1It is seldom the case in Kazuo Ishiguro’s novels that women explicitly assume the role once ascribed to them by the male philosopher Hegel—that they become the ironical voice of a community. Ishiguro’s female characters may now and then come up with a critical utterance, yet more often than not their voice is toned down, stifled, unheard or brought to submissive silence—be they Eastern or Western women. In The Unconsoled, the porter Gustav’s decision to suspend ail verbal communication with his small daughter Sophie, a decision which binds her to an unhappy vow of silence, is emblematic of Ishiguro’s female characters’ predicament with speech and enunciation.
2This predicament is endowed with a paradoxical intensity in the author’s first nove], A Pale View of Hills, where the female voice—for the first and, up to now, only time—coincides with the narrative voice. The novel seemingly belongs to the genre of confessional autobiography, as Etsuko Sheringham offers to provide the reader with an account of her past life in Nagasaki as a young bride, before she followed her second husband to Britain with her first daughter. Yet the novel never quite fulfills its generic vocation as the narrator shows herself reluctant to assert the verbal prerogatives that the genre would confer on her and to stage herself as the subject of confessional statements. Instead of a forceful enunciation, Etsuko’s voice models itself on the ‘little night music’ which she performed as a girl in her future husband’s house, when, as a reaction to the unspeakable horror of the Bomb, she woke up her hosts by ‘playing in the dead of night’, as her father-in-law later reminds her. The violin performance itself is not devoid of ambiguity. Learning that Etsuko was still suffering from shock at that time, when the Bomb had made her an orphan, the reader may ask whether this musical voice is to be heard as a persistant call for expressivity, once catastrophe has threatened to annihilate all forms of communication, or whether it merely confirms that articulate speech must now yield to an inhuman, incomprehensible wail (the word ‘violin’ acting notas an emblem of peaceful harmony, but as a phonetic reminder of the violence endured by the heroine). This surrogate voice does not elicit any response from those who hear it: though they hear Etsuko’s melody, her hosts leave her call unanswered. In a later episode which may be predictive of the daughter-and-father relationship in The Unconsoled, Ogata-San, Etsuko’s father-in-law, asks to listen to the violin once it is too late for the emotional voice to come up again: ‘I remained for several seconds [. . .] the violin under my chin. Then I brought it down to my lap and sighed: “I hardly play it now”, I said.’
3The melody of narrative, too, will play in the dark, hesitant to the end, since it can be adressed to no one, not even Etsuko’s second daughter, Niki, with whom communication proves to be a failure. Among other Ishigurian narratives, this one is eternally deprived of a narratee. In his 1990 interview with the French periodical ‘L’œil de la lettre’, Ishiguro suggested that Ono’s account in An Artist of the Floating World could in fact be adressed to another citizen of his town, ‘someone who would be part of his universe’ (my translation), while Stevens’s account in The Remains of the Days might find a potential hearer in another servant, another butler perhaps. But Ishiguro casts no alter ego interlocutor for Etsuko, not even her own daughter: the only figure of the double that appears in the novel, Etsuko’s friend Sachiko, finally operates as the narrator’s alibi to be dispensed from speaking in her own name.
- 1 Such as the Japanese businessman’s wife who, though absent from the narrative scene, succeeds in ma (...)
4The narrator’s voice resonates as a small, humble, evasive voice, mainly an answering voice offering minimal phatic encouragement to her interlocutors (‘Indeed’, ‘I see’, ‘Really’, etc.). In England as in Nagasaki, Etsuko, it seems, exploits the traditional representation of the housewife as a speechless inferior—a tradition questioned or decoyed by other female characters1—to her benefit, delegating to other voices the dangerous responsibility of statement-making. While obediently reproducing the self-asserting and self-justificating discourses of her father-in-law (who obstinately refuses to condemn Japan’s late imperialist values), or of Sachiko (who shows herself ready to desert Japan with her small daughter in order to follow an American G.I. to California), Etsuko is careful to retain for herself the comfortable persona of a passive, mute witness. Such self-denial successfully prevents her narrative performance from endorsing ethical responsibility: if the narrator herself is not in the position of making full statements, then she may be excused from passing judgements and definitions, either on herself or on others. Etsuko thus relies on vicarious characterization so as to avoid acknowledging her own feelings: for instance, she cleverly stages a conversation between two of her neighbours, who blame Sachiko’s ‘unfriendly’ attitude to them, before slipping in the indication ‘It was never my intention to appear unfriendly but [. . .] I was still wishing to be left alone’ (p. 13). Sachiko, who never conceals her own feelings, is thus cleverly put forward as a narrative stooge allowing the narrator to express and excuse ail at once her own Jack of sociability. Narrative differing (the displacement of significant information) exploits descriptive difference (Sachiko’s characterization as the unfamiliar party, the unkind Other) as a screen for the narrator’s verbal reticence.
