Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism Beyond The Nation

IN KAZUO ISHIGURO’S second and third novels, An Artist of the Floating World (1986) and The Remains of the Day (1989), the narrators look back from the middle of the twentieth century on events that took place in the years before the Second World War.¹ While the novels never mention their own time period, the 1980s, their sly humor and dramatic irony depend on the reader’s sense of distance both from the interwar confidence of the early 1930s and from the Cold War hypocrisy of the 1950s. In these works, interwar confidence comes in the form of English racism, German militarism, and Japanese expansionism, while Cold War hypocrisy is represented, often more subtly, by Englishmen who praise democracy but oppose the decolonization of “all kinds of little countries” that once belonged to Britain (R 192) and by U.S.-influenced Japanese who think that establishing positive, anti-imperialist role models means encouraging children to imitate cowboys instead of samurais (A 30). Comparing the fascisms of the 1930s, the imperialisms of the 1950s, and the nativisms of the 1980s, Ishiguro develops a critical cosmopolitanism that allows us to see how aspects of fascism and triumphalism function not only in Japan and Germany but also in the United States and England, and not only in the 1930s and 1950s but also in the 1980s; in Ishiguro’s narratives, no country looks like a perpetrator or a victim only, or like a major power or a minor supplicant all of the time. Ishiguro generates comparisons not to create equivalences but to notice continuities and mergings among different political circumstances (of the early, middle, and late twentieth century) and among various, conflicting allegiances (to children, parents, teachers, students, art, country, friends, and so on). Ishiguro’s novels are treasonous because they suggest that steadfast and unconflicted allegiances are neither possible nor desirable, because they propose that critical artworks will need to project a limited or only partial faithfulness, and because they use unreliable narratives to generate in their readers self-reflective and contingent kinds of loyalty.

If Ishiguro is eager to compare scenes and kinds of coercion, he is reluctant to treat every instance of coercion as the same. He is also suspicious of social or political movements that aim to make all aspects of individual life accountable to a collective program. An Artist of the Floating World suggests that the production of decadent art—here, the representation and valorization of fleeting, intense moments of consciousness, usually involving pleasure or sexuality—constitutes treason in Japan of the 1930s because it does not express, encourage, or generate “the new spirit” of military conquest (64). Ishiguro’s own emphasis on past moments, on partial or “pale” views, and on intimacy, within a group of novels that focus on the physical and psychic damage of militarism, racism, and neo-imperialism, allows us to see decadence not only as a refusal to participate in the expansionist project but also as a critique of the consolidating “spirit” or aesthetic protocols of that project. In Artist, the narrator recalls a banner that used an image of marching army boots displayed against the name of a popular bar to associate drinking and carousing there with Japanese patriotism (64). To be certain, the banner conformed to the new spirit because it celebrated military activities such as soldiers going to war. But it performed that spirit, too, by reducing acts of pleasure and sociability to an ethic of ineluctable progress: the marching boots represent the forward momentum of war as well as the instrumental and conformist way of thinking that would make all activities subservient to that momentum.

Ishiguro’s treason differs from the idea of treason invoked by most of his characters: he sees it as a principle of imperfect unanimity that informs antifascist and antinativist ideas of community, whereas they see it as a failure of the “fierce and total” devotion that participating in a community requires (A 144). Perhaps the most visible footprint of the 1980s in Ishiguro’s early novels is their frequent use of the word “misunderstanding,” which characters invoke whenever they want to claim that there is confusion rather than conflict. Misunderstanding invokes the ideals of tolerance and mutual inaccessibility that readers trained in multiculturalism, at its height in the 1980s, often bring to Ishiguro’s texts. And it facilitates the assumption of natural inaccessibility that the West has often attributed to the East. To this kind of tolerance, Ishiguro prefers the agency and open antagonism of treason.

However, by placing his characters between one imperial power and another, between social confidence and social questioning, between past and present, and between several national cultures, Ishiguro in some ways cultivates misunderstanding in his readers. His strategies of description and narration can seem to imitate the characteristics of the place and people he is representing. Readers often assume that his novels are expressing specific national traditions or attributes: this is true for the apparent Englishness of When We Were Orphans (2000) and The Remains of the Day, and for the apparent Japaneseness of An Artist of the Floating World and A Pale View of Hills (1982). If Ishiguro’s oeuvre is cosmopolitan in a critical sense because it involves comparison and distinction, it is also cosmopolitan in the most traditional sense: the novels present characters who move from East to West and from West to East; they refer to works of literature, painting, and popular culture from Great Britain, France, Japan, the United States, and elsewhere; they are published originally in English, though some of the narrators do not speak or think in English at all. In another respect, also, the novels are cosmopolitan: they emphasize sensory experiences, such as familiar spaces, evocative smells, and the sound of habitual phrases. Ishiguro uses these spaces, smells, and phrases to associate major events with those that seem to be minor and to ask us to notice that the international politics of immigration and imperialism is shaped by intimate disputes about social achievement, education, and childrearing.

Marcel Proust’s work provides an important comparison for Ishiguro’s because he theorizes the relationship between narratives and selves and also allows that his texts might produce a self, defining in their style a particular persona or experience. By his own account, Proust imagines the “function and task of a writer as those of a translator,” one who mediates (and knows the difference) between an “impression” in life and its “expression” in literature. He will name this difference and yet propose, at times, that expression may suggest what impression was: one may “recognize” in retrospect the telling “evidence” for a self invented in the act of retrospection; a narrative may articulate for the first time the identity whose characteristics it claims merely to recall.² Ishiguro’s early works register this dialectic, between the narratives that generate identities and the narratives that describe them, as the origin of national fictions. Ishiguro’s characters maintain these fictions by invoking what Maud Ellmann, writing about Henry James, calls “vulgar truth.”³ Refusing to endorse a static view of the past, Ishiguro abjures “vulgar truth” in order to abjure “vulgar falsehood” as well. This is to say, as Ellmann explains of James, Ishiguro is unwilling to reduce his narratives to a single, transparent event because in a world of political interpretations such truth is a kind of deception. “As soon as there is representation,” Ellmann proposes, speaking both of narrative and of politics, “there is treason” (509). To represent this treason, Henry James built his late work on the foundation of absent narrative and envisioned his task as the evocation of insufficient representation: he hoped to convey to his readers the sense of “ever so many more of the shining silver fish afloat in the deep sea of one’s endeavour than the net of widest casting could pretend to gather in.”⁴ For James, the floating world was the condition to which fiction aspired. Likewise, Ishiguro proposes that treason in people, nations, and art is more reliable and sometimes more responsible than absolute or merely dutiful allegiance.

