Quiet and Personal, or Resoundingly Universal? An Ishiguro Crisis

ABSTRACT This article considers the theme of crisis throughout Ishiguro's output, to emphasise the central tensions between different binaries: the collective and the individual, the commonplace and the unique, the sensational and the (too) easily overlooked. Continuing the scholarly interest in the importance of memory to Ishiguro's narratives, the argument takes three themes: mnemonic crises and the role of memory in times of crisis; crises of time, in which an individual's ‘generation’ sits uncomfortably with changing or changed circumstances; and how crisis might be artificially calmed through euphemism. The first two themes draw on the work of memory studies in a cultural or societal sense, the latter considers Ishiguro's euphemsims in the context of how language processing can overwrite memory. In attending to Ishiguro's quietness, I focus on readerly complicity, since it is the cognitive work of the reader which reveals the full extent of a given crisis.

It is the significance of this peculiarly Ishigurean style of crisis, and of crisis situations to Ishiguro's style, on which this article focuses.
My title sets up a contrast, a binary opposition even, because the more I thought about Ishiguro in relation to crisis, the more I found myself battling between extremes: the collective and the individual, the commonplace and the unique, that which affects everyone, but whose distinct consequences can only be refracted through the prism of a single existence (and even then remain hazy at best, opaque at worst). This contrast mimics to an extent the tensions between individual and shared memory: does a given crisis concern a single psyche or society at large? Several scholars have built on Halbwachs's and Warburg's original formulations of "collective memory", but following Assman's designation of "cultural memory" I focus instead on cultural memory as, in Erll's phrasing, neither the "Other of history", nor the "opposite of individual remembering", but "the totality of the context within which such varied cultural phenomena originate". 1 It is this "totality" with which Ishigurean crises are enmeshed: the many moving parts and the range of possible responses, for better or worse. As will become clear, the nature of the crises explored here hinge on another binary, that between remembering and forgetting, and the friction surrounding which activity will best determine the future.

Mnemonic Crises: When and What Can Memory Ameliorate?
"The work of memory that is central to Ishiguro's texts […] makes him unique among his contemporaries," argues Teo. 2 While Ishiguro thematises memory, his novels also meet Basseler and Birke's criteria for "mnestic narration" by centring on a subjective consciousness and having multiple time levels, "two aspects [which] are equally invested in representing processes of remembering". 3 I have written elsewhere about how Ishiguro emulates the cognitive processes behind recognition. 4 Such representations of remembering, though, frequently introduce more problems than solutions in the world of the novel.
"Our city is close to crisis", Ryder is told, "We have to start putting things right somewhere [… Christoff] and everything he has come to represent must now be put away in some dark corner of our history". 5 The setting of The Unconsoled, then, is one of 1 Erll, Memory in Culture, 7. In his article "Collective Memory and Cultural Identity," Jan Assmann proffers the "theory of cultural memory" in an effort "to relate all three poles" (mentioned by Halbwachs and Warburg, respectively) "memory (the contemporized past), culture, and the group (society)to each other" (Assman,"Collective Memory," 129). Furthermore, while some of David Rieff's arguments are contentious, I wish to avoid an easy reliance on collective memory since: the world does not have memories; nor do nations; nor do groups of people. Individuals remember, full stop. Yet […] collective memory is often spoken of as if it were indeed on a par with individual, which is to say genuine, memory, and not infrequently, though almost never explicitly, as if it morally outranked it. (In Praise of Forgetting, Perhaps more diplomatically, Rieff later states "Of course collective memory exists, but only metaphorically, which makes it subject to numerous distortions that should put the claims for its importance morally and ethically under severe strain" (Ibid.,116,original emphasis). 2 Teo, Kazuo Ishiguro and Memory, 151. 3 Basseler and Birke, "Mimesis of Remembering," 214-18. 4 Charlwood, "National Identities, Personal Crises," 31-4. 5 Ishiguro, The Unconsoled, 99-100. collective crisis: something has happened which affects all residents. Indeed, about thirty pages later Jakob Kanitz tries to rally his audience by inspiring them to behave calmly, as the citizens of Paris or Stuttgart would, extending the frame of reference across several European nations. 6 Ironically, of course, those comparisons designed to better behaviour only serve to bolster what is an insular (not even national) project to bring "us" together as a city. Though Kanitz's repeated references to Stuttgart seem ineffective, Ryder's narration notes that this "clumsy appeal had got it more or less right". 7 The muddling "more or less right" rhetoric of shaming comparisons and fearmongering might strike readers now as reminiscent of similar attempts to rally feeling around the cause of Brexit. 8 Stirring as this may be, these two scenes belie what more often characterises an Ishiguro crisis: an individual or a couple; a sense of fractured relationships (with both intimates and wider society); and a concerted effort (either one's own or encouraged by others) to explore the meanings and legacies of the past rather than relegate it to "some dark corner of our history". Indeed, though Ryder variously stumbles upon larger debates, his most concerted efforts centre around understanding what happened within his own family. As Teo notes, "the focalisation of the narrative through […] Ryder's self-absorption means that key issues arising from the theme [of collective memories] are ultimately dissipated by being funnelled through an individual's perspective". 9 Compare Kanitz's collective version of crisis with that of a minor character in The Unconsoled: Geoffrey Saunders. Geoffrey Saunders (who is always referred to by his full name, further detaching him from any intimate relationship to the narrator, Ryder) is first introduced as an old school companion. Noticeably, "Ryder remembers how Geoffrey Saunders was the golden boy of our year", but that he didn't go on to achieve the expected accolade of School Captain "owing to some crisis that had obliged him to leave the school very suddenly". 10 Geoffrey Saunders is a man who originates, at least in the novel, in crisis.
Hundreds of pages later, Geoffrey Saunders returns and has been  Ibid., While The Unconsoled was obviously written decades before Brexit, Ishiguro's distrust of nationalist sentiment has been an ongoing theme. Ivan Stacy considers Ishiguro's "explicitly political message" in his Nobel acceptance speech alongside his statements on Brexit ("Looking Out into the Fog," 110). Similarly, Kristian Shaw writes of Ishiguro's being "uncharacteristically vocal on post-Brexit negotiations", but also observes his "sustained engagement with national identity, memory and loss" (Brexlit,92). Richard Robinson's essay "'Many Strange Tongues' in the Fenlands: The Buried Giant as Brexit Allegory?" in this special issue furthers this theme. 9 Teo, "Monuments, Unreal Spaces and National Forgetting," 3. 10 Ishiguro, The Unconsoled, 44-5. 11 Ibid., 437.
