Migration Crisis and Conspiracy in Kazuo Ishiguro

Abstract

ABSTRACT Migration and its crises constitute an insistent theme in Kazuo Ishiguro’s fiction, where – as in real recent history – the politics of migration have a dangerously close relationship with conspiracy narratives. At the heart of such narratives lies the fetishised ideal of the organic, original home and “homeland”: conspiracist paranoia is bound up in desire for epistemological security, responding to the traumatic rifts that migrations expose in a world torn between resurgent nationalisms and fraught globalisations. This essay explores how Ishiguro’s characters register a series of psycho-cultural functions for conspiracy theory that are fundamental to modern and contemporary migration crises, their causes, and their brutal consequences. I argue that Ishiguro’s interrogation of his own protagonists’ narratives of migration alongside international crisis, in novels including A Pale View of Hills, The Remains of the Day, and When We Were Orphans, forms a subtle intervention against the power of conspiricist thought.