Ishiguro’s novels plainly reiterate the many generalizing utterances that characters use to obscure differences over time and within a community. These generalizations are audible in Ishiguro’s novels as the echoes of nationalism and cultural stereotype. Ishiguro shows how cultural stereotypes work by presenting his novels as national allegories,⁵ allowing the characteristics of his texts to stand for the characteristics of the cultures they seem to describe. Ishiguro reproduces these allegories and then displays them, embedding their cultural truths in narratives about the fictionalization of cultural truths. The novels thus demonstrate an “aberrant grammar,” to use Roland Barthes’s term, which disorients systems of meaning and patterns of reference.⁶ Ishiguro’s aberrant grammar is, like the Deleuzian stammer,⁷ an effort to make the process of representation both more vexed and more visible; it is an effort to write “like a foreigner,” if only to assert the necessity of translation even—or especially—within a novel that seems to be about a single national culture.⁸

Theodor W. Adorno has proposed that readers perceive foreignness in language whenever there is a disruption in the conventions of syntax: texts will seem “foreign” when they perform and require interpretation because readers attribute such efforts to a difference between cultures rather than to a difference within them.⁹ Adorno explains, performing the contrast and the subordination that he is describing,

Readers are enraged, Adorno argues, because they are encountering an unfamiliar idea, and they attribute their lack of familiarity to the author’s use of foreign words rather than to the author’s effort to generate unfamiliar meanings. This may explain why the persistent approximation of cultures in Ishiguro’s novels is for many readers mimetic of places rather than displacement:¹⁰ readers attribute the effect of translation to an objective, definable “foreignness,” making a scene of distance out of a story of proximity, immigration, and comparison. This chapter will consider how Ishiguro anticipates, even entices these transformations and how he uses misunderstandings to resist exclusive allegiances and to affirm more critical, more cosmopolitan loyalties.

The “floating world” of Ishiguro’s second novel names a subject for art—“those pleasurable things that disappear with the morning light”—as well as a country, a social milieu, and a past (180). The “artist” of the title is Masuji Ono: in the 1930s, he was a respected painter and imperial propagandist; in the 1950s, after the Second World War, he is a collaborator in disgrace. Ono’s story is elusive, gestural, and translated in every sense, for Ono is a Japanese man speaking his native language, ostensibly Japanese, in formal English. For many readers, the difference between English discourse and Japanese setting does not call attention to the artifice of the novel so much as it articulates a cultural estrangement or simply a culture: Japan itself. These readers thus reproduce a metonymic logic that Ishiguro attributes ironically to many of his characters. It is worth remembering that narratives may project national fictions, even if the assembly of those fictions is part of the stories they tell. By embedding Japanese stereotypes within his work, Ishiguro prefigures and theorizes the interpretations that have come to pursue him.

In several reviews of Ishiguro’s novels, the artist Ono and the artist Ishiguro are metaphorically interchangeable. Critics associate the novelist’s technique with an authentic Japaneseness, and they propose this affiliation as a natural rather than a cultivated element of Ishiguro’s craft. The author’s “instincts,” we are told, “are for the nuanced, the understated, elegant but significant gesture, similar to the deft brushwork of Japanese paintings.”¹¹ It is more common for readers to attribute Ishiguro’s non-English qualities to his style of writing than to his subject or biography, but some have attached a specific cultural particularity to the latter elements as well. For one reader, Ishiguro “remains inalienably Japanese” despite “Western literary techniques,” in good part, it would seem, because the contrast between “the West” and Japan is itself “a favourite subject for Japanese writers.”¹² Ishiguro has lived in England since the age of six, was educated in England, writes in English, but he is regularly compared with “modern Japanese novelists” all the same.¹³

Homi K. Bhabha has suggested that this kind of critical transformation, from difference into identity, attempts to convert what escapes the reading, authoritative gaze—those floating fish, the floating world, those “things that disappear”—into a containable metonymy. For Bhabha, the reader’s failure becomes the object’s abstract noun: “the inscrutability of the Chinese, the unspeakable rites of the Indians, the indescribable habits of the Hottentots.”¹⁴ The floating world of the Japanese. While these metonymies generate the racism of fixed characteristics, Bhabha argues, their opacity also reflects an impotent gaze and the potential failure of definitive sight. Whereas in Bhabha’s account inaccessibility becomes an accessible, if somewhat menacing content, Rey Chow argues that obstinate strangeness justifies for many a distance that need not be measured. “When that other is Asia or the ‘Far East,’” Chow has proposed, it is typically represented in “absolute terms, making this other an utterly incomprehensible, terrifying, and fascinating spectacle.”¹⁵ The problem, Chow explains, is not the incomprehension of difference but the embodiment it provokes: readers transform a subjective, idealized fantasy into an objective place or person; they “(mis)apply [this otherness] to specific other cultures.”¹⁶

Ishiguro’s approach to these transformations is unusual because he suggests that national identities are generated not only to maintain a boundary from the outside but also to erect a boundary in the face of new, perhaps internal estrangement. Ishiguro describes a world of metonymic reading, but he is careful not to suggest either that one might replace it with a more authentic, less figurative form of description or that its consolidating tactics are solely the strategy of an Orientalist perspective. Both Bhabha and Chow have criticized those models of anti-ethnocentrism that, in seeking to replace bad images with good ones, reproduce racist stereotypes by making foreign persons into objects of persistent nobility.¹⁷ Chow is suspicious of any discourse that would transform other cultures into sites of “authenticity and true knowledge” not only because this authenticity forecloses the agency of self-definition and self-fashioning but also because it suggests that observers of these cultures might gain from them a “true knowledge” uninflected by translation and self-interest (52–53). Chow takes up Slavoj Žižek’s observation that those who think themselves “non-duped,” or “undeceived,” are in fact the most deceived of all.¹⁸ She extends Žižek’s argument to assert that “our fascination with the native, the oppressed, the savage, and all such figures is therefore a desire to hold on to an unchanging certainty somewhere outside our own ‘fake’ experience. It is a desire for being ‘non-duped,’ which is a not-so-innocent desire to seize control” (53). The desire to be undeceived, like the desire for a “vulgar truth,” leads to falsehood and coercion.