Young Geoffrey Saunders goes on to tell a young, upset Ryder he is not the only one with problems and details at length a traumatic memory from when he was 7 or 8 where his father attempted to abandon his family. Present day Geoffrey Saunders rehearses the entirety of this complex family memory (in which Ryder took no part) and seems genuinely to expect Ryder to "remember all this? I told it all to you that day". 12 Though a bizarre episode, the pathos of Geoffrey Saunders is in his desperation for someone else to share in and affirm his personal memory. While he is a "sad monologist" (to use Karttunen's phrase), this, for me, is not just another example of Ishiguro highlighting unreliable narration through "the exact reproduction of the conversation in direct speech": Geoffrey Saunders expects such "exact" memory, fundamentally misunderstanding memory's limits. 13 The fact that he twice emphasises the totality of "all" indicates that he is in need of someone to validate his existence. That kind of crisis, and especially the one which arises when others fail to affirm and validate your memory, has a particularly Ishigurean quality. 14 Misremembering, purposeful forgetting or amnesia all test our assumed interdependency as social beings. Humans do not just rely on their own individual memories, but draw on others' memories to piece together a coherent whole. A need for wholeness presupposes a feeling of incompleteness, something Ishiguro takes to new lengths in The Buried Giant (2015). Set in an Ancient Britain where the entire population is afflicted by a kind of amnesia, Axl and Beatrice cannot remember either where their son is, or the precise tenor of their own marital relationship. While my focus here is how remembering and/or forgetting threatens Axl and Beatrice's personal alliance, several scholars have understandably focused on the violent crisis anticipated once the "collective war memory […] vital to a group's self-identity" returns. 15 Early in the Buried Giant when they are trying to recall their son, Axl admits "I was hoping you'd remember more, princess". 16 Part of Axl and Beatrice's coupling involves pairing their memories: two memory systems combined, we assume, are better than one. However, it rarely works like this in an Ishiguro novel: when two characters attempt to align and mutually verify their memories of the same event disagreements arise, from those which can be remedied (when Brodsky doesn't remember a memory of Miss Collins's, but ultimately concedes that the past is "too full of too many things" to remember them all), through to disagreements which cannot be resolved (when Anthony Morgan remembers Banks as a "miserable loner" at school, which Banks refutes). 17 Axl and 12 Ibid., 438. 13 Karttunen, "A Sad Monologist," 1-16; Basseler and Birke, "Mimesis of Remembering," 231. 14 It is perhaps worth remarking upon that while Ishiguro's characters consistently seek external corroboration and validation of their memories, Ishiguro himself notes in his Nobel speech that he needed to write about "'my' Japan" because it was fading from his memory, and that it "was unique and at the same time terribly fragilesomething not open to verification from outside" ("My Twentieth Century Evening," 6). 15 Yiping, "Ethnic War and the Collective Memory," 231. Yiping, Teo and Stacy are but three of the scholars to have examined this theme. While Ricoeur and Margalit often feature in such discussions, it would be interesting to see The Buried Giant read in conjunction with David Rieff's In Praise of Forgetting, especially since Ishiguro adopts an ancient setting. Rieff perceives a "contemporary elevation of remembrance and depreciation of forgetting" (120), and questions the (often politically nefarious) use of remembering long-ago events. As he writes "by all means let societies remember, provided of courseand this is a very big caveat indeed, and one those convinced that remembrance is a moral imperative consistently underestimateremembering does not engender further horrors" (101), which is the precise scenario The Buried Giant presents. 16 Ishiguro, TBG, 27. Hereafter referred to as TBG. 17 Ishiguro, The Unconsoled, 324-6 and When We Were Orphans, 184. This exchange sets up the next disagreement Banks has with Anthony Morgan's memory, over Inspector Kung (198).
Beatrice are acutely aware both of their wish for shared memories to bring them closer together but also of the threat that returning memories could apprise them of facts about the other which would ultimately drive them apart. Noticeably, in their early remembering, even when Axl recalls an event differently, Beatrice is quick to compromise: "If that's how you've remembered it, Axl, let it be the way it was […]. With this mist upon us, any memory's a precious thing and we'd best hold tight to it." 18 At this point in the novel, fearful of fracture, Beatrice chooses to join forces with Axl's memory despite not remembering it herself. "Let it be the way it was" attempts to rewrite history, as if Axl's version of events can be granted objective truth status, even if just so the pair can have a supposed anchoring point to "hold tight" to. 19 Ivan Stacy reads The Buried Giant as a struggle between the two opposing positions of "history-as-narrative" and "history-as-object"; in the latter condition, the past "is regarded as an object or an essential truth that can somehow be retrieved in its original form". 20 While at this point Beatrice is firmly in the realms of "history-as-object", Stacy regards the novel as proposing "an ethical and responsible relationship with the past if we are able to forge a middle path between these two extremes, acknowledging the past as both a matter of empirically verifiable events, and of subjective personal experiences". 21 "Let it be", though, is not a phrase which easily governs the past in an Ishiguro novel. To continue the focus on relationships, characters ruminate on their memories of past arguments, but often unproductively. Relationship crises tend to remain quiet and personal in Ishiguro's novels because the reader does not witness fights in real-time; instead, they see characters struggle with painful memories: both struggling to remember the details and struggling with the import of such a memory. Relationships quietly fracture in the present, because of echoes from the past. While Axl and Beatrice wish for the return of their individual and shared memories, they are aware of the possible threat of what awaits them: "We don't remember our fierce quarrels or the small moments we enjoyed and treasured". 22 The wish to remember with totality will ultimately return the unwanted as well as the "treasured". The Buried Giant stands out among Ishiguro's novels because memory is at the heart of the plot for all characters, not just the remembering narrator. More often, the "fierce quarrels" which charactersise close relationships are half-remembered. For instance, Sophie apologises for their final telephone call, but Ryder only found a faint recollection returning to me. Eventually I thought I could recall also a certain phrase I had been shouting […] "You live in such a small world!" […] nothing more of this exchange would come back to me. 23 A couple of pages later, Ryder remembers more of his argument with Sophie, but to little avail. Though he remembers further exclamations he shouted at her, he reaches the same end point, with "You live in such a small world!" echoing once more. 24 Half-remembered 18 Ishiguro,TBG, Elsewhere in his oeuvre, Ishiguro represents how we naturally go along with another person's memories to keep them happy, or to be polite. When Banks re-encounters Colonel Chamberlain (who accompanied Banks on his crossing to England), Banks notes "he recounted memories of our fellow passengers, […] little incidents I had long forgotten or had not registered in the first place (When We Were Orphans, 27; hereafter referred to as WWWO). 20 Stacy, "Looking Out into the Fog," 112. 21 Ibid., 112-13. 22 Ishiguro, TBG, 49. 23 Ishiguro, The Unconsoled, 35. 24 Ibid., 37.
