Unrequited Labour of Care in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun

Abstract

In this article, I explore questions of care and selfhood from both the humanist and post-humanist perspectives, as they play out in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun. Ishiguro’s novel portrays a tragic, futuristic universe, not too different from ours. Klara is an Artificial Friend, a robot caregiver, whose purpose of existence is to care for the child, Josie. However, theirs is not a relationship of reciprocity, as the novel presents a world where care is commodified as emotional labour. It is a world where the worker is manipulated into practising an ethic of care, while the cared-for is encouraged to receive it as mere paid service. In the particular case of Klara, her personal investment in caring for Josie guarantees that she loses everything in the end, including her ‘self’. I discuss here the ways in which Klara is shown throughout the novel to carefully construct a sense of self and an understanding of her place within the environment, only to eventually lose it in the performance of her one-sided duty of care, imposed on her by the system. I examine the ways in which care is co-opted within an unempathetic economy so that the cared-for receives genuine love and care while the carer is simply used and abandoned, feeling humiliatingly dispensable and, simultaneously, eminently privileged to have been of service.