In Ishiguro’s novels, the fictions of national definition are as often a product of local imagination as they are an imposition of foreign scrutiny. Moreover, Ishiguro proposes, the fixing of national identities depends on a style of representation whose claims to mimetic transparency assume norms of unwavering allegiance and historical continuity. Refusing this transparency at the level of narration, Ishiguro’s novels generate a kind of “hesitant” knowledge that is neither homogenous nor absolute: Ishiguro’s aberrant grammar resists political and cultural norms by reproducing a normalizing rhetoric (for example: “I always think it’s so truly like England out here” [P 182]) excessively and inappropriately. It is important for Ishiguro’s project that his novels are not incomprehensible, for any absolute ignorance would preserve, in its opposite, the fiction of unanimity. Against the ideal of understanding, Ishiguro commits his writing to meanings that change and to people who change their minds. Ishiguro’s characters, for whom lapses in unanimity constitute a disquieting lapse in self-confidence, frequently claim incomprehensibility in order to disclaim conflict and bad feeling. The words “misunderstanding” and “mistake” thus repeat throughout Ishiguro’s texts in the voice of characters and narrators whose response to conflicting interpretations is not acknowledgment but correction. So the English butler of The Remains of the Day calls his employer’s decision to dismiss two maids because they are Jewish a “misunderstanding” (153). And Ogata-San, a former teacher and a supporter of Japanese imperialism before the Second World War, imagines in A Pale View of Hills that his son’s criticism of imperialist education shows that he “clearly [doesn’t] understand” (66). “Misunderstanding” and “mistake” are most prevalent and most significant, however, in An Artist of the Floating World, where they identify all those disagreements and disloyalties that the characters find too difficult to acknowledge (44, 49, 123, 155, and passim). Readers can only make sense of these novels once they, like Ishiguro’s characters, exchange the rhetoric of correction for the condition of ongoing conflict.

Many of Ishiguro’s reviewers have wanted to separate the practical difficulty of reading the novels from the cultural complexities that the narratives present. The reviewers attribute a Japanese style or repertoire to Ishiguro, while they remain otherwise self-conscious about the use of ethnographic language. This ambivalence tends to produce a reflexive denial of cultural or national metonymy, which often constitutes the reviewer’s only articulation—and explicit circulation—of the classification he or she is trying to avoid. Consider, for example, this statement, which introduces a discussion of Ishiguro’s fourth novel, The Unconsoled: “First, Ishiguro himself is a puzzle (I am not referring to his name or country of origin).”¹⁹ The effect of the sentence depends on what is withheld: the reviewer’s meaning, though not Ishiguro’s, is so self-evident that it need not be specified; there is nothing in the review, at least before this statement, that either identifies Ishiguro’s name as Japanese or justifies a connection between “name” and “country of origin.” Moreover, there is nothing to tell us why or how a man or a place, if he or it were Japanese, would be “a puzzle.” The reviewer imagines that this information is obvious, or at least understood; he presumes that his readers might read the name Ishiguro in the same way he says he does not. The reviewer denies a cultural specificity in the grammar of negation, but he reproduces its effect in the rhetoric of presumption: leaving his comment to speak for itself, he affiliates his readers with the clarity of his referent (what he and “we” understand) and thus contrasts them against the “puzzle” of Ishiguro’s prose. The denial of reference (“I am not referring …”) initiates the reviewer’s incomprehension (puzzlement) as that which results from and distinguishes Japanese incomprehensibility.

Readers find it difficult to discuss what signifies Japan without repeating the signifiers as natural or necessary. Gabriele Annan proposes in The New York Review of Books that “the elegant bareness [of Ishiguro’s style] inevitably reminds one of Japanese painting.”²⁰ While Annan comes to dispute the simplicity of this association, she assumes that her readers will share her initial, “inevitable” thought. Annan describes Ishiguro’s indictment of “cliché,” but she produces clichés of her own:

There are three main assumptions posed as “inevitable” here: first, that “elegant bareness” points a straight line to Japanese painting; second, that a “Japanese style” would suggest a celebration of Japanese culture; and third, that Ishiguro’s critique of “cliché” is a critique of “being Japanese” rather than a critique of cultural stereotypes. In the reviews of Ishiguro’s work, Japanese painting has become the “inevitable” comparison for the novelist’s style, if only because so many reviewers make the association. It might be “inevitable,” then, because Ishiguro identifies and evokes the signifiers that produce the collateral effect. In any case, Annan makes no distinction between the claim that emotional restraint is Japanese and the possibility that such restraint reflects disagreement and uncertainty over what being Japanese involves.

As a style of art and self-presentation, restraint—like evasion—is for good reason often associated with ethical failure and political quietude. To be sure, the narrator of The Remains of the Day, the novel that brought Ishiguro the Booker Prize, cultivates restraint to excuse his complicity in decisions that he allowed others to make for him. However, one sees that another character in the novel, while full of “good strong opinion” (184), is not wholly admirable: he may speak for democracy among Englishmen, but he laments the decline of empire and “all kinds of little countries going independent” (192). Ishiguro suggests that literary and artistic styles that seem opinionated do not necessarily express sentiments that are honest, or even ideal. In An Artist of the Floating World, Ono seems to exchange cartoon stereotype and impressionist shadow for realist transparency: the narrator recalls moving in his apprenticeship from the commercial studio of Master Takeda, where the presence of “geishas, cherry trees, swimming carps, temples” (69) defined Japan in paintings sold abroad; to the workshop of Mr. Moriyama, or Mori-san, artist of pleasure houses and social decadence; and finally to the tutelage of Chishu Matsuda, an advocate of Japanese militarism, for whom Ono turns out imperialist propaganda. There are two versions of this trajectory, which the reader is left to assemble. In the first version, which Ono describes, the career moves from one extreme to another: Ono reports that his later art had a political message but no artifice, while his earlier art was commercial or aesthetic but not political. In the second version, which Ishiguro only implies, one sees that Mori-san advocates impressionism with the enthusiasm of a dictator—those who paint in a style that differs from his example are considered “traitors” to his cause (165)—and that Ono’s art is most cunning when he adopts a style of painting that seems direct and explicit.

