Introduction
Homeward Bound
How can strangers find and found home in the world where everything related
to the glorious past is melting and anything referred to as the promising new in the
making? When Julia Kristeva’s concept that “we are strangers to ourselves” has
been widely appreciated in the examination of the diaspora and their relationship to
community formation, does home partake of any relevance or significance in the
identification of self and other? How can the strangers build up home in a world
where their sense of belonging is shattering and their sense of recognition is no less
than an illusion? For those whose definition of home is estranged by new
socio-political norms, home is located at an enigmatic place and going home an
arduous task because home is always already remembered, not recognized. The
displaced people, therefore, become what Sara Ahmed calls the “fetishized strangers”
who are made to believe that their home is not here. They are always already
projected politically and culturally onto the notion that they are, as Pico Iyer puts it,
“impermanent residents of nowhere” (“The Nowhere Man” 30), whose home is
designated in an imagined community of elsewhere. Although their claims of
territorial propriety and cultural centrality are considered preposterous, there are still
some possibilities for the strangers to move beyond the concept of coming from
nowhere and of belonging to elsewhere to forge an accommodation in which they find
themselves relocated, and then reconcile with their situation of now-here. All
depend on how they recount the anxiety-felt memories of a distorted past while facing
their present experiences of being outcast as the unconsoled, the orphaned, or the
remained stranger strangers.
The argument presented above aims to contribute to the depiction of “homeless
strangers,” a term I venture to describe a group of socio-political drifters wavering in
shifting linkages and interconnections created by the emergent forms of the displaced
people at a particular historical conjuncture. We can find prominent examples of the
homeless strangers in the works of Kazuo Ishiguro, a Japanese-born British writer
whose six novels to date have laid bare the subject of the stranger’s homelessness.
The principal argument of my dissertation, therefore, will center on the investigation
of one’s becoming a stranger in a particular historical moment Ishiguro intervenes into.
On the other hand, I would like to explore the possibilities of the homeless stranger’s
be-coming home, the being-at-home and coming-back-home, in the metropolitan
cities Ishiguro describes. By so doing, I wish to shed light on the intricate
configuration of the stranger’s unhomely home and propose an expedient strategy for
his or her recognition of the estranged present without any distorted recollection of the
traumatic past.
A Japanese-born and British-bred novelist writing in English, Kazuo Ishiguro
has pertinently contrived a race track for “a tug-of-war between a sense of
homelessness and being ‘at home’” (Lewis 3). He was born in Nagasaki, Japan, in
1954, and came to England at five when his father’s research on oceanography
attracted the attention and interest of the British government. The Ishiguro family
planned to stay no longer than a year in England, but the short visit was extended and
finally evolved into a permanent immigration to Guildford, Surrey. Conflating his
childhood memory with his upbringing, Ishiguro considers himself as having received
a “typical English education” (Mason 336) together with a “typical middle-class
southern English upbringing” (Bryson 39). This being brought up English by
Japanese parents in a Japanese-speaking home in England, Brian W. Shaffer assumes,
“probably accounts for the author’s sense of not thinking entirely like an English-born
writer, of having perspectives that are slightly different” (2). Influenced and
cultivated by two distinct cultures, Ishiguro is fully aware of his being a “homeless
writer,” of lacking a natural constituency or audience, of being neither “very English”
nor “very Japanese”: “I had no clear role, no society or country to speak for or write
about. Nobody’s history seemed to be my history,” as he tells Kenzaburo Oe (Oe
and Ishiguro 115). For this reason, Ishiguro is, as Shaffer puts it, “most comfortable
identifying himself as an international writer” (2), while Oe tends to regard him as one
of England’s most distinguished contemporary novelists who “writes in English” (Oe
and Ishiguro 117).
In accord with Shaffer, Cynthia F. Wong defines Ishiguro’s self-declaration of
being an “international writer” (Kazuo Ishiguro 7). In the British Council’s short
leaflets introducing British authors, Wong notices, under a photograph of Ishiguro,
there is a quote from him: “I consider myself an international writer” (Wong, Kazuo
Ishiguro 7). The umbrella term “international writer” is a “convenient” one as it
addresses both Ishiguro’s “obvious Japanese ancestry” and some sort of broad themes
with “universal appeal” found in his fiction (Wong, Kazuo Ishiguro 7). In addition,
Ishiguro’s emergence as a writer corresponds to a social milieu that highlights his role
as a bicultural author. If readers perceive that Ishiguro is of Japanese ancestry and
discover relevant cultural paradigms to approach his fiction, as Wong observes, they
should not disregard him as a writer who writes “sensibly and insightfully about grand
human concerns” (Kazuo Ishiguro 11). It is therefore “a matter of time” that
Ishiguro is received more generally as an author writing in English, whose audience
and subject matter are “international in scope and content” (Wong, Kazuo Ishiguro
11).
