1In spite of an undeniable variety in form and style, Kazuo Ishiguro’s novels all bear certain common features characteristic of the author’s writing strategy. The ways of coming to terms with painful or even traumatic events in one’s past are a recurrent theme, while in terms of narrative technique Ishiguro frequently resorts to unreliable narration to shed light on his protagonists’ coping mechanisms. His first published short stories as a young author, written in the course of his MA in Creative Writing in 1980, clearly bear the mark of what were yet to become the defining features of Ishiguro’s writing.
2I will focus here on one of these early short stories: “A Strange and Sometimes Sadness” (Ishiguro 1981), from here on referred to as “Strange”, published in 1981 in Faber and Faber’s Introduction 7: Stories by New Writers. The story is set in England, where Ishiguro lived almost all his life, but for the most part the narrator is reminiscing about her time in Nagasaki during the war, before the atomic bomb was dropped.
3“Strange” starts with the first-person narrator, Michiko, evoking the recent visit of her daughter Yasuko. This visit prompts her to think of another Yasuko that she used to know, the woman she named her daughter after. The majority of the short story is told through seemingly random memories from the time of her friendship with Yasuko and with Yasuko’s father Kinoshita. The anecdotes paint a portrait of daily life in Japan during wartime. Several of them revolve around Yasuko’s fiancé, Nakamura, who is stationed in the Pacific. It rapidly transpires that the narrator is in love with her friend’s fiancé, though the subject is never openly broached. At the end of the story, Michiko remembers the day the atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, and Yasuko and her father died as a result. We also learn that Nakamura was killed around the same period. The story ends with mundane remarks by the narrator on her daily life in England, where she moved after the war. Indeed, throughout “Strange”, the superficially peaceful atmosphere and the deceivingly detached tone of the narration form a stark contrast with the themes dealt with – war and destruction, unrequited love, guilt, and mourning.
4This article aims to show that the writing strategy at work in this early short story revolves around a poetics of silence, which operates on several levels at once. I argue here that this writing strategy clearly prefigures Ishiguro’s style and writing technique in his work as a whole.
5First, I will focus on silence as a stylistic tool, and operating at the level of the diegesis: I will look at silences in the story (literal silences) and then at the silences of the story (what the story does not say). Finally, I will argue that silence also functions here as a narrative strategy. I will focus in particular on the narrator’s unreliability and its implications for the narrative pact and the reader’s involvement in the text, while showing how this narrative strategy relates to Ishiguro’s subsequent work.
In many ways, “Strange” can be seen as a study for Pale View of Hills, Ishiguro’s first novel. In both, the majority of the textual space is occupied by the reminiscences of a first-person narrator on her life in post-bomb Nagasaki, and on her friendship with a woman whose memory is coloured by the narrator’s haunting sense of guilt. This underlying feeling of guilt manifests itself, among other things, through the growing omnipresence of silence at the level of the diegesis: both “Strange” and A Pale View of Hills are replete with unfinished sentences, interrupted dialogues, unanswered questions and things left unsaid, which work as clues for the reader that there is more to the story than meets the eye. The first lines of both works provide a good sample of their similarity in this regard, as well as in terms of plot.
“A Strange and Sometimes Sadness”:
It was the year after we came to England that I gave birth to Yasuko. [...] I began telling my daughter about that first Yasuko, but was quickly interrupted. ‘You’ve told me before’, she said, impatiently. ‘You named me after her. The one who was killed by the bomb.’ […] I saw she had little interest in hearing about the first Yasuko, so I let the matter drop. (1981:14)
A Pale View of Hills:
Niki, the name we finally gave my younger daughter, is not an abbreviation [...] She did not mention Keiko until the second day. […] Perhaps it was not just the quiet that drove my daughter back to London. For although we never dwelt long on the subject of Keiko’s death, it was never far away, hovering over us whenever we talked. (1982:21)
6Both works start in medias res with a mention of the narrator’s daughter, with whom the narrator is both eager and loath to broach the subject of a dead woman who was dear to her: in A Pale View of Hills, this woman is the narrator’s elder daughter, who has recently committed suicide, and in “Strange” she is her dead friend, after whom she named her own daughter. In both cases the daughter shows a certain reluctance to respond; in “Strange” she even cuts her mother off: “[I] was quickly interrupted” (1981:14). This interruption causes the narrator to take refuge in her memories: from the direct speech of this mother-daughter dialogue, the narration moves to Michiko’s reminiscences in free indirect speech.