In a work called Complacency, which Ono painted in support of Japanese militarism in the 1930s, the artist fuses an image of three impoverished boys with an image of three samurai warriors. The fusing is meant to suggest that the fact of poverty can only be redressed by the activities and spirit of imperialist expansion (167–68). Ono’s art as a propagandist is not truer than the illusoriness of the style he adopted under a former teacher: rather, in Complacency, the fact of illusion is no longer represented. The propagandist style acts as if it is true, whereas the impressionist style never makes this claim: in this sense, Ishiguro suggests, the style that claims openness and truth is most deceptive. Restraint, which corresponds both to the impressionist style of painting and to the style of Ishiguro’s novel, seems more honest than the apparent sincerity of wartime propaganda, though it seems only more Japanese to the extent that it is part of a long tradition of Japanese art.

In Ishiguro’s novels about Japan, what counts as Japanese is what James Clifford would call, ethnographically speaking, “an achieved fiction.”²² The point of Clifford’s metaphor is that cultural narratives are by definition “novelistic,” which makes them no more and no less “fictional” for all that. One of Ishiguro’s short stories provides a good example of the relation between what we might call insider and outsider ethnographies, Japan’s stories about itself as opposed to the stories told about Japan. Japan can be fictionalized, Ishiguro suggests, but the “true” Japan is already a fiction, and not just someone else’s. In “A Family Supper” (1990), suicide is offered up both as a fact of Japanese nostalgia and as a myth of Orientalism.²³ Ishiguro’s story begins with a parodic account of seppuku in which the narrator’s mother dies not through her own purposeful and ritualized disembowelment but by the accidental ingestion (at a dinner party) of a fish whose poisonous glands had been imperfectly removed. In case the reader has missed the replacement of one gutting for another, the narrator reports that in Japan “after the war,” it was “all the rage” to serve fugu to neighbors and friends, as if to replace the traditional seppuku with a more sociable form of collective remorse (207).

Ishiguro’s parody is recounted in the first-person voice by a young man who was born in Tokyo but has been living in California in the years just before the beginning of the story. The narrator is returning to Japan some two years after the death of his mother, which is described in the opening paragraphs. Since Ishiguro’s name sounds Japanese, since he is writing in English and publishing his story in Esquire magazine, since he seems to know about Japanese rituals and describe them much as one who has been living far from home, perhaps in California, readers might imagine that the story of poisonous fish and hazardous dinner parties is true. Or maybe that some of it is true. But which part? Even before one gets past the framing narrative of return to the supper that is the story’s putative topic, there are details—both personal and historical—that the narrative encourages its readers to accept. The parody inheres in its assumed referent, in the expectation that readers will find the fish story grotesque, bizarre, unlikely, at best, though they will recognize in it, perhaps, that common and persistent trope of “Japanese” melodrama: suicide.²⁴

Left with this “reminder” of Japan’s predisposition, one enters the body of the tale and the narrator’s supper with his father and sister. Readers learn through dialogue, though not through narration, that the father is melancholy because his business has recently collapsed. Moreover, there are some family conflicts that Ishiguro presents only indirectly: the father is “prepared to forget” his son’s unspecified “behavior” (208) in the past and longs for that time when his business did not involve “foreigners”; the son (the narrator) recalls his father striking him when he was a boy; the sister contemplates immigration to the United States with her boyfriend. These conflicts are what the characters do not talk about: the father does not want to consider the future; the narrator is reluctant to reopen prior disagreements; the sister has not told her father about her thoughts of leaving Japan. What the family does talk about, in implicit and explicit terms, is suicide: for while the mother may have died by accident, the father’s business partner, we learn from the narrator’s sister, has “cut his stomach with a meat knife,” after killing his wife and children (210). The narrator and his father, as well as the narrator and his sister, separately discuss versions of this story twice before the meal is served. The father seems to approve his partner’s action for its particular ethic and its general bravery: he calls his partner “a man of principle and honor” (208); later, the father says he wishes that he had been a pilot during the war, because “in an airplane … there was always the final weapon” (210). With the mother’s death as background and the partner’s suicide as foreground, one learns that the family is having fish for dinner, which the father has prepared by himself in the kitchen.

Ishiguro’s story is about Japanese suicide, though not because the story is solely about Japan and not because Ishiguro thinks that suicide is a natural inclination of the Japanese. Rather, Ishiguro’s tale is about the expectation that suicide is likely to figure in any narrative of Japanese life and about how this expectation, in its generalization about Japanese people, obscures conflicts within Japan and within a Japanese family. “A Family Supper” is a cosmopolitan story not only because the characters think and live between nations but also because the most intimate topics within Japan, such as suicide, parenting, and shame, are generated by international concerns. As Woolf did before him, Ishiguro is marking out lines of entanglement between kitchen and battlefield, between Japanese travel and American occupation. Like many readers, the characters in the story do not see these lines because they tend to assume that collective rituals will resolve local conflicts, including local conflicts about national identity and international identification. Suicide functions as a form of nostalgic citation: it points to a past whose continuity and authenticity can be affirmed, through iteration, in the present. Ritual suicide, for the business partner and even for the air force pilots extolled by the father, is a Japanese anachronism: it seems to reproduce, but in fact merely invents a purely Japanese Japan.²⁵

Ishiguro thus promotes the double consciousness that I have associated with critical cosmopolitanism: if readers see suicide as an essential, defining characteristic of Japaneseness, they may miss its fictionalization, but if they see it only as a Western fiction, they risk underestimating its position within Japanese culture.²⁶“A Family Supper” leads its readers to believe that the father might intentionally repeat the scene of his wife’s accident, but it is clear by the end, after the fish has been entirely consumed, that the remaining family disapproves of the partner’s actions. The ending of “A Family Supper” seems to surprise the narrator as much as it may surprise the reader. The son, who had been living in America, does not approve of his father’s values, but it is clear that he has assumed he knew what his father’s values are:

Ishiguro’s story closes a few paragraphs later without resolution or consolation; it ends, moreover, without the sense that suicide is consolation for what cannot be found or retrieved, either as national past or even as national difference. Although they do not affirm suicide as a positive act, the son and father are reluctant—the word “mistake” suggests this—to acknowledge that the business partner’s values differ from their own, or that their own values in the present are different and opposed to the values of the past. “Mistake,” like “misunderstanding,” transforms political choice and individual action into accident and misapprehension; it implies a continuous self who has merely strayed involuntarily from a course now correctly identified.

