the remains of the day by kazuo ishiguro

It is only through Etsuko’s memories, and her haunting recurring dream about a young girl, that the extent of Etsuko’s pain becomes visible. Niki justifies her refusal to go to Keiko’s funeral: For many years before she left the family home in the South to go away to Manchester, Keiko had locked herself up in her room, emerging only to commence bitter fights with her stepfather and half sister. In a pattern that again foreshadows how later characters will interact with one another, mother and daughter communicate on a very formal, restrained level that allows neither to say what is really on her mind instead, they hover together on the abyss opened by Keiko’s death.

Accordingly, the novel moves along two temporal planes after Etsuko Sheringham is visited at her home in England by Niki, her younger daughter by her second (now dead) British husband that visit comes just after the suicide of Niki’s elder, Japan-born sister, Keiko. As small events trigger a stream of personal memories, answers emerge to questions that the narrator-like all of Ishiguro’s central characters-refuses to discuss openly. In a move that would become typical for his fiction, Ishiguro opens his first novel, A Pale View of Hills, with the narrator seemingly in control, living through a brief, critical moment in the present.

Ishiguro also demonstrates persistent concern with power and the effects of authoritarian ideologies. One important recurring theme has been the role that memory plays in shaping characters’ understanding of themselves. He has been equally successful in creating female and male central characters. Throughout his literary work, Ishiguro has created a wide range of characters, settings, and plots and has worked in many genres. Even then, however, pieces of the central mystery remain left to the reader to put together. What exactly it is that hovers in the dark as each novel opens is a mystery that unravels only slowly, and the process keeps the reader on edge until a final climactic revelation. For each, there lurks in the past an experience that may invalidate the narrator’s projected sense of self and destroy the vestiges of the individual’s human dignity. Readers soon discover, however, that these central voices are rather unreliable in their accounts of past reactions to crises. A common link among Kazuo Ishiguro’s (born 8 November 1954) novels is the prominence of the first-person narrator, through whose meandering thoughts the story unfolds.

The remains of the day by kazuo ishiguro