Nowhere, in Particular: Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled and Central Europe

Abstract

The trajectory of Kazuo Ishiguro’s earlier work and the critical response to it accounts for the deliberateness with which his fourth novel is set nowhere — in a mysteriously unnamed and unnamable European city. After the reception of his first two ‘Japanese’ novels, Ishiguro expressed his annoyance with a certain type of misreading which took their value to be the insider’s view they gave of post-war Japanese life, as if the author were a ‘mediator to Japanese culture’.¹ Ishiguro said, ‘I am not essentially concerned with a realist purpose in writing. I just invent a Japan which serves my needs’. That there was something deliberately ‘inauthentic’, in realist terms, about his recreation of Japanese life — that it was imagined rather than reported — should have been clearer from the start. In his first novel, A Pale View of Hills, the hinges of realism are unfastened in a well-known crux.² The negotiation between realist and fabulist codes, so stark in The Unconsoled, has been a consistent preoccupation from the start of Ishiguro’s career.³