5Such ventriloquy can work both ways for the narrator’s benefit. Etsuko may be forced to assume a discursive position when circumstances require that she should substitute herself to another locutor in a conversation; then she merely reproduces the statements expected of this absent voice: she adresses Mariko in a pseudo-maternai voice in Sachiko’s absence, or takes over her husband’s filial role when obediently comforting old Ogata in his wavering certainties. In fact, these are the moments when she censors ail emotional accents from her speech in favour of impersonal utterances. Her dialogues with Mariko, at the time when she herself expects her first daughter, display her difficulty in verbally rehearsing the motherly role that society calls upon her to assume. Motherliness, in her mouth, is not conveyed through intimate wording but through normative, conservative advice merely aping the voice of the community: ‘Shouldn ’t you be at school? [. . .] But ail children must go to school’ (p. 16), or ‘You can’t expect to make friends if you throw stones at them [. . .] You shouldn’t throw stones, Mariko’ (p. 79), or again ‘Let that alone, that’s very dirty’ when the little girl pretends to eat a spider. The social doxa continuously prevails in her explicit statements, including those she reluctantly delivers to Niki who is yearning for an intimate communication with her mother: ‘It’s nota bad thing at ail, the old Japanese way’, or, when her daughter rejects the idea of getting married and having children, ‘In the end, there isn’t very much else’ (p. 180).
6This difficulty on the narrator’s part to separate ethos from doxa, to recover the subjective, emotive fonction of discourse that she once fully transfered to her musical performance subsists even after her second marriage: her conversations with Niki, which frame her retrospective account of the Nagasaki years, ail fail because Etsuko shows herself incapable to assert her own private motivations for leaving her first husband. Niki’s attempt to help her by wording aloud a counter-doxa of feminist liberation—’So many women get stuck with kids and lousy husbands and they're just miserable [. . .]. You ought to be proud of what you did with your life’—meets with silent reproof and narrative denial (‘It was presumptuous of Niki to suppose I would need reassuring on such matters’) that sounds like Freudian denegation.
- 2 See Cynthia Wong’s own Blanchottian reading of this novel as ‘what Blanchot calls the sharing of th (...)
7At the same time, Etsuko’s committment to narrative censoring shifts from strategic self-deception to enlightening wisdom when she in turn refuses to answer for other characters’ self-deceiving speeches: ail statements whatever, once they are transcribed and reorganized in her narrative, are exposed as potential targets for suspiscion. It is as though in this post-nuclear narrative, haunted by a violence which is never explicited in words, self-avowed discourse stood fatally discredited as a means of knowledge: the characters’ speeches, always couched in an impeccably coherent prose, are nonetheless denounced as inconclusive and hypocritical. Etsuko’s narrative responsibility calls upon her to transcribe her interlocutors’ attempts at building up a positive representation of themselves—Ogata’s solemn acknowledgement of his moral integrity in wartime, Sachiko’s vehement claim that she is merely acting for her daughter’s good—only to deflate them by her silent reception of them. She neither cancels nor condones these acts of speech, but she refuses to satisfy her interlocutors’ demands that she, as their addressee, should participate in their construction. She thus rejects the false Socratic position which Sachiko repeatedly tries to ascribe to her: ‘You can feel free to ask whatever you Iike. [. . .] There must be ail sorts of questions you'd like to ask. So why don’t you ask them?’, conscious as she is that their dialogue would prove no maieusis, would never lead to the discovery of an objective truth that might benefit the two of them. Etsuko’s narrative thus produces an unequal repartition between verbal expansiveness (which she freely allots to others) and silent attention (which she claims for herself). She takes pain to depict herself in terms of taciturnity—as a repressed young wife (‘it was never in the nature of our relationship to discuss things openly’, p. 127), a discrete neighbour (‘I remained silent’ becomes a leitmotiv in her conversations with Sachiko), and an unobtrusive mother (she puts down her silence with Niki to the latter’s refusai to discuss her private life). Yet this display of verbal humility cannot but be interpreted by the reader as a rhetoric of secrecy2 rather than a Jack of verbal skill.
