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The Homeless Writer or the Remains of Japan in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Early Fiction

L’écrivain étranger ou les vestiges du Japon dans l’œuvre de Kazuo lshiguro.
Pascal Zinck

Résumés

Cet article se propose d’examiner, dans les premières œuvres romanesques de Kazuo Ishiguro, le contexte littéraire japonais et la filiation de l’auteur avec cet héritage culturel. Dans des récits caractérisés par la rétrospection, la répétition et l’aporie, plusieurs thèmes d’étude ont été privilégiés: la manipulation de la mémoire, la censure, l’amnésie historique et culturelle et la langue de traduction en relation avec l’écriture de l’exil.

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1A sense of exile, of Joss of one’s home, homeland or birthplace is the hallmark of Kazuo Ishiguro’s works. These retrofictions in which orphaned protagonists keep turning and returning to the past to rake up its embers echo Kobayashi Hideo’s admission of homelessness: ‘lt is not so much that I do not know the country as I do not understand the notion ofbirthplace,” orfirst home””, or asecond home”—indeed, what home of any kind in fact iswhere there is no memory there is no home. If a person does not possess powerful memories, created from an accumulation of hard and fast images that a hard and fast environment provides, he will not know the sense ofwell-being which brims over in the word “kokyo”’ (Kobayashi 48).

  • 1 For ail Japanese terms and references see the glossary at the end of this paper. According to Japan (...)

2Ishiguro’s Joss of his homeland and its attendant nostalgia should not be confused however with the paradigm of Nihon Kaiki, the return to Japan after exposure to and assimilation of western culture.1 On the other hand, although the young Ishiguro shared the cultural affiliation of the kikokushijo, first through comic books and anime (Oba-Q) and later through Japanese literature and films (lshiguro—Oe 8/1 JO), the writer ‘never wanted to go back to Japan and [he] knew that if [he] did that it would not be [his] Japan’ (Appleyard 26, 29). lshiguro did revisit his native country years later on an author’s tour but briefly and reluctantly ‘as though to go back one would commit the crime of having [ail these people] die ail over again’ (Mackenzie 2, electronic edition). Japan does not only provide inspiration and source material for A Pale View of Hills and An Artist of the Floating World (to a lesser extent for When We Were Orphans), it acts as a nexus, an umbilical cord to the past:I realised that [Japan] was a place of my childhood, and I could never retum to this particular Japan. And so I think one of the real reasons why I turned to writing novels was because I wished to recreate this Japan—put together ail these memories, and ail these imaginary ideas I had about this landscape which I called Japan. I wanted to make it safe, preserve it in a book before it faded away from my memory altogether’ (IshiguroOe 8/110).

3This paper is an attempt to read the absent presence of Japan in Kazuo Ishiguro’s work. Its focus is not to reconstruct an original image but to examine how Japan has corne to stand for persona! as well as public erasure through the mediation of history. The following topics will be explored: The first part aims to show how the Japanese literary tradition of shishosetsu!watakushi shosetsu or the self-novel may have informed Ishiguro’s confessional mode. The second section traces the influence of shomin geki through the aesthetics of change and nostalgia. In the third part, the notions of displacement, denial and disembodiment are explored. Finally, the paper addresses the problem of translation, dealing with linguistic affiliation and camouflage.

Shishosetsu/Watakushi shosetsu: Authoring the Self in Relation to the Confessional Paradigm

  • 2 See Suzuki 15–18 and Siary 276–77.

4Shishosetsu/Watakushi shosetsu (a combination of watakushilshi: I, self and shosetsu: a novel borrowed from the Chinese tradition of hsiao-shuo: unofficial history)2 is generally mistranslated as ‘I-novel,’ ‘Ich-Roman’ (Fowler ix, 4). ‘Self­ novel’ or ‘single-consciousness novel’ would be more appropriate given the absence of pronouns, ‘which would serve to distinguish characters from the narrator, as well as clear diacritical and grammatical demarcations between the “framing” discourse and the “framed” story’ (Fowler 29). Indeed, many of the texts retroactively categorised as ‘I-novels’ actually use third-person narrators (Fowler 4, Suzuki 5, 49–50, 71–77). Shishosetsu commonly refers to ‘an autobiographical narrative in which the author is thought to recount faithfully the details of his or her personal life in a thin guise of fiction’ (Suzuki 1). This form, which emerged in the Taish? period in the early-to-mid-l920s and was influenced by French naturalism, initially designated ‘autobiographical sketches whose authors appeared to write directly about their personal lives for a closed circle of fellow writers’ (Suzuki 2), the bundan in a quasi audience-actor rapport. It developed into a more nebulous concept. Literary critics and theorists have endeavoured to define shishosetsu in terms of the author’s intention, ‘as a direct and faithful transcription or confession of his or her personal life, or in terms of the text’s referential accuracy or faithfulness with regard to the facts of the author’s ‘real life’ (Suzuki 2).