It is significant in Ishiguro’s story that there are two suicide effects in play. The business partner seems to think that suicide can compensate for the assault of foreigners and economic decline. The narrator attributes less decisiveness to the business partner’s action: he seems to think that Japanese “restraint” or “despair” naturally leads to suicide. There are multiple agents in the making of the suicide fiction, and their differences can be seen most clearly in two scenes from Ishiguro’s early novels. As in “A Family Supper,” these scenes involve suicides described but not performed in the text. In A Pale View of Hills, suicide haunts the narrative: a young woman has hanged herself in the immediate past of the novel’s present, but there may have been an earlier suicide—the memories are not clear—in the distant past that the narrator recalls in the middle and in the margins of her framing story. The novel opens with a stereotype of Japanese suicide, rendered clearly in the contrast between the narrator’s report of her daughter’s death and her description of an account written in an English newspaper.

The reader learns that the narrator’s daughter, Keiko, has hanged herself just before the story begins. Keiko was born in Japan, but she and her mother later moved to England, where the mother, Etsuko, remarried in the years after the Second World War. Etsuko’s second daughter, Niki, has come home after hearing about her half-sister’s death. The narrator tells us:

Etsuko presents Japanese suicide as “an instinct” of English invention, and this “instinct” is made newsworthy by the juxtaposition of a “pure Japanese” woman and the English room in which she died. The newspaper offers this contrast as the effect of death, but the novel suggests instead that it may be a cause: in her suicide, Keiko seems to be asserting a particular identity and a ritualized history against the demand for assimilation, perhaps also against the racism, of her English home. One might say that she is acting Japanese in order to adopt and stabilize a cultural difference that is otherwise unnoticed or superficially described. Ishiguro presents suicide as the preeminent signifier of Japanese culture, a story so common that “further explanations are unnecessary,” and, at the same time and for this reason, it is a story to which he returns over and over again. Ishiguro uses suicide as a model for national fictions in other contexts: the Japanese “instinct” for suicide, which Etsuko critiques, resonates ironically with the “truly” English landscape that Etsuko celebrates at the end of the novel (182).

In An Artist of the Floating World, the assertive Japaneseness of suicide complicates its status as a form of antinationalist apology. Ono argues, for example, that the suicide of a former patriot, in disgrace after the war, is “honorable” because it acknowledges “mistakes,” even though it maintains the codes and rituals of the past it claims to regret. Ono explains at length to his young grandson, Ichiro:

“No. He wasn’t a bad man. He was just someone who worked very hard doing what he thought was for the best. But you see, Ichiro, when the war ended, things were very different. The songs Mr Naguchi composed had become very famous, not just in this city, but all over Japan. They were sung on the radio and in bars. And the likes of your Uncle Kenji sang them when they were marching or before a battle. And after the war, Mr Naguchi thought his songs had been—well—a sort of mistake. He thought of all the people who had been killed, all the little boys your age, Ichiro, who no longer had parents, he thought of all these things and he thought perhaps his songs were a mistake. And he felt he should apologize. To everyone who was left. To little boys who no longer had parents. And to parents who had lost little boys like you. To all these people, he wanted to say sorry. I think that’s why he killed himself. Mr Naguchi wasn’t a bad man at all, Ichiro. He was brave to admit the mistakes he’d made. He was very brave and honourable.”

Ishiguro thus represents the national allegory of Japanese suicide as an achieved fiction of English convention, as in Pale View’s newspaper report, but he also suggests that Japanese nationalists, Japanese migrants, and even novelists like himself have used this trope to revive and reappropriate the dead metaphors of national identity. Ishiguro’s “suicide” serves to distinguish East and West: in Pale View, it confirms for English newspapers the Japaneseness of a Japanese-born girl living in England, and it also performs the foreignness that, for the girl, cannot be assimilated or described. In Artist, suicide summons Japanese tradition in the face of military defeat and “foreign” intervention. For Ishiguro, Japanese fictions do not originate, or do not only originate, from a distinctly measured outside to be found in a Western, colonialist, or Orientalist gaze. To the extent that Ishiguro’s Japanese characters attribute innate values to common rituals—they attribute “honor” to suicide, for example—these Japanese fictions are what Roland Barthes calls “myths”: “less reality than a certain knowledge of reality.”²⁷ Nature is defined by use, as Barthes writes: “A tree is a tree. Yes, of course. But a tree as expressed by Minou Drouet is no longer quite a tree, it is a tree which is decorated, adapted to a certain type of consumption, laden with literary self-indulgence, revolt, images, in short with a type of social usage which is added to pure matter.”²⁸ In Ishiguro’s novels, characters use suicide to confirm a past and to define it. Making history, the myth of Japanese suicide establishes roots in world that otherwise seems to float.

Ishiguro undoes national allegory by allegorizing the invention of national identities. Seen this way, Ishiguro’s novels are both more and less mimetic than most of his readers would have it. Ishiguro resists not simply the readers who find Japan or England embodied in his texts but also those who acknowledge his fictionalizing only to argue that a true Japaneseness exists somewhere else. Reviewers who notice that the stories produce “the sound of authenticity,” “what looks to a Western reader like a Japanese text,” or “the illusion of depth and feeling where there is only cartoon drawing and cliché” still oppose these reality effects to the reality of Japanese characteristics that have not been represented.²⁹ It is Ishiguro’s analogy between reality effects in novels and social realities in life that bring his texts closest to the truth of national fictions.

