Kazuo Ishiguro Research Articles

Fictional Country Houses of the 1980s: Isabel Colegate, Kazuo Ishiguro, and V.S. Naipaul

The renewed interest in English country houses in the 1980s was part of a focus on the idea of “English heritage,” and it was accompanied by a flourishing of historical novels and costume dramas. In the twenty-first century, scholars have investigated the links between country houses and the British Empire. A careful reading of Isabel Colegate’s The Shooting Party (1980), Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day (1988), and V.S. Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival (1987) shows that these writers took a critical view of the myth of the English country house. Each of them in some way addresses the colonial and imperial connections of the country house, and they each extend a venerable literary tradition in a manner that addresses the concerns of the late twentieth century and anticipates those of the twenty-first. The three novelists make use of a variety of perspectives in their representation of the country house, with significant attention to the experience of servants. Colegate writes out of a personal knowledge of the upper class from her own family background, while Ishiguro and Naipaul are English writers who were born in other parts of the world, giving them distinctive standpoints from which to consider English history and society.

PERSONAL EMPATHY OF CLONES AND AIS: A HUMANISTIC APPROACH TO KAZUO ISHIGURO’S NEVER LET ME GO AND KLARA AND THE SUN

Empathy is the ability to recognise a person or object's posture, position, and feelings as one's own. People's involuntary projection or personal empathy into for an object or for a person is a great concern of humanity that must be addressed for the overall well-being of human existence in the modern world. People are enticed to embrace refined lifestyles with ultra-modern amenities as scientific and technical advances take centre-stage in this global village. In human life, it creates loneliness, distraction, barrenness, and alienation. In Never Let Me Go and Klara and the Sun, Kazuo Ishiguro's protagonists Kathy (the clone) and Klara (the artificial intelligence) respectively feel personal empathy for their fellow humans. They are considered to be objects, capable of replacing decayed organs and broken relationships. Through a humanistic lens, this study compares human beings with mortal clones and chipped AIs, attempting to argue that they are generous enough to possess greater humane traits than human beings in realising the value of life on Earth. Following the theoretical approach of humanity and the intellectual intuition of aesthetics, Hailsham's Kathy and Jossie's artificial friend Klara offer everything they own, even their lives, to their strange human companions. In this way, the article sums up how digital advancements must improve human beings' sympathetic approach by clinging on to life values while hoping for the best in the future. Through his skillful narrative, Ishiguro wonderfully depicts the sense of empathy for the harmonious tomorrow.

EXCAVATION OF THINGS PAST: A HISTORICAL PROBE INTO KAZUO ISHIGURO’S THE REMAINS OF THE DAY

The paper aims to explore the historical aspects of the novel The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro. The novel deals with six days motoring trip in the life of the protagonist Mr. Stevens, an English butler from Darlington Hall, England to Cornwall for business purposes in 1956. The study traces how the physical journey leads him to recognize his past issues through a mental journey of a loyal butler. This helps him to identify his true self. The remembrance of his personal history, loss, historical events, places, historical figures, and political situation in Europe shape his existence. The novel & historical background is First World War and Second World War, which play a major role in this novel. The paper explains the problem statements as how Kazuo Ishiguro mentions the intermixing of Steven’s personal and historical incidents in the novel. It analyses how strong emotion of suppression, suffering, regrets, and pain leads the protagonist to the emotionless condition in his life. The aim of the paper is to bring out the historical traces of the Nazi party, the Treaty of Versailles, the Hayes Society - an elite society of butlers in the 1920s and 1930s and the Suez Canal crisis in the novel. The paper also suggests ideas and the scope of further research.