arguments can only haunt the subject, since without understanding the details of the disagreement they cannot predict the repercussions for either their present or future relationship with this person. Elsewhere in Ishiguro's novels a character misattributes, or reflects that they may be misattributing, a key phrase from a remembered conflict: did Miyake or Suichi say "the greatest cowardice of all"? 25 did Mori-San or Ono say "exploring curious avenues"? 26 did Miss Kenton or Lord Darlington say "these errors may be trivial in themselves, but you must yourself realize their larger significance" to Stevens? 27 did Banks's mother say "How is your conscience able to rest while you owe your existence to such ungodly wealth?" to the company's health inspector, or Banks's father? 28 These are all examples of "source amnesia", whereby "you forget the origin of what you have heard or read, but you remember there was a source". 29 A realistic depiction of a memory process, this nevertheless leaves characters at a mnemonic impasse: without knowing who said this key phrase, what can be done with the information? In these cases of incomplete remembering, characters have neither remembered nor forgotten productively.
While such hazy memories prevent understanding, the import of the past interaction continues to exert influence. Though unaware of why, Beatrice's posture once causes "a fragment of recollection to stir on the edges of Axl's mind. The emotion it provoked, […] surprised and shocked him" because along with protective instincts, were "distinct shadows of anger and bitterness". 30 While (the full return of) memory is called upon to heal crisis, it can also cause schisms, since the emotional residue remains. As Beatrice observes of her son, "I can feel things about him", even without memory present to verify facts. 31 Unfortunately, the same is true when the "him" in question is Axl, though with more negative consequences. By voicing only remembered disagreements and never resolving them in the present time of the narrative, Ishiguro keeps the continued possibility of crisis present in many of his novels' core relationships.
One of Ishiguro's most fervent devotees of memory is Kathy H., the carer whose narrative is designed to "order all these old memories" (clearly intending for remembering to prove productive). 32 In insisting upon memory throughout Never Let Me Go, Kathy works against Ruth, who remembers only as is useful to her present and future life. A carer with no imminent prospect of organ donation and possible death, Kathy's relationship to school memories is qualitatively different from Ruth's or Tommy's, those former students now facing their hastening end. Since Ruth can confirm or deny facts about Kathy's identity, Ruth's purposeful forgetting earns her censure. When she pretends to forget about Miss Geraldine and Hailsham's rules, Ruth is rebuked: "there's no way you've forgotten. So don't give me that". 33 Although "I let her get away with it that time", the next time provokes Kathy's anger. 34 "Get away 25 Ishiguro, An Artist of the Floating World, 56. Hereafter referred to as AFW. 26 Ibid., 177. 27 Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day, 63. 28 Ishiguro, WWWO, 68. 29 Draaisma, Forgetting, 103 (original emphasis). When any notion of a source is forgotten, individuals can unconsciously plagiarise another's material, forgetting that an idea is not original. 30 Ishiguro, TBG, 294. 31 Ibid., 27. 32 Ishiguro, NLMG, 34. 33 Ibid., 174. 34 Ibid.
with it" implies that Ruth has transgressed. If another person could confirm your identity and does not, itat worstalters your existential position: the conditions of reality are not agreed upon. 35 While memories are subjective (and fallible), this posits the notion that individuals can live by alternative truths. Ruth's refusal to commune with Kathy's identity reads uncomfortably in the age of post-truth politics, especially since in recent interviews Ishiguro has admitted to feeling "deeply uncomfortable" about the competing truths abroad in contemporary society. 36 Fiction offers an emotional, not scientific, truth, but currently, Ishiguro observes, we are seeing individuals act aggressively on the basis of what they feel to be true (such as was seen in the January 2021 storming of the US Capitol). While he used to confidently assert that "fiction is important because it contains emotional truth" he notes that this has "gone slightly shaky based on what's happening in the world". 37 Though she rebukes Ruth for forgetting, Kathy is on the receiving end of a mnemonic clash herself when, at Madame's, looking at a picture of Hailsham, Tommy corrects her: "You must be able to remember. If you're round the back with the pond behind you, and you're looking over towards the North Playing Field … ". 38 "Must" is more than an annoyed insistence on the power of Kathy's memory; it is imperative for Tommy that she remember, because this would reassert his own memory of his now-treasured past. 39 Ishiguro reclaims the oft-used phrase "you must remember" for its deep-seated tensions: the modal verb denotes a hinge on which relationship or disassociation sits. Shared memories can bind a collective, but no isolation is greater than being the only person to remember something that more of you could, and perhaps should, be able to remember. Ishiguro often simultaneously reminds us of the wish for shared or collective memory while reasserting memory's resolutely subjective status. Although memory is called upon to resolve crises, more often than not returned memories reveal rifts in the present.