8Etsuko’s voice thus refuses to grant itself the full prerogatives of the speaking subject, while preventing other utterances to benefit from their inscription within her own discourse: narrative pathos lies in the impossibility for A Pale View of Hills to achieve full confessional integrity, because the narrative keeps discrediting ail possibility for a speaking ‘I’ to become a responsible, self-conscious support of truth. The first-person narrative here comes strangely close to becoming that third person narrative voice analyzed by Blanchot in terms of aphonie (Joss of voice). Etsuko’s voice reverberates throughout her account of past and present things as that Blanchottian instance, unable to position itself within the work and equally unable to distanciate itself from it. Her voice becomes that ‘vehicle of neutrality’ which ‘does not say anything’ not only because nothing truthful can be said, but also because it fails to embody itself fully in language and remains, as it were, outside what is spoken. Etsuko’s voice, too, ‘always tries to absent itself from its bearer and always tries to erase him or her as the centre of narrative’; it always tries to conceal the subjective dimension of confessional writing behind an excessively objective account, ‘letting the neuter acquire a speech’ (my translation). Her neutrality has of course been widely analyzed as a display of self-deception, but it also conveys a more generally anguished statement on the difficulty for post-nuclear writing to recover its faith in enunciation as such, in man’s summoning of language as a means both of expressing the unspeakable affects of the private self and of publicizing these affects into a discourse that can be received by a community at large.
9While disclaiming to present her as a speaking subject, Etsuko’s narrative constructs her as a seeing subject, a choice which comfortably secures her status as a lucid witness of her times while exempting her from passing a verbal judgement on what she sees. The novel’s first chapter is thus pervaded with a lexis denoting the narrator’s scopie activities: ‘I could see’ becomes the key-motif, a musical refrain to the narrative, which is reinforced by the repeated use of such verbs as ‘watch’, ‘look out’, ‘gaze’, ‘spot’ or ‘catch sight of’. For instance, the introductory scene between Niki and Etsuko shows the two of them sitting near the window of Etsuko’s cottage and watching the rain fall on the window. This brings on a leitmotiv that will reappear in the next scene, when Etsuko, now alone, is ‘standing at the windows, looking out into the darkness’ (p. 10). Two pages later, she mentions the fact that when she lived in Nagasaki, she liked to observe Suchiko’s wooden cottage: ‘I would stand at my window gazing at it’ (p. 12). Later on, mother and daughter sit in a tea-shop, ‘at a table next to the windows’ and watch a small girl playing on a swing (p. 48). The obsessive window-motif suggests that Etsuko’s gaze requires distanciation to remain outside the views which attract her attention, just as her voice requires to practise linguistic neutrality. The prerogative of the seeing subject is also something which protects her from becoming an object of examination in her turn—a situation inverted in her encounters with Mariko, Sachiko’s small daughter, where the gaze is transferred to the little girl, so that the Etsuko herself becomes the unfamiliar object of a puzzled or terrified look. These scenes also coïncide with a change of setting which deprives Etsuko of her protective window-panes, for the traditional wooden cottage where Sachiko lives with her daughter operates through a system of ‘open partitions’ which slide back and forth tolet the light on. In order to see better, Etsuko is thus compelled to slide open the partitions and confront a scene from which she can no longer be ‘parted’ by the translucid, solid protection of the window-pane. The narrator must at last acknowledge herself as part of the scene of devastation into which she is looking.
