish,
the flapping plastic in the branches, the shore-line of odd stuff caught
along the fencing’, imagining ‘this was the spot where everything I’d
ever lost since my childhood had washed up’, (263) lacking the second
magnifying glass Banks uses to uncover the origin of the magnify-
ing glass that establishes his identity (WWWO 9), training ourselves,
like The Unconsoled’s young Ryder, to endure the hurts that confront
us (171–2), tiling and wallpapering over the difficult bits, and watch-
ing the edge of the wallpaper start to peel, seeing a tile start to crack.
He is an international writer because these investigations peer into the
experiences of so many of us in so many places.
Notes
INTRODUCTION
1. Allan Vorda and Kim Herzinger, ‘An Interview with Kazuo Ishiguro’, Mississippi Review 20
(1991), pp. 134–5.
2. Barry Lewis, Kazuo Ishiguro (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), p. 20.
3. Dylan Krider, ‘Rooted in a Small Space: An Interview with Kazuo Ishiguro’, Kenyon
Review 20 (1998), p. 149.
4. Gregory Mason, ‘An Interview with Kazuo Ishiguro’, Contemporary Literature 30 (1989), p. 336.
5. Rocio Davis, ‘Imaginary Homelands in the Novels of Kazuo Ishiguro’, Miscelánea 15
(1994), pp. 139–54.
6. Mark Wormald, ‘Kazuo Ishiguro and the Work of Art’, in Richard J. Lane, Rod Mengham
and Philip Tew (eds) Contemporary British Fiction (Cambridge: Polity, 2002), p. 231.
7. Vorda and Herzinger (1991), p. 135.
8. Vorda and Herzinger (1991), p. 136.
9. Kazuo Ishiguro, Introduction to Yasunari Kawabata, Snow Country and Thousand Cranes,
trans. Edward G. Seidensticker (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), p. 2.
10. Lewis (2000), p. 19.
CHAPTER ONE
1. Penelope Lively, ‘Backwards and Forwards: Recent Fiction’, Encounter ( June–July 1982), p. 90.
2. Edith Milton, ‘In a Japan Like Limbo’, New York Times Book Review (9 May 1982), pp. 12–13.
3. Michael Wood, ‘Sleepless Nights’, New York Review of Books (21 December 1995), p. 18.
(1991), p. 134.
5. Anthony Thwaite, ‘Ghosts in the Mirror’, Observer (14 February 1982), p. 33.
6. Francis King, ‘Shimmering’, Spectator (27 February 1982), p. 25.
7. Jonathan Spence, ‘Two Worlds Japan Has Lost Since the Meiji’, New Society (13 May 1982),
p. 266.
8. Spence (1982), p. 267.
Review 20 (1998), p. 149.
11. Kazuo Ishiguro, introduction to Yasunari Kawabata, Snow Country and Thousand Cranes,
trans. Edward G. Seidensticker (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), pp. 1–3.
12. Lewis (2000), p. 20.
14. Basil Wright qtd in Gregory Mason, ‘Inspiring Images: The Influence of the Japanese
Cinema on the Writings of Kazuo Ishiguro’, East West Film Journal 3 (1989), p. 42.
15. Mason, ‘Inspiring Images’ (1989), p. 44.
21. Krider (1998), p. 150.
22. James Campbell, ‘Kitchen Window’, New Statesman (19 February 1982), p. 25.
152
NO TE S 153
23. King (1982), p. 24.

24. Spence (1982), p. 267.
25. Fumio Yoshioka, ‘Beyond the Division of East and West: Kazuo Ishiguro’s A Pale View of
Hills’, Studies in English Literature (1988), p. 81.
26. Peter Wain, ‘The Historical-Political Aspect of the Novels of Kazuo Ishiguro’, Language and
Culture ( Japan) 23 (1992), p. 180.
27. Cynthia Wong ‘The Shame of Memory: Blanchot’s Self-Dispossession in Ishiguro’s A Pale View
of Hills’, CLIO: A Journal of Literature, History, and the Philosophy of History 24 (1995), p. 139.
28. Wong (1995), p. 140.
29. Milton (1982), p. 12.
30. Paul Bailey ‘Private Desolations’, Times Literary Supplement (19 February 1982), p. 179.
31. Thwaite (1982), p. 33.
32. Nicholas de Jongh,‘Life After the Bomb’, Guardian (22 February 1982), p. 11.
33. Krider (1998), p. 150.
34. Mason, ‘Interview’ (1989), p. 338.
35. Lewis (2000), p. 22.
36. Lewis (2000), p. 23.
37. Brian W. Shaffer, Understanding Kazuo Ishiguro (Columbia, SC: University of South
Carolina Press, 1998), p. 19.
38. Lewis (2000), p. 23.
39. Campbell (1982), p. 25.
40. Milton (1982), p. 12.
41. De Jongh (1982), p. 11.
42. Lewis (2000), pp. 37–8: citing PVH pp. 11 and 137–8.
43. Lewis (2000), p. 39.
44. Yoshioka (1988), p. 72.
45. Michael Wood, ‘Sleepless Nights’, New York Review of Books (21 December 1995), p. 18.
46. Lewis (2000), p. 43.
47. Wong (1995), p. 141; qtd in Shaffer (1998), p. 36.
48. Milton (1982), p. 12; qtd in Shaffer (1998), p. 36.
49. Shaffer (1998), pp. 36–7.
50. Lively (1982), p. 90.
51. Bailey (1982), p. 179.
52. Wain (1992), p. 186.
53. Norman Page, ‘Speech, Culture, and History in the Novels of Kazuo Ishiguro’, in Mimi
Chan and Roy Harris (eds), Asian Voices in English (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University
Press, 1991), p. 168.
54. Wong (1995), pp. 142–3.
55. Campbell (1982), p. 25.
56. Bailey (1982), p. 179.
57. Mike Petry, Narratives of Memory and Identity: The Novels of Kazuo Ishiguro (Frankfurt: Peter
Lang, 1999), p. 39.
58. Lewis (2000), p. 37.
59. Lively (1982), p. 90.
60. King (1982), p. 24.
61. De Jongh (1982), p. 11.
62. Yoshioka (1988), p. 75.
63. Shaffer (1998), p. 21.
64. Shaffer (1998), p. 21.
65. Shaffer (1998), p. 23.
67. Shaffer (1998), p. 23.
15 4 N OT ES
69. Mason, ‘Interview’ (1989), p. 337; qtd in Shaffer, p. 24.

70. Shaffer (1998), p. 24.
71. Shaffer (1998), p. 24.
72. Shaffer (1998), p. 25.
73. Gabriele Annan,‘On The High Wire’, NewYork Review of Books (7 December 1989), p. 3.
74. Shaffer (1998), p. 25.
75. Mason, ‘Inspiring Images’ (1989), pp. 42–5.
76. Shaffer (1998), p. 26.
77. Mason, ‘Interview’ (1989), p. 338; qtd in Shaffer, p. 27.
78. Lewis (2000), p. 27.
79. Lewis (2000), p. 29.
80. Lewis (2000), p. 36.
81. Milton (1982), p. 12.
82. Lively (1982), p. 90.
83. Yoshioka (1988), p. 79.
84. Lewis (2000), p. 35.
85. Lewis (2000), p. 35.
86. Shaffer (1998), p. 30.
87. Shaffer (1998), p. 31.
88. Shaffer (1998), p. 32.
89. Shaffer (1998), p. 33.
90. Shaffer (1998), p. 21.
91. Shaffer (1998), p. 35.
92. Mark Wormald, ‘Kazuo Ishiguro and the Work of Art’, in Richard J. Lane, Rod Mengham
and Philip Tew (eds) Contemporary British Fiction (Cambridge: Polity, 2002), p. 231.
93. Wormald (2002), p. 232.
94. Wong (1995), p. 128.
95. Wong (1995), pp. 136–7.
96. Wong (1995), p. 138.
97. Wong (1995), p. 142.
100. De Jongh (1982), p. 11.
CHAPTER TWO
1. Nigel Hunt, ‘Two Close Looks at Faraway’, Brick: A Journal of Review, 31 (Fall 1987), p. 37.
2. Patrick Parrinder, ‘Manly Scowls’, London Review of Books (6 February 1986), pp. 16–17.
3. Geoff Dyer, ‘On Their Mettle’, New Statesman (4 April 1986), p. 25.
4. Kathryn Morton, ‘After the War was Lost’, New York Times Book Review (8 June 1986),
p. 19.
5. Michele Field, ‘This Britisher is Japanese’, Sydney Morning Herald (12 March 1988), p. 74.
6. Anne Chisholm, ‘Lost Worlds of Pleasure’, Times Literary Supplement (14 February 1986),
p. 162.
7. Christopher Tookey, ‘Sydenham, mon amour’, Books and Bookmen (March 1986), p. 33.
8. Rocio Davis, ‘Imaginary Homelands in the Novels of Kazuo Ishiguro’, Miscelánea, 15
(1994), pp. 139–54.
9. Bruce King, ‘The New Internationalism: Shiva Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, Buchi
Emecheta, Timothy Mo and Kazuo Ishiguro’, The British and Irish Novel Since 1960 (New
York: St. Martin’s, 1991), p. 207.
11. Mason, ‘Interview’, (1989), p. 341.
NO TE S 155
12. Norman Page, ‘Speech, Culture and History in the Novels of Kazuo Ishiguro’, Mimi Chan
and Roy Harris (eds), Asian Voices in English (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press,
1991), pp. 166–7.
14. King (1991), p. 208.
15. Clive Sinclair ‘The Land of the Rising Son’, Sunday Times Magazine (11 January 1987), p. 37.
17. Mason ‘Interview’ (1989), p. 343.
18. Malcolm Bradbury, ‘The Floating World’, in No, Not Bloomsbury (London: Andre Deutsch,
1987), p. 364.
19. Bradbury (1987), pp. 364–5.
20. King (1991), p. 208.
21. Lewis (2000), pp. 62–3.
22. Lewis (2000), p. 63.
23. Lewis (2000), p. 64.
24. Lewis (2000), pp. 64–5.
25. Lewis (2000), p. 65.
26. Lewis (2000), p. 66.
27. Lewis (2000), p. 67.
29. Hunt (1987), p. 38.
30. Rebecca L.Walkowitz,‘Ishiguro’s Floating Worlds,’ ELH, 68 (2001), p. 1071.
32. Shaffer (1998), p. 43.
33. Shaffer (1998), p. 44.
34. Shaffer (1998), p. 44.
35. Shaffer (1998), pp. 45–6.
36. Shaffer (1998), p. 48.
37. Shaffer (1998), pp. 49–50.
38. Shaffer (1998), p. 54.
39. Shaffer (1998), p. 56.
40. Tookey (1986), p. 34.
41. Shaffer (1998), p. 59.
42. Shaffer (1998), p. 59.
43. Shaffer (1998), p. 60.
44. Shaffer (1998), p. 61.
45. Tookey (1986), p. 34.
47. Cynthia F.Wong, Kazuo Ishiguro (Plymouth: Northcote House, 2000), p. 38.
48. Wong (2000), p. 39.
49. Margaret Scanlan, ‘Mistaken Identities: First-Person Narration in Kazuo Ishiguro’, Journal
of Narrative and Life History, 3: 2 & 3 (1993), p. 144.
50. Wong (2000), p. 41.
51. Wong (2000), p. 43.
52. Wong (2000), p. 44.
53. Wong (2000), p. 45.
54. Wong (2000), pp. 46–7.
55. Wong (2000), p. 49.
56. King (1991), p. 207.
57. Peter J. Mallett, ‘The Revelation of Character in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day
and An Artist of the Floating World’, Shoin Literary Review, 29 (1996), p. 12.
58. Page (1991), p. 166.
15 6 N OT ES
59. Scanlan (1993), p. 141.