7This silencing on the part of Yasuko suggests to the readers that something is going on in this exchange that they do not have access to. Yasuko’s reaction could mean that she has heard the story many times and that she is tired of her mother’s fixation on the past; the use of the adverb “impatiently” tends to confirm this first interpretation. It could also mean that the subject of Yasuko, or more generally of Michiko’s past life in Nagasaki, is usually taboo between mother and daughter, and that Michiko’s breaking of the taboo puts Yasuko ill-at-ease. This reading is supported by the incipit of A Pale View of Hills, which, as shown above, is clearly the counterpart of the incipit of “Strange”. In this incipit, Keiko’s death is more explicitly described as taboo between the two women, central as it may be in their thoughts. As always in Ishiguro’s writing, there is no way to decide between the different readings, but from the very beginning the reader of either work is encouraged to pay attention to the permanent tension in the text between speaking out and remaining silent.
8Thus, at the level of the diegesis, silence is omnipresent: the string of anecdotes that form the bulk of “Strange” is punctuated by moments of silence which become more and more frequent as the story progresses. These blanks are one of many clues that there is more to the story than meets the eye.
9However, even though in this passage of “Strange” silence is forced upon the narrator by her daughter, in the rest of the story silence generally results either from self-restraint or from estrangement between the characters. In particular, silence keeps growing between the narrator Michiko and her friend Yasuko as the story progresses. There is a turning point close to the end of the short story, when the two friends come close to quarrelling about the delicate subject of Michiko’s fiancé, Nakamura:
It never developed into an open quarrel, but remained with us for some weeks, somewhere just beneath the surface of things, and it had an uncomfortable way of colouring almost everything we said to each other.” (1981:21)
10This image of some undefinable and elusive feeling, subtly altering the significance of every word, forms part of the text’s self-reflexivity. Indeed, it works as a mise-en-abyme of the poetics of the entire short story: just as in Michiko’s description, what is at stake in “Strange” is never clearly presented as such. Throughout the story, the interpretive work is largely left to the reader, who has to go beyond the narrator’s seemingly detached account in order to understand the emotional significance of the events reported. Brian W. Shaffer points out the relevance of the parallel between the expression and Ishiguro’s writing strategy: “What unites [the] three Japanese stories, and indeed Ishiguro’s first three novels, is thus their shared focus on the unsaid, on matters that lie ‘somewhere just beneath the surface of things’.” (Shaffer 10).
11After this key episode, silence and reserve seem to take over the two friends’ relationship, as they become progressively more estranged:
Yasuko fell silent then. We walked to the bottom of the hill without speaking. (1981:22)
[O]ur next few meetings had a reserve about them quite foreign to us. We did not openly discuss the matter of her marriage for a long time. (1981:22)
Yasuko sat there quietly, and I thought she would say nothing more of the incident. (1981:23)
I did not reply. I think I was searching for something suitable to say. (1981:23)
We sat there silently while the evening grew darker. (1981:24)
12This presence of literal silence in the story also contributes to the text’s self-reflexivity: these silences described in the narration mirror what the narration itself is doing, so that literal silence in the diegesis sheds light on the silences of the story.
13By ‘silences of the story’, I mean all the facts that the narrator fails to provide, so that the reader must either make do without them or find out about them without direct help from the narrator.
