unhomely homes of the strangers in the floating world. In his six novels up to date,

Conclusion

At Home in a Floating World

The displaced people’s anxiety to return to a nostalgic past has been

demonstrated by the stories of the Ishigurean strangers in my examination of the

unhomely homes of the strangers in the floating world. In his six novels up to date,

Ishiguro focuses on how his characters acknowledge crucial moments when a

different decision might have been made to secure a better outcome. In consistently

laying bare the conflict between duty and desire as well as the theme of remorse and

shame, Ishiguro has successfully dedicated himself to the emotional story of his

characters. He also astutely insinuates into his protagonists’ hindsight that, in

general, humans “are not equipped with any vast insight into the world around us,” as

he tells Nermeen Shaikh. “We have,” as Ishiguro further puts it, “a tendency to go

with the herd and not be able to see beyond our little patch, so it is often our fate that

we are at the mercy of larger forces that we cannot understand. We just do our little

thing and hope it works out” (Shaikh). Ishiguro uses his eloquent and unsentimental

narratives to convey his characters’ journey from emotional turmoil to purgation.

For those left unconsoled, orphaned and considered outdated in the world, Ishiguro

has provided them with particular cultural scenario respectively to rethink their past

and envisage a future that might not be as amicable as they expect but to a certain

degree hospitable to accept them as the constituent parts of the “‘real’ Home” where

“one imagines oneself to have originated, and in which one projects the self as both

homely and original” (Ahmed 77).

In spite of the profound vulnerability and pathetic elusiveness that beset the

protagonists, all six novels at the end partake of a redemptive note. As Ishiguro tells

Shaikh that his novels

end with kind of a partial accommodation on the part of the narrator of the painful things he or she has come to accept, that he or she couldn’t accept earlier on. But usually there’s still an element of self-deception or something left there, just enough to survive, because one of the sad things about people’s lives is that they are rather short. If you make a hash of it, often there isn’t time for another go. (Shaikh)

The stories of Etsuko in A Pale View of Hills and Masuji Ono in An Artist in the

Floating World are applicable instances of what Ishiguro says about his novels. Both

Etsuko and Ono are caught between two worlds, so they have to, in the words of

Rushdie, “deal in broken mirrors, some of whose fragments have been irretrievably

lost” (11). Nevertheless, it is precisely the fragmentary nature of these memories of

the irretrievable past that makes Etsuko and Ono recollect a past that is reminiscent of

the experience of being-at-home. Etsuko’s and Ono’s earlier lives have somehow

been flawed by false calculation, but their pathos is by no means great fault of their

own. They both have unspeakable pasts tainted with guilt because they happened to

live in Japan at a specific period of the wartime, and now they realize what actually

happened. They have become the unconsoled strangers, in the words of Sara Ahmed,

the “bod[ies] out of place,” in postwar Japan. Etsuko’s condition of being a stranger

is determined by the event of leaving home, of migration after the war while Ono’s is

his enthusiastic involvement in Japanese imperialism before and during the war.

Both Etsuko’s and Ono’s improper pasts result in their having a home that is

impossible to inhabit in the present. The question of being-at-home or

being-away-from-home, therefore, hinges on their memories of the past. In their

attempt to remember the past experience of being-at-home, Etsuko and Ono search for

the lost shards of memory by recalling their strange encounters with either an intimate

friend or old acquaintances. While dealing with their present experience of being

away from home, however, Etsuko and Ono choose to stay in the community of

strangers because they eventually realize that their failure of retaining consistent

memory of the past takes them even farther away from home. They both try to keep

their secret guilt in concealment, but the act of imputing the culpable past to the other

has uncannily detained them in the community of the scapegoat. Even though this is

the case, Etsuko and Ono do not succumb themselves to the woe of being homeless

strangers in the floating world. Instead, they have shown us, as I have attempted to

demonstrate in Chapter One, their wish for a promising future. It may be too late for

him and her to have another go, since they both are heading towards the twilight of

their lives, but the nation can start anew. At the end of their narratives, Etsuko and

Ono have found solace in the younger generation. Etsuko feels at home and not at

home in England inasmuch as the place now she settles in is neither a comforting

place nor an imaginary community where she can find a collective identity to share

with her English born and bred daughter, Niki. However, as she sees Niki off at the

door of her unhomely home, Etsuko smiles with content for she has reconciled her

guilt-ridden past with a promising future that may be found in Niki. As for Ono, an

old man sitting on the bench and watching the young salary men pass by, a certain

nostalgia for the past has revived but he smiles with “genuine gladness” (Artist 206).

He seems to deliver the message that it is never too late to learn from mistakes, try

again and do better. If the displaced people can take some comfort from the fact that

the next generation will benefit from the mistakes they have made, they can find a

place of home providing consolation and familiarity at any place in the world. The

realization of defeatism is poignant but a courageous optimism. Etsuko and Ono

have demonstrated a sort of balance between feeling defeated and guilty and trying to

find reasons to obtain some kind of consolation. Their vision of home is sadly

pathetic but amazing as they have eventually learned to dredge up some hope from

their flawed memory of home.

In The Unconsoled and When We Were Orphans, Ryder and Christopher Banks

have respectively shown us that one may still feel comfortable even when left alone at

“a lost home in a lost city in the mists of lost time” (Rushdie 9). As I pointed out in

Chapter Two that both Ryder and Christopher Banks are troubled by intense

childhood trauma which affects every aspect of their adult outlook of the world. The

wounds of their childhood not only deeply influence their worldview that we all are

orphans to ourselves, but also jeopardize the possibility for children to reconcile with

the shadows of their vanished parents. In order to alleviate their anxiety of being the

orphaned strangers in between two worlds, between their imaginary homelands and

the Home, Ryder and Banks manipulate their memory of the past to conceptualize

their home that is lost in a lost city—Ryder’s home in a nameless European town and

Banks’s in the International Settlement of Shanghai.