5Without probing the intricacies of the Japanese confessional novel, the following characteristics should be emphasised. Shishosetsu implies a kind of osmosis between author and narrator-protagonist—the one seemingly flowing into the other through a very porous text. Hence, a strategy of discourse based on the myths of truthfulness (jitsu) and authenticity (makoto), on the one hand, and on the hierarchical opposition, on the other, between reality and fiction (Fowler 2–70). Second, the shishosetsu recorder-witness paradigm involves a limited narrative scope and viewpoint and reduces the need for character delineation and plot. As a departure from Western confessional writing, the purpose of shishosetsu is not so much concerned with self-observation, self-criticism, or a quest for meaning. Instead, what is at stake is an unmediated experience, a subjective act of perception in the author’s daily life. In addition the genre’s composite form, partly essay, partly epistolary and reportive cannot be isolated from the poetics of mono no aware (bitter-sweet poignancy and mutability of things) and mujokan (feelings of transience), two key concepts of Japanese art and culture.

  • 3 The phrase used by Ishiguro (Lewis 9) refers to the first two navels set in a Japanese context.

6Clearly, A Pale View of Hills and An Artist of the Floating World should not be read within the strictures of shishosetsu. However, Ishiguro’sJapanese’ novels3 show several affinities with the rhetoric of confession. Ishiguro has admitted to building in an oblique relationship with his characters (Wahlner, electronic edition 8). Furthermore, the narrator’s restricted scope, the palindromic structure of Ishiguro’s fiction, the absence of an ending and a plot pared down to the minimum can all be traced back to the shishosetsu’s aversion to teleology (Mason 1986, 341–42, Vorda 26). Another legacy can be suggested in the use of the diary form or patterns of autobiography. Etsuko’s rewriting of her past echoes the mise en abyme of Ame Kuroi (Ibuse 32, 34, 35), particularly Shizuma Shigematsu’s copying of his own diary and that of Yasuko. In An Artist of the Floating World, Ono’s chronicle of the demise of the Migi-Hidari can be construed as a loose adaptation of Nagai Kafu’s Bokuto kidan (ukiyo zashi, the story of thefloating world’, is a favourite shishosetsu theme). The abortive diaries of The Remains of the Day and When We Were Orphans can also be noted in this respect. Furthermore, Ono’s attempts at both evading and acknowledging his past correspond to a particular category of confessional fiction which Wolfe describes asliteraturicide’. Ishiguro reworks Sensei’s confession as is evidenced by a confrontation with the final part of Natsume Soseki’s Kokoro, entitledSensei and His Testament’ (Natsume 125–29). In this light, it is highly ironical that Ichiro should be the bearer of the rumours conceming Ono’s potential seppuku.

Shomin-geki

7Ishiguro’s discovery of his Japanese identity has in part been influenced by the films of Gosho Heinosuke, Ozu Yasujiro, Naruse Mikio and Yasujiro Shimazu (Lewis 69). According to Gregory Mason, his fiction is also indebted to the style and technique of the shomin-geki (Mason 1989, 45). Ozu, in his later films from Tokyo Monogatari (1953) onwards, has admitted his preference for plotlessness, omitting significant events, keeping lead characters offstage or attending to trivia and seemingly meaningless conversations: ‘Pictures with obvious plots bore me now. Naturally a film must have some kind of structure or else it’s nota film, but I feel that a picture isn’t good if it has too much drama’ (Gueist 93, Anderson and Richie 360). Ishiguro expresses himself in no other terms: ‘Increasingly, I feel plot spoils a lot of books that are otherwise good. Often, when I form a picture of what I want to do, plot is something that would go counter toit’ (Mason 1986, 4, quoted in Mason 1989, 43).