10Sight and vision thus become the means through which the narrative insidiously recovers a subjective intensity. Etsuko’s descriptions become implicitly ladden with expressivity; her retrospective visualization of her husband and fatherin-law sitting face to face thus conveys the resentment which, as a young submissive bride, she could not speak out: ‘I see him now as I saw him so often, seated on the tatami in our living room, hunched forward toward his breakfast or supper. I remember he had the same tendency to hunch forward—in a manner not unlike that of a boxer—whether standing or walking. By contrast, his father would always sit with his shoulders flung well back, and had a relaxed, generous manner about him.’ (p. 28–29). While the diegesis stops short of mentioning the wife’s motives for leaving her husband, the description succeeds in building up a picture of Jiro as a mean, greedy and dominating figure: Etsuko’s narrative sleigh-of-hand allows vision to voice what speech cannot or will not display. Images thus appear in A Pale View of Hills as an oblique means of release, forcing the narrative voice to relinquish its self-proclaimed neutrality as it devotes itself to representation. These images may be incomplete, unfocused, ‘pale’ or fading views whose details are left unspecified, yet they pervade the narrative with an intensity of their own: / see becomes a faultless surrogate for/ say. The narrator unceasingly confronts herself to images of various shapes and natures: Mariko’s drawings, television pictures, dream patterns, and, lastly, the photograph of Nagasaki which she hands on to Niki who has required ‘a photo or something . . . a postcard or something’ so that a poet-friend of hers can set in words the painful experience which her mother refuses to talk about. This last example shows how the novel’s images are brought to compensate narrative aporia by recontextualizing meanings, letting various planes of experience overlap and communicate. The reader finds therein a possibility of filling narrative blanks, ail the more as Etsuko’s response to the pictures she encounters subverts the collective doxa she bows to verbally to the benefit of her own shameful impulses. While, for instance, old Mrs Fujiwara’s assertion in Nagasaki that ‘once the child comes, [she, Etsuko] will be delighted’ merely elicits a slightly doubtful ‘I hope so’ on young Etsuko’s part (p. 77), the television movie watched years later by an older Etsuko triggers off her explicit denial of the statement: ‘People always pretend to be delighted . . . l’m sure nobody ever receives the news of a baby like these people do in these films’ (p. 48). Moreover, narrative anachrony stages the (later) TV incident before the (earlier) conversation with Mrs Fujiwara so as to emphasize the narrator’s unresolved contradictions. Her later statement sounds ail the more absurd as she has just suggested that her own daughter should get married and have children. The image—the televized representation of birth—operates as the means of a comparative reading that gives the reader a chance to understand that motherhood never was the persona) accomplishment Etsuko claims to have known, and that she may in fact have extended her resentment towards Jiro to Jiro’s child, Keiko.
- 3 This ironical questioning is reiterated in the last pages of the narrative since the true voice, th (...)
11The importance given to dream and dream-representations later provide a mode) for Etsuko’s narrative in the way of free association. Just as the visual clichés of the TV film work up a significant link between past and present, the dream image which is the most haunting element of the nove)—that of a little girl and a rope—brings together a cluster of episodes and representations disseminated in the narrative: the British little girl on her swing, whom Niki and Etsuko observe from the tea-shop’s window; Keiko’s suicide by hanging; the little girl who ‘had been found hanging from a tree’ when a series of child murders had alarmed Nagasaki; and Mariko’s fright when she twice sees Etsuko walking towards her with a bit of rope in her hands. This last picture, once it is connected with the other manifestations of the dream-image, allows the reader not only to guess at Etsuko’s subconscious death impulse towards her first daughter, which may have caused her suicide years later, but also to establish a link between the two child victims of the story, both of whom are forced by their mothers to leave their native countries and follow a foreign step-father abroad. The image thus provides the reader with an opportunity to question the narrator’s presentation of the facts.3
12As it throws doubt on the novel’s patterns of enunciation, the image triggers off a new pragmatics of reading, in which the characters’ statements become interchangeable through the free associations they generate. Mariko’s violent rejection of Frank, the libidinous American GI who is to become her step-father, thus echoes Keiko’s unspecified quarrels with her mother’s second husband, the British academic who wrote many clever articles on Japan. The reader cannot but realize the repressed violence in Etsuko’s civilized, European existence: Mariko’s abuse of G.I. Frank—a very camai figure, indeed—as ‘a pig [who] drinks his own piss’! ends itself to superimposition with the other substitute father, the brainy British academic who separated Keiko from her beloved father and condemned her to an unbearable exile. The highly civilized figure of Mr Sheringham, with his upper-class patronym and well-cultured background, is blurred with that of the libidinous American soldier: the two men become equivalent vectors of textual violence. That Etsuko too sees her second husband as something of a foreign invader filters through her later statement that he never understood Japan at ail while appropriating it through writing.
- 4 See Isabelle Joyau’s skilful deciphering of the implicit vocabulary of murder and betrayal in the l (...)
