Kazuo Ishiguro: When We Were Orphans (2000)

And this isn't how you do it.

I'm on record as having hated The Unconsoled, Ishiguro's previous book, but still I had high hopes for this one.  I seemed to remember it having gotten good reviews, and it came highly recommended by at least one person whose opinion I quite respect.  And:  I knew that with this book Ishiguro, for the first but not last time, had decided to flirt with genre fiction.  In this case, the detective story.

The fact that The Unconsoled had been such a dismal misstep didn't concern me:  I was entirely prepared to see it as the kind of experiment that, while not successful in itself, paved the way for future successes. Well.

At first that's precisely what When We Were Orphans felt like to me:  the kind of achievement that pre-Unconsoled Ishiguro wouldn't have been able to pull off.  From the start it's clear that we're, yet again, dealing with an unreliable narrator - a narrator whose self-deceptions it's our challenge to unravel.  But because of the monstrously unmoored quality of the previous novel it's not clear quite what our basis for judging the narrator of this novel is:  what is the nature of reality, of normality, in When We Were Orphans?  We need to know this to know how far his narrator, Christopher Banks, deviates from it.  In other words, the previous book casts a shadow of uncertainty over this one, and it's to this work's benefit, at least at first:  there's the sense that the book could go off in unexpected directions at any moment.  And since the plot here is quite straightforward and coherent, that sense of uncertainty is a good thing.  It provides a frisson of subtextual suspense that the first three books didn't have.

But.  When We Were Orphans falls apart in the second half, precisely when it should be at its best. 

Banks is a self-styled Sherlock Holmes-type detective between the wars.  He was born and partly raised in Shanghai, but sent home to England as a boy when both his parents were kidnapped.  The kidnapping was never solved, and now as an adult, in 1937, he decides it's time to go back to Shanghai and solve their disappearance.  This, of course, brings him back to Shanghai just as the Japanese are invading China, giving Banks and the reader a front-row seat for this historical tragedy.   Banks's connection to it is personal, not just because he was born in Shanghai, but because his best friend as a child was a Japanese boy who lived next door to him.

There's a lot of potential here for social-historical critique, contrasting the International Settlement of which Banks is a product with the lives of ordinary Chinese citizens, exploring the distance between the behavior of the Japanese army in the '30s and Banks's knowledge of his friend in the '10s, etc.  And Ishiguro does pursue some of this.  But it's largely undercut by what he's trying to do with his narrator's self-deception.

Simply put, Banks is so obsessed with his parents' disappearance that he's completely unable to see past it to what's going on in Shanghai when he returns.  The second half is dominated by a long set piece in which Banks ventures outside the International Settlement in search of a kidnappers' safe-house where he thinks his parents are being held.  The invasion is in full swing, with much of the city lying in ruins and the dead and dying filling the streets, and all of this is described to us, but Banks doesn't seem to register it (despite the fact that he's doing the describing).  All he can think about is locating the safe-house; the battle and its casualties are mere annoyances to him, obstacles.  At one point he stumbles across a Chinese army outpost and demands of an English-speaking officer that he provide men to help him in his wild-goose chase, despite the fact that every last soldier is needed to defend the city.

It's pretty clear that what Ishiguro is doing here is satirizing the solipsism of empire, the cluelessness of Europeans in Asia who thought the world revolved around them.  And that's certainly a thing worthy of satire.  But this didn't work for me as satire - Banks's self-delusion is just too hard to believe.  Even the most oblivious expat would have noticed the bombs going off next to him.  It's clumsy.

And it's undercut by the way Ishiguro has other characters interact with Banks.  Banks demanding that the Chinese officer provide men is satire - we immediately see Banks as the white imperialist ordering other races to serve him instead of themselves.  But why does Ishiguro have the officer comply?  If this is part of the satire it's even less effective.  And, curiously, the scenes in which the officer complies don't feel like satire - the officer seems to have heard of Banks's parents' kidnapping, and seems more than willing to lead him around the city for hours.  It's one thing to posit, as part of the satire, subject peoples trying to please their colonial masters, but this is a bit heavy-handed...

And why do all the foreigners in Shanghai greet Banks with the assumption that he's going to somehow defuse the tension between China and Japan?  Several times people refer to the great work that he's there to carry out, and oh yes, he's also going to solve his parents' case - and why does everybody know about that, too?  Especially when it's revealed at the end what really happened to them, it hardly seems the kind of thing that would still be on the foreign community's mind twenty years later, while bombs are going off all around them.