14Just as in A Pale View of Hills, we know nothing of the period between the narrator’s life in Nagasaki and her new life in England. The phrasing of the first sentence, “It was the year after we came to England that I gave birth to Yasuko” (1981:13), suggests that the reader already knows of the narrator’s move to England and of Yasuko’s identity: the only element introduced as new is the time of her birth. Similarly, Michiko’s marital situation is only mentioned in passing at the beginning of the story: “She was married four years ago, not long before my husband’s death.” (1981:14). The existence and subsequent death of the said nameless husband are presented as familiar information, mentioned only by chance in order to situate another event in the general timeline of the story – here, her elder daughter’s wedding. Thus from the very start, the reader is placed in an awkward position, expected to know more than s/he does and compelled to infer information from context.
15Significantly, Yasuko’s fiancé Nakamura is also introduced in this off-hand and seemingly casual manner: “And her agony had to continue, for her fiancé had been stationed in the Pacific” (1981:3). However, though he never appears in person in the story, Nakamura quickly appears to be one of the story’s absent centres: in spite of this literal absence, he is at the centre of all attentions.
16His name first appears several pages in, at the end of a long description of the setting of a conversation between the narrator and her friend Yasuko’s father, Kinoshita:
I remember clearly, for instance, that conversation with Yasuko’s father one morning on my way to work. There was a small bridge leading out of Nakagawa where each morning he and I and several others would wait for the tram that would take us into the city. Before the war, Kinoshita-San had been a civil servant, but now he too worked in a factory, one not far from mine. Each morning he would be there on the bridge before me, a small briefcase from his office days clutched under one arm. He had become quite thin by then and his increasing years made him stoop a little. That particular morning, he greeted me with his usual bow and smile, then told me Yasuko had at last received a letter from Nakamura. (1981:16)
17The abundance of details on the surroundings creates a contrast with the absence of narrative comment on the subject that is nevertheless at the heart of the episode: Michiko’s secret love for Nakamura. Kinoshita is the one who brings up the subject of Nakamura, hinting several times at these hidden feelings:
“You were always very fond of Nakamura-San.”
“Yes, I’m fond of him. But mainly I worry for Yasuko’s sake.” […]
“We both of us must worry selflessly, isn’t that so, Michiko-San?”
Perhaps I coloured slightly then. “I’m not sure what you mean, Kinoshita-San.” […]
“Of course you wished Nakamura-San to choose Yasuko. But another part of you wished them to remain apart, isn’t that so?”
I cannot recall if I found the words of denial. I suspect not. (1981:17)
18The central piece of information of Michiko’s love for her best friend’s fiancé is thus provided to the reader by indirect means, through Kinoshita’s discourse. By focusing exclusively on her answer, Michiko indirectly confirms the truth of Kinoshita’s insinuation. In his choice to convey the information indirectly, not only does Ishiguro encourage his readers to use their faculties of deduction, he also draws their attention to the information in question: paradoxically, the narrator’s reluctance to revealing her love emphasises its very importance for her. The perceptible tension between the desire to hide and the urge to reveal, mirrored in the narrator’s failed attempt to tell her daughter about Yasuko at the very beginning, is the expression of the narrator’s pain and feeling of guilt when it comes to Nakamura.
19This technique of introducing crucial information that is painful for the narrator through direct discourse, in a dialogue between the narrator and another character, is typical of Ishiguro’s writing. The best-known example takes place at the end of The Remains of the Day, when Miss Kenton mentions the feelings she and Stevens have for each other, feelings left unsaid up to that point of the narration:
“For instance, I get to thinking about a life I might have had with you, Mr Stevens.’ […]
I do not think I responded immediately. […] Indeed – why should I not admit it? – at that moment, my heart was breaking.” (1996: 239)
Here again, the central piece of information is provided by another character in direct reported speech, and even though it is obvious that these words have struck a chord, the narrator fails to report his answer, or even if there was one at all.