Even as Ishiguro’s texts suggest that “restraint” is not simply, or not necessarily metonymic of Japanese culture, they regularly propose that styles of presentation are characteristic of particular identities. The works least identified with a Japanese setting or experience, which offer no explicit references to Japan whatsoever, provide a helpful template for Ishiguro’s project, since they allow us to disaggregate narrative estrangement from the representation of worlds that are, for most English readers, already strange. Stevens, the narrator of The Remains of the Day, proudly attributes his own purposeful discretion to the essential reticence—“dignity”—of a genuine Englishness. For Stevens, discretion is neither an intention nor a failing; it is an indispensable characteristic. The countryside of England, where Stevens manages Darlington Hall, may be distinguished from the “sights offered in such places as Africa and America” by its lack of “unseemly demonstrativeness.” Lest one fail to connect such scenic moderation with the narrator’s own taciturn performance, Stevens offers a closer metaphor: it is, he explains, “the very lack of drama or spectacle that sets the beauty of our land apart” (28). If a distinctive artlessness is the hallmark of English manner, it is the accomplishment of this effect, everywhere boasted by Stevens, that nevertheless gives its claims away. “Dignity” turns out to be a cover story, not a disinterested attribute of English identity but a purposeful stylization of it; it is, in this case, merely the strategic defense of a guilty butler. The emotional restraint necessitated by “dignity” leads Stevens to facilitate the Nazi sympathies of his employer, Lord Darlington, by refusing to consider them. Playing valet to the German officers who frequented Darlington Hall before the war, Stevens fancies his circumspection as a kind of British patriotism. In The Remains of the Day, therefore, Ishiguro allows us to imagine that the text is not simply a description of England but an expression of it.³⁰

For Ono in Artist, as for Stevens in Remains, the perceived authenticity of local characteristics depends on an exoticism displaced elsewhere. Ishiguro wants us to see that national traditions are forged by international encounters. Ishiguro’s narrative thus conveys the nearness of Japan in the distance of other cultures. Salman Rushdie has proposed “authenticity” as “the respectable child of old-fashioned exoticism,”³¹ and Ishiguro exploits this family relation: what seems most Japanese in Artist is the fascination with and seeming mistranslation of American culture. Chantal Zabus has included Ishiguro among other contemporary writers who write in English but were born outside of Great Britain. These writers, Zabus posits, are “exiled in English” and often “write with an accent” to express their alienation within the Anglophone literary and cultural tradition.³² On his own, Ishiguro has indeed called himself “a kind of a homeless writer,” neither “a very English Englishman” nor “a very Japanese Japanese either.”³³ His sense that national identities require emphatic participation—if one is not “very,” one is not quite “at home”—leads him not to reject or hybridize standard English (as Rushdie does) but to reproduce it aberrantly.

In Artist, there is rarely a break in the frame of English narration. Typically, Ono’s voice comes with all the elements of polite and educated British speech, and little sounds “Japanese” about it. A meal one enjoys is “very nice” (136); a routine matter is “some such thing” (20). However, what seems “standard” or beneath notice does become conspicuous at times. The naturalized vernacular of the novel’s English is strikingly ruptured in those moments when Ichiro, Ono’s grandson, imitates characters from American popular culture:

Ichiro’s “Hi yo Silver!” and, later, “Popeye Sailorman” (152) are not quite right. They are a long way from his other Anglophone pronouncements, which are usually rather precise, if somewhat imperative. Ono cannot identify his grandson’s appropriations of either the Lone Ranger or Popeye; he does not know who these characters are or even that they are American. It is the reader’s ability to recognize America, and Ono’s failure to do so, that registers Japan as a place, if not itself foreign, then surely foreign to us.

Ichiro’s mispronunciation of American popular culture early in the novel serves to demonstrate both an international and a generational drama, in which Ono’s daughter and son do not speak English but are willing to learn, while Ono finds the idea of English speech from his Japanese grandson “extraordinary” (35). Ono is shocked by two developments: his grandson is trying to speak a language other than Japanese, and his grandson is imitating not Japanese heroes but American ones. The generational conflict registers a change in the private choices made by Ono’s family and also within the public choices made by the Japanese government, which before the war had tried to exclude European and American influences from Japanese art and culture. In the substitution of American cowboys for Japanese warriors, Ishiguro does not propose that images of militarism and imperialism have been removed from family life—the cowboys-and-Indians motif suggests otherwise—but only that everyday family decisions, such as whether to go to a movie, have national as well as international consequences.

Of course, even if Ichiro had gotten his imitations right, an America defined by Popeye and the Lone Ranger is not so very different from a Japan identified by geishas and cherry trees. America as foreign trope—“Hi yo Silver!”—partakes of the metonymic exoticism that is everywhere criticized in Ishiguro’s work.³⁴ In Pale View, Etsuko’s fantasy of English pastoral prompts, like Ichiro’s fantasy in Artist, a lexical awkwardness: “I always think it’s so truly like England out here,” the Japanese-born narrator tells her daughter, Niki. Pale View is narrated from an unspecified English village where Etsuko now lives. Reflecting on her arrival from Nagasaki after the Second World War, Etsuko continues and reiterates: “When your father first brought me down here, Niki, I remember thinking how so truly like England everything looked. All these fields, and the house too. It was just the way I always imagined England would be and I was so pleased” (182). Etsuko refuses to recognize the difference between the imperfect England she experiences (recall that her eldest daughter, born in Japan, hanged herself) and the idealized England she conjured as an escape from postwar Nagasaki. In a single gesture, this moment of repeated affirmation and infelicitous phrasing signals the unreliability of Etsuko’s narrative, the exoticism of its rhetoric, and the foreignness of her perspective. The emphatic nostalgia of Etsuko’s language records her failing effort to make England correspond to the place she allowed herself to imagine. For her, “England” remains an optimistic fiction from a Japanese past.

That familiar category, “unreliable narrator,” would seem to characterize the first-person protagonist in every one of Ishiguro’s six novels to date. Throughout Ishiguro’s work, the signs of this unreliability are often indistinguishable, as they are in Pale View, from the details that make a speaker seem foreign to the novel’s discourse. To consider this connection, one might observe that unreliable narrators typically articulate values or interpretations jarring to the reader’s expectations.³⁵ That is, the unreliable narrator is one whose values are visible, for the category functions only if readers can recognize the speaker’s perspective as radically different from their own. The unreliable narrator emerges in a contested or troubled identification between narrator and reader. In this sense, unreliable narrators are an effect of cultural and conventional disjunction: we know that the narrator’s world is not ours, not because we perceive the content of this difference, but because we perceive the fact of difference at all. This difference is marked: unlike the “reliable” narrator, the unreliable narrator is perceived as being the story rather than merely having one.