The only way to explain much of the book is to conclude that Banks is not just in a state of denial about certain things, like the narrators of Ishiguro's first three books, but outright delusional - in this sense the resonances with The Unconsoled become dismaying as the book goes on, because the way things just don't add up means either that the narrator is nuts (which the book doesn't seem to support) or the world is...

So, to sum up.  As a satire of British imperialism this is weak, and as a depiction in fiction of the Japanese invasion of Shanghai it's distracted.  On both counts that's a shame, because there's a deeply coruscating novel to be written about the foreign community in Shanghai at this time - it's a rich subject. 

Meanwhile, as an examination of a self-deluding character it falls short of the achievements of Ishiguro's first three books, because it's impossible in the end to figure out exactly how Banks is deluding himself.  (For about a hundred and fifty pages in the middle of the book I had an entire alternate scenario worked out in which we learned in the end that Banks was actually ethnically Chinese or Japanese and had been adopted by white parents and raised in the English way - that would have explained a lot of the odd expectations people seemed to have of him, as well as a number of other details - and I think I would have liked that book better!)

Perhaps worst of all, as a detective novel it's a complete failure.  Now, I get that Ishiguro wasn't trying to write a straight detective novel:  rather, it's an Ishiguro novel with a main character who happens to be a detective.  Nevertheless I think Ishiguro is playing with the conventions of the detective novel - he gives us a mystery, puts a detective there to solve it, and in the end he does provide a solution to the mystery.  But the solution is simply ridiculous, and the detective does so little detecting that it's impossible to believe that he's the celebrated sleuth that everybody else in the novel seems to admit he is. 

Yeah.  I'm afraid I just don't get this one.  I still have two by Ishiguro to go - I hope he gets better.

Kazuo Ishiguro: The Unconsoled (1995)

I just finished Kazuo Ishiguro's fourth novel, The Unconsoled (1995). I started it just after finishing Oliver Twist - that's how long I've been struggling to get through it. This is a bad, bad book.

I'm not absolutely positive I get everything he's trying to do - I'll admit that right up front. It seems to me that he's trying to craft some sort of existentialist fable in a surrealistic mode, using dream logic and absurdist machinery. The Kafka homage is clear: the unnamed Central European setting, the hints of totalitarianism, the characters' tendency to babble.

But whereas in Kafka this sort of thing creates unbearable tension broken only by wicked, knowing humor, here everything falls flat. What should be funny is just maddening. What should be resonant is just trivial. I kept remembering Wyndham Lewis's famous dis of Gertrude Stein: "Gertrude Stein’s prose-song is a cold black suet-pudding. We can represent it as a cold suet-roll of fabulously reptilian length. Cut it at any point, it is the same thing; the same heavy, sticky, opaque mass all through and all along." That's this book: thick, slow, dreary, boring, and endless.

That's all I have to say about the book, really. It didn't do it for me. But you may wish to read reviews by people who liked the book. This reviewer posits a reading that might cause the book to make a certain amount of sense; I didn't see much internal evidence to support the reading, and even if it's true, it doesn't make the book any less atrociously boring, but it's a nice try. This reviewer gushes. Not much one can say in response. Glad he liked it.

Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains Of The Day (1988)

Once again, this seems like a logical progression from his previous book. One of the ironies in Artist Of The Floating World was that we're never sure quite how war-mongering Ono's art was: as long as he's in denial about his war responsibility, the other characters (who we only see through his eyes) seem to be blaming him for a lot, but once he admits his guilt, those around him act as if he has nothing to be ashamed of - they even laugh a bit that he thinks a mere artist could have had any influence at all.

Here, Ishiguro's again concerned with war guilt, but this time there's a figure who has been held unmistakeably guilty by his society: Stevens' employer Lord Darlington, who was a Nazi sympathizer and sometime anti-Semite engaged in actual treason against Britain, and who was exposed for same. No ambiguity about his guilt. Ishiguro's interest is still squarely focused on the issue of denial, but no longer is it the guilty party who's engaged in denial. Now he's examining how we can be blind to great moral failings in those we love, or look up to.

In that sense this makes a fine companion to Ishiguro's first two books; thematically they form a sort of trilogy, with thematic and tonal affinities that far outweigh the fact that this book takes place in a different country than the first two. The first time I read Artist I felt that its characters were Englishmen in disguise, and I still think that to an extent; certainly Ono and Stevens (and Etsuko's father-in-law) would understand each other.