Even so, Ishiguro still cannot prevent himself from falling prey to the charge of
an inauthentic “British writer writing on Japan” (Minami 63). Akira Minami, for
example, nominates Ishiguro as “a unique writer” (“特異な作家である”) whose
fabrication of an unrealistic Japan in his first two novels helps him receive England’s
prestigious literary awards but loses the account of persuasiveness from a Japanese
perspective (Minami 64). The Nagasaki in A Pale View of Hills is set around 1950,
while the fictional city in An Artist of the Floating Worl d from 1948 to 1950. Having
an earthly experience of living through the war time, Minami articulates his feelings
of uneasiness and dissatisfaction and posits that Ishiguro’s application of childhood
memory and indirect source of a country he barely knows achieve nothing but divorce
Japan from reality. Although Ishiguro’s Japanese series are ironically favored by the
British readers and regarded “persuasive” in the examination of the Japanese national
attitudes toward the Second World War, Minami finds it hard to view Ishiguro’s Japan
anything but “an image remarkably separate from reality” (“それはかなり現実から
游 離 し た 画 像 と し か 思 え な い の で あ る ”).” His interrogation of Ishiguro’s
unrealistic depiction of Japan is, Minami reiterates, “an expectation of Ishiguro’s
future transformation and growth” (“Ishiguro の今後の脫皮と成長を期待すること
にする”)(64).
Ishiguro, however, opposes such an angled juxtaposition of his literary creation
of Japan with his Japanese identity. In a conversation with Bill Bryson, Ishiguro
defends:
I’m very aware that I know very little about Japan, particularly modern day Japan, and I found it disturbing that many of the reviews of my first two books were saying things like, “Read this book if you want to understand how Japanese people think.” That was worrying to me because I didn’t have that kind of authority. (44)
He did not return to Japan until the Japan Foundation paid for his trip to visit his
native country in 1989. After twenty-nine years, Japan is nothing like the one he
remembered from his childhood. He tells Bryson that “apart from the fact that both
places are called Japan I might as well have been to different countries.” Even the
language sounded different from the one his parents used at home (44). Japan is too
unfamiliar and unfamilial to be called home for this Japanese-British novelist.
Yoshiko Enomoto also tackles the outlandish Japan Ishiguro describes and
proposes that Ishiguro’s stories about Japan to a certain degree “reflect [the writer’s]
Japanese identity” in his treatment of “guilt” (171). A Pale View of Hills (1982)
delivers, Enomoto remarks, “a Western notion of individualism” which is “set against
the traditional Japanese family system and family ties” (172). While in An Artist of
the Floating World (1986), the “traditional Japanese and Western cultures are
juxtaposed” to lament for the “older ways” (175). Japan is substantially treated as a
locale where the conflict between the traditional and the modern can be seen through
the changing relationships in the Japanese family (Enomoto 175-76). Ishiguro’s
employment of the traditional Japanese forms of human relationship to manage the
causes of his protagonists’ secret guilt, Enomoto asserts, is “somewhat related to the
postwar cultural change” (179-80). Although he does not show his particular favor
of the “Japanese old ways,” Ishiguro is “more conscious of “Japaneseness” and more
concerned for old Japan than the Japanese writers in his generation (Enomoto 180).
Enomoto also points out that Ishiguro is different from those Western writers who
“tend to emphasize exoticism or give stereotyped pictures of Japan,” and it is in this
sense that his stories about Japan are “nostalgic investigation of the lost roots of his
own identity” (180).
Although Ishiguro repeatedly declares that he has never particularly felt himself
to be Japanese (Mason 337), his hyphenated identity is always highlighted and used
by critics in his native country. A number of the critics in Japan, either writing in
Japanese or English, accuse him of being an unreliable storyteller who uses Western
literary techniques to write stories whose nonsense-making absurdity and fallacious
contextualization are derived from the narrators’ intentional concealment of errors that
are injurious to self-respect. Even when he chooses an English setting as a deliberate
reaction to the classification of him as a Japanese writer living in England, Ishiguro
still receives harsh criticisms from the Japanese side. Akinori Sakaguchi, for
example, has some remarkably contentious views on Ishiguro’s ambiguous treatment
of the “little slips” and his character’s unreliable narration of the past in his analysis of
The Remains of the Day (1989). Paying close attention to Ishiguro’s narrative
technique and its implication on the protagonist’s recollection of the past, Sakaguchi
agrees that Ishiguro has to a certain extent successfully constructed a distinct narrative
skill for the novel of memory in which an old man’s ambiguous verbalization of his
bygone days is subtly revealed. An old man, his memory and his recollection of the
past create a three-dimensional agglomeration in most of Ishiguro’s works, which
Sakaguchi calls “a technique of ambiguity” (“曖昧技法”) (17). But the practice of
such a “calculated ambiguity” (“設けられた曖昧性”) would eventually turn out to be
a “calculated failure” (“計算された破綻でしかない”) if it is dashed with an “abrupt
denouement” (“唐突な終り方”) in which errors committed in the past are concealed
and replaced by an evasive technique of bantering (Sakaguchi 17, 26).