8Initially tantamount to domestic farce, the shomin-geki or domestic popular drama developed by turning its back on jidai geki, the ‘monumental style’ popularised in the West by Kumagai Hisatora (Abe Ichizoku, The Abe Clan, 1938), Mizoguchi Kenji (Genroku Chushingura, Forty-Seven Ronins, 1941–42), Kinugasa Teinosuke (Jigoku Mon, Gate of Hell, 1953) and Kurosawa Akira (Seppuku, 1962, Kagemusha, The Shadow Warrior, 1980; Ran, Chaos, 1985) to focus on the common place and ‘a passive endurance of the world’ (Anderson 270). The aesthetics of the monumental style which were marshalled and appropriated to define Japaneseness during the war years (Davis 2) are evoked in An Artist of the Floating World with references to samurai and blood feuds and ousted ronin who ding to the obsolete bushido code of honour (lshiguro 30, 36, 76). Low-key shomin­ geki, by contrast, strikes a chord with lshiguro: ‘It’s concerned with ordinary people in everyday life, and it has that sort of pace: a pace which reflects the monotony and melancholy of everyday life’ (Tookey 34). Foregrounding his novels in domestic loci gives lshiguro an entry to Japan he can identify with and write about. It also provides a template for a ‘normal’ Japan: ‘Tm very keen that whenever I portray books that are set in Japan, even if it’s not very accurately Japan, that people are seen to be just people [. . .]. My experience of the Japanese people in this realm is that they're like everybody else. They're like me, my parents. I don’t see them as people who go around slashing their stomachs’ (Mason, 1986, 343).

9Ishiguro acknowledges Ozu’s influence as most of his protagonists derive their names from Ozu characters and actors—Hirayama, Miyake, Noriko/Setsuko, Sugimura feature in Tokyo monogatari (1953) and Samma no aji (1962), while Taro, Mariko and Tatsuo Saito, Keiko, Setsuko, Kenji and Fujiwara, the noodle vendor, as well as Ichiro appear in Umarete wa mita keredo (1932), Munakata shimai (1950), Ochazuke no aji (1952), Soshun (1956), Tokyo Boshoku (1957) and Higanbana (1958).

10The theme of war widows, waifs and strays (Nagaya Shinshiroku, 1947) may have influenced the character of Mariko in A Pale View of Hills. Ishiguro’s ‘Japanese’ novels also borrow Ozu’s recurrent theme—the dismantling of ie, the traditional three-generation Japanese household, in the face of modernity. This awareness of the erosion of family bonds is expressed by Noriko in Bakushu (1951): ‘We could not stay together forever . . . that’s Iife.’ Ozu explored the emotional latticework of human relations in the chichi-to-musume or father-daughter/father­ daughter-in-law interactions. The affectionate albeit taut relationships between Ogata-San and Etsuko, Ono Etsuko and Mariko are modelled on Ozu’s long enduring acting duet of Chishu Ryu and Setsuko Hara.

11This pattern is epitomised in Banshun (Late Spring, 1949). Noriko, who lives happily with her widowed father, Shukichi, sacrifices her marriage prospects to her family position. The father, afraid that she will live a Ionely and barren life, leads her to believe that he intends to remarry in order to free her. Resigned to the separation, Noriko agrees to an arranged marriage with Satake. Daughter and father make a final trip to Kyoto together. The father returns to an empty house and peels an apple.

  • 4 In When We Were Orphans, Colonel Hasegawa who reminisces on the nostalgia of Gengi monogatari is th (...)

12Banshun’s elegiac last scene resonates with Ono’s penultimate musings during which he peels an orange. The very title An Artist of the Floating World encapsulates Ozu’s sense of flux, of transience as in Seishun no yume imaizuko (Where are the Dreams of Youth, 1932) and Ono’s ‘Bridge of Hesitation’ echoes the nostalgie pilgrimage of Bash? or the mono no aware of Murasaki’s Gengi monogatari, especially its final chapter called ‘Yume no ukihashi’ (the floating bridge of dreams).4 In A Pale View of Hills, Sachiko who contemplates her receding dream of escape to America from another bridge resembles Machiko’s missed encounters from Kimi no nawa: ‘various changes may occur to the people who cross this [Sukiya] bridge [. . .]. Only the appearance of this bridge will always be the same.’ (Kikuta 3:157) Like Ozu’s models or Kurosawa’s Watanabe—Ikiru’s terminal cancer victim (lkiru, 1952)—Ishiguro’s ramrod anachronistic father figures ‘evince a kind of existential dignity amid the breakdown of traditional values’ (Mason 1989, 49).

Displacement, Denial and Disembodiment

13The previous point has drawn parallels between the techniques of Ozu and Ishiguro. A bridge, a fruit being peeled, or the sound of a tram in the distance do not only serve as kangeki, interstices or counterpoint to faltering dialogue, they are focal points to attract the reader or viewer. Writer and director alike ‘infuse a “de­ centering effect” in their tales, displacing the emphasis away from the story and towards the mise-en-scène’ (Lewis 70).