Wrong Time, Wrong Place: Crises of My Generation
Geoffrey Saunders offers in snapshot form the crisis trajectory of many an Ishiguro character: "the golden boy" who later falls, often due to a changed context (think of Ono at his peak, or Stevens in his prime). The past, looked upon in present circumstances with the application of hindsight, rarely looks as it did at the time. As Ishiguro said in a 1989 interview, "I'm interested in this business of values and ideals being tested, and people having to face up to the notion that their ideals weren't quite what they thought they were before the test came". 40 Towards the end of An Artist of the Floating World, Matsuda tells Ono "It was simply our misfortune to have been ordinary men during such times". 41 However, 35 The dress rehearsal for this momentthough with far less hanging on the outcome (since they are not close friends)is in WWWO, when old school friend James Osbourne retorts "Don't pretend you've forgotten!" that Banks used to speak of Osbourne's social connections (5). 36 Ishiguro, "An Evening with Kazuo Ishiguro." 37 Ibid. 38 NLMG, 228. 39 See Teo for a reading of how former Hailsham students and current carers Kathy and Laura do manage to affirm each other's existence: "Their affirmation of each other's lives through the stories they tell constitutes a mutual or collective recognition of each other" (Ishiguro and Memory,80). 40 Swift, "Kazuo Ishiguro by Graham Swift." 41 Ishiguro,AFW,[199][200] another binary Ishiguro keeps in play is that of ordinary and extraordinary. As Sloane notes, even as characters may consider themselves to have played significant roles in proceedings, Ishiguro's novels suggest instead that individual lives are defined by "by the slow synthetic accretion of the stratified minutia that constitute the geology of our unremarkable, undocumented private lives", a sequence of much quieter moments. 42 Characters genuinely believe at the time that their small acts will have a greatly enlarged effect. Over the sounds of bombing in Shanghai, Banks announces to the audience gathered, his optimism concerning his ability to bring the case "in the very near future, to a happy conclusion". 43 Later in the police station, Banks further hopes that upon (re)solving the case "morale will be boosted no end". 44 Writing of When We Were Orphans as a "parody of international crisis", Dean notes "it is the excessive and literal qualities" of Banks's representation as an abandoned child "that turn Banks's story into parody". 45 Banks himself seems taken with his representativeness of something larger: while his parents' case was famous, Banks' claims for the possible impact of its solution seem drastically overblown, and indeed prove to be.
Writing about The Remains of the Day, Rebecca L. Walkowitz notes that "the novel takes seriously the idea that international, collective events can be transformed by local, individual actions". 46 Whether or not this proves to be the case, the effect on the individual character is always profound, and though the world can move on, the individual may not be able to. With Ono and Stevens especially, Ishiguro contrasts the lifespan of the individual with that of the nation. Speaking about An Artist of the Floating World, Ishiguro reveals "I wanted a certain poignancy to emerge from his sense that a man's life is only so long, while the life of the nation is much longer; that Japan as a nation could actually learn from its mistakes and try again even if Ono couldn't". 47 The lost opportunity to "try again" is also embodied in Ogata-San, the elderly father-in-law of A Pale View of Hills. Unable or unwilling to admit he was wrong, Ogata-San (initially) rejoices in the chance to speak to Shigeo Matsuda (whose article insulted Ogata-San and colleagues) to set Shigeo straight. 48 As Shigeo replies, "it just so happens that your energies were spent in […] an evil direction" and although "It's all behind us now", that is only true for Shigeo's (younger) generation. 49 Again, though, this crisis (a life wasted in the service of the wrong ideals) is casually, quietly identified as something which "just so happen [ed]". All of Ishiguro's characters (including the non-humans) are subject to their limited lifespan.
In the introduction, I referred to "some larger framing menace kept at the periphery" in an Ishiguro novel. His characters happen to live contemporaneously with disturbing events or paradigmatic socio-cultural shifts. Whatever is happening to an individual character, it is set against a backdrop of unrest. Sometimes this is given a vague or imaginative spin for the perspective of the child, so Kathy H. can fear the woods which 42 Sloane, Ishiguro's Gestural Poetics, 4. 43 Ishiguro, WWWO, 161. 44 Ibid., 231. 45 Dean, "Ishiguro and the Abandoned Child," 152. 46 Walkowitz, "Unimaginable Largeness: Kazuo Ishiguro, Translation," 218. 47 Shaffer and Wong, Conversations with Kazuo Ishiguro, 170. 48 Ishiguro, A Pale View of Hills, 147. 49 Ibid. This moment in the novel is a prime example of Ishiguro's quiet conflicts, with both men containing their fury and observing external rules of politeness.
surround Hailsham in part because the external world whose presence at the estate's border will prove in actuality to be prejudicial and difficult. 50 Banks as a boy is similarly told that beyond the International Settlement lie "ghastly diseases, filth and evil men". 51 In other novels, violence is seemingly about to erupt after the final page: The Buried Giant anticipates "the coming conquest". 52 At the end of Klara there is too off-hand a mention of Melania, the former housekeeper and the novel's only non-native English speaker: "We believe she is now in California. […] she was hoping to be accepted by a community there." 53 That Rick hopes "she finds somewhere safe" bespeaks a wider world of threat and fear: Melania has become a migrant again, the subject of a largely unexamined international crisis in Klara's background, that of migration and the (en)forced movement of peoples. 54 Once again, Ishiguro "explores the sense of disquiet that accompanies a place that has experienced a hollowing out of specific communities", in Teo's phrase. 55 Though we swiftly move back into Klara's experiences, Ishiguro never allows the prism of experience to close down wholly to the personal: larger events must always impinge on each individual existence.
Klara and the Sun offers yet another version of being born at the wrong time. The world has changed dramatically from the parents' generation (which seemed to follow the familiar trajectory of educational attainments through to job market). Thanks to improvements in genetic engineering, parents can elect to "lift" their childrento have them genetically edited so that they are more intelligent than they would otherwise be, setting them on a specific, elite educational track which removes them from the company of other, "unlifted" children. As well as certain children being raised above others, it seems that in the world of Klara, certain adults are removed from career contention (presumably because of increased automation and artificial intelligence). Josie's father, Paul, seems to be a victim of his particular historical moment. While the label sounds improvised on the spot (thanks to the ellipsis) when the Mother explains to Klara that Paul "was … substituted. Like all the rest of them" 56 from the chemical plant, later Paul makes it clear that "substitutions" are the official name: I think the substitutions were the best thing that happened to me. I'm well out of it.