Unfortunately, Sakaguchi is prone to believe that The Remains of the Day lays bare
Ishiguro’s “calculated failure” (Sakaguchi 25) because the story ends with the butler’s
abrupt decision to start bantering in order to search for “the key to human warmth”
(Ishiguro 245). Also, Stevens’s beating around the bush is not only the very
outcome of the novelist’s manipulation of ambiguity (“[スティーヴンス]の右往左
往,左顧右眄を,イシグロは曖昧技法を駆使して”), but also a proof of an
incongruous contextualization of bantering (Sakaguchi 27). Ishiguro’s ambiguous
treatment of “bantering” eventually makes Stevens “a man of concealment and
deception” (“隠蔽と欺瞞の人なのである”). Sakaguchi cannot accept Ishiguro’s
“technique of ambiguity” and suggests that Ishiguro “stop bantering” (“本当に,冗談
を言わないでと言いたい”) (27).
Takahiro Mimura also emphasizes the reliability of Stevens’s story and maintains
that the butler’s inability to reconstruct the past accurately attests to the potential of
human imagination. Stevens’s deliberate concealment is a “desperate struggle” (“必
死のあがき”) to reassure the subjectivity that is on the verge of being shattered
(Mimura 119). Rather than drawing a parallel between the writer and his creative
work, Mimura focuses on the issue of language performativity in its application to
one’s formation of subjectivity. He argues that Stevens’s “unreliable narration” (“信
用できない語り”) is not an arbitrary rendition of the past. Instead, it sustains his
subjectivity of being “a competent butler” (“ふさわしい執事”) in his providing
services for the American entrepreneur, the new master of Darlington Hall. Likewise,
his decision to start bantering at the end of the story is not a preposterous gesture but
an effective move to aim for a reproduction of subjectivity (Mimura 135). Mimura
employs Western literary theories, such as structuralism, postmodernism and
psychoanalysis, to tackle the crevice embedded in Stevens’s recollection of the past.
He is also one of the few Japanese reviewers who focus on the novel’s aesthetic value
rather than the novelist’s historical or political intention of defending himself against
the charges of being homeless.
In contrast to those who read Ishiguro’s works in Japan, the Euro-American
Ishiguro scholars give less attention to the cultural relativism than to the writer’s
literary imagination and his protagonists’ need to survive in a rapidly changing society.
Take, for instance, Brian Shaffer’s understanding of the novelist and his characters’
psychological complexity. Shaffer observes that Ishiguro’s novels are
narrated in the first person by protagonists who have something to hide, from themselves no less than from their readers, yet who reconstruct their past failures and misplaced loyalties nostalgically, even elegiacally.
Unsurprisingly, these first-person protagonists make for “unreliable”
narrators—narrators, in Wayne Booth’s influential term, who fail to speak for or act in accordance with the norms of the work, and who therefore are to be construed ironically in one way or another. (Understanding 6-7)
The writer himself is, Shaffer continues, “more a novelist of the inner character than
of the outer world,” while his novels are ready to
engage historical and political realities, but history and politics are explored primarily in order to plumb the depths and shallows of the characters’
emotional and psychological landscapes and only secondarily to explore, say, World War Two, Japanese fascism, or the English class system.
(Understanding 8)
Other than their being “unreliable,” Shaffer further contends, Ishiguro’s protagonists
“employ one or more psychological defense mechanisms—in particular,
repression—to keep certain unwelcome memories or intolerable desires at bay.”
They “repress” knowledge about their “pasts” in order to “protect themselves from
painful experiences or wishes” which are proven to be “incompatible,” Shaffer’s
borrowing from Sigmund Freud, with their “ethical and aesthetic standards”
(Understanding 9).
Although his novels are “experimental in a quiet way,” as Shaffer puts it,
Ishiguro does not aim to include “postmodern elements” in his books. Nor does he
intend to write novels that can be “taken as meditations on ‘the nature of fiction’”
(Shaffer, Understanding 10). But his intentional evasion does not reduce the
subtlety and psychological explosiveness of his work:
That Ishiguro’s novels eschew a postmodern dimension does not make them simple or straightforward. In fact, their psychological and particularly their chronological complexity render them difficult and even opaque for novice readers. (Shaffer, Understanding 11)
Ishiguro does not believe in the nature of fiction because he appears to be more
interested in “tackling and reworking his culture’s dominant myths” (Shaffer,
Understanding 10-11, emphasis added). Shaffer here uses the singular form of the
word “culture” to generalize Ishiguro’s background and his literary creation. I would,
in contrast, consider it more appropriate to use the word “culture” in its plural while
investigating Ishiguro’s leitmotif of the being at the interim between homes. The
culture he chooses to tackle is not an either-or binary option. It is rather a both-and
discretion because his narratives of memory engage in the reworking of both the
Japanese and the British dominant myths. This proposition coincides with Mike
Petry’s suggestion that Ishiguro employs a particular type of text to reply to some
cardinal questions about his memory of Japan and his present experience of being
“100 per cent English” (14).