13The central image of the little girl and the rope reproduces this oblique strategy through which the narrative voice brings up obsessional representations of violence. Its ambivalence lies not only in the open interpretation it raises in the reader’s mind, but also to the fact that it hovers between symbol and image. As a symbol, it works up links and connexions: the rope literally ties Etsuko to the context of post-war violence from which she tries to distanciate herself; it clings to her feet as she walks along the riverbank, towards Marika, securing her so to say to a landscape of desolation and menace, forcing her to assume her role as an agent of violence; it also works up a collective emblem reflecting back on the violence wrought upon the whole Japanese population by the War. As a symbol, too, it enables the narrative to link together vision and discourse, weaving into the narrative that unspeakable subtext constituted by Etsuko’s trend of infanticidal feelings.4 And yet as an image, the picture remains inarticulate—a timeless, nameless configuration of violence, given to repetition-and-variation, yet falling short of verbal definition as Etsuko’s hesitant voice cannot bring itself to name the rope: ‘You see, the little girl is not on a swing at ail. It seemed like this at first. But it’s not a swing she is on’ (p. 96). This sentence ends the first part of the novel on a blank, as Etsuko cannot bring herself to state the real nature of the rope. Etsuko’s incapacity to recategorize the rope, notas a child’s play, but as an instrument of murder, brings into relief the narrative’s difficulty in composing with the force of the image, with its potential of opaque illumination. The disruptive violence of the image paradoxically resides in the link it postulates between the child and the rope—a scandalous association which breaks up the semantic connexion between the thing and its name in Etsuko’s mouth.
14I would say that the tension between this particular image’s visibility and its capacity for un-linking the admitted networks of meaning (‘sa force de déliaison’, as Jean-Luc Nancy demonstrated in a recent essay entitled Au fonds des images) dates back to 1946. That was the year when the poet Takashima Shigeru wrote a haiku (now reprinted in Gallimard’s recent anthology of the genre) whose central image is oddly similar to that of the novel. The French translation of this poem simply reads:
Assise sur une balançoire
victime de la Bombe
La petite fille morte
So that a literal translation of this in English would read:
Sitting on a swing,
A victim of the Bomb—
The dead little girl.
- 5 ‘L’écriture est en somme un satori: le satori (l’événement Zen) est un séisme plus ou moins fort [. (...)
- 6 The haunting potency and universal scope of this image have since then inspired another representat (...)
15Shigeru exploits the disconcerting, even deviating properties of the haiku to reconsider the poet’s capacity for significant vision. This particular haiku remains faithful to its traditional vocation, which is precisely to voice a transient sight while bringing its readers to a new sense of time. Like its classical predecessors, it seizes the truth of an instantaneous perception through deliberate verbal ellipsis; it proceeds to satori, that is deprivation of speech through spasm, according to Barthes’ account of the haiku.5 But in 1946 this ellipsis renews the significance of aporia, bearing as it does the brunt of senseless, speechless suffering; the instant is born of historical catastrophe instead of individual epiphany; the image proceeding from this sense of catastrophe now achieves contradiction in contraction: the contrast between play and death, youth and annihilation, energy and stasis is perpetuated; in the last sober line, ‘the dead little girl’, presence and denial, designation and erasure are brought to coincidence. The image cuts through its own painful designation (one particular child stupefied to death in the circumstances of play) to achieve some dull exemplarity: like Etsuko, Shigeru emblematizes ‘the’ little girl into an emblem of meaningless suffering that can be extended to ail victims of the Bomb.6
16Like Shigeru’s haiku, Etsuko’s dream perpetuates the expression of grief even after terror and pity have deprived language of its supposed coherence. The uncanny image of the dead little girl on her swing-which-is-not-a-swing, while lending itself to infinite variations across the layers of experience, both persona! and collective, enacts the return of Etsuko’s repressed voice. It even allows for that puzzling narrative twist at the end of chapter 9, where two child-figures merge once again: whereas Etsuko is supposed to adress Mariko, who rejects the idea of leaving Japan for America, the narrative reproduces her persuasive adresses to the spectral Keiko, on the eve of their leaving for Britain: ‘If you don’t like it over there we can always come back [. . .]. Yes, 1 promise. If you don’t like it over there we'll come straight back’ (p. 172; italics mine). These are the words of betrayal which may have inseminated death in Keiko when the promise was left unfulfilled for years. The unexpected recovery of the subjective, authoritative voice in the words ‘I promise’ restitutes a fleeting intensity to the narrator’s voice, even though she is not in fact performing a promise, but uttering a lie. Whether the displaced reminiscence of a false vow, or the fantasmatic reconstruction of something that should have been said and was not said at the time, Etsuko’s voice briefly tells the truth to her reader: that she, the silent woman, was once guilty of a lie that cost a life. The lie, never explicited as such, needs the reader’s active participation to be recognized as the only significant confessional statement in Etsuko’s account of herself. It needs a series of perverse narrative stratagems—duplication, vicarious enunciation, blurred contextualization, denial and omission—for the reader to identify it as the one pathetic statement that Etsuko never forgave herself, yet never found the courage to acknowledge publicly.