How can you say that? You were top-flight. Unique knowledge, specialist skills. How is it right no one can make use of you? 57 Another symptom of this advanced society, then, is that talented hard-working professionals are out of work, living in what sounds like a parallel world to the one Josie and her mother inhabit, which is characterised by aspiration and the possibility of a bright future. Instead of the future, Paul is relegated to the past: when Josie's mother drives Klara past Kimball Refrigeration she notes that Paul "was once a rising star there"; he was once and is no more. 58 "Substituted": something else takes Paul's place 50 Ishiguro, NLMG, 59. 51 Ishiguro, WWWO, 64. 52 Ishiguro, TBG, 323-4. 53 Ishiguro, Klara, 292. 54 Ibid. 55 Teo, "Monuments, Unreal Spaces and National Forgetting," 12. 56 Ishiguro, Klara, 99. 57 Ishiguro, Klara, 191. 58 Ibid.,99. in a way that would not have happened in any earlier time. "Substitutions" operates similarly to the "donations" emphasised in Never Let Me Go as I explore below: one individual is sacrificed for the sake of someone else's advancement or betterment. Ishiguro selects those scenarios where characters will have to reckon with their worth.
Ishiguro appears already to have been thinking about the idea of substitutions in his 2017 Nobel Laureate Lecture. Near the end he looks towards "the challenges posed by stunning breakthroughs in science, technology and medicine", noting that advances in Artificial Intelligence and robotics will bring us amazing, life-saving benefits, but may also create savage meritocracies that resemble apartheid, and massive unemployment, including to those in the current professional elites. 59 From the Mother's speech above, it sounds like Josie's father occupies a previous "professional elite": "unique knowledge, specialist skills"he sounds like he should be a contender for exclusive employment. However, he claims to be "well out of it", the colloquial expression denoting satisfaction at leaving something behind also ironically restating the division between him and "it": the new working order.
Although it is awkward that his ex-wife should pose the question "How is it right no one can make use of you?", one of the crisis points society appears to have reached in Klara is an insecurity over what human beings are for. To "make use" of Paul is an instrumental, functional understanding of his purpose. Rather than valuing existence as an innate gift, this expression places humans in a work hierarchy, where one is subject to, and dependent on, a higher authority being able to "make use of" you to a presumed commercial end. Klara allows Ishiguro to explore a new version of forgetting: how, in O'Gorman's phrase, "capitalist modernity's breathless desire is to forget": 60 Forgetfulness is about waves of amnesia that are neither a product of weak memories nor rational decisions to move beyond quarrels but of societal and economic determinations, of commercial choices and secular obligations, of the fixed regimes of acceptable thinking about time in advanced capitalism. 61 Klara moves Ishiguro into new mnemonic territory, where the dynamic between remembering and forgetting is a product of capitalist structures. 62 Paul's crisis (though he will not acknowledge it as such) is to be alive at a time where his skills have been outsourced beyond the human race. The Mother and Paul are opposed with regards memory: she cannot forget what he once was, while Paul seems to have wilfully forgotten his past.
If Paul's generation has an uneasy time of it, then his lifted daughter Josie, her unlifted friend Rick and Josie's Artificial Friend (AF) Klara, highlight the schisms inherent within the younger generation. Noticing Rick's presence at an interaction meeting for lifted children, one of the mothers (and they do all appear to be mothers in this patriarchal future) states "What's important is that this next generation learn how to be comfortable with every sort of person". 63 Rick is a "sort of person" distinct from their own children. 59 Ishiguro, "My Twentieth Century Evening," 15. 60 O'Gorman, Forgetfulness, 6. 61 Ibid.,5. 62 This is not to say that Ishiguro has never engaged with this theme previously, but to highlight the extensions to his work of memory that Klara's setting enables. 63 Ishiguro, Klara, 67.
Josie's mother echoes the sentiment of learning how to get along with others when reasoning why Josie must endure the meeting: I'd had years of being alongside other kids […]. But for your generation, it's going to be pretty tough unless you put in some work now. 64 Extra time and effort must now into developing a skill which formerly developed naturally, as part of attending co-educational school. While it is heartening to hear that in this world, "it's not enough just being clever", we see little evidence of that in the narrative. The above quotation highlights an awkward homophone. The mothers mean "your generation" in terms of peer group, and a shared age, but generation appears in another guise in the novel.
Klara opens "When we were new", the four-monosyllabic phrase repeated on the opening page, with "Even though I was new then" on the next page. It is firmly established that Klara once was, and no longer is, new. This states her immediate difference: she is "new" rather than "young", but while Klara cannot be "young" she can be "old". With "old" the shared antonym for "new" and "young", Ishiguro both aligns and divorces Klara and Josie. Klara is bought to accompany Josie through the latter's childhood or youth; Klara is only chosen for her relative novelty, but although Klara can be old, she cannot grow old. As Josie grows up, she outstrips the need for her AF companion, and Klara is left to be "old" meaning outmoded, unneeded and ultimately discarded.
In the final meeting between Klara and Manager, the Manager notes her inability to "feel towards B3s as I did towards your generation". 65 An earlier (though arguably better) model of AF even at the time of purchase, Klara's special talents cannot save her. This use of "generation" is decoded in the opening pages of the novel: "Which model is this one?" "He's a B2," Manager said. "Third series." 66 It is on the basis that he is a generation behind the latest model that Boy AF Rex is passed over in this scene. O'Gorman links this kind of advertising to forgetting, that the "citizens of modernity" are taught that "a commitment to purchasing the new is necessary to be modern"; while the Manager does not necessarily believe that newer is better, "in the service of consumer culture, advertisers are the imaginative champions of moving on". 67 For AFs, then, "generation" relates to your model, to your position on the production line of technological advancement. This sense of "generation" is divorced from procreation, familial relationship and a hope for a collective future; it is solely a marker of where something sits in relation to the best version currently available. Meeting this version of "generation" right at the end of the novel nudges the reader to revisit the meaning of "generation" earlier in the text. With the "lifted" children genetically modified and supposedly improved, they have become a NextGen human race, leaving the others behind. The meaning of "generation" which places you in a value system seems to win out in the novel, over a shared epoch. When talking about "my 64 Ibid., 63 (original emphasis). 65 Ishiguro, Klara, 306-7. 66 Ibid., 4. generation" in this world, you would further have to specify which grouping, which category, perhaps even which caste before the collective term would hold.