14As in Kimi no nawa, the narrators of A Pale View of Hills and An Artist of the Floating World find themselves compelled to retrieve the past, Etsuko to make sense of Keiko’s suicide and at the request of her surviving daughter, Niki; Ono to avoid smear and humiliation as a result of the investigations for Noriko’s arranged marriage. Yet, the process of retrieval is impeded by their fear of encountering the very object for which they long. Thus, they ‘beat about the bush’, to borrow one of Stevens’s favourite equivocations. Etsuko attends to her tomato plants and joins in village gossip. Ono frets about garden layout or building materials to repair his symbolically damaged villa. Both narrators are very selective in their recall and develop discursive strategies to deflect attention and distance themselves from the past.

15In A Pale View of Hills, this backtracking is engineered through repetition, rewriting, memory manipulation as well as the Doppelgdnger figures of Etsuko/Sachiko and Keiko/Mariko. Etsuko’s embedded specular story follows the kokeshi, the Japanese folk figure pre-dating Russian dolls which represents a crypt for a dead infant (Tawada 85–86). When recording a post-war outing to Inasa, the narrator musesKeiko was happy that day. [. . .] It’s just a happy memory, that’s ail’ (Ishiguro 182, my emphasis). Etsuko’s mantra does not tally with past events. This is clearly a substitution for Mariko. At the time of the picnic, Etsuko was pregnant with Keiko—a pregnancy which she found problematic at the start of her confession (Ishiguro 17). The narrator’s slip of the tongue can only mean that Keiko and Mariko are one and the same child and that, by inference, Etsuko doubles up as Sachiko.

  • 5 In Kagami No Onna Tachi (Women In The Mirror, 2003), Yoshida Kiju’s loose adaptation of A Pale View(...)
  • 6 Memory manipulation through eut-out photographs recurs in When We Were Orphans.
  • 7 Tom-boy Marika can be construed as a combination of Nosaka’s Seita and the wildcat narrator of Oe’s (...)

16This interpretation is substantiated by the narrator’s give-away shift to the pronoun ‘we’ in addressing Mariko about the possibility of exile in the United States: ‘If you don’t like it over there, we'll corne straight back. But we have to try it and see if we like it there. I'm sure we will’ (Ishiguro 173). When Sachiko dismisses her daughter’s fantasies about a homicidal woman, she equates them to child’s play: ‘You know how it is with children [. . .] They play at make-believe and they get confused where their fantasies begin and end’ (Ishiguro 75). Etsuko’s fabrications fall into that category. Only her schizophrenic double can exorcise the ghosts from the past and contribute to healing wartime traumas (Ishiguro 75, See 58, 65–66, 76, 91, 94, 111).5 During the trip to Inasa, Etsuko casts a cursory glance at Nagasaki harbour, barely registering the space where the nuclear bomb was dropped. Apart from death imagery and sparse references to General MacArthur’s SCAP rule (Ishiguro 62), the nuclear holocaust is almost omitted from both ‘Japanese’ navels. Private and public erasure is epitomised in the calendar with eut-out photographs of Nagasaki which Etsuko leaves as a memento or inspirational source to a poet friend of Niki’s.6 The derelict cottage and wasteland where Mariko roams free amid mosquitoes, spiders, larvae and stray cats may be reminiscent of Nosaka’s Hotaru no haka (1967) or Tsushima’s Danmari Ichi (1984).7

17But unlike the hibakusha literature of Hara or Ibuse, both navels also seek to contain the war’s ‘disturbing memories through their aestheticization’ (Igarashi 177). The Nagasaki war memorial is further evidence of this disjuncture. Seibo Kitamura’s statue, which suggests the avatar of a foreign god, is perceived by Etsuko as a pathetic traffic warden (Ishiguro 137–38). The keepsake photograph of the monument on which Ogata-San fails to inscribe meaning completes the process of disembodiment.

18Etsuko’s reluctance to corne to terms with her private failures—e.g. her life in Japan—as well as with the traumas of the national psyche correspond to ‘a schizophrenic condition, a split into a pure inner self and an obsequious outer self. The inner self managed to shelter itself from the external [. . .] reality and to preserve an ideal image of Japan, whereas the outer self recast extemal demands as its own wishes’ (Igarashi 207, see Yomata Inuhiko, quoted in Broderick xi). The narrator alternately idealises and vilifies the language and culture of the victor or glosses over the war, replicating the reticence of survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As Oe Kenzaburo recorded in his Hiroshima Noto (1965), A-bomb victims who recovered from their wounds and regained a sense of normalcy preferred to endure mutilation in silence (see Richie 23–24).