Reading the Victorian Novel’s Future in Never Let Me Go

ABSTRACT: Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005) exemplifies the contemporary Anglophone novel’s inheritance of the Victorian novel. Specifically, it reworks this historical genre’s thematization of an unchanging present for marginalized subjects. In Ishiguro’s counterfactual Britain, cloned beings are raised for organ harvesting. The predetermined condition of their trajectories applies to countless Victorian heroines. By comparing Ishiguro’s protagonist to the heroine of George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (1876), I demonstrate that Ishiguro’s novel recontextualizes a gendered lack of futurity in the Victorian novel. Additionally, I connect pro-clone advocacy in Never Let Me Go to mid-Victorian liberalism. Despite professing objectivity and disinterestedness, the advocates reproduce the British public’s subordination of clones to a class of non-persons. As one of the Victorian novel’s futures, Never Let Me Go illustrates how the Anglophone novel still grapples with unjust experiences of the present while challenging readers’ assumptions of personhood, individuality, and difference.

Hidden Oppression and “Narrative” as Resistance: A Biopolitical Reading of Never Let Me Go

Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, which depicts the unfortunate prospect of a group of clones in a dystopian way, has a central theme of power and oppression. From a biopolitical perspective, it may be called “an Agambenian novel.” The clones who seem to live a “normal” life but eventually have to face their unusual destiny, resemble what Agamben has elaborated as “homo sacer”. This essay argues how the sovereign power turns the clones into “bare life” by means of spatial isolation, leaving them trapped in a state of exception—in which legality and legal needs are suspended, and finally deprives them of their lives in a “legal” way. With an analysis of the reminiscent narrator, the essay continues to argue that Ishiguro’s “narrative,” with its potential for resistance and protest, functions to uncover the hidden oppression in daily life and negate any political violence in a society.

Understanding the Digital Companions of Our Future Generation

The main protagonist in Kazuo Ishiguro’s latest novel is Klara, an artificial friend whose existential goal is to be a child’s companion. Some aspects of this fictional narrative have begun to gradually enter our daily lives. Products reminiscent of Klara are available abundantly on the market: smart toys, adaptive learning applications, and companion robots. Children can relate to these products and perform activities together with them. Preliminary research has shown fundamental differences between existing technologies and these emerging children’s digital companions. However, we still do not know much about their benefits and risks. This paper explores different and even contradicting perspectives on the phenomenon. We present the discussion from four perspectives - 1) temporality, 2) use, 3) trust and ethics, and 4) sociotechnical design - and conclude the paper with an agenda for interdisciplinary IS research. The agenda points to the need for a psychological, medical, engineering, and temporal research community to understand this emerging sociotechnical phenomenon and design its future for the better.

A Study of Power Space and Spiritual Space in Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

A Study of Power Space and Spiritual Space in Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

LITERATURE AND FILM: KAZUO ISHIGURO’S “NEVER LET ME GO” AS AN EXAMPLE OF INTERMEDIATE RE-CODING

The article provides a comparative study of Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel “Never Let Me Go” and its film adaptation directed by Mark Romanek. The analysis is made in the context of the theory of intermediality, which involves the interpenetration of various forms of information transmission. According to modern views on intermediality (I. Rajevsky, L. Elleström) it has been established that screen adaptation belongs to “medial transposition” which are understood as the transformation of one media into another by re-coding. The objective of the article is to study the problem of re-coding of literary works by means of cinematography, since it is the transfer of original author’s plots to the screen that creates a wide interpretive field for intermediality research. Literature and cinematography both benefit from their interaction. For cinema, these are engaging plots and challenges in reproducing the original literary style and genre, while for literature; it is an increase of readers and bigger attention to the literary work. The indisputable advantage of cinematography is visual and audio elements that can create a brighter picture of the changed emotional state of the characters, and therefore the film is able to involve the viewer into the events depicted on the screen. The article examines the issue of film language, which is understood as a means of expressing artistic reality in cinema using a set of technical and metaphysical methods for creating reality. Thanks to editing, the director managed to recreate the time-space structure of the novel, which combined three different time life periods of the characters. Important compositional elements were preserved; in particular, considerable attention was paid to the visual interpretation of the basic symbols of the novel.