This is the best of the three, however, and I think it's partly because in shifting settings Ishiguro has brought his themes into sharper focus. His main concern in these first three books is repression: of guilt, of emotion, of need, of self. In the first two books it seemed to me that he was locating this repression in an imaginary Japan constructed of equal parts Western stereotypes and Ozu mannerisms, and to me it felt a little overdone. In Remains Of The Day, he's fessed up to the fact that this repression (also) exists in Ishiguro's own England - but in locating it in Stevens the butler he's both hit on the perfect device for exploring repression (Stevens' view of the job description is that it's basically a professional represser) and managed to depict repression without stereotyping an entire culture. We're free to see bits of Stevens in ourselves and people around us (we'd be fools if we didn't), but at the same time Stevens is an extreme case, made believable precisely because his repression is depicted as a function of his vocation, rather than (solely) his nationality.

That's not the only reason this is the best of the three, of course. I'd also point to the fact that the England of Remains seems so much more vividly rendered than the Nagasaki of Hills or the unnamed metropolis of Artist: Ishiguro is simply surer of his setting here. Then there's the variety of tone in this book: it has the famous muted love story, which is undeniably moving, and it also has moments of humor the likes of which Ishiguro hadn't shown before.

Kazuo Ishiguro's An Artist of the Floating World (1986)

You know, kiddies, you shouldn't take everything Wikipedia says as gospel. For example, the entry on this novel is currently nearly a hundred percent bullshit, and it sounds like plagiarized bullshit to boot. But I'm not here to argue with Wikipedia; besides, that would be like wrestling with the sea.

What's interesting reading this novel right after A Pale View of Hills, which I did this time, is to see how much this is a logical progression from its predecessor. The main character here, Ono, is essentially a reformulation of Etsuko's father-in-law there. I.e., he's a retired man whose career was at its height during the war, a war whose values he supported and helped perpetuate through his work; and now, after the war, he has to confront the fact that a lot of people resent him for helping to bring about the tragedy through which they're now living. Ishiguro has taken a background character and theme and moved them into the foreground. In that sense, as well as the fact that they're his only two novels set in Japan, they beg to be read together.

I have some of the same frustrations with this as I had with his first book. His depiction of his Japanese characters often reads, to me, like an Englishman's more-or-less stereotyped imagining of Japanese people, rather than the real thing. This sense is particularly acute when I think of Ono's daughters, Noriko and Setsuko (patterned, of course, after daughters in Ozu movies). The deference and indirection with which they address their father is carried to such an extreme that it's really hard for me not to read them as caricatures...

Similarly I find his depiction of Japanese society as a whole problematic. Not wrong - again, I wouldn't go that far. But I'm not sure about the aesthetics he portrays Ono as espousing. On the one hand he's an artist, like the title says, "of the floating world" - i.e., someone trained in the finer points of aesthetic hedonism, the bittersweet enjoyment of sybaritic pursuits. On the other, he made his name with rabble-rousing fascist propaganda art. I'm not saying it's impossible for one person to evolve from one to the other, but Ono is portrayed as embracing both, and I'm saying that this is a far more uneasy union in reality than Ishiguro manages to evoke on the page. There's a lot more to be worked out here than the book succeeds in working out; Ishiguro may well be aware of this, but for whatever reason, he doesn't really go there in his writing. As a result, Ono's aesthetics feel like two more stereotypes thrown together facilely.

That said, the novel still works on a psychological level, just like the first one. It's another excellent examination of how we lie to ourselves, rationalize away our guilt, and again it's couched in an effective first-person performance. We watch the process of rationalization in real time, as it were. This, of course, was Ishiguro's early specialty.

Kazuo Ishiguro's A Pale View of Hills (1982)

1.

Whenever I talk or think about Kazuo Ishiguro, I find myself wanting to say or think "Ishiguro Kazuo." That is, I find myself doing the mental thing I do when I read an English translation of a Japanese writer, which is to flip their names back into Japanese order. Thus I may read "Haruki Murakami," but I've trained myself to think "Murakami Haruki." Because, dude, that's who he is.