Calming Crisis Through Euphemism
Ishiguro's novels are remarkably calm and measured, given the revelations (and occasional near-revolutions) found within them. Why is this? The overused phrase "sleepwalking into a crisis" comes to mind: often the awareness of something shattering comes upon you imperceptibly in an Ishiguro novel, like Ryder, who only realises that he is crying after he has already begun to sob. 68 Part of my interest in the "quiet" of crisis in Ishiguro is my ongoing refusal to accept James Wood's consistent criticism of Ishiguro's style, referring to his "pithless, neutered prose", or "his flatness as a writer". 69 This spectacularly misses the point: Ishiguro has a genius for manipulating language to quieten crises, and one measure of this is how much his novels reward re-reading. John Mullan has written on this in relation to Never Let Me Go, but for me it is taken to new heights in The Buried Giant (and now, also, in Klara and the Sun). 70 The spare nature of the prose, and the unlikely plot lodestone that is Axl and Beatrice's relationship allows you to read over the more violent episodes until you catch yourself.
It is entirely possible to read The Buried Giant multiple times and consistently miss or forget the character of Harvey. A brute from Axl's soldiering past, he is a killer who "liked his savagery to look impulsive and effortless". 71 Across a couple of pages, Axl remembers two events, which he cannot wholly separate out, in which his Harvey assaults defenceless villagers apropos of nothing. 72 Axl remembers taking preventative action the second time, but crucially cannot "remember now if his careful actions had saved the shepherds". 73 The reader, like Axl, is so embroiled in unpicking the tangled threads of memory that these moments of unconscionable violence pass by almost without notice.
While The Buried Giant's dialogue has been criticised for sounding stilted, terms of endearment belie the crisis that Axl and Beatrice's marriage becomes as memories begin to return and, with them, the seeds of marital discord. Similarly, the marked politeness of address in the novel ("mistress", "sir") sows an uneasy calm among peoples whom the reader become increasingly aware may turn on each other after the novel's end.
In The Buried Giant memory's vagaries help to quieten crises, but Never Let Me Go makes use of a further device: euphemism. Etymologically, euphemism comes from the Greek for "to speak fair" and is related to "euphemious", meaning "fair of speech". 74 "Fair" here, though, refers to aesthetics rather than ideas of justice, since euphemisms are used to disguise the greatest injustices. "Speech" is the medium in question: this concerns how language is used to talk about certain topics. Given the narrative voice, and transcriptions of conversations, Never Let Me Go itself "speaks fair", its continued euphemisms (donate, complete, carer) spoken trippingly on the tongue until the Ibid., 147-8. 73 Ibid., 148. 74 "euphemism, n." and "euphemious, adj." OED. end. As Victor Sage writes, "the language of Hailsham is a tissue of euphemism", but so too is the whole text, narrated as it is by someone whose formative years were spent enunciating and internalising these terms. 75 Donate and complete are related euphemisms in this world: the clones are "created" to "donate your vital organs", a process which causes them to complete, to die. 76 Semantic irony is rife: "donation" proposes a voluntary gift; "to complete" suggests personal achievement. 77 The stark reality of the clones' existence is first printed to the reader in Miss Lucy's plain-talking speech, but Kathy's reaction is telling: "once she'd seen the puzzled, uncomfortable faces in front of her, she realised the impossibility of completing what she'd started". 78 "Complete" appears in its natural form, but being coupled with "the impossibility" reminds the reader of its specialised meaning in this world. I highlight this same verb, contravening the way in which the prose encourages the reader to read over it. This sentence enacts the acceptance of this euphemism as a constituent part of the lexicon: the abnormal, the abhorrent, is normalised.
In a novel that abounds with death (albeit off-stage), there is only one mention of death non-euphemised. When Kathy confronts Miss Emily, she asks: "Why train us, […] make us produce all of that? If we're just going to give donations anyway, then die, why all those lessons? Why all those books and discussions?". 79 The triple use of "all" forms a linguistic accumulation that, like Kathy and Tommy's hopes, comes to nothing. This one use of "die" undoctored has more force due to the protective nature of most of the text, where people are "lost" or have "gone". 80 Kathy's questions cannot be answered, because while for the clones these euphemisms overlay their real-life experience, Miss Emily and Madame (and society at large) do not believe that clones experience life in the same way.
Ishiguro offers unexpected euphemisms, such as "students", alongside the more anticipated. Miss Emily explains that before the Hailsham project, "all clonesor students, as we preferred to call youexisted only to supply medical science". 81 This unmasking comes close to the end of the novel, shattering the reader's own acceptance of the Hailsham students as actual students, rather than euphemistic ones. As Kathy claims, "it might be just some trend that came and went […] But for us, it's our life", and for the reader, too, this "trend" forms the life-blood of the novel: they cannot accept Kathy's life as a "trend that came and went" because the novel solely concerns this "trend". 82 The reader, too, is affected by these euphemisms.
Euphemisms do not just shape a community, they condition it: the clones relate to each other differently because of them and adapt their behaviour accordingly. An example is Kathy's opening boast that her "donors [stay] 'calm'. I've developed a kind of instinct around donors", making her "an unwitting accomplice to the organ donation system". 83 As social psychologist Albert Bandura explains "language shapes thought 75 Sage, "The Pedagogics of Liminality," 42. 76 Ishiguro, NLMG, 73. 77 See Currie for a reading of the euphemisms "carer" and "donations" (100) and Reitano's footnote 50 for an in-depth reading of "complete" (385). 78 Ishiguro, NLMG, 74. 79 Ibid., 237. 80 Ibid., 262 and 269. The first refers to Tommy's death, the second to Ruth's. 81 Ishiguro, NLMG, 239 (original emphasis). 82 Ibid., 243. 83 Ibid., 3; Rebecca Walkowitz, "Unimaginable Largeness," 224. patterns on which actions are used. Activities can take on very different appearances depending on what they are called". 84 Bandura was writing about wartime euphemisms, but his statement is also true in memory: the language used colours the material recalled. In their famous 1974 experiment, Loftus and Palmer show that subjects rate the remembered speed of a car before collision as higher if prompted with a verb indicating velocity: "About how fast were the cars going when they smashed into each other?" produced a conspicuously higher remembered speed than "About how fast were the cars going when they contacted each other?". 85 While Loftus and Palmer highlight how such findings bear on witness testimony, this experiment (subtitled "An Example of the Interaction Between Language and Memory") speaks to the ways in which particular uses of language ameliorate or disguise the memories seen in Ishiguro's fiction. Loftus and Palmer conclude that verbal labelling "causes a shift in the memory strength of forms which are better representatives of the label". 86 All of the Hailsham euphemisms operate as verbal labels and, when seen in the context of her euphemised upbringing, Never Let Me Go's Kathy can be somewhat recuperated. While some critics have bemoaned her banal tone, she is merely a product of the system which manufactured her. 87 "The context in which the Hailsham clones, and we, Ishiguro's readers, grow up has a direct effect on the richness of their, and our, mental life and well-being", observe Matthews and Groes. 88 This "direct effect" is also seen linguistically, in Kathy's narration and the reader's habituation to this. Habit-forming is key to the effect of Ishiguro's euphemisms: the consistency of their usage means that while "the whole school environment is a fiction […] the reader can almost forget this, because the students themselves do not fully understand their situation. They are […] 'told and not told'". 89 As an adult, Tommy considers that the guardians "timed very carefully and deliberately everything they told us, so that we were always just too young to understand", or in Wong's phrase, "in misalignment with their cognitive level". 90 As Stacy points out, because "information is tactically given to and withheld from the clones […] Miss Lucy's revelatory speech does not act as a spur for the kind of rebellion seen in other dystopian fictions", with Kathy recalling the students' indifference. 91 What might, in another novel, have been the catalyst for insurgency, is subdued to a passing oddity in Ishiguro, with menace accruing for a later (though still relatively tame) outburst.
