The author, Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki in 1954. He moved to England with his parents when he was six years old, so his formal education must have been, in large part at least, in English with emphasis on things English – including perhaps the Arthurian legends. Yet at the outset of his literary career, he's done not remotely what most other writers who have moved from one culture to another have refashioned themselves.
His first novel is set in postwar Nagasaki. His second, An Artist of the Floating World (1986), retains a Japanese setting, but its fundamental frame foreshadows the novel that was to follow only three years later, The Remains of the Day, the work that initially established Ishiguro's international reputation and marked an almost complete rupture with Japanese Bushido.
The central character of An Artist of the Floating World is a painter who had shown undying loyalty to Japan's traditional value system, to patriotic and conservative attitudes that were tested but by no means diminished during the old man's experiences of life in postwar Japan.
The painter's moral barometer is no different from the absolute loyalty of the narrator of The Remains of the Day, the butler Mr Stevens, to his late employer, Lord Darlington, whose Nazi sympathies brought about his downfall. The novel tells of Mr Stevens' journey in 1956 to the West Country where he, as an Englishman, looks upon his native land with the eyes of an outsider, the eyes of one who has never gazed beyond the confines of a Great House and its rituals.
And in one sense Mr Stevens lacks memories, just as the characters of The Buried Giant have forgotten their past, just as the clones bred for organ harvesting in Never Let Me Go have no memory of anything beyond the institution where they were nurtured because they have no other past.
All this seems to me to reveal a dilemma Ishiguro shares with other writers who have same cultural backgrounds. In his hands, English is an extremely stiff instrument, so it seems to remain essentially alien, however eventually converting him into a ventriloquist who speaks confidently but stiltedly through the mouth of a Mr Stevens as well as of a Sir Gawain.
This is the outsider's quandary, and this renders Ishiguro's work initially amusing, particularly when addressing the most English subjects,i.e. the class system, the foundation myths and legends of ancient Britain.
