Two-World Literature: Kazuo Ishiguro's Early Novels by Rebecca Suter

Abstract

Reviewed by: Two-World Literature: Kazuo Ishiguro's Early Novels by Rebecca Suter Matthew C. Strecher Two-World Literature: Kazuo Ishiguro's Early Novels. By Rebecca Suter. University of Hawai'i Press, 2020. 158 pages. ISBN: 9780824882372 (hardcover; also available as softcover and e-book). When Kazuo Ishiguro (b. 1954) broke into the literary world in 1982 with his maiden work, A Pale View of Hills, it was perhaps only to be expected that this very British author should have been associated by some critics with Japan, the land of his birth. This misconception was not alleviated by the fact that both his first novel and his second, An Artist of the Floating World (1986), are set in Japan, albeit one that exists solely in his imagination. It was perhaps also inevitable that he would be compared to other non-Anglo-Saxon British writers such as Salman Rushdie, Timothy Mo, and Shiva Naipaul, and that he should be pushed at times into the tricky position of "postcolonial" writer (notwithstanding the fact that Japan was never a part of the British colonial empire). Over time, attempts were made to read Ishiguro and his work as a kind of quasi-Japanese literature, as "ethnic" English (meaning, presumably, not "White English"), and as "international," which is probably shorthand for "We have no real idea where this person belongs." Ishiguro presents a conundrum to those who are determined to place him and his fiction into a neatly labeled box. Their efforts are not helped by the fact that Ishiguro himself, on an intellectual level, seems to prefer confounding the labelers, perhaps resenting these efforts to pigeonhole his identity. Does being ethnically Japanese make one culturally Japanese? Does it entitle (or indeed, require) one to become a spokesperson for Japan? These questions clearly troubled Ishiguro in his youth when, like many young persons of color living in a predominantly White society, he appears to have found it preferable to blend in and simply "be English." To be sure, having spent his entire life from the age of five in England, whatever his citizenship (he remained a Japanese citizen until 1983), he had surely earned the right to think of himself as an Englishman if he so chose. But the matter was not quite so simple, even for Ishiguro, whose culturally and linguistically Japanese home life, even in Surrey, sowed images in his mind of a birthplace he could barely remember, much less describe in prose. At best he was able to construct a version of Japan in his mind, not for the purpose of introducing Japan to his readers (what would have been the point of such an introduction?), [End Page 182] but to provide a setting for stories that deal with broader, indeed universal, aspects of the human condition. Perhaps this is why, after setting his first two novels in an imaginary version of Japan, he placed his third, Remains of the Day (1989), in the most quintessentially English setting imaginable: a grand and lordly English mansion, owned by a quintessentially charming and conservative English lord (Lord Darlington), looked after by a quintessentially English butler who believes in all the good old values of good old England. These are the three novels that form the focus of Rebecca Suter's fascinating monograph, Two-World Literature, whose title, one finds, refers to a number of related things. On the superficial level, it is an alternative to the idea of "one-world" literature (or for that matter, one-world thinking), celebrated by some as a triumph of "world" literature, decried by others as yet another invitation for White, Western (and, no doubt, predominantly male) parochialism to become the standard by which all literatures of the world will be measured1 As "one-world literature" appears to be at an impasse, Suter opts for "two-world literature" as a means of understanding Ishiguro and his work. But what exactly does "two-world" mean here? Suter explains it as a way of approaching the external world, perception, memory, description, representation, values, and culture through a multifaceted lens of reference, or as she states it, "the capacity, and the will, to hold different perspectives and to understand reality through...