19In An Artist of the Floating World, Ono deploys an optical illusion in which he finds himself at the wrong end of the telescope or the victim of a parallax, a ‘flawed’ perspective (Ishiguro 199, 200). Consequently he waxes lyrical about the death throes of the Migi-Hidari, the bohemian quarter, particularly Mrs Kawakami’s gutted establishment. The graphie description with its mournful undertones—‘graveyard’, ‘remains’, ‘pyres’, ‘funeral’, undertaker-like ‘dark birds’ (27–28) displaces Yamahata Yosuke’s apocalyptic shots of Nagasaki. The artist’s rhapsodising over the loss of his former haunts is in stark contrast to the repressed memories of his wife’s death. Michiko is only mentioned three times in passing (11, 91, 200) and her accident seems to be disconnected with the war as she was the victim of a ‘freak’ bombing. Incidentally, the collateral damage to the villa appears to matter a great deal more. The war constitutes the novel’s central aporia as the narrator keeps shifting his perspective from pre-war ukiyo-e pictures and artistic conflicts to post-war disengagement and retirement.

20The Sensei excels at sfumato and chiaroscuro effects so that meaning fluctuates—to borrow the novel’s key motif—and remains forever tentative. Ono, and more to the point the reader, are never quite sure who said what at what point in time (54, 56, 58, 61, 69, 190–91, 194). The poetics of fuzziness and flotation operate during two key moments. In the first instance, the narrator catches everyone unawares by making impromptu revelations during Noriko’s miai. His interpretation of the scene does not match that of the other protagonists. According to Ono’s account, his delayed tenko for wartime activism was a dramatic coup which helped Noriko regain her composure at a critical juncture and interrelate with the Saitos on an equal footing. Setsuko disputes her father’s version and questions the validity of his judgement, implying that Dr Saito may also feel concemed by the Joss of face.

  • 8 The fusuma screens which Suichi parts to interrupt the conversation and avoid Ono’s company can sym (...)

21The second case occurs during the funeral ceremony for Kenji. The narrator is at pains to exonerate himself from war responsibilities. Conjuring his way out of the tight corner, he deflects attention to the ‘disturbing’ changes in his son-in-law and his negative influence on Setsuko (59, 61).8 The ceremony suffers an ironie twist. Ono slips into the conversation that the ashes the family mourns are likely to be from another soldier. The rituals at the cemetery and at the kamidana echo national disembodiment in the form of the shinto commemorations performed at the Yasukuni Shrine, the mausoleum where fallen soldiers were apotheosised as national deities (Winther-Tamaki 166–67).

22Self-sacrifice was not limited to gyokusai, the suicidai martyrdom of the armed forces. It was promoted at ail echelons of pre-war society to anchor the values of patriarchy and uphold the kokutai polity and its ultimate icon, the divine Tenno, descendant of Amaterasu Omikami, the sun goddess (Winther-Tamaki 162, Tsunoda vol. 2,787, Iritani 85).

23The relationships between the different Sensei and their disciples are based on self-suppression and feudal obedience. Thus creativity is fettered as it may undermine the ateliers’ power structure. Sensoga artists such as Ono and its models, Miyamoto or Fujita, realign their aesthetics to embrace martial art ‘as though [they] have offered [their] right arm to the nation.’ (Fujita, quoted in Winther-Tamaki 176).

24Out of touch with post-war self-emancipation and democracy, Ono who finds his plans thwarted by his daughters resorts to feudal ideology (76–77). Yet samuraisation is seen as an irrelevant posture and Ichiro is well aware that his Oji no longer controls ‘the machinery of Top-Down communication’, to borrow lritani’s terminology. Ono emulates Ogata-San who bemoans the demise of Yamato damashii and ‘the old system’: ‘We devoted ourselves to ensuring that proper qualities were handed down, that children grew up with the correct attitude to their country, to their fellows. There was a spirit in Japan once, it bound us ail together’ (Ishiguro, A Pale View of Hills 66, cf. 147).

25This Sensei’s nostalgie retrenchment to Yamato damashii may resonate with Nagai or Tanizaki as expressed in In'ei Raisan (1935). At a more sinister level, it can be interpreted as a way to obliterate war memories and eradicate history. A similar revisionist agenda is at work in The Remains of the Day. The revisionist strategies of Ono and Ogata-San operate in two complementary directions. They articulate a Nihonjinron ideology, the theory of Japanese uniqueness, a kind of ‘self-Orientalism’ manufactured for the purposes of self-definition (Miller 209, See Befu, Dale and Oguma): ‘The Americans, they never understood the way things were in Japan. Not for one moment have they understood. Their ways may be fine for Americans, but in Japan things are different, very different. [. . .] Take what happened in my profession, for instance. Here was a system we'd nurtured and cherished for years. The Americans came and stripped it, tore it down without a thought. They decided our schools would be like American schools, the children should leam what American children leam. And the Japanese welcomed it ail’ (Ishiguro, A Pale View of Hills 65, 66).