60. Scanlan (1993), p. 142.
61. Scanlan (1993), pp. 142–3.
62. Scanlan (1993), p. 143.
63. Scanlan (1993), p. 144.
64. Scanlan (1993), p. 144.
65. Scanlan (1993), p. 144.
66. Scanlan (1993), p. 145.
67. Lewis (2000), p. 54.
68. Scanlan (1993), p. 151.
69. Lewis (2000), p. 54.
70. Mallett (1996), p. 18.
71. Scanlan (1993), p. 152.
72. Scanlan (1993), p. 152.
73. Gregory Mason, ‘Inspiring Images: The Influence of the Japanese Cinema on the Writings
of Kazuo Ishiguro’, East West Film Journal, 3 (1989), pp. 42–5.
74. Lewis (2000), pp. 69–70.
76. King (1991), p. 208.
77. Mallett (1996), p. 12.
78. Tookey (1986), p. 34.
80. King (1991), p. 207.
82. Morton (1986), p. 19.
CHAPTER THREE
1. Michiko Kakutani, ‘An Era Revealed in a Perfect Butler’s Imperfections’, New York Times
(22 September 1989), p. 33.
2. Terrence Rafferty, ‘The Lesson of the Master’, New Yorker (15 January 1990), p. 102.
3. Galen Strawson, ‘Tragically Disciplined and Dignified’, Times Literary Supplement (19–25
May 1989), p. 535.
4. William Hutchings, ‘English: Fiction’, World Literature Today 64: 3 (1990), p. 464.
5. Merle Rubin, ‘A Review of The Remains of the Day’, Christian Science Monitor (13 November
1989), p. 13.
6. Geoff Dyer, ‘What the Butler Did’, New Statesman and Society (26 May 1989), p. 34.
7. Mark Kamine, ‘A Servant of Self-Deceit’, The New Leader (13 November 1989), p. 21.
8. Gabriele Annan,‘On The High Wire’, NewYork Review of Books (7 December 1989), pp. 3–4.
9. Anthony Thwaite, ‘In Service’, London Review of Books (18 May 1989), p. 17.
10. David Gurewich, ‘Upstairs, Downstairs’, The New Criterion (December 1989), p. 80.
11. T. S. Eliot, ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’; qtd in Thwaite (1989), p. 17.
12. Lawrence Graver, ‘What the Butler Saw’, New York Times Book Review (8 October 1989), p. 3.
13. Strawson (1989), p. 535.
14. Kamine (1989), p. 22.
15. Rafferty (1990), p. 103.
16. Graver (1989), p. 3.
17. Alice Bloom, ‘Why the Novel (Still) Matters’, Hudson Review 43 (1990), p. 161.
18. Kamine (1989), p. 21.
19. Rafferty (1990), p. 102.
20. Kamine (1989), p. 22.
21. Margaret Scanlan, ‘Mistaken Identities: First-Person Narration in Kazuo Ishiguro’, Journal
of Narrative and Life History 3:2 & 3 (1993), p. 141.
NO TE S 157
22. Scanlan (1993), p. 146.

23. Scanlan (1993), p. 147.
24. Scanlan (1993), p. 151.
25. Deborah Guth, ‘Submerged Narratives in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day’, Forum
for Modern Language Studies 35.2 (1999), p. 126.
26. Guth (1999), p. 130.
27. Guth (1999), p. 131.
28. Guth (1999), p. 131.
29. Guth (1999), p. 132.
30. Guth (1999), p. 133.
31. Guth (1999), p. 134.
32. Scanlan (1993), p. 151.
33. Guth (1999), p. 136.
34. Guth (1999), p. 137.
35. Kathleen Wall ‘The Remains of the Day and Its Challenges to Theories of Unreliable
Narration’, Journal of Narrative Technique 24 (1994), p. 18.
36. Wall (1994), p. 22.
37. Wall (1994), p. 23.
38. Wall (1994), p. 24.
39. Wall (1994), p. 24.
40. Wall (1994), p. 25.
41. Wall (1994), p. 26.
42. Wall (1994), pp. 27–8.
43. Wall (1994), p. 28.
44. Wall (1994), p. 30.
45. Wall (1994), p. 29.
46. Wall (1994), p. 29.
47. Wall (1994), p. 30.
48. Seymour Chatman, Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1978), p.149; cited in Wall (1994), pp. 30–1.
49. Wall (1994), p. 31.
50. Wall (1994), p. 32.
51. Wall (1994), p. 34.
52. Wall (1994), p. 34.
53. Karl E. Jirgens, ‘Narrator Resartus: Palimpsestic Revelations in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The
Remains of the Day’, Q/W/E/R/T/Y: Arts, Littératures & Civilisations du Monde Anglophone
9 (1999), pp. 228–9.
54. Wall (1994), p. 36.
55. Wall (1994), p. 37.
56. James Phelan and Mary Patricia Martin, ‘“The Lessons of ‘Weymouth”: Homodiegesis,
Unreliability, Ethics, and The Remains of the Day’, Narratologies: New Perspectives on Narrative
Analysis (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1999), pp. 90–1.
57. Phelan and Martin (1999), p. 91. Italics in original.
58. Phelan and Martin (1999), p. 92.
61. Phelan and Martin (1999), pp. 105–6.
67. Phelan and Martin (1999), pp. 107–8.
15 8 N OT ES
68. Andrew Teverson, ‘Acts of Reading in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day’, Q/W/E/
R/T/Y: Arts, Littératures & Civilisations du Monde Anglophone 9 (1999), p. 251.
69. Teverson (1999), p. 252.
70. Teverson (1999), p. 253.
71. Teverson (1999), p. 256.
72. Teverson (1999), p. 256.
73. Teverson (1999), p. 254.
74. Jirgens (1999), p. 221.
75. Gurewich (1989) p. 80.
76. Teverson (1999), p. 255.
77. Teverson (1999), p. 257.
CHAPTER FOUR
1. Norman Page, ‘Speech, Culture, and History in the Novels of Kazuo Ishiguro’, in Mimi
Chan and Roy Harris (eds), Asian Voices in English (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University
Press, 1991), p. 162.
2. John Sutherland, ‘Why Hasn’t Mr. Stevens Heard of the Suez Crisis?’ Where Was Rebecca
Shot?: Curiosities, Puzzles, and Conundrums in Modern Fiction (London: Weidenfeld &
Nicolson, 1998), p. 188.
3. Meera Tamaya, ‘Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day: The Empire Strikes Back’, Modern Language
Studies 22 (1992), p. 51.
4. Kenzaburo Oe and Kazuo Ishiguro, ‘The Novelist in Today’s World: A Conversation’,
Boundary 2: An International Journal of Literature and Culture 18 (1991), p. 110.
5. John P. McCombe, ‘The End of (Anthony) Eden: Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day and
Midcentury Anglo-American Tensions’, Twentieth Century Literature: A Scholarly and Critical
Journal 48:1 (2002), p. 78.
6. McCombe (2002), pp. 78–9.
7. McCombe (2002), pp. 79–80.
8. McCombe (2002), pp. 93–4.
9. McCombe (2002), p. 81.
10. McCombe (2002), p. 81.
11. McCombe (2002), p. 82.
12. McCombe (2002), p. 82.
13. T. O. Lloyd, p. 341, qtd in McCombe (2002), p. 83.
14. McCombe (2002), p. 85.
15. McCombe (2002), p. 91.
16. McCombe (2002), p. 81.
17. McCombe (2002), p. 87.
18. McCombe (2002), p. 97.
19. G. Bo Ekelund, ‘Misrecognizing History: Complicitous Genres in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The
Remains of the Day’, International Fiction Review 32:1–2 (2005), p. 70.
20. Ekelund (2005), p. 71.
21. Ekelund (2005), p. 73.
22. Ekelund (2005), p. 70.
23. Ekelund (2005), p. 73.
24. Ekelund (2005), p. 73.
25. Ekelund (2005), pp. 70–1.
26. Ekelund (2005), p. 70.
27. Ekelund (2005), p. 71.
28. Ekelund (2005), pp. 73–4.
29. Ekelund (2005), p. 75.
30. Ekelund (2005), p. 76.
NO TE S 159
31. Ekelund (2005), p. 79.