In his study of Ishiguro’s first four novels, Mike Petry is at variance with Shaffer
and argues that Ishiguro can be considered “a postmodern writer” in light of the
“metafictional practices” embedded in his works. Petry maintains that Ishiguro is
very much aware of “postmodernism’s predilections for intertextual references,” and
“the foregrounding of the artificiality of fiction.” While his fiction relies largely on
“blank spaces,” that is, “the absences in the narrative,” in which “what is not told
turns out to be as . . . significant as what is told” (10). This explains why Ishiguro’s
first-person narrators are so “hesitant” in their recollection of the past, because
“narrating the past has a freeing and healing effect on these narrators, but it
simultaneously underscores the unspeakability, the absolute unrepresentability of the
real event” (Petry 11). Petry continues to argue that Ishiguro’s employment of the
metafictional techniques is often done in a “fresh, subtle and . . . unobtrusive manner”
(11). Take, for example, the butler’s “parrot-like behaviour” in The Remains of the
Day. Petry remarks that the occurrences of Stevens’s repeating a particular phrase or
sentence “signify and underline the perfect sang-froid of the type of butler Ishiguro
wishes to depict.” It is also Ishiguro’s intentional device to depict Stevens as a
“fictional construct” so that the readers can be invited to participate in a
“self-conscious mode of writing” that is “playful” and “less mimetic” than a “realistic
mode of writing” (11-13, emphasis original).
In his analysis of Ishiguro’s writing techniques, Petry emphasizes Ishiguro’s
deliberate treatment of the metafictional elements, such as intertextuality and
self-reflexivity. Nevertheless, he does not agree to term Ishiguro a writer of
“historiographic metafiction” on account that Ishiguro is less concerned with the
reconstruction of history than “the affirmation of the importance of history to the
understanding of contemporary existence” (Petry 19-20). It is in this regard that
Petry regards Ishiguro as “a truly English writer—someone who is deeply rooted in
the English language and culture,” whose literary creation gives a strong sense of the
writer’s “awareness of Japan, her history, and her people” (14-15). Petry’s argument
here is parallel with my earlier contention that Ishiguro occupies a culturally
intermediary position to tackle and rework his cultures’ dominant myths. However, I
find it disputable when Petry, examining the novelist’s subtle treatment of liminality
and displacement, describes Ishiguro as a “100 per cent English” writer with “a strong
awareness of Japan” and reiterates that it is “quite extraordinary” and a “wrong”
assumption to regard “Ishiguro as a post-colonial writer” (15-16). Barry Lewis
demonstrates the same concern and provides a range of discussion about the
application of postcolonial ideas to Ishiguro.
Continuing on the interrogation of the two cultures Ishiguro embodies, Lewis
regards Ishiguro as “a displaced person, one of the many in the twentieth century of
exile and estrangement” (1). He also terms Ishiguro an English writer and addresses
that Ishiguro is an in-between character whose home is “a halfway house, neither
Japanese nor English, somewhere in-between departure and arrival, nostalgia and
anticipation” (1). It is this “homeless mind” Ishiguro allows us to examine his
fictions “through the optic of displacement, and its effect upon his themes, characters
and style.” The concepts of “dislocation and homelessness” are therefore “versatile
tools for exploring the richness of Ishiguro’s writings” because underlying all his
works is “a tug-of-war between a sense of homelessness and being ‘at home’” (Lewis
1-3). Ishiguro would have assented to Lewis’s proposal as he tells Oe that:
I was very aware that I had very little knowledge of modern Japan. But I was still writing books set in Japan, or supposedly set in Japan. My very lack of authority and lack of knowledge about Japan, I think, forced me into a position of using my imagination, and also of thinking of myself as a kind of homeless writer. I had no obvious social role, because I wasn’t a very English Englishman and I wasn’t a very Japanese Japanese either. . . . I had no clear role, no society or country to speak for or write about. Nobody’s history seemed to be my history. (Oe and Ishiguro 115)
Neither England nor Japan is home for Ishiguro. But “if nowhere is home,” indebted
to Pico Iyer, “everywhere is” (Lewis 12). In light of this, we may state that
Ishiguro’s home is both English and Japanese, and Ishiguro is “a truly international
writer” who “believes he is ‘stuck on the margins,’ thereby aligning himself with the
postcolonial emphasis on the marginal, the liminal, the excluded” (Lewis 12-13,
emphasis original). Furthermore, in keeping with Pico Iyer’s suggestion, Lewis
claims that Ishiguro is