17The imaginary vocation of the narrative provides a site where the narrative voice plays with words and pictures in the dead of night. This is a nocturnal and dangerous activity insofar as it plays at monstration—the obsessional showing up of monstrous images, to the cost of building a monstrous representation of the narrator herself as she is drawn into her own strategy of representation .While helping the reader to fill the blanks in the narrative, while functioning as a symbolic clue, the image remains imbued with a violence of its own which words attempt vainly to express: ‘the horror of this image’ (p. 54); ‘that chilling image intruded into thoughts and I came away from the window trying to put the picture out of my mind’ (p. 157). These flashes of terror convey the modern subject’s acknowledgement of the unspeakable deep inside him or her, an acknowledgement that can neither extend to speechless contemplation (the window must be after all deserted) nor achieve purgation through confessional discourse.
- 7 It does not even achieve a status of finality as the next episode stages young Etsuko ‘gazing empti (...)
- 8 ‘Le mot imago désignait l’effigie des absents [. . .]. L’imago ne répare pas l’accroc de leur mort: (...)
- 9 Ono’s propaganda paintings in lshiguro’s next novel, An Artist of the Floating World, reiterate thi (...)
18The subject’s impossible encounter with the image is dramatized in the episode where Etsuko is woken by an inner representation which, once again, is denied verbal expression (‘Then I remembered what had woken me’, p. 88). Etsuko opens her eyes, then her door; she walks out on the landing and opens the door of Keiko’s former bedroom. ‘I stepped further into the room. The curtains had been left open and I could see the orchard below. The sky looked pale and white; it did not appear to be raining.’ Crossing the thresholds of awareness along with Etsuko, the reader may feel confident that the narrative is preparing itself for a final disclosure. Yet what the reader faces is a blank page—a pale patch of sky, as empty of force or comfort as ‘the window . . . ail sky without colour’ that prevails in the last sentences of Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts. Though its subject may be briefly possessed with intense representations, the narrative is once again left on the threshold of neutrality, facing an empty frame where no recognizable figures will appear.7 Keiko’s room can at most be construed as a failed imago in Nancy’s definition of the term,8 that is, a significant image of her absence, a visual representation of the empty place she now occupies in the house. Yet Etsuko fails in constructing her vision as imago because she stops short of re-presenting absence, of interpreting the emptied out sight as a sign of Joss: she passively records a blank. While expressive of a sacrificial content—the holocaust that ‘blanked out’ the scene of existence—the image never reaches the stage where it might tum the narrative itself into a sacrificial ritual, where the spectra of violence could be summoned in shared, collective representations. In fact the only collective representation of violence mentioned in the text is the Memorial to the Victims of the Bomb which Etsuko and Ogata-San observe in the course of his visit to Nagasaki, and it is a failure. It fails precisely through excessive figuration: ‘The statue resembled some muscular Greek god, seated with both arms outstretched. With his right arm he pointed to the sky from where the bomb had fallen; with his other arm—stretched out to the left—the statue was supposedly holding back the forces of evil’ (p. 137). The Memorial fails to achieve true representation; instead, it appears as an overcoded sign9 whose very intelligibility undermines its sacrificial fonction as an image: instead of displaying the meaninglessness of violence as a step towards collective catharsis, its shape is interpreted in terms of order and law, as it comically reminds Etsuko of a policeman conducting traffic. Its visibility is reduced to the picturesque—in fact, it becomes a picture in a post-card that can be exchanged for money and sent as a souvenir (‘It doesn’t look so impressive in a picture’, p. 138).
- 10 Cf. Slavoj Zizek’s comment on Hegel’s Egyptian statue, which also utters a cryptic sound: ‘This mys (...)
19Etsuko’s failure to communicate her dream to Niki may leave the reader uncertain whether her narrative has really achieved an exorcism of the past. Her final offering of the Nagasaki photograph to the foreign poetress admired by her daughter might well be a last attempt to discharge herself of the burden of representation, to let another female voice attempt once more to fit words to images. And yet the image is also what preserves Etsuko’s voice from disappearing into limitless neutrality, and the narrative from surrendering its share of intimacy. Though Etsuko’s voice, like her sight, is subjected to fading and inacuracy, it keeps up its nocturnal melody to the end, in that last poignant scene where the heroine stands in front of Keiko’s bedroom and hears ‘a small clear sound’ resound in the void space. The semantic preference given to ‘sound’ over ‘noise’ underlies the deep humanism in Ishiguro’s novels which prevents the narrative from being entirely neutralized, as it allows a small clear sound to persist in the cryptic space built up by text and context.10 Fickle and devious as it may turn out to be, the human voice can still be heard playing in the dead of night.