20Nakamura’s central role in the story is hinted at again in the description of the near-quarrel between the two friends, which focuses on the subject of Nakamura himself. Ironically, in this episode, the narrator is actually encouraging her friend to overcome her feeling of guilt for leaving her father, and to go ahead with her plan of marrying Nakamura after the war. In retrospect, the narrator comments that “It is odd to think now that I felt so involved. After all, it had little to do with me.” (1981:21)
21The discrepancy between the narrator’s indirect confession of her feelings a few pages earlier and her feigned detachment here is a clue for the reader that the narrator is not fully reliable. Here, Phelan’s typology of unreliable narrators (Phelan, James 34-37) can lead us to conclude that Michiko’s unreliability lies not in her underreporting, but rather in her misinterpreting of what she reports. Indeed, she does confess to emotional involvement in the subject of Yasuko and Nakamura’s wedding but fails to provide an adequate explanation for the significance of this feeling, expressing instead a surprise that the readers cannot share, knowing as they do of her love for Nakamura.
22It is no coincidence that the other absent centre in “Strange” is the atomic bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki in 1945. Indeed, Nakamura and the bomb are linked by the feeling of guilt they provoke in the narrator, for having coveted her friend’s fiancé on the one hand, and for having survived the bomb that killed Yasuko on the other. We can see a parallel between the story’s poetics of silence and the work of annihilation of the bomb itself: in “Strange”, as well as in A Pale View of Hills, the bomb’s literal destruction of the narrator’s friends and of her city is reflected in the text, as the narrator creates a different form of erasure by attempting to talk around the traumatic losses at the basis of the story.
23Thus in the case of the bomb, the most crucial piece of information is again provided by another character: the fact that the bomb killed Michiko’s friend is made clear at the beginning of the story by the narrator’s daughter, Yasuko’s namesake:
“You’ve told me before”, she said impatiently. “You named me after her. The one who was killed by the bomb.” (1981:13)
24This sharpness of tone contrasts with the characteristically detached, matter-of-fact manner in which the narrator describes the event herself, at the very end of the story: “The next day, the bomb fell. The sky was strange, the clouds were huge, and there was fire everywhere. Yasuko died and so did her father.” (1981:25)
25However, even though the bomb is rarely explicitly mentioned, it is clearly central in the narrator’s preoccupation, and in her telling of the story. As with Nakamura, the narrator seems to fight contrary urges to tell the reader about the bomb and to keep her memories to herself, a tension that can be better understood in the light of literary trauma theory.
26Indeed, as pointed out by Cathy Caruth, “trauma stands outside representation, altogether” (Caruth 17), which explains Michiko’s inability to give a straightforward account of what is at the heart of her preoccupations. However, recounting her experience, painful though it may be, is also a way for Michiko to cope with the traumatic events that lie in her past and with her sense of guilt: “trauma is only known through repetitive flashbacks that literally re-enact the event because the mind cannot represent it otherwise. [...] [T]his concept of trauma perceives responses as fundamentally pathologic and privileges the act of speaking or narration as the primary avenue to recovery.” (Balaev 150)
27We find a good illustration of the way Michiko uses narration to deal with her trauma in the episode that takes place the day before Yasuko’s death. While the two friends are strolling in a park, Michiko suddenly catches a ghastly expression on her friend’s face:
I saw Yasuko staring towards me with an expression so ghastly it completely distorted her face. The eyes were staring so frantically they trembled with the tension. Her jaw was quivering, her teeth starting to bare.” (1981:23-24)
28This frantic expression could be a literal illustration of the “speechless fright” described by Balaev: “[a] central claim of contemporary literary trauma theory asserts that trauma creates a speechless fright that divides or destroys identity” (Caruth 17). Here, describing Yasuko’s facial expression is a means for the narrator to exteriorise her own unspeakable feeling of horror while distancing herself from it at the same time, by attributing it to her friend and describing only a silent manifestation of it, rather than the feeling itself. Rather than a straightforward account of events, her somewhat biased narration is a therapeutic tool: “memories of the traumatic experience are revised and actively rearranged according to the needs of the individual at a particular moment” (Caruth 164).