Displaced as the tragic hero Oedipus, Ryder and Banks drift between homes in

order to settle in somewhere that can be identified as a place of familiarity and

familiality. Although their homeward bound journey is either deferred or differed

from the one they retain in the memory, from their faulty but compelling recollection

of home, they have proven that they can find a place, like Oedipus at Colonus, to ward

off the sense of displacement and learn that their orphanage may be treated as a

convenient identity to roam in-between homes as long as they “try and see through”

their missions to the end (Orphans 335). It is in this manner that they manage to

approach tranquility in the community of strangers and recollect their memory of

home that is closer to the one they imagine as a familiar and comforting place. To

conclude his search in the unnamed European town for the parents who never show

up, Ryder gets on a carnivalesque tram that runs “a continuous circuit” (Unconsoled

534) from home to home and starts anew. Likewise, Banks, after taking his

homeward bound journey to the Settlement in Shanghai, accepts his orphanage and

finds his mind at peace as he acknowledges that London has come to be his home and

that he would not mind if he has to stay there alone for the rest of his days.

Stevens’s and Kathy’s quest for a vanishing memory of home is a journey

towards the heart of darkness. As Ishiguro tells John Mullan, Never Let Me Go is

not a science fiction about advances in biotechnology, nor a “prophecy” about the

future. Instead, it relates “something simple, but very fundamental, about the

sadness of the human condition. . . . I wanted my novel to be one in which any reader

might find an echo of his or her own life” (Mullan). Ishiguro employs clones to

raise questions which in recent years, as he observes, “have become a little awkward”:

“What does it mean to be human?” “What is the soul?” “What is the purpose for

which we’ve been created, and should we try to fulfill it?” The introduction of

clones is, Ishiguro says, his “futuristic way of going ancient” (Mullan). It is, I would

like to venture, his realistic way of going avant-garde to suggest that we all live

metaphorically, if not literally, in an evanescent world. Through Stevens in The

Remains of the Day and Kathy in Never Let Me Go, we may come up with the sense

that, as I have tried to explicate in Chapter Three, it is feasible for the social

remainders like Kathy and Stevens to find a place of consolation in an ephemeral

world.

In my examination of Stevens’s and Kathy’s struggle for be-coming home in

either the “butlers-and-Rolls-Royce England” or “the England of the 70s, 80s and

90s” (Mullan), I focus on how their unfailing self-surrender to professionalism turns

out to be in vain and to what extent their devotion to dignity becomes preparation to

sacrifice for a world in which an unconditional welcome provided by their hosts

seems too deliberate to be real. Both Stevens and Kathy are treated as the privileged

and respected for their unmatched professionalism; however, it is paradoxically their

pride on professionalism that prevents them from living a life suffused with dignity

and hope. Like Etsuko, Ono, Ryder and Banks, Stevens and Kathy deal with their

anxiety of being the remaining strangers by averting or implicating others for the

responsibility of their guilt and shame. However, their efforts to start anew

distressingly defy the changes taking place around them. Stevens and Kathy cannot

escape from “the stranger forms of exclusion.” In order to find a mind at peace,

Stevens and Kathy have to count on the hospitality provided by their host or hostess in

a world whose social milieu has become strange to the privileged homeless.

Searching for an unhomely home in the universe of strangers, Stevens and Kathy

eventually realize that they are merely transient guests whose values to the society

amount to nothing but sacrificial victims when the community suffers torments from

the memory of a culpable past.

Both Kathy and Stevens eventually settle into the remnants of their lives, but

their hope for a different closure seems too pale to be envisioned. Apart from this,

their return to a nostalgic past to transform the inevitable is also proven to be a futile

exertion. In the end, they both find themselves alone and desolate, though they are

irrefutably worthy of the professionalism they have dedicated themselves to. When

Stevens and Kathy, the privileged homeless, are aware that there is no other place than

the community of strangers that they can imagine as a place of home, they tacitly

accept their destiny. Being the transient guests whose value to the new world is to

become the reminders of a collective memory contaminated by a culpable past,

Stevens and Kathy impress us with their overwhelming passivity. They also awaken

our compassion for the social outcasts who are blamed for sins they have never

deliberately meant to commit.

The Ishigurean stories of strangers are so compelling and intimidating that we

seem to find “an echo” of our own lives in these stories and reflect that we sometimes

choose to be self-deceiving when encountering situations beyond our grasp. This

explains why we come across the Freudian “gruesome fear” (“The Uncanny” 224)

when the stranger stands contrapuntally in front of us and mirrors the sadness of the

human condition. We often have the stranger take up the responsibilities for things

we do not wish to recall, and thus, open our memory to manipulate in order to fend

ourselves off the memory tainted with guilt. Ishiguro’s privileged strangers also

question the possibility to go beyond the dichotomy of self and other. Although

Julia Kristeva has urged that we should consider ourselves strangers among strangers,

in effect, I am inclined to agree with Sara Ahmed and venture to say that we are

strangers to ourselves whereas there are other strangers who suffer from stranger

forms of exclusion. Only after we regard ourselves as strangers among the stranger

strangers can the displaced people, like Ishiguro’s homeless strangers, picture a world

in which their sense of alienation is less excruciating and the sense of belonging more

affirmed. Be-coming home, then, can be ardently anticipated.