26Another ploy to erase Japanese defeat and, by correlation, the war, is to disparage Japan, the country that reinvented itself i.e. America’s Japan as opposed to Nihon or Nippon, the country’s former name. It should be stressed that, in Japanese, Japan, the new appellation is not written in the Kanji ideographs, but in katakana syllables used mainly for foreign words. This usage can both signify that Japan has indigenised westernisation or that it has adopted the Other’s gaze. Thus, Ono and Ogata-San deplore American colonisation. In A Pale View of Hills, Sachiko’s romantic affair with the English language turns sour and instead of emulating Professor Higgins, her ‘Ame-ko’ mentor acts like Madam Butterfly’s B.J. Pinkerton.

27Like Nosaka’s Toshio, the main protagonist inAmerika Hijiki’, who used his newly acquired linguistic skills as a small-time pimp introducing pan pan women to American Gls, Etsuko’s double admits to paying her passage to the west working as a hotel maid or saloon girl (87).

28The new generations represented by Jiro, Shigeo Matsuda and Ichiroape the ways of the enemy’ (Ishiguro 147). Their role models are Gary Cooper, Humphrey Bogart or Popeye, not the samurai warriors. They have discarded their traditional homes with tatamis, shoji and fusuma in favour of western-style appartments. They watch baseball games and play golf. The ie topos which defined Japaneseness has been recycled as uchi no kaisha, the internai, familial world of the company as is highlighted in the closing scene of An Artist of the Floating World.

29A final representation of disembodiment is worth mentioning. The prehistoric monster that Ichiro draws and the film that he watches seem to be based on Honda’s Gojira. Interestingly, the young boy finds the movie soporific, yet he needs to be shielded from its exposure so that he misses a significant amount or recreates scenes from under the safety of his raincoat. While re-enacting the scene of the nuclear holocaust, Gojirarelegates memories of war and images of the enemy to the abject. [. . .] the monster’s dark surface is inscribed by memories of war, yet the inscriptions remain unreadable to the audience’ (Igarashi 114, 115).

A Japanese Palimpsest: Translation and Linguistic Affiliation

30By his own admission, Ishiguro’sJapanese novels’ may have been a passport to the literary establishment, in the wake of the Rushdie bandwagon (Lewis 9). At a more profound level they provide a kind of camouflage or smokescreen allowing the writer to explore his dual identity through the polarity of east and west and the themes of dis-orientation, alienation and homelessness.

31When questioned about the narrator’s voice in A Pale View of Hills, the novelist was aware of the difficulty of casting a narrator ‘reproducing Japanese dialogue in English’:the language has to be almost like a pseudotranslation, which means that I can’t be too fluent and I can’t use too many Western colloquialisms. It has to be almost Iike subtitles, to suggest that behind the English language there’s a foreign Ianguage going on. I'm quite conscious of actually figuring these things out when I'm writing, using a certain kind of translationese’ (Vorda 345).

32In an interview with F.X. Feeney, Kazuo Ishiguro admitted the influence on his writing of David Magashak, a translator of Chekov’s works. He added that in The Remains of the Day, Stevens spun a kind of butlerese or translationese. In L’Art de la Fugue, I have tried to show how The Remains of the Day and When We Were Orphans operate an English subtext based on a ‘Holmesian palimpsest’ and intertexuality (Zinck 573–91). Ishiguro shows an affinity with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s hero (Japan should be substituted for China):

Finding [his] China right behind [his] house
Was he Sherlock Holmes, the fellow whose
Tracks pointed back when he reversed his shoes?
(Nabokov, Pale Fire, Cantos 1, 25–27)

  • 9 Bin designates a bottle in Japanese.

33It may be fair to assume that Ishiguro’s sense of a translated idiom stems from the erasure of his native language. Even if his Japanese was blotted out of his memory, its basic structure may have carried over in his writing. Similarly, German writer, Tawada Yoko expresses herself in German, to question or ‘uproot’ her Japanese native tongue. Realizing that ‘languages are made ofholes’ (Tawada 57), her short story, ‘An empty bottle’ attempts to bridge the gap between her two identities. The German expression of self-affirmation confronts Japanese emptiness (63).9 Tawada relishes the struggle of writing in a foreign language, yet she feels haunted by a Japanese hypotext peopled with ideographic ghosts: ‘when I corne back to Japan to speak in Japanese I feel as if speaking some translated language. While writing in Japanese I would go through the process of rediscovering and rebuilding feelings and memories attached to each word as a Japanese’ (ltakura, Asahi Shimbun).