‘a paradigm of the polycultural order,’ along with writers such as Ben Okri, Michael Ondaatje, Vikram Seth and Timothy Mo. These writers are at the centre of a new genre of world fiction, one dominated by what Susie O’Brien calls the ‘rhetoric of hybridity and polyculturality.’” (Lewis 13) To rationalize his categorization of Ishiguro as an “international writer,” Lewis alludes
to Bruce King’s contention that:
Ishiguro has much in common with the Trinidadian Shiva Naipaul, the Anglo-Indian Salman Rushdie, the Nigerian Buchi Emecheta and the Hong Kong-born Timothy Mo. All five novelists concern themselves with cultural and racial dignity in novels such as Rushdie’s Grimus (1975), Naipaul’s The Chip-Chip Gatherers (1973), Emecheta’s The Slave Girl (1977) and Mo’s An Insular Possession (1986). Also, they are not afraid to criticize the countries in which they were born both as insiders and Westerners: “[they] help map the post-colonial world by being part of more than one culture.” (Lewis 13)
There are, however, some critics like the aforementioned Mike Petry who do not
feel the same as Lewis in dealing with Ishiguro’s postcolonial identity. Kanan
Oyabu and Seven Connor, Lewis points out, do not recognize Ishiguro as a
postcolonial writer on account that “Ishiguro does not tackle the colonial mentality or
the issue of polycultural identity directly.” These topics are, Lewis quotes from
Oyabu, “not within his purview” (13). Although it is problematic to term Ishiguro a
postcolonial writer simply because of his “foreign-sounding name,” Lewis argues,
Ishiguro is a figure of living “between two worlds and thus produces a hybrid text”
(Lewis 14). He is also a representative of the “lucky individuals,” Lewis uses Iyer’s
aptly put phrase, “with one foot on either side of the widening gap between Japan and
the world at large” (14). The “in-betweenness,” the weighing relevance of England
and Japan, is therefore a recurrent theme that Ishiguro develops to divorce “otherness”
from “sameness” on the one hand, and displace “otherness” onto “somebody” and
“somewhere else” on the other (Lewis 14-15).
The measurement of weighing Ishiguro’s stories of the displaced people is
distinctively different in both cultures he inherits. The Japanese reviewers, such as
Akira Minami and Yoshiko Enomoto, juxtapose the novelist to the Japan he imagines
and see his stories about Japan as the writer’s quest for lost roots, while Akinori
Sakaguchi criticizes him as an “unreliable storyteller,” who uses “calculated
ambiguities” to demonstrate a “calculated failure” (17-26). Takahiro Mimura also
examines the reliability of Ishiguro’s protagonist, but he regards the narrator’s failure
to recount the past accurately as a potential of human imagination and a “desperate
struggle” to reassure his fragmented subjectivity (135). Ishiguro’s reviewers from
the other end, in contrast, cling to the notion that Ishiguro is an “international writer,”
who criticizes the country he was born both as an insider and a westerner (Lewis 13).
His works on Japan manifest the postmodern inclination for intertextual references,
and help map out “blank spaces” for the interrogation of “the absences” in the
narrative (Petry 10-11). This explains why Ishiguro’s narrators are “hesitant” and
“unreliable” in their remembrance of things past. To “repress” knowledge about
their past is to protect themselves from painful experiences, as Shaffer suggests
(Understanding 9), but to “narrate the past,” as Petry perceives it, has paradoxically
“a freeing and healing effect” when dealing with the “unrepresentability of the real
event” (11). His being part of more than one culture is also considered pivotal in
mapping out a postcolonial world in which “Japaneseness” becomes an open signifier
for the construction of syncretic identities suitable for Ishiguro’s being an
international writer. Barry Lewis has shed light on this when he maintains that
Ishiguro focuses more on the “homeless mind” than on the factual and historical
incidents (1). It is precisely the writer’s in-betweenness and his state of being
homeless that we may defend Ishiguro against the Japanese reviewers’ charges of his
lack of authority and knowledge about Japan.
In light of this, I am in favor of the Euro-American scholars’ interpretation of
Ishiguro’s narratives of the “homeless mind.” Since the displaced people, the
“diasporas,” as Ien Ang terms it, are “fundamentally and inevitably transnational in
their scope, always linking the local and the global, the here and the there, past and
present,” they have
the potential to unsettle static, essentialist and totalitarian conceptions of
“national culture” or “national identity” which are firmly rooted in
geography and history. But in order to seize on that potential, diasporas should make the most of their “complex and flexible positioning . . . between host countries and homelands” (Safran 1991:95), as it is precisely that complexity and flexibility which enable the vitality of diaspora cultures.