„WHEN WE WERE NEW“: (PRIVRŽENO) PREDAVANjE O JEDNOJ KLAUZI KAZUA IŠIGURA

The paper proposes a formalist reading of the initial clause of Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Klara and the Sun contextualized by an approach leaning on “evocative impressionism”, broadly cor- responding with declamatory procedures which Paul Frye has labeled “appreciative teaching”. Aiming to address both the “texture” and the “structure”, the reading probes minutia of the functioning of the aforementioned initial clause in terms of its phonetics, semantics, as well as its intertextual and metafictional references. The resulting interpretation offers to see the clause as relatively self-sufficient and self-referential; not only can the clause be shown to refer to itself, its own past and future instances, but also to be „doubly directed” flowing toward the rest of the novel, but also back toward itself, as if doubling back challenged by the “tidal bore” of the remaining text. As such, the phrase is further discussed as a structural building block, a form of refrain, almost verse-like, which, however, occurs in a form of “decremental repeti- tion” – fading away as it recurs, as if in the guise of an echo growing ever less frequent and ever more distant, finally becoming a kind of “phantom presence” of the concluding pages of the novel from which, as it turns out, it begins, and in which it reaches its end.

A eugenic attempt to create “upper class”: Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro

During the first third of the 20th century, scientific advances in genetic research led to an alarm for the modern world and mankind. Under the coercion of artificial intelligence and sterilization programs sponsored by the state, cultural values have been deeply influenced. British author Kazuo Ishiguro, along with his latest novel Klara and the Sun, poses several pertinent questions about the moral standards of existence and humanity. Klara and the Sun is a dystopian novel that offers a speculative future through which the effects of advanced technology, science, and artificial intelligence concepts may be decoded. Ishiguro’s serious concerns about a new society and changing social relations question human insecurity in different layers of the community. The desire to create a master race through a gene-modification process forms the main structure of the narrative. Therefore, based on eugenic attempts in the modern world, this study, addresses the violation of ethical standards that cause inequality, marginalization, and miscommunication. This study seeks to present important insights into the science of genetics and eugenics through the characters of the novel. Josie, a lifted girl, and Rick, an unlifted boy, exemplify the superiors and inferiors of the community that punctures the goals of a biocapitalist and technology-dependent society. In this sense, this article aims to uncover the results of eugenic programs that force people to modify their genes for social improvement, especially social relations.

Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled: An Interdisciplinary Analysis

The study proposes a theoretical analysis of Kazuo Ishiguro’s fourth novel, using the storytelling forms proposed by Kurt Vonnegut, along with the Freudian and Jungian oneiric theories, in order to decide the Kafkaesque texture of the narrative. The protagonist Ryder can open secret portals to physical places in his past and can reconfigure his reality based on memories. Firstly, the study discusses the intertextual connection of The Unconsoled with Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five and Woolf’s Orlando: A Biography while treating its Kantian value according to the domino effect and the quantum principle of probability. The second part analyses Ishiguro’s dream techniques, in conjunction with concepts like the Pygmalion and Golem effects, the imposter syndrome, the tunnel memory and Kahneman’s system 1 and 2 of thinking, for explaining Ryder’s irrational doings. The last part examines Ryder’s cognitive dissonance, his lack of anagnorisis, as well as his flow of consciousness, as compared to Woolf ‘s Mrs. Dalloway and Joyce’s Odysseus. The protagonist’s need for mental decluttering and willpower is then explained through the Stoic principles in Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, as a way to strike a balance between creation and consumption, both in Ishiguro’s novel and in real life. The problems of the nameless European city are also interpreted from a game theoretical perspective, with the tragedy of the commons and the public goods game as examples of faulty cost-benefit relationships. Holistically speaking, the study highlights the meditative power of The Unconsoled, focusing on the narrative’s similitudes to the semantic-linguistic incomprehensibility of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake.

