Artist of the Floating World(1986). In both, an old man remembers a life in which he
has made dubious accommodations with authority in order to retain an honoured
role. For both, the radical revision of perspectives after 1945 (when the city of
Ishiguro’s birth was hit by a nuclear bomb) is too painful to admit. If the Japanese
setting is slightly opaque to outsiders, the English country house seems convincing
enough, at least to those who don’t know country houses. The butler’s quaintly
dignified language does not hide from us what he has taught himself not to see: that
his admired master was host to pre-war Anglo-German appeasement talks. This
finely managed serious comedy shows clearly how sticking to social roles and rules
can lead to self-deception, self-betrayal and, in the butler’s case, a failure to respond
to love. Ishiguro draws no attention to this, nor to his skill. Japanese reticence could
be recommended to a Britain where the post-modernist often rings twice.
The longest and most ambitious of his five novels,The Unconsoled, is altogether
more baffling. A celebrated pianist arrives in a nameless central European city to give
a recital. His stay turns into a series of failed meetings, missed rendezvous, and inter-
rupted conversations. Everyone fawns on him, no-one protests when he is late for yet
another meeting. The experience of reading this unconsoling novel is reminiscent of
an Ingmar Bergman film, set in a series of haunting landscapes which dissolve into
each other. There are repeated instances of the power of group-think, of collusion in
social hypocrisy, and abasement before unknown forces. Ishiguro is a compelling
writer, a true craftsman, a creator of memorable worlds, but The Unconsoled,
compared with his other novels, left many readers looking for a clue. It is a first rate
nightmare.
Never Let Me Go is more straightforward. The narrator, a schoolgirl, immerses us
in the special language of her coeducational boarding school in the English country-
side. Everything is as it might be in a boarding school – full of special customs and
terminology. Teachers at this school, for example, are ‘guardians’. As the pages turn,
the school language becomes clearer. We see the children leave the school to go on
to a less controlled but still isolated farm setting. Once their training is finished,
‘vet erans’ are released into the outside world to become ‘carers’; and finally ‘donors’.
When they have no more organs to give, donors ‘complete’. They are clones, bred to
supply spare body parts, bred out of ‘possibles’: selected human beings of good
physique. Physical sexual activity is some consolation for the lonely clones, who
cannot themselves have children, though they can love. The question ‘Do they have
souls?’ hovers. The carers’ working lives are like those of a community nurse or social
worker; Ishiguro has been a social worker. The adult clones long for a normal life;
one narrator envies above all the life of an office worker. As in Ishiguro’s other novels
there is a powerful sense of complicity, of things unsaid, of denial, of the power of
motivational social codes. Late in the story, a retired ‘guardian’, challenged by former
pupils now adult, admits that the school’s supposed ‘deferrals’ of the date of first
donation for those who were really in love, were no more than a rumour. The story
has little of the thin and diagrammatic quality of dystopian and science fiction: we
feel pity for some guardians as well as for the clones. Ishiguro builds up intimate
effects, creating a world through its specialized idioms and vocabulary. This profes-
sional trick is worked also by more popular practitioners such as Beryl Bainbridge,
John Le Carré and Patrick O’Brian. Ishiguro is expert in suggesting the forces at play
in a conversation: who dominates, and how. He creates a sealed world, from which
one wishes to escape. Although the background tone is one of restrained melancholy
at human imperfection and the abuse of power by social authority, Ishiguro always416 15 · CONTEMPORARIES
Kazuo Ishiguro (b.1954).