In other words, a critical diasporic cultural politics should privilege neither host country nor (real or imaginary) homeland, but precisely keep a creative tension between “where you’re from” and “where you’re at.” (Ang 34-35, emphasis original)
Ang’s “diasporic cultural politics” aims to do justice to the “multiperspectival
productivity of the position of in-between-ness” in her theorization of hybridity and
postmodern ethnicity (35). I find her statement an apt description for the like of
Ishiguro, whose complex and flexible positioning between the host country and
homeland makes home a trope of diasporic imagination. Home in this sense
becomes, as Sara Ahmed perceives it, “a place of no return” (89). The recognition of
Ishiguro’s Japaneseness embedded in his British cultural inheritance enables us to
detect the fact that the displaced people can never return to their origin, even if it is
possible to visit the geographical territory that is seen as the place where they are from.
Ishiguro’s position of in-betweenness helps us understand the cultural context he sets
for his postmodern novels of the homeless mind. It also creates a crevice for us to
elaborate on the contention that where one is at always refers to the very notion of
where one is from.
Ishiguro is not a Japanese writer creating a Japanese story fraught with what
Sakaguchi calls the “calculated ambiguities.” Any reading of his works as Japanese
creation not only fails to deliver the writer’s “flexible positioning” between two
worlds, but also conceals his intention to defend the displaced people’s unreliable
narration of the past. He is not writing about any specific place for the only reason
of claiming authenticity. Instead, he sets his novel, say, An Artist of the Floating
World, in an “imaginary city” to suggest that “I’m offering this as a novel about
people and their lives, and that this isn’t some piece of documentary writing about a
real city” (Mason 341). Ishiguro is not trying to tell the readers “what Tokyo was
like after the war” or how devastated Nagasaki was after the blast of the atomic bomb.
He tells Mason that it is “irksome” if he has to keep referring to the actual history of
Tokyo or turn his novel on Nagasaki into a “bomb book” (341). As for his anxiety
of influence, Ishiguro feels that he is “very much of the Western tradition”:
I’m quite often amused when reviewers make a lot of my being Japanese and try to mention the two or three authors they’ve vaguely heard of, comparing me to Mishima or something. It seems highly inappropriate.
I’ve grown up reading Western fiction: Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Charlotte Brontë, Dickens. (Mason 337)
There is, however, some influence from the Japanese side as well:
Tanizaki, Kawabata, Ibuse, and a little Soseki, perhaps. But I’m probably more influenced by Japanese movies. I see a lot of Japanese films. The visual images of Japan have a great poignancy for me, particularly in domestic films like those of Ozu and Naruse, set in the postwar era, the Japan I actually remember. (Mason 337)
By the same token, his first-person protagonists cannot merely be seen as images
reflecting the Japanese mind. They grow out of his interests in people who
work very hard and perhaps courageously in their lifetimes toward something, fully believing that they’re contributing to something good, only to find that the social climate has done a topsy-turvy on them by the time they’ve reached the ends of their lives. The very things they thought they could be proud of have now become things they have to be ashamed of.
(Mason 340)
He draws his subject to the postwar Japan because “that’s what happened to a whole
generation of people.” They “lived in a moral climate that right up until the end of
the war said that the most praiseworthy thing they could do was to use their talents to
further the nationalist cause in Japan, only to find after the war that this had been a
terrible mistake” (Mason 340). But Ishiguro does not wish to inscribe in the
Japanese history. He intervenes in that particular historical juncture to create an
imaginary Japan in which people like Masuji Ono in An Artist of the Floating World
would end up with the thinking, “My life’s messed up because I happened along at a
certain time in Japanese history,” as Ishiguro tells Shaffer (“An Interview” 11). He
also wants a certain “poignancy” to emerge from Ono’s sense that:
A man’s life is only so long, while the life of a nation is much longer; that Japan as a nation could actually learn from its mistakes and try again even if Ono couldn’t. Ono is looking at this younger generation of people coming up. Perhaps they have the same sense of patriotism or idealism that he had, but they live in different times and they may well have a better chance of creating something worthwhile. Ono has got to accept that a man’s life is much too short to have a second chance. He had a go; it’s too late for him to have another. But he takes comfort in the fact that a nation’s life isn’t like a man’s life. A new generation comes along; Japan can try again.
(Shaffer, “An Interview” 11)
So does Ono. Although everything related to the prestigious past is melting and
anything referred to as the promising new in the making, I posit, Ono can have
another go if he has prepared himself for the recognition of the estranged present
without any distorted recollection of the traumatic past.
Among the reviews of Kazuo Ishiguro’s works, Barry Lewis’s seems congruous
with my examination of the sense of homelessness implied in Ishiguro’s stories of
displacement. Lewis maintains that Ishiguro focuses more on the “homeless mind”
than on the factual historical incidents, which helps explain away Ishiguro’s lack of
authority on and knowledge about Japan in composing his Japanese duet.