29Michiko’s projection of her own feelings onto Yasuko is even more explicit in the last page of the story, when the narrator mentions the episode again:
I often recollect her face, the way I saw it that night, and I think perhaps it was a premonition not just of the atomic bomb, but that Yasuko had seen something at that moment – something in my own face.” (1981:26)
30Michiko’s unspoken feeling of guilt translates textually in her conviction that Yasuko’s distorted face reflects her somewhat supernatural knowledge of both the Michiko’s secret love and the impending bomb. As for the idea that Yasuko’s reaction might have had a premonitory dimension, it is likely to be a manifestation of Michiko’s reconstruction of the past. The trauma of the bomb and the loss of her friend colour all her memories, just as the two friends’ quarrel coloured everything they said afterwards.
31In A Pale View of Hills, the narrator entertains the idea of having had a similar premonitory feeling of her daughter’s suicide by hanging, at a time when she was still pregnant with her:
I find it tempting to persuade myself it was a premonition I experienced that afternoon. [...] In all possibility, it was nothing so remarkable. The tragedy of a little girl found hanging from a tree. (1983:156)
32The narrator of A Pale View of Hills, like that of “Strange”, is affected by a post-bomb trauma doubled by a more personal one, her daughter’s death. Just as in “Strange”, her reminiscences are altered by her sense of guilt and recomposed temporally to match her present feelings that she should have seen the tragedy coming, and is therefore guilty for failing to prevent it. Both traumas function as absent centres in the novel, and in her work of reconstructing the past the narrator adopts a similar strategy to Michiko’s: avoidance and displacement of the underlying focus of the story. Just as the bomb erased Yasuko from Michiko’s life but not the mark she made on her, unreliable narration in “Strange” shows, in counterpoint, Michiko’s continuing feeling of guilt and distress.
33According to Balaev, “[t]he narrative strategy of silence may create a ‘gap’ in time or feeling that allows the reader to imagine what might or could have happened to the protagonist, thereby broadening the meaning and effects of the experience” (Caruth 159). This is the case in “Strange”, where the narration goes back and forth between present and past, which subtly inform each other in the narrator’s perception, and where Michiko’s feelings are always expressed indirectly, thereby requiring the reader’s active involvement.
34In my analysis of unreliable narration in “Strange”, I follow Gaby Allrath’s division of textual signals of narrative unreliability into three groups: unreliability on the story level, discourse level and structural level (Allrath 22).
35On the story level, “signals of narrative unreliability often take the form of various inconsistencies in the narrator’s account” (Fonioková 49). “Strange” contains several episodes in which we find such an example of story-level contradiction, where the attentive reader can detect an inconsistency between Michiko’s tale and other characters’ reactions.
36In the scene where the narrator describes her friend’s face as distorted by a frantic expression, for instance, there is clearly a discrepancy between Michiko’s account and Yasuko’s reaction:
A cry of alarm escaped me and I grasped her shoulders. Perhaps I shook her quite roughly.
‘What’s the matter?’ she said. ‘Michiko, what’s wrong?’
And when I looked again, apart from a puzzled look, the face was gentle, beautiful, Yasuko’s face once more. (1981:23)
37These two sets of contradictory accounts confirm the idea that the narrator’s telling of the story is a distorted one, and that the knowledge of present-time Michiko is tainting her memories of past events.
38On the level of discourse, textual signals of unreliability function as metanarrative alerts. These alerts encourage the reader to keep an eye out for clues of the narrator’s biased or even dishonest account of the story – in particular, on her keeping key information from the reader (Fonioková 53-57).