МОТИВ КАТАСТРОФІЗМУ В ПОЕТИЦІ АНТИУТОПІЧНОГО ЖАНРУ: КАДЗУО ІШІҐУРО І ЯРОСЛАВ МЕЛЬНИК

The article examines the concept of catastrophe as an art theme, which is extremely relevant in our time and is also marked by the entropy features. We can confirm that this phenomenon grows and affects many spheres of human life, both external (global, social) and internal (psychological). The author of the article focuses on how modern dystopia reflects an awareness of a catastrophe, which is happening or has already happened. We have analyzed two novels from this point of view: “Masha, or the Fourth Reich” by the French writer of Ukrainian origin Yaroslav Melnyk and “Never Let me Go” by the English writer of Japanese origin Kazuo Ishiguro. The article emphasizes that the dystopias of our time correct classical dystopia attitudes, because they tend to the diffusion of new genres, acquiring the features of a parable novel, a myth novel, an alternative history fiction, and a philosophical novel. We have also noted the controversial nature of new formations, which combine signs of utopia and dystopia. Regarding the ideological and thematic component, the author of the article states that Ya. Melnyk and K. Ishiguro focus on the traditional problems of humanism and the relationship between “man and society” and on individual’s catastrophic depopulation issues in the conditions of nowadays turbulent challenges. The purpose of the article is to study the specificity of catastrophism artistic embodiment in the novels “Masha, or the Fourth Reich” by Yaroslav Melnyk and “ Never Let me Go ” by Kazuo Ishiguro and its functions in the structure of the dystopia genre. To achieve this goal we used historical-literary, cultural-historical and hermeneutic research methods. It was determined that the catastrophism motif realization in the dystopia genre contributes to searching for new experimental forms, activates the processes of transformation and diffusion in the genre creation field, paradoxically and organically combines classic and modern elements of dystopia, renewing the poetics of the genre. Conclusion. Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel “Never Let me Go” demonstrates a powerful example of genre synthesis: “stream of consciousness” coexists with the classic English estate novel, which is emphasized by confessional and allegorical intonations and does not prevent the writer from resorting to some possibilities of a detective story. Features of the traditional parable form and mythological genre are also observed. Fantastic elements are interspersed with realistic ones. But allegorical, mythological, fantastic, and realistic features organically coexist in the novel, reinforcing the author’s main ideas. Yaroslav Melnyk in his novel “Masha, or the Fourth Reich” successfully synthesizes an alternative history novel, an adventure novel and a classic philosophical novel. Here conflicting utopia and dystopia also organically coexist, reinforcing each other. A dystopia genre structure becomes open and acquires unlimited hybridization, losing its classical features and even postmodern boundaries. Thus, the catastrophic reality of the 21st century promotes the search for new experimental forms, activates unpredictable processes in the genre creation field, and paradoxically and organically combines classical and modern elements of literary art. Once again, modern dystopian literature shows that “common issue” as a social slogan cannot satisfy individual human needs. The problem of egocentrism with the insufficient development of the political machine is becoming more and more acute. As a general phenomenon, consumer society does not justify itself and makes the lives of its sons doomed. Unfortunately, the heroes of modern dystopias less and less often choose to fight and more often to humble themselves or flee, which is the main difference from their classical predecessors. The prospects of further work are to deepen the understanding of the causes of stylistic and substantive differences in dystopias, the influence of socio-cultural reality on modern dystopias genre synthesis, the differences in the methods of utopian representation and artistic means of enhancing catastrophization within stories framework.