32. Ekelund (2005), p. 83.
33. Ekelund (2005), pp. 83–4.
34. Ekelund (2005), pp. 85–6.
35. Ekelund (2005), p. 87.
36. Ekelund (2005), p. 90.
37. James M. Lang, ‘Public Memory, Private History: Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day’,
CLIO: A Journal of Literature, History, and the Philosophy of History 29:2 (2000), p. 144.
38. Lang (2000), p. 145.
39. Lang (2000), pp. 146–7.
40. Lang (2000), p. 147.
41. Lang (2000), p. 149.
42. Lang (2000), p. 150.
43. Lang (2000), p. 151.
44. Lang (2000), p. 152.
45. Michael Andre Bernstein, Foregone Conclusions: Against Apocalyptic History (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1994), p. 16; qtd in Lang (2000), p. 153.
46. Lang (2000), p. 153.
47. Lang (2000), p. 154.
48. Lang (2000), pp. 154–5.
49. Lang (2000), p. 158.
50. Lang (2000), pp. 156–7.
51. Lang (2000), p. 157.
52. Lang (2000), p. 160.
53. Lang (2000), p. 161.
54. Lang (2000), p. 161.
55. Lang (2000), p. 162.
56. Lang (2000), p. 163.
57. Gregory Mason, ‘An Interview with Kazuo Ishiguro’, Contemporary Literature 30 (1989),
p. 337; qtd in Lang (2000), p. 164.
58. John Ash, ‘Stick It Up Howard’s End’, GQ (August 1994), p. 43.
59. Susie O’Brien, ‘Serving a New World Order: Postcolonial Politics in Kazuo Ishiguro’s
The Remains of the Day’, Modern Fiction Studies 42:4 (1996), p. 788.
60. O’Brien (1996), p. 796.
61. O’Brien (1996), p. 788.
(1991), p. 140; qtd in O’Brien (1996), p. 789.
63. O’Brien (1996), p. 789.
64. O’Brien (1996), p. 790.
65. O’Brien (1996), p. 791.
66. O’Brien (1996), p. 792.
67. Pico Iyer, ‘“The Empire Writes Back”’, Time, (8 February 1993), p. 58; qtd in O’Brien
(1996), p. 793.
68. O’Brien (1996), p. 793.
69. O’Brien (1996), p. 788.
70. O’Brien (1996), p. 794.
71. O’Brien (1996), p. 795.
72. Salman Rushdie, ‘What the Butler Didn’t See’, Observer, (1989), p. 53; reprinted as ‘Kazuo
Ishiguro’, in Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–1991
(London: Granta Books, 1991), pp. 244–6.
73. Andrew Teverson, ‘Acts of Reading in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day’,
Q/W/E/R/T/Y: Arts, Littératures & Civilisations du Monde Anglophone 9 (1999), p. 254.
74. O’Brien (1996), p. 795.
16 0 N OT ES
75. O’Brien (1996), p. 796.

76. Molly Westerman, ‘Is the Butler Home? Narrative and the Split Subject in The Remains of
the Day’, Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 37.3 (2004), p. 157.
77. Westerman (2004), p. 158.
78. Westerman (2004), p. 158.
79. Westerman (2004), pp. 158–9.
80. Westerman (2004), p. 159.
81. Westerman (2004), p. 159.
82. Westerman (2004), p. 159.
83. Westerman (2004), p. 159.
84. Westerman (2004), p. 159.
85. Wall (1994), p. 23.
86. Westerman (2004), p. 160.
87. Westerman (2004), p. 160.
88. Salecl (1996), p. 180: qtd in Westerman (2004), p. 160.
89. Westerman (2004), p. 160.
90. Westerman (2004), p. 161.
91. Westerman (2004), p. 162.
92. Westerman (2004), p. 161.
93. Westerman (2004), p. 162.
94. Westerman (2004), p. 163.
95. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 70; qtd in Westerman
(2004), pp. 163–4.
96. Bhabha (1994), p. 77; qtd in Westerman (2004), p. 163.
97. Westerman (2004), p. 164.
98. O’Brien (1996), p. 801.
99. Westerman (2004), p. 167.
100. Westerman (2004), p. 167.
101. Westerman (2004), p. 168.
102. Westerman (2004), p. 169.
103. Westerman (2004), p. 160.
104. Ryan Trimm, ‘Inside Job: Professionalism and Postimperial Communities in The Remains
of the Day’, Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory 16.2 (2005), p. 138.
105. John J. Su, ‘Refiguring National Character: The Remains of the British Estate Novel’,
MFS: Modern Fiction Studies 48.3 (2002), p. 567.
106. Oe and Ishiguro (1991), p. 115.
CHAPTER FIVE
1. Daniel Schacter, The Seven Sins of Memory: How the Mind Forgets and Remembers (Boston:
Houghton, 2001).
2. Lillian Furst, ‘Memory’s Fragile Power in Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day and W. C. Sebald’s
“Max Ferber”’, Contemporary Literature 48.4 (2007), p. 533.
3. Furst (2007), p. 534.
4. Furst (2007), p. 535.
5. Furst (2007), p. 536.
6. Furst (2007), pp. 537–8.
7. Furst (2007), p. 538.
8. Furst (2007), p. 539.
9. Furst (2007), p. 539.
10. Furst (2007), p. 540.
11. Furst (2007), p. 541.
12. Furst (2007), pp. 541–2.
NO TE S 161
13. Furst (2007), p. 541.

14. Furst (2007), p. 542.
15. Furst (2007), p. 542.
16. Furst (2007), pp. 542–3.
17. Furst (2007), pp. 543–4.
18. Furst (2007), p. 545.
19. Furst (2007), p. 546.
20. Furst (2007), p. 546.
21. Furst (2007), p. 547.
22. Furst (2007), p. 548.
23. Furst (2007), p. 549.
24. Furst (2007), p. 542.
25. Furst (2007), p. 543.
26. M. Griffith, ‘Great English Houses/New Homes in England? Memory and Identity in
Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day and V. S. Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival’, Span 36
(1993), pp. 448–503.
28. Su (2002), p. 553.
29. Su (2002), pp. 555–6.
(1991), p. 139; qtd in Su (2002), p. 563.
31. Su (2002), p. 563.
32. Su (2002), p. 564.
33. Su (2002), p. 565.
34. Su (2002), p. 565.
35. Griffith (1993), p. 491.
36. Su (2002), p. 566.
37. Su (2002), p. 567.
38. Su (2002), p. 567.
39. Su (2002), p. 568.
40. Su (2002), p. 569.
41. Su (2002), p. 569.
42. Su (2002), pp. 569–70.
43. Su (2002), p. 570.
44. Susie O’Brien, ‘Serving a New World Order: Postcolonial Politics in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The
Remains of the Day’, Modern Fiction Studies 42:4 (1996), p. 793.
45. Su (2002), p. 570.
46. Su (2002), p. 571.
47. Su (2002), p. 571.
48. Su (2002), p. 572.
49. Kwame Anthony Appiah, ‘Liberalism, Individuality, and Identity’, Critical Inquiry 27.2
(2001), p. 313.
50. Appiah (2001), p. 315.
51. Appiah (2001), p. 316.
52. Appiah (2001), pp. 316–17.
53. Appiah (2001), p. 316.
54. Appiah (2001), p. 319.
55. Appiah (2001), p. 319.
56. Appiah (2001), p. 320.
57. Appiah (2001), p. 331.
58. David Medalie, ‘“What Dignity is There in That?”: The Crisis of Dignity in Selected Late-
Twentieth-Century Novels’, Journal of Literary Studies (2004), p. 2.
162 N OT ES
59. Medalie (2004), p. 4.