39The first subtype of textual signal on the discourse level consists of metanarrative comments on the narrator’s limitations. In “Strange”, comments on the limits of the narrator’s memory abound:
Of course these things are in the past now and there must be much I have forgotten. (1981:15)
I cannot remember their precise places in time. (1981:15)
I cannot recall if I found the words of denial. I suspect not. (1981:17)
Perhaps we discussed things of importance, I do not remember. (1981:25)
Etc.
40This is a recurrent strategy in Ishiguro’s work: we find strikingly similar comments in each of his first three novels, respectively A Pale View of Hills, An Artist of the Floating World and The Remains of the Day:
Memory, I realize, can be an unreliable thing: often it is heavily coloured by the circumstances in which one remembers, and no doubt this applies to certain of the recollections I have gathered here. (1983: 156)
It is quite possible, of course, that I imagined this. (1986:128)
It is possible this is a case of hindsight colouring my memory, but I have a distinct feeling that it was at that moment I first sensed something odd, something duplicitous perhaps, about this apparently charming American gentleman. (1989:90)
41At first, such comments can paradoxically strengthen the reader’s trust. However, in combination with other signals, they function for the experienced reader as clear indicators of the narrator’s unreliability. These warnings are all the more suspicious as in other places, the narrator seems to have an implausibly good memory, claiming to picture a scene in all its minute details, and rendering whole conversations that took place decades ago. Metanarrative comments on the limitations of the narrator’s memory are thus interwoven with passages that would represent feats of memory, were they to be regarded as entirely reliable.
42The second subtype of textual signal on the discourse level is what Kathleen Wall calls the “verbal habits” of the narrator (Wall 13). Among such characteristic verbal habits listed by Allrath (quoted in Foniokovà 49), two are particularly relevant in the case of “Strange”.
43Firstly, the specific and recurrent use of certain words is a common marker of unreliability, as such patterns of speech emphasise the constructed nature of the discourse. In “Strange”, we observe a striking recurrence of markers of uncertainty and of the lexical field of strangeness.
44Examples of uncertainty markers (emphasis ours):
She seemed uninterested, perhaps a little embarrassed. (1981:13)
A lone plane, it seemed, had carried out an air-raid that evening. (1981:18)
Apparently no one had been hurt. (1981:18)
I must have made some more bewildered remarks. (1981:23)
Etc.
Examples of semantic references to strangeness (emphasis ours):
I had encountered something strange, perhaps supernatural. (1981:14)
He continued to regard me with his curious expression […]. (1981:17)
I thought it odd, but carried on working. (1981:17)
It’s like they keep falling from somewhere strange. (1981:19)
Etc.
45Both the very recurrence of these patterns of speech and their semantic field contribute to giving the reader a sense of distrust. Just as with comments on the limitations of her memory, they show that the narrator is distancing herself from her own narration, and contribute to the idea that her account might not be entirely reliable.
46Secondly, the narrator’s great restraint also points to the fact that she keeps a lot from the reader, both in terms of facts and feelings. In almost every scene, Michiko’s desire to keep her thoughts and feelings from other characters manifests itself in her choice to remain silent:
I was astonished but said nothing. (1981:21)
I resisted the urge to question him further. (1981:23)
I decided to let it drop and merely laughed again. (1981:24)
I told no one of my experience the night before in the Shingokko gardens. (1981:25)
Etc.
47But this reserve goes beyond what the narrator shares, or rather does not share, with the other characters. It also applies to her attitude towards the reader, of which the anecdote of Kinoshita’s cooking offers a striking example. Michiko and Yasuko come back one evening to find that Yasuko’s father has been cooking for them as a surprise, and they all sit down to eat together:
I had taken but two or three mouthfuls when I noticed Yasuko looking over to me. Then I saw her father looking suspiciously from one face to the other. Yasuko burst into laughter, covering her mouth with a hand. The fish had been salted so much it was impossible to eat. (1981:20)
48Through Michiko’s passing comment, “I had taken but two or three mouthfuls when I noticed Yasuko looking over to me”, we perceive how little responsibility she is willing to take for her own narration: the reader can only fully understand the situation described through other characters’ reactions. Here, only once Yasuko’s hilarity has made it obvious that something is wrong does Michiko explain what she must have already known, having taken several mouthfuls of the overly salted fish, and she does so without offering any personal comment.