Unreliable narrators regularly project their stories into the lives of the people they describe. One thinks of Nelly Dean in Wuthering Heights or Charles Kinbote in Pale Fire, both of whom liked to imagine the considerable effect of their influence in the choices made by others. This desire, which the narrators hardly realize, is part of the story these novels tell. Ishiguro’s narrators, though they also offer information about themselves that they do not know or do not say they are providing, importantly reverse the usual projective process: rather than claim all stories as their own, they try to propose that their own stories are always someone else’s. The anxiety and disappointment they detail, they assure us, do not belong to them. For the reader, Ishiguro registers this disavowal through the displacement or abstraction of pronouns. Floating worlds, unreliable and gestural, are thus articulated in and as floating words. This analogy between the processes of culture and the processes of the novel is one of the aspects of Ishiguro’s work that seems most continuous with earlier modernist fiction. Ishiguro’s aberrant grammar has the effect not of substitution but of comparison and reflection: individual people and distinctive loyalties, no longer subordinated by time and moral certainty, become less individuated and less distinctive, competing truths rather than continuous ones.

For example, in Remains of the Day, Stevens translates personal choices into universal rhetoric by addressing his own morality as a matter of English “dignity.” When the housekeeper Miss Kenton accuses him of complacency towards the Jewish maids who were fired, Stevens denies indifference, replying: “Naturally, one disapproved of the dismissals. One would have thought that quite self-evident” (154). Ishiguro has the wit to notice that the choice of “one” over “I” unites an “impersonal” grammar with the rhetoric of English impersonality. Stevens’s language seems at once natural—what a butler sounds like—and yet tactical. “One” negates the claim to personal feeling Stevens’s statement would otherwise offer, and it is stilted, an attempt to sound like the gentleman that Stevens, in his indifference and in his status as a butler, fails to be. “One” cannot be said to replace “I” exactly, since “one” leaves open the possibility that “I” is implied; moreover, we might notice that “I” is everywhere dependent on Stevens’s fantasy about what “one” would do.

Reading this last scene, it is important to see the “I” that “one” at once effaces and putatively includes. A narrator is unreliable if he or she blithely conflates a unique and subjective experience with a generic and objective fact: Stevens allows “one’s” disapproval to compensate for his silence. The reader’s assumption that a statement has a universal application rather than an individual specificity is an everyday force of habit, certainly a valid expectation for readers trained, as we are, in the traditional model of sympathetic reading. However, an unreliable narrator, for whom our expectations fail to function, makes this habit visible. For Ishiguro, the realization that a speaker has fused a story about him- or herself with a story about someone else revises the status of linear past and discernable narrator, as well as the status of blame, guilt, and loyalty. Readers are no longer confident of knowing a fact or a character when they see one.

One learns from a slippery pronoun in Pale View of Hills that Etsuko may be revealing information about herself when she says she is telling a story about Sachiko, a woman she knew in Nagasaki. At the time Etsuko met Sachiko, about three decades before the novel opens, the latter woman was planning to marry an American soldier stationed in Japan for the postwar occupation. Sachiko was hoping to leave Nagasaki with her future husband and her daughter, and this is not unlike the (not shown, little discussed) trajectory we know Etsuko follows, as she marries an Englishman and takes her daughter abroad. In a scene she describes from memory, Etsuko tries to convince Sachiko’s daughter, Mariko, that a departure for America will “turn out well,” though at the last moment she shifts from “you” to “we”: “if you don’t like it over there, we can always come back” (173). This is the text’s first explicit signal that the girl Etsuko calls Mariko in her memories might be Keiko, Etsuko’s daughter who hangs herself in England many years later. The narrator shifts to “we,” but the girl is still called “Mariko” as the chapter closes. It is hard to tell where Etsuko’s past begins and Sachiko’s narrative ends, or whether Sachiko is really there at all.

An Artist of the Floating World complicates this structure of displaced narrative by recounting and layering, in a palimpsest of memories, several stories at once. Toward the end of the novel, Ono describes a long-past confrontation with Mori-san that took place in “that same pavilion” (175, 177) where, he tells us, a later conversation with his own student, Kuroda, also unfolded. The later scene is never explicitly narrated in the novel. In the earlier scene, Ono tells Mori-san that he needs to leave the “floating world” and its art for “something more tangible than those pleasurable things that disappear with the morning light” (180). Mori-san, who has already confiscated Ono’s new “experimental” paintings, demands the last of Ono’s unfinished work, the “one or two” canvases Ono did not store with the others (178). Eventually, when Ono demurs, Morisan offers a cutting response. As Ono reports this exchange, he interrupts his account to acknowledge that Mori-san’s language might in fact be his own, the phrases he later used in a similar exchange with Kuroda; Ono is not sure what he has remembered and what he has projected backward.

The retrospective tense that tells us that the earlier scene with Mori-san is at an end—“I still turn over in my mind that cold winter’s morning”—also indicates that the much later scene with Kuroda has already taken place as well (180). “That” recalls “that same pavilion” and links the two events (175): the “arrogance and possessiveness” Ono seems to attribute to Mori-san seamlessly becomes the very attitude he adopted towards Kuroda (180). In this transition, Ono’s narrative jumps ahead. He is now visiting Kuroda’s home where imperial police have taken the younger artist into custody and burned his paintings because Ono, angry at his student’s turn away from nationalist themes, has fingered him as a political traitor. There is “the smell of burning,” a smell we associate with a childhood memory Ono relates at the beginning of the novel, in which his father, trying to urge a more “useful” profession, destroys all of his son’s early paintings but the “one or two” Ono has hidden (43–47). Ono later associates this same smell with the damage to his adult home and the death of his wife in the war, as well as with the death of his son, Kenji, who was a soldier in the Japanese army (“‘The smell of burning still makes me uneasy,’ I remarked. ‘It’s not so long ago it meant bombings and fire’” [200]). The repetition of phrases, “the smell of burning” and those “one or two” paintings withheld from father and teacher by son and student (43, 178), implies that Ono’s discussion with Mori-san and the episode with his father stand in for a scene we will never see: Ono’s rejection and betrayal of Kuroda, who is subsequently tortured as a government traitor. Rather than shift from personal to impersonal as in Remains, or from “you” to “we” as in Pale View, Ono’s telltale, demonstrative pronoun—“that same pavilion”—merely floats, leaving the reader to imagine a scene that is not or cannot be given and to measure the nearness of artistic and political treason.