34Kazuo Ishiguro is in a slightly different position as he does not use such verbal interplay between Japanese and English. In When We Were Orphans, the word ‘tomodachi’ is meant to actas a talisman (lshiguro 261). It has the opposite effect and marks its speaker as a traitor.

35Reading Ishiguro’s ‘Japanese’ novels, one is aware of a Japanese palimpsest circulating under the English script. The consensus markers desho-ne desu-ne, deshita-ne, honto-ni seem to crop up at almost every sentence like Stevens’s ubiquitousof course’. Onodera Takeshi also employs these markers in his translation of A Pale View of Hills, T?i Yamanami no Hikari (252, 256, 258–60).

36When questioned about his translation, Professor Onodera was well aware of a Japaneseoriginal’. He further admitted to recreating lshiguro’s Japanese world by harnessing his own memories: ‘I was aware of a Japanese subtext and Japanese idioms as well as sentence structures embedded in the English prose. Among such examples, typical ones are the dialogues between Etsuko and Ogata-san, her father-in-law. For example, the scene where Etsuko prepares a lunch box for Ogata-san, her father-in-law who is going out to visit his friend for himself seems almost trite as their dialogue and psychology which supports it fits into the Japanese traditional pattern of the relation between those of their position. I felt as if I could hear their voices with a particular kind of flattering intonation, used in such scenes in Japanese and could even imagine the expressions they show while talking to each other.

37This scene is very interesting because, it, including pauses, suggests a unique pattern of love between a man (in this case Ogata-san) and his daughter-in-law. You see they are enjoying jokes pretending to accuse each other of some trivial failures. thus, in a sense, pledging their trust and intimate feeling they have each other. So I could translate such scenes quite easily remembering those I myself experienced since childhood, and it sometimes brought about criticism as well as praise saying that my translation was not translation or even English literature but unmistakably Japanese literature’ (Onodera Takeshi, letter to Pascal Zinck).

38The Japanese cipher in The Remains of the Day can make for a more compelling case. The long clauses with clusters of non verbal adjuncts, the indirectness conveyed by the use of intransitive verbs and the absence of first persor pronouns subject seem to be modelled on Japanese syntax. This should be qualified however, given the novel’s vintage English butler and Stevens’s ventriloquism Furthermore, it is more relevant to read the Victorian template of Wilkie Collins Charles Dickens or Sir Arthur Conan Doyle through which Ishiguro hones his linguistic as well as his fictional skills.

39The themes of homelessness, of Joss of one’s original home, of orphaning are central to Ishiguro’s fiction. The desire for finding a new home/country ranges frorr social respectability to exoticism or monomaniacal quest. The East/West polarit) works on two different levels. In A Pale View of Hills, The West is alternatel) eulogised or vilified as the forbidden other fruit: ‘what about the other side Perhaps she [Mariko]’s on the other side?’ As in the short story ‘A Family Supper’, America, represents the much desired other country opening its arms te assimilate Etsuko’s double: ‘it won’t be like an entirely foreign country. And as foi the language, I already speak it to a certain extent [. . .]. Once I've been in Americ, for a little while, I should speak it like an American woman’ (A Pale View of Hill 43). Etsuko’s escape to the West fails to live up to her expectations. Instead o1 assimilation and emancipation, she treasures her seclusion in her cottage in Britain’s ‘home counties’. Similarly, in ‘A Family Supper’, the narrator’s exile to the United States proves a fatal attraction. It is hinted that the estrangement is the root cause of the mother’s accidentai death from afugu dish.

40The second level shifts from dis-orientation, physical displacement to private and public erasures. War-related traumas which were neatly consigned are reopened and exposed by the new generation.

41A Gulliverian law of diminishing returns operate in Ishiguro’s fiction. The oriental native coastline recedes in the distance of When We Were Orphans in more ways than one. The Japanese source material which sustained his early works has shrunk markedly in the subsequent novels. The Unconsoled offers elusive referencesChristoff may be a variation on Krysztof Penderecki, the Polish composer who wrote a requiem for Hiroshima and the fictional composer Yamamoto may be a tenuous allusion to Admirai Yamamoto Isoroku, the naval commander of the naval forces in charge of the attack on Pearl Harbor.