60. Aurel Kolnai, ‘Dignity’, in Robin S. Dillon (ed.) Dignity, Character, and Self-Respect (New
York: Routledge, 1995), p. 56; qtd in Medalie (2004), p. 4.
61. Medalie (2004), p. 4.
62. Medalie (2004), p. 5.
63. Michael Meyer, ‘Dignity as a (Modern) Virtue’, David Kretzmer and Eckart Klein (eds),
The Concept of Human Dignity in Human Rights Discourse (The Hague: Kluwer Law
International, 2002), p. 203; qtd in Medalie (2004), p. 5.
64. Medalie (2004), p. 6.
65. Meyer (2002), p. 203; qtd in Medalie (2004), p. 6.
66. Medalie (2004), p. 6.
67. Medalie (2004), p. 7.
68. Medalie (2004), p. 8.
69. Medalie (2004), p. 11.
70. David Gurewich, ‘Upstairs, Downstairs’, The New Criterion (December 1989), p. 78.
71. Rob Atkinson, ‘How the Butler Was Made to Do It. The Perverted Professionalism of The
Remains of the Day’, Yale Law Journal 10 (1995), p. 184.
72. Atkinson (1995), p. 185.
73. Atkinson (1995), pp. 185–6.
74. Atkinson (1995), p. 189.
75. Atkinson (1995), p. 191.
76. Atkinson (1995), p. 192.
77. Atkinson (1995), p. 194.
78. Atkinson (1995), p. 196.
79. Atkinson (1995), p. 197.
80. Atkinson (1995), p. 199.
81. Atkinson (1995), pp. 208–9.
82. Atkinson (1995), p. 200.
83. Atkinson (1995), p. 201.
84. Atkinson (1995), p. 209.
85. Atkinson (1995), p. 210.
86. Atkinson (1995), pp. 212–13.
87. Atkinson (1995), p. 218.
CHAPTER SIX
2. Graham Swift, ‘Kazuo Ishiguro’, Bomb (Fall 1989), p. 23.
3. Richard Rorty, ‘Consolation Prize’, Village Voice Literary Supplement (October 1995), p. 13.
4. Pico Iyer, ‘The Butler Didn’t Do It, Again’, Times Literary Supplement (28 April 1995), p. 22.
5. Alan Wall, Spectator (13 May 1995), p. 45.
6. Rorty (1995), p. 13.
7. Anita Brookner, ‘A Superb Achievement’, Spectator (24 June 1995), p. 40.
8. Richard Eder, ‘Meandering in a Dreamscape’, Los Angeles Times Book Review (8 October
1995), p. 3.
9. Lucy Hughes-Hallett, ‘Feeling No Pain’, Sunday Times Books (14 May 1995), p. 7.
10. Charlotte Innes, ‘Dr Faustus Faces the Music’, Nation (6 November 1995), p. 548.
11. Wall (1995), p. 45.
12. Amit Chaudhuri, ‘Unlike Kafka’, London Review of Books (8 June 1995), pp. 30–1.
13. Stanley Kauffmann, ‘The Floating World’, The New Republic (6 November 1995), p. 45.
14. Louis Menand, ‘Anxious in Dreamland’, New York Times Book Review (15 October 1995), p. 7.
15. James Wood,‘Ishiguro in the Underworld’, The Guardian (5 May 1995), p. 5.
NO TE S 163
16. Kazuo Ishiguro, The Unconsoled (London: Faber & Faber, 1995), pp. 488–91.
17. Innes (1995), p. 547.
18. Brooke Allen, ‘Leaving Behind Daydreams for Nightmares’, Wall Street Journal (11 October
1995), p. A21.
19. Rachel Cusk, ‘Journey to the End of the Day’, The Times (11 May 1995), p. 35.
20. Shaffer (1998), p. 90.
21. Gary Adelman, ‘Double on the Rocks: Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled’, Critique: Studies in
Contemporary Fiction 42.2 (2001), p. 167.
22. Menand (1995), p. 7.
23. Vince Passano, ‘New Flash from an Old Isle’, Harper’s (October 1995), p. 74.
25. Cynthia F. Wong, Kazuo Ishiguro (Plymouth: Northcote House, 2000), p. 77.
26. Shaffer (1998), p. 99.
27. Wong (2000), p. 73.
28. Pierre François, ‘The Spectral Return of Depths in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled’,
Commonwealth Essays and Studies 26.2 (2004), p. 80.
29. Iyer (1995), p. 22.
30. Lewis (2000), pp. 104–5.
31. Michael Wood, ‘The Discourse of Others’, Children of Silence: Studies in Contemporary
Fiction (London: Pimilico, 1995), p. 172.
32. M. Wood (1995), p. 172.
33. M. Wood (1995), p. 173.
34. Iyer (1995), p. 22.
35. Lewis (2000), p. 110.
36. Shaffer (1998), p. 99.
37. Wong (2000), p. 66.
38. Rorty (1995), p. 13.
39. Francis Wyndham, New Yorker (23 October 1995), p. 92.
40. Iyer (1995), p. 22.
41. Richard Robinson, ‘Nowhere in Particular: Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled and Central
Europe’, Critical Quarterly 48.4 (2006), p. 111.
42. Robinson (2006), pp. 108–9.
43. Robinson (2006), p. 111.
44. Robinson (2006), p. 112.
45. Robinson (2006), pp. 112–3.
46. Robinson (2006), p. 115.
47. Robinson (2006), p. 116.
48. Merle Rubin, ‘Probing the Plight of Lives “Trapped” in Others’ Expectations’, Christian
Science Monitor (4 October 1995), p. 14.
49. Robinson (2006), p. 118.
50. Robinson (2006), p. 119.
51. Robinson (2006), pp. 119–20.
52. Kauffmann (1995), p. 45.
53. Shao-Pin Luo ‘“Living the Wrong Life”: Kazuo Ishiguro’s Unconsoled Orphans’, Dalhousie
Review 83.1 (2003), p. 58.
54. Luo (2003), p. 70.
55. Luo (2003), p. 73.
56. Luo (2003), pp. 73–4.
57. Luo (2003), p. 74.
58. Luo (2003), p. 60.
59. Luo (2003), pp. 76–7.
60. Luo (2003), p. 77.
61. Eder (1995), p. 7.
16 4 N OT ES
62. Paul Gray, ‘Bad Dream’, Time (2 October 1995), p. 82.

63. Allen (1995), p. A21.
64. Lewis (2000), p. 109.
65. M. Wood (1995), pp. 174–5.
66. Passano (1995), p. 73.
67. Brookner (1995), p. 40.
68. Kauffmann (1995), p. 44.
69. Menand (1995), p. 7.
70. Lewis (2000), p. 109.
71. François (2004), p. 79.
72. Sybil Steinberg, ‘A Book About Our World’, Publisher’s Weekly (18 September 1995), p. 105.
73. Steinberg (1995), pp. 105–6.
74. Lewis (2000), p. 107.
75. Steinberg (1995), p. 106.
76. M. Wood (1995), p. 178.
77. Dylan Otto Krider, ‘Rooted in a Small Space: An Interview with Kazuo Ishiguro’, Kenyon
Review 20 (1998): p. 148; qtd in Wong (2000), p. 67.
78. François (2004), p. 77.
79. Passano (1995), p. 73.
80. Cusk (1995), p. 35.
81. Kauffmann (1995), p. 44.
82. Allen (1995), p. A21.
83. Shaffer (1998), pp. 94–5.
84. Carlos Villar Flor, ‘Unreliable Selves in an Unreliable World: The Multiple Projections of
the Hero in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled’, Journal of English Studies 2 (2000), p. 163.
85. Villar Flor (2000), p. 166.
86. Steinberg (1995), p. 105.
87. Adelman (2001), p. 167.
88. Adelman (2001), p. 168.
89. Lewis (2000), p. 111.
90. Lewis (2000), p. 113.
91. Lewis (2000), pp. 114–5.
92. Lewis (2000), p. 115.
93. Lewis (2000), p. 117.
94. Lewis (2000), p. 120.
95. Wong (2000), p. 66.
96. Wong (2000), pp. 68–9.
97. Wong (2000), p. 69.
98. Wong (2000), pp. 69–70.
99. Wong (2000), p. 70.
100. Wong (2000), p. 74.
101. Wong (2000), p. 72.
102. Wong (2000), p. 78.
103. Wong (2000), p. 79.
104. Cusk (1995), p. 35.
105. Lewis (2000), p. 123.
106. François (2004), p. 77.
107. François (2004), p. 81.
108. François (2004), p. 82.
109. François (2004), p. 83.
110. François (2004), p. 84.
111. François (2004), p. 85.
112. François (2004), pp. 85–6.
NO TE S 165
113. François (2004), p. 87.

