Kazuo Ishiguro is the author of seven novels that are distinguished both by their charm and by the nastiness of their subject matter. His stories are sympathetic portraits of neglectful mothers (A Pale View of Hills), aging fascists (An Artist of the Floating World), Nazi sympathizers (The Remains of the Day), and clones marked for organ harvesting and death (Never Let Me Go). They circle around unpleasant revelations and buried memories: In When We Were Orphans, the hero, detective Christopher Banks, discovers that his whole life has been made possible because his mother has been kept in sexual slavery. It makes you sick, when you read it. Then you set the book down, and you think, “What a charming read.”
This charm comes in part from Ishiguro’s egoless prose. Seemingly uninterested in developing an identifiable style, Ishiguro allows each novel to adopt its own particular, often unassuming voice. As Stevens, a butler, narrates his own story in The Remains of the Day, we come to recognize a voice that is repressed, overly scrupulous, educated but not quite educated enough—and above all, defensive and not entirely willing to acknowledge itself as having a self at all.
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