REVISITING GENTLEMANLINESS IN 20TH CENTURY BRITAIN: KAZUO ISHIGURO’S THE REMAINS OF THE DAY

New Historicism is a literary approach that came into prominence in the 1980s owing to Stephen Greenblatt’s studies based on Renaissance works. Greenblatt treats a literary text as a product of the social and political setting from which it emerges. Conducting his studies primarily on Shakespeare’s plays, the author illustrates how a literary text is affected by the interrelationship between history and literature. The new historicist approach shows that any literary text is shaped not only by the socio-political context of the author but is also largely determined by the critic’s response to it. Accordingly, such a viewpoint affects the reader’s conventional perception of time and history. The purpose of the present study is to perform a new historicist reading of Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day (1989) with a particular focus on the representation of the concept of gentlemanliness to question the validity of its conventional perception. Given the theoretical framework, the study employs such concepts as self-fashioning, representation, persona, time, and history. The novel is based on the reminiscences of a former butler, Stevens, who has devoted his entire life to the service of an English gentleman and owner of a spectacular mansion near Oxford. Never being outside the boundaries of the estate and unaware of the rapid changes in the world, Stevens is determined to live by the conventional principles of gentlemanliness characterized by such values as dignity, loyalty, and modesty. The research argues that the perception of gentlemanliness has changed over the decades due to the subversive force of time undermining its validity in 20th-century Britain. Hence, a new historicist approach to Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day focuses on the impact of various socio-political contexts on the conventional understanding of gentlemanliness.

Dream logic and unreliability in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled

Narratologists remain divided over how and if narrative unreliability works in literary dream sequences. Many believe that Wayne C. Booth’s idea of unreliable narration as a “secret communion” of author and reader “behind the narrator’s back” does not extend to surrealistic prose styles, in which Booth claimed “the author and reader may meet, like Voltaire and God, but they do not speak”. While recent scholarship has challenged this notion, few studies have examined how traditional norms of unreliability might function within literary dream logic specifically. My paper aims to reconcile these approaches, using as a case study Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel The Unconsoled (1995), a text unique in pairing dream prose with a narrator whose self-deception exemplifies the ironic gap central to unreliable narration. Employing theories of unreliability, narrative processing, and dream interpretation, I analyse the relationship between dream logic and narrative structures in The Unconsoled. I argue these dream laws come to signify the narrator’s self-deception, rendering his account suspect as an alternative, ironic account emerges in its shadow. Examining these concepts together illuminates how unreliability might operate outside conventional realism while showcasing how dreams can function as literary devices within one of the most enduring frameworks in narratology.

Is Empathy a Necessary Function for Future Social Robots? A Discussion of Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun and Police Robots

Abstract Drawing inspiration from the recent novel Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro, and in the context of the ongoing Black Lives Matter movement against police violence, the benefits and drawbacks of installing an empathy function in robots designed for social use are explored. In the novel, empathic robots are used for the purpose of friendship with children, responding to the emotional needs of humans. To contrast the empathic robots with humans, who at times lose their empathy, a thought experiment assesses the future potential of empathic robots used for law enforcement purposes. The results indicate that empathy is not an important function in police robots and should be suppressed to improve their performance. Further analyses draw on psychological perspectives and sociocultural factors to better understand current police attitudes toward empathy, revealing that empathy is not considered a necessary quality for police officers. Based on those analyses, absence of empathy can be a potential cause of ongoing police brutality in the United States. Last, a posthuman future is envisioned in which all robots can have an empathy function, and the qualities that today define humanity are no longer tied to physical human embodiment.

“Just Fabric”: The Becoming Black of the (Post)Human in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun (2021)

In Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun (2021), Klara is an AF (Artificial Friend), one among a range of humanoid automatons manufactured with the objective of keeping affluent, genetically augmented teenagers company. As this essay argues, a disturbing historical parallel to the position of the AFs in the social hierarchy is that of slaves. Like the deployment of black bodies as dehumanized raw materials in plantation economies, the exploitation of the androids in Ishiguro’s novel is premised, I contend, on their exclusion from the category of the “human.” The ethics of such a network of production, consumption, and disposal are hardly ever called into question in the dystopian world of the novel. This essay locates the novel in a flux of debates around the nexus between capitalism, race, artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, and environmental change. It deploys Achille Mbembe’s concept of “the becoming black of the world” to investigate the construction of “posthuman” races through technological advances in Ishiguro’s technologized world. Drawing on Mbembe and other theorists, I demonstrate how the historical objectification and exploitation of black bodies expand to encompass the entire planet, with androids, genetically modified humans, and the earth itself functioning as sites of mining and extraction.