But Kazuo Ishiguro, as near as I can tell, isn't "Ishiguro Kazuo." I mean, I don't know anything about his personal life, but judging by what's public knowledge, he's British, not Japanese. Let me hurry to say that I'm not trying to set myself up as some kind of arbiter of authenticity, nor do I think he should be taken primarily as a representative of his culture, whatever that may be. He's himself first and foremost: born in Japan, raised in the UK from age 6. His parents named him 石黒一雄, but he seems to have grown up as Kazuo Ishiguro.

But what does that matter? From his third novel on, I'm not sure that it does. But in his first two novels, I think it matters a great deal, because he sets them in Japan, a Japan that he later admitted (see the bottom of that Wikipedia entry) was mostly imaginary. As it could only be, since not only was he not raised there, but he was writing about Japan in the 1940s and early 1950s, before his own birth.

These first two novels present difficulties because even though he is imagining Japan, he gets it largely right, which lends his imagination a certain authority. Or does he? I don't know. I first encountered Ishiguro in a class on Japanese literature - the prof ended the term by asking us to think about "diaspora" J-lit. So from the first I was thinking about these books in terms of accuracy - and hell, I don't know. I wasn't in Nagasaki during the Occupation: I don't know if the characters in A Pale View of Hills are acting authentically Japanese or like an Englishman's idea of Japanese. The question nags at me: I'll admit it: but I think it nags at me less because I think there's an answer and I don't know it than because it forces me to confront the fact that there can be no answer to that question, but no escape from it either. I've always felt that to formulate an "authentically" Japanese (or British, or American) behavior is to stereotype, essentialize, and I've always fought against it, but at the same time I'm not sure if it's possible to completely abstain from this kind of thinking. Ishiguro, I think, is aware of that: early in the book the narrator, a Japanese woman living in Britain, gripes at how the English think Japanese have a racial predilection for suicide - and yet the story she tells is full of suicides. In other words Ishiguro is highlighting a British stereotype of Japaneseness even as he's indulging it, perhaps even perpetuating it.

2.
Jim Emerson at Scanners talks about what he calls the Barton Fink Box Test. He quotes Joel Coen talking about the mysterious package in that masterpiece of a film:

The question is: Where would it get you if something that's a little bit ambiguous in the movie is made clear? It doesn't get you anywhere.

I think we can even extrapolate from this a Barton Fink Box Ploy, whereby filmmakers, and novelists and whoever else, introduce a note of ambiguity precisely to remind you that what's at stake isn't really What's In The Box, but What Does The Box Mean. It's how the Coens shock you out of what's (also) a really good Hollywood noir so that you remember it's also a piece of arthouse existentialism. It masterfully turns the conversation away from the plot and toward the meaning of the events in the plot (meaning being, of course, something the Coens always deny in their interviews). "I'll show you the life of the mind."

Ishiguro has a classic BFBP at the climax of A Pale View of Hills, where suddenly we wonder if two separate characters are really one and the same, if any of the events we've been told about really happened, if the narrator actually killed her own child... And of course it tantalizes us: I want to know if Etsuko and Sachiko are one and the same, if Keiko and Mariko are one and the same, etc.

But immediately I realize that this is Barton Fink's Box. Would knowing if Etsuko and Sachiko are one and the same make any difference? Whether or not they are, we can say that Etsuko feels some responsibility for her daughter Keiko's suicide, and she's in denial about it, that she feels some guilt for fleeing Japan for the UK over the wishes and expectations of her first husband and her child, and she's not talking about that. To put a finer point on it: either Etsuko is Sachiko, and she killed her daughter Mariko so she could be free to move to America with her lover, or she's not Sachiko, but only Etsuko, who forced her daughter Keiko to move to UK with her and her lover, in the process setting her daughter up for so much depression that she eventually kills herself. Same difference.

3.
Same could be said, I guess, about the question of the novel's authenticity as a depiction of Japan during the Occupation. The question is: is the novel an authentic depiction of Japan during the Occupation, or is it an Englishman's imagination of Japan during the Occupation. The answer to that question is eternally elusive, but knowing the answer wouldn't change anything. What we have is a penetrating examination of self-sacrifice, self-denial, and how it will fail at key moments; of the lies we tell ourselves to mask those moments of failure; of the undeniable need for self-fulfillment, for a chance at happiness, damn the consequences; and we have all of this in a sharply-evoked context of social upheaval that threatens or promises to revolutionize gender relations.

What we have, in short, is a novel full of insights. Whether those insights are ultimately Japanese or British is unanswerable. The answer is in the box - but the box itself is a fiction. There's nothing inside.