114. François (2004), p. 88.
115. François (2004), p. 89.
116. Hughes-Hallett (1995), p. 7.
117. Cusk (1995), p. 35.
118. Shaffer (1998), pp. 91–2.
119. Wyndham (1995), p. 90.
120. Villar Flor (2000), p. 160.
121. Wyndham (1995), p. 93.
122. Wyndham (1995), p. 94.
123. Kauffmann (1995), p. 45.
124. Hughes-Hallett (1995), p. 7.
125. Wyndham (1995), p. 94.
126. Steinberg (1995), p. 106.
CHAPTER SEVEN
1. Suzie Mackenzie, ‘Between Two Worlds’, Guardian (25 March 2000), p. 10.
2. Brian W. Shaffer, Rev. ‘When We Were Orphans’, World Literature Today 74.3 (Summer
2000), p. 595.
3. Virginia Quarterly Review ‘When We Were Orphans (Book Review)’, vol. 77, issue 3
(Summer 2001), p. 100.
4. Joyce Carol Oates, ‘The Serpent’s Heart’, Times Literary Supplement (31 March 2000), p. 21.
5. Michael Gorra, ‘The Case of the Missing Childhood’, New York Times Book Review (24
September 2000), p. 12.
6. Michiko Kakutani, ‘The Case He Can’t Solve: A Detective’s Delusions’, New York Times
(19 September 2000), p. 7.
7. Alice McDermott, ‘Whodunit?’, Commonweal (3 November 2000), p. 25.
8. Gillian Harding-Russell, ‘Through the Veil of Memory’, Queen’s Quarterly 109.1 (2002), p. 95.
9. Maya Jaggi, ‘In Search of Lost Crimes’, Guardian (1 April 2000), p. 8; see also Rosemary
Hartigan, ‘When We Were Orphans (Book Review)’, Antioch Review 59.3 (Summer 2001),
p. 637.
10. Shaffer (2000), p. 595.
11. Jaggi (2000), p. 8; referring to Ishiguro’s use of ‘appropriations’ as documented by Julia
Llewellyn Smith in ‘A Novel Taste of Criticism’, Times (3 May 1995), p. 17 and Sybil
Steinberg in ‘A Book about Our World’, Publishers Weekly (18 September 1995), pp. 105–6.
12. Benjamin Anastas, ‘Keeping It Real’, Village Voice 45.40 (10 October 2000), p. 62.
13. Kakutani (2000), p. 7.
14. Oates (2000), p. 21.
15. Ron Charles, ‘The Remains of the Day with Parents’, Christian Science Monitor 92.221 (5
October 2000), p. 15; see also Virginia Quarterly Review (2001), p. 100.
16. McDermott (2000), p. 25.
17. Barbara Hoffert, ‘Review: When We Were Orphans’, Library Journal 125.13 (August 2000),
p. 157.
18. Gavin McNett, Salon (19 October 2000), http://dir.salon.com/story/books/review/
2000/09/19/ishiguro
19. Andrew Barrow, ‘Clueless in Shanghai’, Spectator (25 March 2000), p. 44; see also Charles
(2000), p. 15.
20. Barrow (2000), p. 44.
21. Brian Bouldrey. San Francisco Chronicle (24 October 2000), p. RV 5.
22. Henry Carrington Cunningham, III. ‘The Dickens Connection in Kazuo Ishiguro’s
When We Were Orphans’, Notes on Contemporary Literature 34.5 (2004), pp. 4–6.
23. Philip Hensher, ‘It’s the Way He Tells it’, Observer Review (19 March 2000), p. 11.
16 6 N OT ES
24. Tova Reich, ‘A Sleuth in Search of Himself ’, The New Leader 83.4 (Sep/Oct 2000), p. 43.
25. Hensher (2000), p. 11.
26. Gorra (2000), p. 12.
27. Candia McWilliam, ‘Painful, Lovely, Limpid in Freezing Fog’, Financial Times (Weekend, 8
April 2000), p. 4.
28. James Wood, ‘The Unconsoled’, The New Republic 223.16 (16 October 2000), p. 44.
29. Wood (2000), p. 45.
30. Harding-Russell (2002), p. 96.
31. Gorra (2000), p. 12.
32. Shaffer (2000), pp. 595–6.
33. William Sutcliffe, ‘History Happens Elsewhere’, Independent on Sunday (Sunday Review, 2
April 2000), p. 49.
34. Kakutani (2000), p. 7.
35. Wood (2000), p. 46.
36. Barrow (2000), p. 44.
37. Jaggi (2000), p. 8.
38. Anastas (2000), p. 62.
39. McWilliam (2000), p. 4: see also Barrow (2000), p. 44, McDermott (2000), p. 26, and
Charles (2000), p. 15.
40. Oates (2000), p. 21.
41. Jaggi (2000), p. 8: see also Gorra (2000), p. 12.
42. McDermott (2000), p. 26.
43. James Francken, ‘Something Fishy’, London Review of Books (13 April 2000), p. 37.
44. Phil Whitaker, ‘Return of the Native’, New Statesman 129.4480 (3 April 2000), p. 58.
45. Oates (2000), p. 21.
46. Gorra (2000), p. 12.
47. Barrow (2000), p. 44.
49. McDermott (2000), p. 25.
50. Bouldrey (2000), p. RV 5.
51. Boyd Tonkin, ‘Artist of his Floating World’, The Independent (Saturday, 1 April 2000), p. 9.
52. Gorra (2000), p. 12.
53. Oates (2000), p. 21.
54. Charles (2000), p. 15.
55. Gorra (2000), p. 12.
56. Francken (2000), p. 37.
57. Paul Gray, ‘The Remains of Shanghai’, Time (18 September 2000), p. 86.
58. Bouldrey (2000), p. RV 5.
59. Charles (2000), p. 15.
60. Gorra (2000), p. 12.
61. Reich (2000), p. 42.
62. Francken (2000), p. 37.
63. Mackenzie (2000), p. 10.
64. Tonkin (2000), p. 9.
65. Kakutani (2000), p. 7.
66. Charles (2000), p. 15.
67. Sutcliffe (2000), p. 49.
68. Jaggi (2000), p. 8.
69. Alexander M. Bain, ‘International Settlements: Ishiguro, Shanghai, Humanitarianism’, Novel
40.3 (Summer 2007), p. 242.
70. Shaffer (2000), p. 595.
71. Reich (2000), p. 43.
72. McDermott (2000), p. 25.
NO TE S 167
73. Reich (2000), p. 43.

74. McDermott (2000), p. 25: see also Oates (2000), p. 21.
75. Sutcliffe (2000), p. 49.
77. Mackenzie (2000), p. 10.
78. Oates (2000), p. 21.
79. Mackenzie (2000), p. 10.
80. Wood (2000), p. 48.
81. Shaffer (2000), p. 596.
82. Barrow (2000), p. 44.
83. Hartigan (2001), p. 637.
84. Wood (2000), p. 49.
85. Mackenzie (2000), p. 10.
86. Barrow (2000), p. 44.
87. Tonkin (2000), p. 9.
88. Reich (2000), p. 43.
CHAPTER EIGHT
1. Kirkus, 73.1 (1 January 2005), p. 11.
2. Theo Tait, ‘A Sinister Harvest’, The Telegraph (13 March 2005), http://www.telegraph.
co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2005/03/06/boish206.xml
3. James Wood, ‘The Human Difference’, The New Republic (16 May 2005), p. 36.
4. John Mullan, ‘A Life Half Lived’, The Guardian (18 March 2006), Books, p. 7.
5. Frank Kermode, ‘Outrageous Game’, London Review of Books 27.8 (4 April 2005), p. 21.
6. Sarah Kerr, ‘When They Were Orphans’, New York Times Book Review (17 April 2005), p. 16.
7. Siddhartha Deb, ‘Lost Corner’, New Statesman (7 March 2005), http://www.newstatesman.
com/200503070047.
8. James Browning, ‘Hello Dolly; When We Were Organs: Novelist Kazuo Ishiguro Pens a
“1984” for the Bioengineering Age’, Village Voice 50.13 (30 March 2005), p. 75.
9. Joseph O’Neill, ‘Never Let Me Go’, The Atlantic Monthly 295.4 (May 2005), p. 123.
10. Wood (2005), p. 38.
11. Claire Messud, ‘Love’s Body’, The Nation (16 May 2005), p. 30.
12. Margaret Atwood, ‘Brave New World’, Slate (1 April 2005), http://www.slate.
com/id/2116040/
13. O’Neill (2005), p. 123.
14. Kazuo Ishiguro, ‘Future Imperfect’, Guardian (25 March 2006), http://www.guardian.
co.uk/books/2006/mar/25/featuresreviews.guardianreview36
15. Gary Rosen, ‘What Would a Clone Say?’ New York Times Magazine (27 November 2005), p. 4.
16. Daniel Vorhaus, ‘Review of Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go’, American Journal of Bioethics
7.2 (February 2007), p. 99.
17. M. John Harrison, ‘Clone Alone’, Guardian (26 February 2005), p. 26.
18. Lev Grossman, Time (4 November 2005), p. 62.
19. Tait (2005).
20. Ruth Scurr, ‘The Facts of Life’, Times Literary Supplement (13 March 2005), pp. 21–2.
21. Tim Adams, ‘For Me, England is a Mythical Place’, The Observer (20 February 2005), p. 17.
22. Atwood (2005).
23. Peter Kemp, ‘Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro’, Sunday Times (20 February 2005), p. 41.
24. Atwood (2005).
25. Ishiguro (2006).
26. O’Neill (2005), p. 123.
16 8 N OT ES
27. Tait (2005).

28. Rebecca L. Walkowitz, ‘Unimaginable Largeness: Kazuo Ishiguro, Translation, and the New
World Literature’, Novel 40.3 (Summer 2007), p. 216.
29. Walkowitz (2007), p. 235.
30. Walkowitz (2007), p. 224.
31. Walkowitz (2007), p. 224.
32. Walkowitz (2007), p. 225.
33. Walkowitz (2007), p. 226.
34. Walkowitz (2007), p. 226.
35. Walkowitz (2007), p. 227.
36. Walkowitz (2007), p. 227.
37. Walkowitz (2007), p. 228.
38. Walkowitz (2007), p. 228.
39. Bruce Robbins, ‘Cruelty is Bad: Banality and Proximity in Never Let Me Go’, Novel 40.3
(Summer 2007), p. 291.
40. Robbins (2007), pp. 292–3.
41. Robbins (2007), p. 293.
42. Robbins (2007), p. 294.
43. Robbins (2007), p. 294.
44. Robbins (2007), p. 295.
45. Robbins (2007), p. 296.
46. Robbins (2007), p. 298.
47. Robbins (2007), p. 298.
48. Robbins (2007), p. 299.
49. Robbins (2007), p. 299.
50. Robbins (2007), p. 300.
51. Robbins (2007), p. 300.
52. Robbins (2007), p. 301.
CONCLUSION
1. Natalie Reitano, ‘The Good Wound: Memory and Community in The Unconsoled’, Texas
Studies in Literature and Language, 49.4 (2007), p. 362.
2. Leona Toker and Daniel Chertoff, ‘Reader Response and the Recycling of Topoi in Kazuo
Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go’, Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas 6.1
(2008), pp. 163–80.
3. Lisa Fluet, ‘Ishiguro’s Unknown Communities’, Novel: A Forum on Fiction, 40.3 (2007), p. 285.
4. Earl G. Ingersoll, ‘Desire, the Gaze, and Suture in the Novel and the Film: The Remains of the
Day’, Studies in the Humanities 28.1–2 (2001), pp. 31–47.
5. Jones, Edward T., ‘On The Remains of the Day: Harold Pinter Remaindered’, The Films of
Harold Pinter, (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2001), pp. 99–107.
6. A. O. Scott, ‘Wallowing in Music for the Miserable, Then Splashing Down in a Giant Vat of
Beer’, New York Times (30 April 2004), p. 13.
7. Mick LaSalle, ‘Merchant-Ivory’s Final Film a Refined Delight. Naturally’, San Francisco
Chronicle (13 January 2006), p. E6.
8. Peter Bradshaw, ‘The White Countess’, Guardian (31 March 2006), p. 9.
9. Graham Swift, ‘Kazuo Ishiguro’, Bomb (Fall 1989), p. 22.
10. J. Hoberman, ‘The Sorrow and the Ditty’, Village Voice 49.17 (28 April 2004), p. C65.
11. Chu-chueh Cheng, ‘Making and Marketing Kazuo Ishiguro’s Alterity’, Post Identity, 4.2
(Fall 2005), http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.pid9999.0004.202
Review 20 (1998), p. 154.
13. Lawrence Graver, ‘What the Butler Saw’, New York Times Book Review (8 October 1989),
pp. 3, 33.
Select Bibliography
NOVELS BY KAZUO ISHIGURO
A Pale View of Hills, London: Faber & Faber, 1982.