49This self-restraint illustrates the above-mentioned tension, fundamental in the narrative, between the narrator’s urge to tell and her reluctance to do so. As Tamar Yacobi puts it, in this type of narrative strategy, “incongruity arises more from the speaker’s misfocusing than from any direct misdjudgment on his part: the issue most central or relevant […] is passed over in silence throughout the mediator’s discourse, while side-issues receive liberal commentary.” (Yacobi in Fonioková 55). This notion of misfocus echoes that of an absent centre. The fact that the elements at the heart of the story are largely glossed over is emphasised by the abundance of details provided on ancillary, safer subjects, and by the many digressions from the main storyline. For the experienced reader, they only contribute to revealing Michiko’s true preoccupations.
50Indeed, the poetics of silence at work in the narrative strategy of “Strange” can have one of two effects on the readers. They are likely to either have a feeling of incomprehension, that they are left out of the story, or – if they accept the implicit narrative pact – that they are expected to take an active role through their interpretive faculties. In order to understand what is at stake, they need to operate a re-focusing, to read between the lines and fill the blanks of the story and of the narration. This alternative is introduced even before the beginning of the story, through the title itself: “A Strange and Sometimes Sadness” is a paratextual element that functions as a signal of unreliability on the structural level, “[forewarning] the reader against taking the narrative at face value” (Fonioková 57).
51It is obvious at first glance that something is not quite right in this title: the sequence article + adjective + ‘and’ + adverb + noun forms an enallage. This figure of speech, which is a particular form of ellipse, refers to the substitution of the expected grammatical form by another, incorrect one.
52This enallage forces the reader to make an adjustment in order to make sense of the title. Since the reader’s first impression is likely to be that a word is missing – an adjective between “sometimes” and “sadness” – such an adjustment would precisely consist in filling the blank. The title could then read, for instance, “A Strange and Sometimes [Suspicious] Sadness”.
53Another solution would be a grammatical re-categorisation of “sometimes”, making it an adjective while staying semantically as close as possible to the original adverb – for instance, “A Strange and [Occasional] Sadness”.
54Yet another option would be to break down “sadness” into an adjective (sad) and a suffix (ness), where “ness” would function semantically as a noun, meaning something general like “thing” or “feeling”: “A Strange and Sometimes Sad [Ness]”. In this case, strange and sad would both qualify “ness”.
55The indeterminacy and openness of this expression results in a narrative pact of active participation that starts as early as the title. The reader is made aware that s/he must either adopt an active role and be ready to fill in the blanks of the text, or else be left in incomprehension.
56We can see a form of self-reflexivity of the short story in this alternative, which befalls not only the reader but also the narrator herself: the trauma caused by the atomic bomb, which forms the background of “Strange”, is unspeakable precisely because it is such an incomprehensible event. Narration becomes for Michiko a means of expressing and dealing with the “repetitive flashbacks that literally re-enact the event because the mind cannot represent it otherwise” (Balaev 151). Indeed, by trying to put words on it – or rather, around it – she makes the choice to metaphorically rebuild her life by reconstructing the past, just like the reader who accepts the narrative pact needs to reconstruct the story by filling its blanks. Nevertheless, even to this model reader the story remains open. As often in Ishiguro’s fiction, there does not seem to be just one correct underlying version of the short story; rather, it allows every reader to have their own reading, in the same way that “[t]raumatic memory is rarely represented as an exact recalling of events. Rather, the construction of the past includes new details with each telling, or it is constructed from different perspectives” (Balaev 163).