42In When We Were Orphans, tomodachi, the Japanese signifier for friend fails to act as a password or talisman, quite the reverse, it signais Akira as a traitor and condemns him. Akira’s hybrid house and the bonding metaphor of sudare thread equally fail to stand the narrator in good stead. Banks’s will-o'the-wisp urge to move back to his native home with his family never materialises—the house has been structurally altered, almost beyond recognition, and he resigns himself to his Joss, many years Iater, finding an alternative haven in the British Museum (When We Were Orphans 313). My final point is that the most enduring Japanese traces are not to be located in the text as peripheral referential markers. Rather, they circulate in the writing as a counter-text or spectrography authoring a fractured self, an in-between identity. In chemistry, trace elements have more to tell in absentia. Similarly, Kazuo Ishiguro’s works are riddled with holes, gaps, blanks, interstices, aporias such as the eut-out photographs in a Nagasaki calendar or in newspaper clippings, Sugimura’s designs leaving blots in the townscape, Reginald Cardinal’s ideal holey world, Ryder’s vanishing locale and syncopated time. The writer’s missing identity can only be conveyed through such voids, these halfway substitutes that are ‘neither Japanese nor English, somewhere in-between departure and arrivai, nostalgia and anticipation’ (Lewis 1).

43Kazuo Ishiguro’s Joss can be bridged in the text—transit home and suture for the nomadic writer—a gift for the reader to partake and pass on to others. This act can be summed up by the metaphors of butlering and serving food. It is also worth mentioning the reference to a relay race in both The Unconsoled and When We Were Orphans.

44To quote Homi Bhabha: ‘Remembering is never a quiet act of introspection or retrospection. It is a painful remembering, a putting together of the dismembered past to make sense of the trauma of the present.’

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Annexe

GLOSSARY
Anime: animation
Chichi-to musume: father-daughter (relation)
Bundan: literary circle
Bushido: samurai code of honour
Fusuma: sliding screen
Hibakusha: A-bomb, nuclear bomb le: traditional Japanese household Jidai geki: period drama
Jitsu: truthfulness Kamidana: family altar Kangeki: interstice, gap
Kikokushijo: retumee child to Japan Kokeshi: Japanese folk dolls Kokutai: national polity
Kokyo: homeland
Makoto: authenticity
Miai: arranged marriage (negotiations)
Mono no aware: poignancy and sadness of things
Mujokan: feelings of transience
Nihon Kaiki: retum to Japan
Nihonjinron: the theory of Japanese uniqueness
Ronin: retainer Samurai: feudal warlord Sensoga: war art
Seppuku: Samurai ritual suicide by disemboweling (also known as harakiri) Shinto: Japanese state religion
Shoji: paper screen
Shomin geki: popular bourgeois drama
Shosetsu: novel
Sudare: Japanese bamboo blinds
Tenko: (political) recantation, conversion
Tenno: the Emperor system
Ukiyo-e: the floating world
Uchi no kaisha: family-like company
Watakushilshi: I, self
Yamato damashii: spirit of old Japan

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Notes

1 For ail Japanese terms and references see the glossary at the end of this paper. According to Japanese usage, surnames precede fore-names.

2 See Suzuki 15–18 and Siary 276–77.

3 The phrase used by Ishiguro (Lewis 9) refers to the first two navels set in a Japanese context.

4 In When We Were Orphans, Colonel Hasegawa who reminisces on the nostalgia of Gengi monogatari is the name of the lead actor in the eponymous film by Yoshimura Kimisaburo (1951). Murasaki is also the name of a character in A Pale View of Hills (Ishiguro 61–62).

5 In Kagami No Onna Tachi (Women In The Mirror, 2003), Yoshida Kiju’s loose adaptation of A Pale View of Hills, the embedded infanticide story is strongly linked to amnesia. Facing a broken mirror in the shape of concentric bombing rings is for Aï, Masako/Miwa and Natsuki a first step towards coming to terms with Hiroshima.

6 Memory manipulation through eut-out photographs recurs in When We Were Orphans.

7 Tom-boy Marika can be construed as a combination of Nosaka’s Seita and the wildcat narrator of Oe’s Memushiri Kuchi (1958).

8 The fusuma screens which Suichi parts to interrupt the conversation and avoid Ono’s company can symbolise the processes of displacement and compartmentalisation at work in the novel.

9 Bin designates a bottle in Japanese.

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Pascal Zinck, « The Homeless Writer or the Remains of Japan in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Early Fiction »Études britanniques contemporaines [En ligne], 27 | 2004, mis en ligne le 13 septembre 2025, consulté le 18 janvier 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/ebc/16787 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/14z5u

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Pascal Zinck

Université de Cergy-Pontoise

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