An Artist of the Floating World, London: Faber & Faber, 1986.
The Remains of the Day, London: Faber & Faber, 1989.
The Unconsoled, London: Faber & Faber, 1995.
When We Were Orphans, London: Faber & Faber, 2000.
Never Let Me Go, London: Faber & Faber, 2005.
SHORT STORIES
‘A Strange and Sometimes Sadness’, Introduction 7: Stories by New Writers, Faber and Faber, 1981,
pp. 13–27.
‘Waiting for J.’, Introduction 7: Stories by New Writers, Faber and Faber, 1981, pp. 28–37.
‘Getting Poisoned’, Introduction 7: Stories by New Writers, Faber and Faber, 1981, pp. 38–51.
‘A Family Supper’, Firebird 2, ed. T. J. Binding, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983: pp. 121–31.
‘The Summer After the War’, Granta 7 (1983), pp. 119–37.
‘October, 1948’, Granta 17 (1985), pp. 177–85.
‘A Village After Dark’, The New Yorker (21 May 2001), pp. 86–91.
Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall, London: Faber & Faber, 2009.
FILMS AND SCREENPLAYS
A Profile of Arthur J. Mason, dir. Michael Whyte, with Bernard Hepton, Charles Gray, and Cheri
Lunghi. United Kingdom: Skreba/Spectre, 1984, short film.
The Gourmet, dir. Michael Whyte, with Charles Gray and Mick Ford. United Kingdom: Skreba/
Spectre, 1986, short film.
The Remains of the Day (with Ruth Prawer Jhabvala), dir. James Ivory, with Anthony Hopkins,
Emma Thompson, and James Fox. United Kingdom: Merchant Ivory, 1993, 134 min.
The Saddest Music in the World, written by George Toles and Guy Maddin, dir. Guy Maddin,
with Mark McKinney, Isabella Rossellini, and Maria de Medeiros. Canada: Rhombus
Media, Buff alo Gal Pictures, and Ego Film Arts, 2004, 101 min. Original screenplay Kazuo
Ishiguro.
The White Countess, dir. James Ivory, with Ralph Fiennes, Natasha Richardson,Vanessa Redgrave,
Lynn Redgrave, and Hiroyuki Sanada. United Kingdom: Merchant Ivory, 2006, 136 min.
Never Let Me Go, screenplay by Alex Garland, dir. Mark Romanek, with Keira Knightley.
United Kingdom: DNA Films, Fox Searchlight, Film4. In production.
169
170 S EL EC T B IB L I OGR A P HY
OTHER WRITINGS
‘I Became Profoundly Thankful for Having Been Born in Nagasaki’, Guardian, (8 August 1983), p. 9.
‘Introduction’, Yasunari Kawabata, Snow Country and Thousand Cranes, Trans. Edward G.
Seidensticker, Harmondsworth: Penguin: 1986, pp. 1–3.
Letter to Salman Rushdie, The Rushdie Letters: Freedom to Speak, Freedom to Write, ed. Steve
MacDonogh, London: Brandon: 1993, pp. 79–80.
‘Future Imperfect’, Guardian, (25 March 2006), http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2006/
mar/25/featuresreviews.guardianreview36
SELECTED INTERVIEWS
Bryson, Bill, ‘Between Two Worlds’, New York Times, (29 April 1990), sec. 6, pp. 38–9, 44, 80.
Jaggi, Maya, ‘Kazuo Ishiguro Talks to Maya Jaggi’, Wasafiri: Journal of Caribbean, African, Asian
and Associated Literatures and Film, 22 (1995), pp. 20–4.
Krider, Dylan Otto, ‘Rooted in a Small Space: An Interview with Kazuo Ishiguro’, Kenyon
Review, 20 (1998), pp. 146–54.
Mason, Gregory, ‘An Interview with Kazuo Ishiguro’, Contemporary Literature, 30 (1989),
pp. 335–47.
Oe, Kenzaburo, and Kazuo Ishiguro, ‘The Novelist in Today’s World: A Conversation’, Boundary 2:
An International Journal of Literature and Culture, 18 (1991), pp. 109–22. Reprinted as ‘Wave
Patterns: A Dialogue’, in Grand Street, 10 (1991), pp. 75–91.
Shaffer, Brian W. and Cynthia F. Wong, Conversations with Kazuo Ishiguro ( Jackson, Miss:
University Press of Mississippi, 2008), 224 pp.
Sinclair, Clive, ‘Kazuo Ishiguro’, The Roland Collection, video interview, 1986.
Spiegel Online, Interview with Kazuo Ishiguro, (10 May 2005), http://www.spiegel.de/inter-
national/0,1518,378173,00.html
Vorda, Allan and Kim Herzinger, ‘An Interview with Kazuo Ishiguro’, Mississippi Review,
20 (1991), pp. 131–54. Reprinted as ‘Stuck on the Margins: An Interview with Kazuo
Ishiguro’, Face to Face: Interviews with Contemporary Novelists (Houston: Rice University
Press, 1993), pp. 1–36.
CRITICISM
Books Devoted to Kazuo Ishiguro
Lewis, Barry, Kazuo Ishiguro (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 191 pp.
Shaffer, Brian W., Understanding Kazuo Ishiguro (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina
Press, 1998), 146 pp.
Wong, Cynthia F., Kazuo Ishiguro (Plymouth: Northcote House, with British Council, 2000),
102 pp.
Selected books and Essays with Key Discussions

of the Fiction of Kazuo Ishiguro
Adelman, Gary. ‘Double on the Rocks: Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled’, Critique: Studies in
Contemporary Fiction 42.2 (2001), pp. 166–79.
S E L E CT B I B LI O G R APHY 171
Appiah, Kwame Anthony. ‘Liberalism, Individuality, and Identity’, Critical Inquiry 27.2 (2001),
pp. 305–32.
Atkinson, Rob. ‘How the Butler Was Made To Do It. The Perverted Professionalism of “The
Remains of the Day”’, Yale Law Journal 10 (1995), pp. 177–220.
Cheng, Chu-chueh. ‘Making and Marketing Kazuo Ishiguro’s Alterity’, Post Identity 4.2 (2005),
http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.pid9999.0004.202
Ekelund, G. Bo. ‘Misrecognizing History: Complicitous Genres in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The
Remains of the Day’, International Fiction Review 32.1–2 (2005), pp. 70–90.
François, Pierre. ‘The Spectral Return of Depths in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled’,
Commonwealth Essays and Studies 26.2 (2004), pp. 77–90.
Furst, Lillian. ‘Memory’s Fragile Power in Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day and W. C. Sebald’s “Max
Ferber”’, Contemporary Literature 48.4 (2007), pp. 530–53.
Griffith, M., ‘Great English Houses/New Homes in England?: Memory and Identity in Kazuo
Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day and V. S. Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival’, Span 36 (1993),
pp. 488–503.
Guth, Deborah. ‘Submerged Narratives in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day’, Forum for
Modern Language Studies 35.2 (1999), pp. 126–37.
Ingersoll, Earl G. ‘Desire, the Gaze, and Suture in the Novel and the Film: The Remains of the
Day’, Studies in the Humanities 28.1–2 (2001), pp. 31–47.
Jirgens, Karl E. ‘Narrator Resartus: Palimpsestic Revelations in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains
of the Day’, Q/W/E/R/T/Y: Arts, Littératures & Civilisations du Monde Anglophone 9 (1999),
pp. 219–30.
Lang, James M. ‘Public Memory, Private History: Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the
Day’, CLIO: A Journal of Literature, History, and the Philosophy of History 29.2 (2000),
pp. 143–65.
Luo, Shao-Pin. ‘“Living the Wrong Life”: Kazuo Ishiguro’s Unconsoled Orphans’, Dalhousie
Review 83.1 (2003), pp. 51–80.
Mason, Gregory. ‘Inspiring Images: The Influence of the Japanese Cinema on the Writings of
Kazuo Ishiguro’, East West Film Journal 3 (1989), pp. 39–52.
McCombe, John P. ‘The End of (Anthony) Eden: Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day and
Midcentury Anglo-American Tensions’, Twentieth Century Literature: A Scholarly and Critical
Journal 48.1 (2002), pp. 77–99.
Medalie, David, ‘What Dignity is There in That?: The Crisis of Dignity in Selected Late-
Twentieth-Century Novels’, Journal of Literary Studies 20 (June 2004), pp. 48–61.
O’Brien, Susie, ‘Serving a New World Order: Postcolonial Politics in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The
Remains of the Day’, Modern Fiction Studies 42:4 (1996), pp. 787–806.
Phelan, James and Mary Patricia Martin. ‘The Lessons of “Weymouth”: Homodiegesis,
Unreliability, Ethics, and The Remains of the Day’, Narratologies: New Perspectives on Narrative
Analysis (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1999), pp. 88–109.
Reitano, Natalie, ‘The Good Wound: Memory and Community in The Unconsoled’, Texas
Studies in Literature and Language 49.4 (2007), pp. 361–86.
Robbins, Bruce, ‘Cruelty is Bad: Banality and Proximity in Never Let Me Go’, Novel 40.3
(Summer 2007), pp. 289–302.
Scanlan, Margaret, ‘Mistaken Identities: First-Person Narration in Kazuo Ishiguro’, Journal of
Narrative and Life History 3:2 & 3 (1993), pp. 139–54.
Sim, Wai-chew, ‘Kazuo Ishiguro’, Review of Contemporary Fiction 25.1 (2005), pp. 80–115.
Su, John J., ‘Refiguring National Character: The Remains of the British Estate Novel’, MFS:
Modern Fiction Studies 48.3 (2002), pp. 552–80.
Sutherland, John, ‘Why Hasn’t Mr. Stevens Heard of the Suez Crisis?’ Where Was Rebecca Shot?:
Curiosities, Puzzles, and Conundrums in Modern Fiction (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson,
1998), p. 188.
Teverson, Andrew. ‘Acts of Reading in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day’, Q/W/E/R/T/Y:
Arts, Littératures & Civilisations du Monde Anglophone 9 (1999), pp. 251–8.
172 S EL EC T B IB L I OGRA P HY
Toker, Leona and Daniel Chertoff , ‘Reader Response and the Recycling of Topoi in Kazuo
Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go’, Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas 6.1
(2008), pp. 163–80.
Walkowitz, Rebecca L., ‘Ishiguro’s Floating Worlds,’ ELH 68 (2001), pp. 1049–76.
——, ‘Unimaginable Largeness: Kazuo Ishiguro, Translation, and the New World Literature’,
Novel 40.3 (Summer 2007), pp. 216–39.
Wall, Kathleen, ‘The Remains of the Day and Its Challenges to Theories of Unreliable Narration’,
Journal of Narrative Technique 24 (1994), pp. 18–42.
Wong, Cynthia F., ‘The Shame of Memory: Blanchot’s Self-Dispossession in Ishiguro’s A Pale
View of Hills’, CLIO: A Journal of Literature, History, and the Philosophy of History 24 (1995),
pp. 127–45.
A Selection of Reviews of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Novels
A Pale View of Hills