Crucially, the reader is given no insight into Tommy's emotional reaction to the idea that the guardians deliberately drip-fed information; Kathy quickly determines it "a conspiracy theory". 92 If there is any resentment on donor-Tommy's part, it is swiftly side-lined by carer-Kathy's forgiving gloss, who justifies both to herself and the reader 84 Bandura, "Moral Disengagement in the Perpetration of Inhumanities," 195. 85 Loftus and Palmer, "Reconstruction of Automobile Destruction," 586. 86 Ibid., 588. 87 I differ from Lydia R. Cooper, who, comparing Kathy with Stevens, finds that "their reconstructed memories actually reveal their moral culpability" (107). Kathy is literally produced by her "autonomy-denying social system" (Cooper 107) while Stevens is a human being reacting to his society. The comparison works better in Cooper's later formulation, that because Stevens and Kathy "do not fully acknowledge the pernicious nature of their respective societies, their pride in fulfilling their prescribed roles is both tragic and troubling" (112). 88 Matthews and Groes, "Your Words Open Windows for Me," 6. 89 Victor Sage, "The Pedagogics of Liminality," 42. 90 Ishiguro, NLMG, 75. Wong,Kazuo Ishiguro,99. 91 Ivan Stacy, "Complicity in Dystopia," 241. 92 Ishiguro,NLMG,75. why it is perfectly reasonable that the guardians would talk about donations while lecturing them about sex. 93 "Naturally", "in other words", "to be fair", "of course": Ishiguro uses a string of phatic expressions to show how entrenched Kathy is in her (perhaps more truthfully, their) beliefs. While the reader understands that Kathy is protecting the very system which conspires against her, she does not hear her own protestations in its favour. But equally, the reader stops hearing carer, donation, complete, student for what they actually mean, because right up until the end of the novel, the euphemisms stand in the place of the truth.
A couple of pages after the sex/donations theory, child-Tommy worries about his cut elbow "unzipping" in the night. While this fear is fostered by a childish prank, Tommy's own language is revealing: "I wanted to play safe, that's all. We should never take chances with our health". 94 Suddenly, a guardian-style sentiment is transplanted into Tommy's own (or, more believably his) utterance. While this sentence may have been swallowed wholesale, it demonstrates the broader context in which the students, given weekly medicals and manifold health warnings, are bred to look after those bodies, theirs, which incubate organs for humans.
The particular euphemisms of this alternate world speak to a pre-existing class of reallife euphemisms: the language of medicine. Medical jargon aside, readers will have experienced a "sharp scratch" (needle entry) or "discomfort" (pain). As a carer working in hospital-like facilities, Kathy already has one foot in the medical world (now as professional, later as patient). On the first page, she refers to the fact that her donors are rarely "classified as 'agitated'". 95 This term is marked-out, belonging to the voice of her oppressors rather than Kathy herself, and, importantly, the reader never learns how the donors react: their response is subsumed into the nearest "classification" as defined by the system. 96 As psychologist Bandura outlines, "the specialized jargon of a legitimate enterprise is also misused to lend respectability to an illegitimate one". 97 Explaining one donor's death, Kathy insists that "it had been a particularly untidy operation". 98 While not quite oxymoronic, "untidy" is an awkward adjective: it both hints and trauma and suggests a misplaced prizing of presentation over pity. Throughout, Kathy displays "system-trusting language", but the point is that this lexicon is indoctrinated into the clones by the self-same system from an early age. 99 Kathy does not possess the language with which to distrust her own existence: she is "not so much an unreliable narrator, as an inadequate narrator". 100 In using euphemisms, Ishiguro foregrounds the way in which language affects memory. As Reitano points out, "Ishiguro is less concerned […] with the ways memory haunts us than he is in examining how we come to know things, and therefore remember and believe them, in the first place". 101 The order in which facts are learned and 93 Ibid. 94 Ibid., 78. 95 Ibid., 3. 96 See Robbins, "Cruelty Is Bad," 296. 97 Bandura, "Moral Disengagement," 195. 98 Ishiguro, NLMG, 93. 99 Robbins, "Cruelty Is Bad," 294. 100 John Mullan, "On First Reading Never Let Me Go," 111. 101 Reitano, "The Good Wound," 380. the terms attached to them radically qualifies the knowledge gained. Just before Miss Emily is revealed, Marie-Claude asks "'What did we do to you? With all our schemes and plans?' […] 'Do I go too far?'". 102 This question hangs over all of their former actions. However, if in their actions Marie-Claude and Emily go too far, then the novel reveals that no-one's language goes far enough either adequately to witness, or to condemn.
The most obvious euphemism Ishiguro introduces in Klara and the Sun is that of "lifted", to mean genetically modified for increased intelligence. Its introduction to the novel immediately announces its exclusionary nature, since "I don't belong here. This is a meeting for lifted kids". 103 It cannot be a mistake that "lifted" rhymes with "gifted", and "gifted children" is the current nomenclature we use to remove certain children from the company of others (at least those in their peer group) so that they might better focus on honing their talents. Earlier, I noted that "parents can elect to 'lift' their children", perhaps subconsciously acknowledging the religious potential of this euphemism: as well as the eschatological significance of being "lifted" at the rapture, within the novel, the lifted children have already formed a mortal elect. But while "lifted" bespeaks being raised above in some way, it also has an undertone of having robbed something (not just through "shoplifting" but because "lifted" used to mean "arrested"). 104 There is both an indication of cheating Nature at her own game, but also having cheated children out of a full experience of humanity.
