Thoughts on Kazuo Ishiguro

After reading two novels by Kazuo Ishiguro, I cannot — much to the author’s satisfaction, I’m sure — keep my thoughts to myself. This haphazard attempt to make sense of what I’ve read is as much for me as it is to nudge you to go pick up these books and give them a chance.

The emotional potency of Kazuo Ishiguro’s work is subtle. It can be missed altogether if you aren’t paying attention. It is precisely this technique that gives his work a special role in our lives: to elevate our sensitivity--both to our own intuitional knowledge that is frustratingly coded in the vague language of feelings and also to the emotional undercurrents--vast and even volatile--that exist under the calm repose and surface apperance of our peers. If we are awake to the emotional energy embedded in Ishiguro’s deceptively simple prose, the overused phrase "in that moment, my heart was breaking", delivers a penetrating, devastating, and personal blow. Such a cliched phrase should undermine the power of the author’s message, yet Ishiguro manages otherwise.

Ishiguro himself explains, through his protagonist of Never Let Me Go, how his books operate. Kathy is a nurse who, in an early scene, ponders a patient's personal questions. She concludes he was "getting me to describe things to him...so that maybe during those sleepless nights, with the drugs and the pain and the exhaustion, the line would blur between what were my memories and what were his". In ishiguro's stories, we are immersed in seemingly mundane, ordinary worlds, and this particular style erodes the barrier of fiction and personal experience. As a result, we experience the characters' life events as though they were our own.

Then the reader's emotions are amplified by Ishiguro's choice to leave his characters' plight unresolved. In both his novels that I've read, the climax unfolds in the last handful of pages. Structuring the novel this way denies all possibility for redemption. There is no phoenix rising and no change of the tides. Just raw, inconsolable pain.

After confronting such merciless literary choices, the reader may struggle to make sense of what he is feeling. Inspired by rumi's poem, Guest House, I am inclined to see the internal explosion the reader experiences as not only devastating, but useful. It is useful to the degree that it clears away the self-deception, projections, and false hopes we harbor. In its place, a new, less illusioned invigoration may fill the vacated space.

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