Bailey, Paul, ‘Private Desolations’, Times Literary Supplement (19 February 1982), p. 179.
De Jongh, Nicholas, ‘Life After the Bomb’, Guardian (22 February, 1982), p. 11.
King, Francis, ‘Shimmering’, Spectator (27 February 1982), p. 25.
Lee, Hermione, ‘Quiet Desolation’, New Republic (22 January 1990), pp. 36–9.
Lively, Penelope, ‘Backwards and Forwards’, Encounter (June–July 1982), pp. 86–91.
Milton, Edith, ‘In a Japan Like Limbo’, New York Times Book Review (9 May 1982), pp. 12–13.
An Artist of the Floating World

Dyer, Geoff, ‘On Their Mettle’, New Statesman (4 April 1986), p. 25.
Field, Michele, ‘This Britisher is Japanese’, Sydney Morning Herald (12 March 1988), p. 74.
Hunt, Nigel, ‘Two Close Looks at Faraway’, Brick: A Journal of Reviews no. 31 (Fall 1987),
pp. 36–8.
Morton, Kathryn, ‘After the War was Lost’, New York Times Book Review (8 June 1986), p. 19.
Parrinder, Patrick, ‘Manly Scowls’, London Review of Books (6 February 1986), pp. 16–17.
Sinclair, Clive, ‘The Land of the Rising Son’, Sunday Times Magazine (11 January 1987), p. 37.
The Remains of the Day

Graver, Lawrence, ‘What the Butler Saw’, New York Times Book Review (8 October 1989),
pp. 3, 33.
Gurewich, David, ‘Upstairs, Downstairs’, New Criterion (December 1989), pp. 77–80.
Kamine, Mark, ‘A Servant of Self-Deceit’, New Leader (13 November 1989), pp. 21–2.
Lee, Susanne Wah, ‘Of Dignity and Servility’, The Nation (18 December 1989), pp. 761–3.
Rafferty, Terrence, ‘The Lesson of the Master’, New Yorker (15 January 1990), pp. 102–4.
Rubin, Merle, ‘A Review of The Remains of the Day’, Christian Science Monitor (13 November
1989), p. 13.
Rushdie, Salman, ‘What the Butler Didn’t See’, Observer, (21 May 1989), p. 53; reprinted as ‘Kazuo
Ishiguro’, in Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–1991 (London:
Granta Books, 1991), pp. 244–6.
Strawson, Galen, ‘Tragically Disciplined and Dignified’, Times Literary Supplement (19–25 May
1989), p. 535.
The Unconsoled
Brookner, Anita, ‘A Superb Achievement’, Spectator (24 June 1995), pp. 40–1.
Cusk, Rachel, ‘Journey to the End of the Day’, Times (11 May 1995), p. 38.
Innes, Charlotte, ‘Dr Faustus Faces the Music’, Nation (6 November 1995), pp. 546–8.
S E L E CT B I B LI O G R APHY 173
Menand, Louis, ‘Anxious in Dreamland’, New York Times Book Review (15 October 1995), p. 7.
Passaro,Vince,‘New Flash from an Old Island’, Harper’s (October 1995), pp. 71–5.
Rorty, Richard, ‘Consolation Prize’, Village Voice Literary Supplement (October 1995), p. 13.
Wood, Michael, ‘Sleepless Nights’, New York Review of Books (21 December 1995), pp. 17–8.
Wyndham, Francis, ‘Nightmare Hotel’, New Yorker (23 October 1995), pp. 90–4.
When We Were Orphans

Bouldrey, Brian, ‘A Life in Pieces’, San Francisco Chronicle (24 October 2000), p. RV 5.
Carey, John, ‘Few Novels Extend the Possibilities of Fiction. This One Does’, Sunday Times
(2 April 2000), Culture p. 45.
Gorra, Michael, ‘The Case of the Missing Childhood’, New York Times Book Review
(24 September 2000), p. 12.
Harding-Russell, Gillian, ‘Through the Veil of Memory’, Queen’s Quarterly 109.1 (2002), pp. 95–101.
Jaggi, Maya, ‘In Search of Lost Crimes’, Guardian (1 April 2000), p. 8.
Oates, Joyce Carol, ‘The Serpent’s Heart’, Times Literary Supplement (31 March 2000), pp. 21–2.
Reich, Tova, ‘A Sleuth in Search of Himself ’, New Leader 83.4 (Sep./Oct. 2000), p. 43.
Tonkin, Boyd, ‘Artist of his Floating World’, Independent (Saturday, 1 April 2000), p. 9.
Wood, James, ‘The Unconsoled’, New Republic (16 October 2000), p. 44.
Never Let Me Go
Atwood, Margaret, ‘Brave New World’, Slate (1 April 2005), http://www.slate.
com/id/2116040/
Kakutani, Michiko, ‘Sealed in a World That’s Not as It Seems’, New York Times (4 April 2005), p. E8.
Kemp, Peter, ‘Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro’, Sunday Times (20 February 2005), p. 41.
Kerr, Sarah, ‘When They Were Orphans’, New York Times Book Review (17 April 2005), p. 16.
Menand, Louis, ‘Something about Kathy: Ishiguro’s Quasi-Science-Fiction Novel’, New Yorker
81.6 (28 March 2005), pp. 78–9.
Messud, Claire, ‘Love’s Body’, The Nation (16 May 2005), pp. 28–31.
Scurr, Ruth, ‘The Facts of Life,’ Times Literary Supplement (13 March 2005), pp. 21–2.
Wood, James, ‘The Human Difference,’ New Republic (12 May 2005), p. 36.
Index
Adams, Tim 139 Corseri, Gary 18

Adelman, Gary 114, 116 Cusk, Rachel 105, 113, 118, 121
Allen, Brooke 105, 111–12, 113
Althusser, Louis 78 Dali, Salvador 112
Anastas, Benjamin 124, 128 Davis, Rocio 2, 18, 27
Annan, Gabriele 17–18, 44 de Certeau, Michel 70–1
Appiah, Kwame Anthony 84, 93–5, 97, 101 de Jongh, Nicholas 11, 12, 15, 24
Ash, John 73–4 di Chirico, Giorgio 105, 110
Atkinson, Rob 84, 97–101 Dickens, Charles 2, 125, 140
Atwood, Margaret 138, 139 displacement 18, 115
Dostoevsky, Fyodor 2, 9, 103
Bachelard, Gaston 110–11 Doyle, Arthur Conan 126
Bahr, Hermann 107 Dyer, Geoff 26, 44
Bailey, Paul 11, 14
Bain, Alexander M. 132 Eden, Anthony 61, 63, 64, 90
Barrow, Andrew 125, 129 Eder, Richard 103, 111
Beckett, Samuel 102, 107, 138 Ekelund, G. Bo 62, 66–9, 82
Bernstein, Michael André 71 Eliot, George 141
Bhabha, Homi 77, 80 Eliot, T.S. 45
Bloom, Alice 46 ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred
Bohnaker, William 37 Prufrock’ 45
Booker Prize 1, 26, 103 Encyclopaedia Britannica 59
Booth, Wayne 55 Endo, Sushaki 6
Bouldrey, Brian 125, 130 Escher, M. C. 105
Bradbury, Malcolm 28, 28–9, 150
Bradshaw, Peter 148–9 Field, Michele 26
Brontë, Charlotte 2 Fluet, Lisa 148
Brookner, Anita 103, 112 Foucault, Michel 10, 107
Buchan, John 129 Francois, Pierre 106, 112–13, 113, 118
Byatt, A. S. 150 Francken, James 128
Freytag, Gustav 19
Campbell, James 9, 12, 14 Fulness of Days, The 67–8
Carrington Cunningham, Henry 125 Furst, Lillian 84, 85–9, 101
Carroll, Lewis 111
Chatman, Seymour 53 Giddens, Anthony 69
Chaudhuri, Amit 104, 108 Gorra, Michael 123, 126–7, 129, 130
Chekhov, Anton 2, 9, 83, 103 Graver, Lawrence 45
Cheng, Chu-chueh 150 Gray, Paul 111
Chertoff, Daniel 148, 149–50 Griffith, M. 89, 90
Chisholm, Anne 26 Gurewich, David 44, 59, 97
Christie, Agatha 131 Guth, Deborah 46, 48–50, 60, 81
174
I NDE X 175
Harrison, M. John 139 Jung, Carl Gustav 119–20