The betrayal of Kuroda seems to be the political kernel or “primal scene” of Ishiguro’s novel, even though it is difficult to separate this scene, which we never see, from all of its echoes throughout the text: we come to know the betrayal of Kuroda—a betrayal prompted by Ono’s inability to tolerate Kuroda’s independence—only in so far as Ono compares it to other, represented betrayals in his life.³⁶ As the novel continues, the later scenes offer new interpretations of early ones: the scenes that seem like echoes, that seem like pale views of the narrator’s past, introduce some information for the first time. In retrospect, the given scene with Mori-san and the implied scene with Kuroda lend a political tone to the scene with Ono’s father, which constitutes the first betrayal in the novel: as Kuroda is imprisoned for refusing to be “useful” to the militarist regime, so Ono’s father, who punishes his son for choosing art over business, seems to enforce a similar orthodoxy (46). The novel not only refuses to separate politics and art but suggests that art is both political and politicized when its values (decadence, imagination, nonconformity) are among those that politicians seek to suppress. For the novel, the refusal to inhabit, to affirm, or to represent “the real world”—as Ono’s imperialist mentor demands, as Ono’s father demanded before him—is its own political act (172).

From the novel’s later point of view, patriarchy is legible as an element of fascism, and this implication is present in the relationship between Ono and his father, in the relationship between Ono and his children, and in the metaphors of obedience that Ishiguro uses to describe Japan’s postwar relationship to the United States (185). Ishiguro presents Ichiro’s reluctance to watch a film about a destructive monster as an alternative to the heroic nationalism that Ono cultivated in his son, who died while an eager soldier in the war.³⁷ To his daughter, Setsuko, who does not want Ichiro to acquire the values passed down to her brother, Ono responds, “‘You know, I remember your mother protesting in just the same way when I decided to let Kenji have a taste of sake at this age. Well, it certainly did your brother no harm’” (157). In turn, Setsuko reminds her father that his past attitudes, both in relation to his wife and in relation to his son, were not, from a postwar perspective, for the best: “‘There is no doubt Father devoted the most careful thought to my brother’s upbringing. Nevertheless, in the light of what came to pass, we can perhaps see that on one or two points at least, Mother may in fact have had the more correct ideas’” (158). Ishiguro would have his readers see, as Ono begins to see, that what is “correct” has changed: Ono needs to betray his past—to display it, to question it, and to turn away from the values of absolutism—in order to live responsibly in the present. Ishiguro demonstrates in these examples that people may commit treason not only because they do not embrace the values of their government but also because the values that once seemed loyal can become disloyal, from the perspective of a new leader or a new teacher or a new parent: Ono’s past activities, which once seemed like “the best of things,” now seem, even to him, like “things best forgotten” (94); those whom Ono has called “victims of the occupying forces” (88) are now called “war criminals” (56). The lesson here is not that new loyalties must replace old ones but that all-encompassing forms of loyalty have to become more discriminating in some ways and less discriminating in others: it is not enough to follow the American generals instead of the Japanese emperor, Ishiguro suggests; instead, Ono has to learn to distinguish attitudes of loyalty, conflicting loyalties (to country, children, friends, art), and the interest that any given loyalty serves.

That the violence Ono attributes to his father and his teacher may be his own violence, that the absolute allegiance that they demanded may be what he also required: these alter the lessons of the novel and establish betrayal as an essential aspect of the novel’s instruction. Ono tells a number of stories, but his subsequent unreliability, our sense that he has evaded both scrutiny and responsibility, obscures the content and the characters that he has led his readers to discern. The telling of stories turns out to be the subject as well as the strategy of Ishiguro’s novel. As reliable and unreliable narration are usually distinguished, one is either the master of a narrative, one who possesses knowledge, or one is the narrative, one about whom knowledge is generated. In Artist, however, the narrator’s inability or unwillingness to maintain these distinctions, to make it clear for the reader whose experiences he is describing, produces several histories and several perspectives. We know Ono through his relation to others, through the words he recalls as other people’s words, through the actions we must guess by implication. His stories—abstract, indirect, partial—constitute the substance of the storyteller, but they may fail to produce an authoritative plot, definitive self, or coherent community. Kathleen Wall has suggested, writing about Remains of the Day, that, “changes in how subjectivity is viewed will inevitably be reflected in the way reliable or unreliable narration is presented” (22). As Ishiguro accommodates and theorizes such changes, his narratives estrange and challenge the theory as well as the content of national identity. What readers confidently label “foreign” or “Japanese” in Ishiguro’s work may be an attempt to reify a process of classification that his work aims to obstruct.

Confidence and labeling are themselves primary topics in Ishiguro’s novels, and that primacy is nowhere more apparent than in the first paragraph of his very first book. A Pale View of Hills begins:

Ishiguro’s oeuvre opens with an echo: Niki, a name that is not “a Japanese name” but merely sounds like one. “Niki” imitates what is already an imitation. It is an echo of an echo, a “vague” repetition of an abstracted place, “the East.” The narrator wishes to forget the past, but the “compromise” name intones, in its morethan-Englishness, the nagging effect of reminder—not Japan but its reverberating, persistent memento. The novel thus opens with an empty gesture of several sorts: the father does not speak Japanese, but he wants to give his daughter a Japanese name; the compromise name is English in origin but sounds Japanese, though only to an English father. The echo represents another (though the first) structure of failed consolation, where what is missing is always out of reach, in the previous city, in the past, in a fantasy of transparent proper nouns.³⁸

Ishiguro’s novels associate loyalty with what seem to be two very different impulses: fascism, on the one hand, and multiculturalism, on the other. Above all, this may be Ishiguro’s treason. In Artist, oaths of loyalty recapitulate an undernoticed coercion: even after the war, when Ono finally announces that his past influence is “best erased and forgotten,” he observes his son-in-law’s father watching him “like a teacher waiting for a pupil to go on with a lesson” (123). The new loyalty enforces old positions: no longer a sensei, Ono must be a student. The postwar slogans of the American occupation (“our country has finally set its sights on the future” [186]) echo the polished assurance of prewar imperialism (“Japan must go forward” [169]). Ishiguro uses this repetition with very little difference to make allies of American democracy and Japanese militarism, both certain of progress and continuity. He replaces continuity with transience: less heroic and less affirmative, Ishiguro’s progress is visible in Ono’s daughters, who no longer obey; in Ono’s grandson, who is allowed to admit fear; and even in Ono, who seems to learn that fleeting moments may be more valuable, and more reliable, than permanent monuments. Committed to change but also to conflict, Ishiguro commits to treason: his floating worlds betray their narrators, and they everywhere betray “us.”