Furthermore, Lewis’s attempt to juxtapose the predicaments of Ishiguro’s characters
with the reflections of the novelist’s experience of being related to a land that can only
be imagined assists me in exploring the ephemeral worlds Ishiguro fashions. He
seems, however, too preoccupied to fathom the dynamics of cultural assimilation and
the tensions of constructing collective memories in his dealing with the concepts of
displacement and homelessness. That he associates the novelist’s life experiences
with those of his characters’ is also arguable because identifying a novelist’s literary
creation with his life experience eviscerates the novelist’s capacity of imagination,
discrediting him always succumbing to a lived experience of the homeless mind.
What Lewis fails to observe prompts us to investigate and understand the homeless
stranger’s be-coming home in the interstitial world.
To lay a theoretical framework for the depiction of the stranger’s homeward
bound journey, I would like to employ Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytical concept of
the “uncanny” to shed light on the “uncanny strangeness” implied in the Ishigurean
strangers. “The Uncanny” (“Das Unheimliche”) is an essay written by Freud in
1919 in which the phenomenon of the uncanny is approached from various angles:
language and semantics versus experience; literature and myth versus everyday life
and psychoanalytic practice; the individual feeling versus the universal phenomenon.
Freud’s essay is a direct response to the psychiatrist Ernst Jentsch’s “On the
Psychology of the Uncanny” (“Über die Psychologie des Unheimlichen”). For
Freud, as for Jentsch, the uncanny is a specific form of anxiety, related to certain
phenomena in real life and to certain thematic elements in art, especially in fantastic
literature. Examples of such phenomena or literary justifications are the double,
strange repetitions, the confusion between animate and inanimate experiences related
to death (“The Uncanny” 219-20). Freud stresses from the outset that the uncanny is
an aesthetic experience. Aesthetics is used here in the broad sense of “the theory of
the qualities of feeling” as opposed to the narrow sense, “the theory of beauty,” which,
according to Freud, limits its scope to positive feelings (“The Uncanny” 219). The
fact that the uncanny is related to aesthetics also accounts for the subjectivity of the
experience. Freud insists that not everyone responds equally to the feeling of the
uncanny, and the list of phenomena is neither conclusive nor generally accepted. It
depends, especially in literature, on the treatment of the material whether a thematic
element is uncanny or not. Provided the uncanny does not occur in everyday life and
in art, there would not be a specific word for it (“The Uncanny” 220).
In the wake of Freud’s essay in “The Uncanny,” the uncanny begins at home.
The German word “unheimlich” is considered untranslatable, and the English
equivalent, “uncanny,” is itself difficult to define. Literally, it means “un-home-like”
or unfamiliar, though this word also contains the word “home-like” within it because
the uncanny is an experience of whatever that had or has been familiar becomes
suddenly and inexplicably strange and alien. In the lengthy display of dictionary
entries Freud reproduces, there are several difficulties which have to do with the
negativity of the notion. Un-heimlich is the negation of the adjective heimlich,
derived from the semantic core of Heim, namely, home. But it turns out that
heimlich has two meanings. The first sense is more literal: domestic, familiar,
intimate. The second meaning differs from the positive and literal sense to the more
negative metaphorical sense of furtiveness and concealment. In the positive sense,
heimlich refers to the intimacy of the home. In the negative sense, by contrast, the
walls of the house shield the interior and, in the eyes of the outsider, the seclusion of
the inner circle is associated with secrecy and conspiracy (“The Uncanny” 220-24).
Unheimlich in the sense of strange, unfamiliar and uncanny is then the negation
of the positive meaning of heimlich but paradoxically coincides with the negative
meaning of heimlich. This peculiar etymology runs counter to the intuition and
complicates the straightforward scheme of familiar versus strange and therefore the
negative “un-” arouses “gruesome fear” (“The Uncanny” 224). Freud concludes his
lexicographic research by stating that the specificity of the sensation of the uncanny
lies in the fact that something is frightening not because it is unfamiliar or new but
because what used to be familiar and familial has somehow become strange. He
quotes a phrase from Schelling which formulates precisely this relation:
“‘Unheimlich’ is the name for everything that ought to have remained . . . secret and hidden but has come to light” (“The Uncanny” 224, emphasis original). It is to this
extent Freud posits that everything seen as unheimlich “ought to have remained secret
and hidden but has come to light” (“The Uncanny” 225). The uncanny, therefore,
arouses its “gruesome fear” not from something externally alien or unknown but from
something strangely familiar and amicable which defeats our efforts to separate
ourselves from it. This indescribable quality is actually an integral part of
understanding the uncanny experience. It is terrifying precisely because it cannot be
adequately explained or easily disavowed.
Freud’s essay on the uncanny also interprets the uncanny as a return.