A Story of Longing for Humane Affection Tinged with Memory

Never Let Me Go is the sixth novel by Kazuo Ishiguro published in 2005. The setting of the incidents depicted in the novel is England. Spanning more than two decades; between early 1970s up to the second half of the 1990s, hypothetic dystopian novel narrates the experiences of clones whose lives have been pre-determined, shortened and doomed due to forced organ donation so that human can live healthier and longer. Ishiguro’s narration dwells upon the interplay between the themes of memory, grief, longing for human affection, the discrepancy between technologically supported biomedical advances and ethics all of which have far-reaching implications. While search for meaning and essentiality of human affection stand out to be the humanizing aspect of life, they also contribute to the moral qualities of the novel as well as increasing novel’s significance as a cautionary story. In the vortex of emotional exploitation, social conditioning and individual degradation, clones’ experiences present a testimonial quality. Much of clones’ efforts aim at the affirmation of their existence in obtaining meaning with solidarity and memory. Through the reading of this atypical dystopian narrative, the trajectory of quest for meaning, which cannot be made up for anything else and the vitality of interpersonal affection with its unifying essentiality of memory is followed and tried to be pointed out.

Disposable culture, posthuman affect, and artificial human in Kazuo Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun (2021).

Kazuo Ishiguro's novel Klara and the Sun (2021) philosophizes on how in the current technologically saturated culture, the gradual evolution of the empathetic humanoids has, on one hand, problematized our normative notions of cognitive and affective categories, and on the other, has triggered an order of emotional uncanniness due to our reliance on hyperreal real objects for receiving solace and companionship. The novel may be conceived to be a commentary on the emerging discourse in the domain of cognitive and emotional computing that aspires to transform the inner life and social relationships of the human community. The novelty of the paper lies in its ability to showcase how Kazuo Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun (2021) creates a rupture in the existing research and literary narrative by critiquing the theoretical underpinnings of emotional computing that optimistically foresees a future where simulated empathetic minds will be able to decode the complexities of the human emotions. It discusses how literature turns into an apt tool to reflect on the limitations of the programmed machines to decode the elusiveness of the human mind that defies the one-to-one correlation between words, multiple connotations, and their underlying emotions. Through the lenses of the fictional narrative, the paper foregrounds how the concept of the social robot designed to offer empathy, care, and companionship turns into a failed project. The paper draws on critical perspectives from disposability theory, posthuman affect, and immaterial bodies to foreground the noncodified feature of affective experientialities that emerge as a result of the interface between humans and nonanimate beings.

Mirrors and Windows: Synthesis of Surface and Depth in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun

ABSTRACT This article argues that Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun (2021) represents an attempt to synthesize modernist and postmodernist conceptions of surface and depth in a positive way. In doing so, it parallels moves by metamodern and transmodern theorists, who are in the process of attempting to divine the dominant artistic mode following postmodernism. However, Klara and the Sun differs from most meta- and transmodern work in that its synthesis give surfaces primacy over depth. Surfaces possess three qualities in the novel. The first is that they can act as a bridge between individuals and groups by expressing hypothetical scenarios that enable cooperation between different parties. The second, explored through the image of the horizon, is that surfaces can be dynamic, and can combine a modernist sense of groundedness with postmodern relativism. Finally, positive surfaces are framed by soft borders, and as such the frames that delineate an image or field of vision can be recognized as subjective while still allowing communication to take place. Taken together, these factors suggest that the concept of depth is a misleading mirage, while positive surfaces are the medium by which empathy and understanding can be achieved.

The Broken Voice: Reading Post-Holocaust Literature

The Broken Voice: Reading Post-Holocaust Literature