Jane Austen has been reincarnated in the personage of Kazuo Ishiguro. The great novelist of early-nineteenth-century English manners, who observed the moral inconsistencies of the nobility and argued for a form of social meritocracy, could not have hoped for a more...
[more]Jane Austen has been reincarnated in the personage of Kazuo Ishiguro. The great novelist of early-nineteenth-century English manners, who observed the moral inconsistencies of the nobility and argued for a form of social meritocracy, could not have hoped for a more loyal and perfect heir to her legacy.
Ishiguro's meticulously crafted novels peel layer after layer off the conventions that rule life both in his adopted land of Britain and his homeland of Japan. Brought to England by his parents in 1960, he was positioned, like Austen, as an outsider in both cultures (with the acute powers of observation such a vantage point allows). His first novel, "A Pale View of Hills" (1982), straddles both settings.
Told from the perspective of a Japanese woman who has immigrated to England, the story recalls her youthful years in Nagasaki and her attempt to find her bearings in the rebuilt city. In the citizens of Nagasaki she finds little willingness to discuss the terrible closing events of WWII -- instead she must confront their absurd, reflexive adherence to traditional social manners. The novel unfolds much later, when the middle-aged narrator has just lost a daughter; her memories are an excursion into the origins of this disaster, into the way conventions have limited her ability to comprehend catastrophe.
The collapse of an old way of life and the shattering of illusions are at the heart of Ishiguro's novel about the English class system, "The Remains of the Day" (1989). Again Ishiguro employs a narrator whose understanding of his world gradually widens as he peers beneath the crust of formality. The protagonist is a butler named Stevens who has devoted his life to stewarding daily events at Darlington Hall. Now that a rich American usurper has replaced his original master, the manners and mores of the country manor and its former lord come into question.
The exacting rules that have guided Stevens' performance as butler, and that have cost him his one chance at love, crumble into a heap of subterfuges. Far from leading an ideal life, Stevens has blindly served a foolish, possibly evil man and destroyed along the way a woman to whom he could have offered emotional fulfillment.
Both these and Ishiguro's other novels ("The Artist of the Floating World" and "The Unconsoled") employ innovative narrative techniques. Temporal perspectives shift as narrators excavate their memories and piece together shards of reality -- shards that have lain hidden beneath layers of "proper" or "correct" ways of thinking. In pure Austen fashion, Ishiguro conveys a rebuke to the systems of social and colonial hierarchy that impede individuals.
Class and gender distinctions, great political and military causes -- all the things that persuade people to adopt subaltern roles in life -- are repeatedly revealed in their hollowness. Beware putting allegiance in banners, in human gods, in manners, in one's own grasp of reality, Ishiguro seems to say: sometimes we must read a story more than once before we know what really happened.
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