According to Freud, the uncanny is the class of frightening things that leads back to
what is long known and familiar to us. In other words, the uncanny is what is
supposed to be kept secret but is involuntarily revealed. For instance, Freud
continues, when one is caught in a mist and has lost one’s way in a mountain forest,
“every attempt to find the marked or familiar path may bring one back again and
again to one and the same spot, which one can identify by some particular landmark.”
It is only this dynamics of “involuntary repetition” that one may expose oneself to an
“uncanny atmosphere” (“The Uncanny” 237). The feeling of the uncanny can also
be demonstrated when the recurrence of a number is described as such:
We naturally attach no importance to the event when we hand in an overcoat and get a cloakroom ticket with the number, let us say, 62; or when we find that our cabin on a ship bears that number. But the impression is altered if two such events, each in itself indifferent, happen close together—if we come across the number 62 several times in a single day, or if we begin to notice that everything which has a number—addresses, hotel rooms, compartments in railway trains—invariably has the same one, or at all events one which contains the same figures. We do feel this to be uncanny.
(“The Uncanny” 237-38)
The uncanny thus becomes a kind of unwilling and mistaken self-exposure that marks
the return of the familiar in our inner sense of “compulsion to repeat.” This
discovery prepares us for the fact that “whatever reminds us of this inner ‘compulsion
to repeat’ is perceived as uncanny” (“The Uncanny” 238). It is also concerned with
the phenomenon of the “double.” The “double” invokes a sensation of the uncanny
because the double calls forth all the repressed content. Through its resemblance to
oneself, the double becomes a terrifying reminder of aspects of the self one has
repressed. It represents everything that is unacceptable to the self, whose negative
traits have been suppressed by the encounter with society. So we have, on the one
hand, characters considered “identical” because they bear great resemblance to each
other. On the other hand, we have a subject who “identifies himself with someone
else, so that he is in doubt as to which his self is, or substitutes the extraneous self for
his own.” Consequently, there is “a doubling, dividing and interchanging of the self”
that calls forth the “constant recurrence of the same thing,” that is, “the repetition of
the same features or character-traits or vicissitudes, of the same crimes, or even the
same names through several consecutive generations” (“The Uncanny” 234-35).
Although the uncanny arises as the recurrence of something long forgotten and
repressed in a homely place, Freud reminds us, not everything that returns from
repression is uncanny. The return of the repressed is a necessary condition for the
uncanny, but not a sufficient one. It must be “subject to certain conditions” and
“combined with certain circumstances” for the creation of the uncanny experience
(“The Uncanny” 237). In order to probe into “certain conditions” and “certain
circumstances,” Julia Kristeva applies Freud’s explication on the dynamics of the
heimlich and the unheimlich to lay stress on her theory of the “uncanny strangeness.”
The heimlich and the unheimlich, Kristeva concurs with Freud, are not antithetical
opposites. They are relatively interchangeable terms on the basis that the heimlich,
the familiar and intimate, is reversed into its opposite and brought together with the
contrary meaning of “uncanny strangeness” harbored in the unheimlich. The
strategy Freud provides for the examination of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s story of the
uncanny, “The Sand-Man” (1817),
1is to remove the uncanny strangeness from the
outside where fright has anchored it, then to locate it inside the familiar which is
potentially tainted with strangeness and referred to as an “improper past.” Such
“past” and “familiar” evokes the self to postulate that “the other is my (‘own and
proper’) unconscious” (Kristeva 183). Consequently, when the self projects itself
out of what is experienced as dangerous or unpleasant, the other concurrently runs
with it and emerges under certain conditions to repeat whatever the self aims to rid off.
In order to depart from the eerie familiarity doubled by the other, the self has to “[fend]
off the danger [caused by the “improper past”] by the process of repression” (Freud,
1 Freud regards Ernst T. W. Hoffmann (1776-1822) as “the unrivalled master of the uncanny in literature,” and his work, The Devil’s Elixir, a two-volume novel published respectively in 1815 and 1816, “contains a whole mass of themes to which one is tempted to ascribe the uncanny effect of the narrative” (“The Uncanny” 233). The story opens with the childhood recollections of the student Nathaniel, who is tormented by the memories associated with the mysterious and terrifying death of his beloved father. “The Sand-Man was coming” is used by his mother and the nurse to send the children to bed. Even though his mother has once denied the existence of such a person and explained that the Sand-Man is used merely as a figure of speech, the nurse gives details otherwise: the Sand-Man is a wicked man who comes when children would not go to bed and throws handfuls of sand in their eyes as punishment.
Although Nathaniel is sophisticated enough to ignore the gruesome attributes the nurse describes of the Sand-Man, he identifies the lawyer Coppelius, one who comes to a meal occasionally, with the dreaded Sand-Man whose visits remind him of the threat of losing his eyes, his castration complex. For a detailed psychoanalytic approach of the story, please refer to Freud’s astute reading in “The Uncanny” (227-33).