Hensher, Philip 125 Kaf ka, Franz 102, 103, 124–5
Herzinger, Kim 1 Kakutani, Michiko 43, 123, 124
Harding-Russell, Gillian 123, 126 Kamine, Mark 44, 45, 46
Hughes-Hallet, Lucy 103, 121, 122 Kauff mann, Stanley 104, 108, 109, 112,
Hunt, Nigel 26 113, 121–2
Hutchings, William 44 Kawabata, Yasunari 2, 3, 6, 7, 83
Kemp, Peter 139
Ibuse, Masuji 2 Kermode, Frank 138
Ichikawa, Kon 8 Kerr, Sarah 138
The Heart 8 King, Bruce 27, 29, 36, 40, 41
Ichiyo, Higuchi 6 King, Francis 6, 10, 15
Ingersoll, Earl G. 148 Kolnai, Aurel 95
Innes, Charlotte 103, 104 Kondo, Dorinne K. 37
Ishiguro, Kazuo, Works Krider, Dylan 2, 9
Artist of the Floating World 1, 9, 25–42, Kubrick, Stanley 31
43, 44, 47, 68 2001: Space Odyssey 31
‘A Family Supper’ 28 Kurosawa, Akira 7
Introduction to Kawabata’s Snow
Country and A Thousand Cranes 3 Lang, James 62, 70–3, 82
Never Let Me Go 137–47, 148, 151 LaSalle, Mick 148
Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Lee, Hermione 44
Nightfall 149 Lewis, Barry 7, 11–12, 13, 14, 18–19,
A Pale View of Hills 1, 5–24, 25, 28, 61, 20, 29–31, 39, 40, 105, 106, 110, 112,
70, 113, 114 115–16, 118
The Remains of the Day 1, 25, 36–7, 41, Lively, Penelope 5, 10, 15, 19
43–60, 61–83, 84–101, 102, 128, Lloyd, T. O. 65
131, 133, 150 Luo, Shao-Pin 109–11, 120
The Remains of the Day (fi lm) 1, 14–15,
81–2, 148 Maddin, Guy 148, 150
The Saddest Music in the World 148, 149 Mallet, Peter J. 36, 39, 41
‘A Strange and Sometimes Sadness’ 12 Martin, Mary Patricia 46, 55–8, 60
The Unconsoled 24, 102–22, 123, 124, Mason, Gregory 2, 7, 16–17, 18, 23, 28,
128, 134, 147, 148, 149, 151 31, 40, 41, 83
When We Were Orphans 24, 109, 110, McCombe, John P. 61, 63–6, 82
123–36, 137, 147, 149, 151 McDermott, Alice 123, 128
The White Countess 148, 149 McWilliam, Candia 128
Ivory, James 148 Medalie, David 84, 95–7, 101
Iyer, Pico 75, 103, 106 Menand, Louis 104, 105, 112
Merchant, Ismail 148
Jaggi, Maya 128, 132 Meyer, Michael 96
James, Henry 19, 44, 83, 103 Mill, John Stuart 93, 94
‘The Beast in the Jungle’ 44 On Liberty 93
The Turn of the Screw 18–19 Milton, Edith 5, 10, 11, 12, 13, 19
Jarry, Alfred 107 Mizoguchi, Kenji 8, 18
Jhabvala, Ruth Prawer 148 Ugetsu 8, 18
Jirgens, Karl 54–5, 59 Mo, Timothy 2
Jones, Edward T. 148 Morris, Jan 107
Joyce, James 12 Morton, Kathryn 26, 42
Dubliners 12 Musil, Robert 107
176 INDE X
Nagasaki, bombing of 5, 10, 11, 12–13, Shaffer, Brian 12, 13, 15–16, 17, 20–1, 32–4,
23, 44, 61, 113 103, 105, 114, 117, 124, 127, 132–3, 134
Naruse, Mikio 2, 7, 8 shomen-geki 7, 8–9, 40
When a Woman Ascends the Stairs 8 Sinclair, Clive 28
Nietzsche, Friedrich 139 Soseki, Natsume 2
Spence, Jonathan 6, 10
O’Brien, Susie 62, 73–7, 80, 81, 92 Strawson, Galen 43–4, 45
O’Neill, Joseph 139 Su, John J. 82, 84, 89–93, 101, 133
Oates, Joyce Carol 124, 128, 129, 130 Suez Crisis 44, 61, 62–3, 63–4, 82, 90
Oe, Kenzaburo 150 Sutcliffe, William 131
Ozu, Yasujiro 2, 7, 8 Sutherland, John 61, 62–3, 64
Early Spring 8–9
Good Morning 8 Tait, Theo 140
Tokyo Story 8 Tanizaki, Junichiro 2
Teverson, Andrew 47, 58–60, 69, 76
Page, Norman 13, 27, 37, 63 Thatcher, Margaret 89–90
Parrinder, Patrick 26 Thwaite, Anthony 6, 11, 44–5
Passano, Vince 105 Toker, Leona 148, 149–50
Petry, Mike 14 Tonkin, Boyd 129, 135
Phelan, James 46, 55–8, 60 Tookey, Christopher 26
Picasso, Pablo 112 Trimm, Ryan 82
Pinter, Harold 14, 148
Powell, Anthony 126 Villar Flor, Carlos 114
projection 17, 18, 32, 114, 115, 124 Vorda, Alan 1
Puccini, Giacomo 10, 12 Vorhaus, Daniel 139
Madame Butterfly 10, 12
Wain, Peter 10, 13
Rafferty, Terrence 43, 45, 46 Walkowitz, Rebecca 32, 140–3, 150
rationalisation 17, 18, 46 Wall, Alan 103
Reich, Tova 125, 135 Wall, Kathleen 46, 50–5, 60, 77, 78, 81
Reitano, Natalie 148 Westerman, Molly 62, 77–82
Robbins, Bruce 140, 143–7 Whitaker, Phil 128–9
Robinson, Richard 106–9 Whitbread Book of the Year Award 1, 26
Rorty, Richard 103, 106 Winifred Holtby Award 1
Rosen, Gary 139 Wodehouse, P. G. 83
Rubin, Merle 44, 108 Wong, Cynthia 10, 13, 14, 22–3, 32,
Rushdie, Salman 1, 2, 5, 76 34–6, 70, 105, 106, 113, 116–18, 150
Midnight’s Children 1 Wood, E. F. L., First Earl of Halifax
67–8, 82
Said, Edward 109 Wood, James 104, 126, 127, 134, 137, 138
Salecl, Renata 78 Wood, Michael 5, 13, 106, 112, 113
Sayers, Dorothy L. 131 Wormald, Mark 2, 22
Scanlan, Margaret 32, 35, 37–9, 46, Wright, Basil 8
47–8, 60 Wyndham, Francis 106, 121
Schacter, Daniel L. 84, 85–9
Scott, A. O. 148 Yoshioka, Fumio 10, 12–13, 15, 19

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The Novels of

Readers’ Guides to Essential Criticism

Consultant editor: Nicolas Tredell

ISBN 978–0–230–51746–2 ISBN 978–1–137–08062–2 (eBook)

presentation of the Anglo-American tensions as they appear in the novel,

CHAPTER SIX 102

CHAPTER SEVEN 123

CHAPTER EIGHT 137

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY 169

O ne of the world’s most important contemporary writers, Kazuo

I was brought up by Japanese parents. I think I understood very deeply

In an informative interview with Gregory Mason, Ishiguro notes

My style is almost the antithesis of Rushdie or [Timothy] Mo [born

out – to express meaning that can’t usually be expressed through

Kawabata was a writer who quite deliberately aspired to a ‘classical’

issues of discussion are Ishiguro’s relationship to Japan, his ability

Bad Memories: A Pale View

A NEW WRITER WITH A JAPANESE NAME AND FACE

The critical reception of Ishiguro’s fi rst novel introduced several issues

ISHIGURO’S JAPAN THROUGH THE LENS

Mason has followed up on Ishiguro’s claim of fi lmic influence in his

‘embattled in her search for independence and dignity’, a familiar her-

Ishiguro employs analogous devices to retard and disperse the impe-

Mason’s work not only helps illuminate Ishiguro’s conception of the

More than just a setting, the cultural upheaval and reorientation of

This view of domestic life agrees with Ishiguro’s perception of Japanese

ISHIGURO’S NOVELS AS SOCIOLOGICAL

Asked by Dylan Krider about the amount of research that he had

the traditional and modern worlds’ as one of Ishiguro’s themes.22

Ogata-San’s visit, which turns out to be much longer than he originally

ISHIGURO’S NOVELS AS SOCIOLOGICAL AND HISTORICAL

Other critics have focused more directly on the individuals in the

Responding to Mason’s questioning of the difference between

IN THE AFTERMATH OF THE BOMB

The falseness of the socio-historical position is particularly important

Michael Wood addresses this question by diagnosing the absent bomb

motives in a ‘persistent act of self-explanation and self-justification’.53 It

Ishiguro’s deceptively simple manner of presenting Etsuko’s retro-

The novel’s reticence has bothered some critics, such as James

Additionally, Lewis notes, in passing, the similarity of Ishiguro’s use of

if that attempt was ultimately discarded).58 On a similar note, Lively

ETSUKO AND/OR SACHIKO

Shaffer is more persuasive in arguing that Etsuko uses Sachiko’s

GUILTS AND GHOSTS

Shaffer expands on Annan’s reading. The ‘never-articulated fear

Screw (1898) by the English-based American novelist Henry James

Either: (a) Etsuko is confusing different sets of memories; or (b) Etsuko

Left with these interpretative difficulties, several critics have looked to

The whole city of Nagasaki is alerted by a series of child murders, the

While Milton, Lively, and Yoshioka provide a start to understanding

individual’s aggression cannot find satisfactory outlet in the external

Mark Wormald annotates another important image in the novel by

[W]e glimpse through the quietly distorting medium of Etsuko’s prose

Seeing across vast distances, we are warned, is fraught with difficulty.

RECONCILING THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE COLLECTIVE

Cynthia Wong considers what Etsuko’s narrative, regardless of its fac-

The reader cannot truly validate the incompatible details of Etsuko’s

Instead, Wong argues, we have to allow ‘for complexities without

suffering. The important point, Wong suggests, may not be fi nding