Kazuo Trio

I’ve already discovered, this year, a new writer whose babies I would like to have. This kind of discovery doesn’t happen very often, but it’s something glorious when it does. I get all gushy and beautifully rapt, and start to feel like they’re walking beside me for days. Oh, literary love-affairs! They’re even more fulfilling than the real thing.

Kazuo Ishiguro, where have you been all my life? Over the last months, entirely by chance, three Ishiguro novels have come into my hands, loaned to me by a housemate, a friend, my mother. What has dazzled me most is the variety of the books, their subjects, scopes, their narrative voices all so different from each other that they seem like they’ve been penned by different hands. Over the last months, I’ve listened to the narration of a traumatised Japanese woman living in an English county, an ageing and upright butler, a brittle and doomed young woman, and believed them all entirely. And it’s been an interesting journey, to say the least.

I started with A Pale View of Hills (Faber& Faber, 1982), a slender and scruffy volume plucked from my housemate’s Billy bookshelves. What amazed me about this book is the depth of its control – from the opening pages, you’re aware that some kind of tragedy has taken place, that something terrible has happened to the narrator’s younger, more Japanese daughter, but this never entirely unravels. It’s a story told in hints, and in glimpses, and riddled with doublings, mirrorings and misunderstandings. And the narrator is lovely – an observant and touchingly melancholic woman, describing the early days of her unhappy marriage in post-war Japan and her current quiet twilight in the English countryside, visited by her estranged daughter. It’s a tale of the uncanny, a ghost story and a tale of the occluded, the deluded and the ruptured – and it’s this central mystery, this unresolve, the things that are withheld and suppressed that make it such a powerful and striking book. And had me caught. It was such a beautiful, sticky web that Isiguro weaves.

So I was shocked, or disconcerted at the very least, when I moved on to The Remains of the Day. Instead of that beautiful, dreamy and ambiguous female voice, here was a butler as black-and-white in vision as his upper lip is stiff. This book is almost an exercise in the British accent, and masterful in its control – the narrator’s self-delusion reveals itself so slowly, and his entire narrative unfolds in arcs of memory and reminiscence, as he drives through the English countryside. So slowly the novel’s real concerns become apparent – it’s a story about class, about race, and about nostalgia – that is, a story about a very specific kind of Britishness that is so keenly observed and sharply drawn, and startling in its poignancy.

Finally, then, my mother lent me Never Let Me Go in the months before the film was released here. Unfortunately, her copy didn’t have the beautiful cover pictured here; instead, I had to carry around Keira Knightley’s horse-face in my handbag for a week. I suffer for my stories.

And it’s a story well known for its heartbreak, for its devastating sadness in conclusion and melancholy right throughout. But reading this as the third part of a trio, I was struck mostly by its similarities with Kazuo’s other tales. Ostensibly, there are huge differences – this is a kind of speculative fiction, the narrator is a young and self-aware woman, there’s a love story here that’s largely missing from the other books. But it’s a story built of memories, of looking back at a childhood in a lost and unrecoverable world. And Hailsham, the school at the novel’s centre, is an archetype of that very British institution – the country boarding school.

Englishness and loss both haunt this novel – just as they lie at the core of the other two books. And I think, somehow, that this is writing about migration; that by both observing a culture from the outside, and by examining the workings of memory, nostalgia and unrecoverable pasts, Isiguro is writing books of exile. That there is something of the Japanese writer at the heart of these very English books, and something strange and estranged there that pulls so strongly on the heartstrings.

Oh Kazuo. Thank you for giving me such pleasure.

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