While in some ways Artificial Friend, or AF, appears to be a very direct label, I want to argue that it is somewhat of a euphemism. There is no doubt that AFs are "artificial" (they are created to serve a purpose); "friend" is a euphemism. While AFs are ostensibly a stand-in for the myriad schoolmates or peers a lifted child would otherwise have had, as the novel unfolds we see increasing instances in which Klara is not treated as a friend. While Klara offers to take the picture to Rick, Josie assents readily because "Other people's AFs go on errands". 105 In the running of errands, the Artificial Friend starts to seem more of an artificial servant, reminiscent of the "boy AFwho was walking three paces behind and not by chance: this was how the girl had decided they would always walk". 106 While they may not get on, Klara and Melania are an obvious pairing within the household in that they both serve a given function to the family. Moreover, while the Mother's feelings towards Klara seem to wax and wane, the fact that she can assure Klara "you won't have to travel in the trunk" when they travel into the city, without any apparent jest, shows that "friend" is a misnomer of a title. 107 What Klara has in the end, instead of death (or instead of Mr Capaldi dissecting her motherboard) is a "slow fade". This seems one of the cruellest euphemisms the novel has to offer, not least because it is presented as if it is a boon. On refusing Capaldi's request to look inside the black box of an AF, the Mother says "Klara deserves better. She deserves her slow fade.
[…] Let her have her slow fade". 108 That it is couched in terms of "her slow fade" makes it seem Klara's right, something owed to her. Yet how is the reader expected to see ending up in a Yard (which itself might be a euphemism for "scrap-heap"), having lived in a family house and helped to raise a child, as a fitting end? As the Mother rightly asserts, "Klara deserves better".
Klara and the Sun proves that Ishiguro remains a master of the euphemism to highlight the ways in which we faux-ameliorate our actions. By attending to the euphemisms he uses, or even just gestures towards, we can start to unpick what is happening beneath the obvious and what he is indicating within his wider imaginative world. "Gestures", "indicating": I am not suggesting that certainty will be forthcoming. As Sloane's Kazuo Ishiguro's Gestural Poetics observes, "Ishiguro's fictions point towards the ineffable essence of their characters' worlds which, much to their dismay, remains 'slightly beyond' the language and which vanishes on too close inspection". 109 Shameem Black's theory of Ishiguro's inhuman aesthetics, conceptualised in relation to Never Let Me Go, is given further validation by Ishiguro's latest work: As with all of Ishiguro's novels, what does not appearwhat lurks on the fringes of the narrativeis often the most important specter in the story. When the novel invites us to extend sympathies beyond the category of human, it recognises this category as exclusionary and troubling in itself. The implicit analogies between deracinated, geneticallyengineered students and exploited workers in a multicultural Britain and a globalising economy ask us to recognise how many people in our own world are not considered fully human. 110 Black's reading points the reader back to the ways in which we already inhabit a world where not everyone is treated as "fully human". As future-facing as genetic modifications and artificial friends seem to be, Ishiguro in fact highlights the most pressing concerns of our ongoing international crises around health, economics, migration and more. The ethical challenge is not to come, but is already present.

Concerning the Reader
Answering a question in a 1989 interview, Ishiguro avers that I don't try to be a quiet writer. There's a surface quietness to my booksthere aren't a lot of people getting murdered or anything like that. But for me, they're not quiet books, because they're books that deal with things that disturb me the most and questions that worry me the most. They're anything but quiet to me. 111 These novels are "anything but quiet"; indeed, it is precisely this quietness which gives an Ishiguro crisis an echo chamber in which to resound. Readers might not see clones being murdered, but we are aware that is what these pages point to; the two Jewish maids Lord Darlington asks to be let go are an index of a war beyond Darlington Hall's walls and a people being made to disappear.
As Ishiguro states in his Nobel speech, Proust's work made Ishiguro realise he could similarly organise narrative: "two seemingly unrelated moments […] placed side by side […] I could place a scene from two days ago right beside one from twenty years earlier, and ask the reader to ponder the relationship between the two". 112 It is a big "ask" Ishiguro makes of his reader, one which draws us inside the world of the novel. It is not just 109 Sloane, Kazuo Ishiguro's Gestural Poetics, 11. 110 Black, "Ishiguro's Inhuman Aesthetics," 803. 111 Shaffer and Wong,Conversations with Kazuo Ishiguro,58. 112 Ishiguro, "My Twentieth Century Evening," 8. memories which are placed "right beside" each other, but also small details of great consequence to a single individual next to that which affects "The entire globe". 113 The full import of an Ishiguro crisis is not realised until you are already entrenched in reading (perhaps even re-reading) a novel, but the extent of its implications are always larger than they appear at first glance.
Since the full consequences of each crisis can only be revealed by the reader's cognitive work in untangling the various relationships, the euphemisms, and the half-forgotten memories, the reader becomes both complicit and the fellow wounded: it is we who turn up the volume as we make the connections about what it all might really mean. The nature of Ishiguro's prose makes the realisations take place in the reader's mind. As much as we read about characters who are trying to understand what is happening in their minds (why they feel this way, why that stimulus prompts this memory), so too is the reader led to reflect on the modes of thinking which, when replicated widely, have led to the international crises we seem prepared to live with, and which continue to perpetuate inequalities on a grand scale. Layers of self-protection in language, rewriting one's personal past: such acts are almost always at someone else's expense, and by keeping the reader quietly navigating the work of a single narrator, Ishiguro gestures at effects which ripple outwards. The interplay between low-key individual reactions and far-reaching national and international behaviours is consistently revealed to be more tumultuous yet inextricable than we first thought. Ishigurean crises offer a slow violence, non-sensational representations of past and future conflicts, which always point us back to the present and crises of our own making. We could do something about the latter but, to use Shigeo's phrase, it "just so happens" that we do not. 114

Data Access Statement
This study did not generate any new data.

Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).