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Globalisation and dislocation in the novels of Kazuo lshiguro Wai-chew Sim Submitted for the degree of PhD The University of Warwick Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies February 2002 II Table of Contents Acknowledgements Summaty iv 1 Introduction 1 2 A Pale View of Hills 56 3 An Artist of the Floating World 111 4 The Remains of the Day 177 5 The Unconsoled 252 6 When We Were Orphans 314 7 Conclusion 376 Bibliography 380 iii Acknowledgements I would like to thank Jeremy Treglown and Neil Lazarus for their invaluable support and encouragement throughout my studies and research. Special acknowledgement goes to my supervisor, Benita Parry, for her unfailing patience, generous comments and prodding, critical suggestions, for which I owe heartfelt thanks. This dissertation is dedicated to my family. iv Summary Celebratory claims for the epistemic centrality of the diasporic, nomadic and non-territorial subject have been advanced in recent years. Migrancy is said to confer privileged sensibility and ocular omnipotence; it has also been proposed as a universal ontological condition. At the same time there has been immense critical investiture in the counter-hegemonic valencies of diasporic and syncretic or hybrid cultural forms, which are often parsed as inherently oppositional or subversive, all of which helps to buttress theoretical moves that downplay or dismiss paradigms of rootedness, territoriality and/or national identity in contemporary critical discourse. This dissertation challenges the articulations above through a critical elaboration of the writings of Anglo-Japanese author Kazuo lshiguro. It does this by drawing attention to the operation of exilic self-fashioning in lshiguro's fiction. But, more importantly, it shows that his writing inscribes a trajectory that is metacritical in its ambit, suggesting that critical elucidation of cosmopolitan cultural production needs to attend to the systematicity and effects of international capital if its oppositional impetus is not to be emasculated. This claim derives from the propensity in Ishiguro's fiction to refine the substance of earlier work in response to their popular reception, while simultaneously restating contestatory themes, which means that his authorial trajectory is also able to illuminate some of the commonplace misrecognitions underwriting the reception of cosmopolitan cultural production. Insofar as the increasingly normative insistence on the oppositional makeup of diasporic and syncretic cultural forms and experiences tends to misjudge the appropriative proclivities of global capital the predominance of the former in critical discourse is, therefore, deeply problematised, together with the allied propensity to devalue materialist interpretative categories. The importance of exilic themes in Ishiguro's fiction and also the trajectory proposed here reminds us, however, that migrant encounters can take many forms, and hence that scrupulous attention must be paid to the negotiated specificities of different migrant encounters. 1 Chapter One. Introduction On the academic left it appears there is increasing consensus about the political beneficence and saliency of syncretic cultural forms, hybrid locations and transnational positionings. Unlike the past, the stress is on `the productivity rather than the pain' of migration, which at times seems to be characterised as a simple and sufficient good in itself.' The emphasis is on the way in which new cross-border movements facilitate the production and reworking of multiple identities, enabling the renegotiation of formerly static meanings and metanarratives by opening up possibilities for new subject positionings. The critical weight assigned to what has been perceptively termed an 'ethics of nonbinary complexity' 2 appears to find expression in the assumption that the concept-figure of diaspora and its semi-cognates - migrancy, movement, in-betweenness, hybridity - can help us not only to reorder perception and interpretation in a way appropriate to a qualitatively altered lifeworld, but that it is also constitutively counter-hegemonic, that attention to its intricate and multiple operations will tend to further the aims of oppositional discourses. Against such an increasingly normative development this dissertation sounds a cautionary note about the inclination to foreground as inherently destabilising the political valencies of syncretic or diasporic cultural forms and nonbinary critical dispositions. It does this through a critical examination 2 of the writings of Anglo-Japanese writer Kazuo lshiguro, concentrating principally on the five novels that he has published to date. Work on Ishiguro is important because of the paucity of secondary literature on his fiction, as against his emergence as a major contemporary writer. But it is also important because his authorial career raises trenchantly some of the implications left unconsidered when the search for transnational epistemologies adequate to the increased globalisation of experience and outlook subsumes all cosmopolitan texts under a monumentalised conception of diaspora and-or syncreticity. Such a move tends to dowhplay or dismiss paradigms of rootedness, territoriality and other geocultural factors of political identity in social and critical thought. But as my thesis seeks to demonstrate these paradigms continue to exert a regnant hold on contemporary cultural production, suggesting that their critical devaluation is in many ways premature. The counter-example provided by lshiguro's fiction can firstly be considered through its departure from what has in effect become a normative characterisation of cultural production traversed by the experience of geographical dislocation. Against the grain of the invocations which tend to parse the phenomena in incipiently celebratory and post-statist terms, a conspicuous feature of Ishiguro's work is the large place accorded to exilic concerns. This is arguably attributable to the specificities of lshiguro's personal background, although by itself that gives only part of the picture. Born in 1954 in Nagasaki, Ishiguro came to England in 1960 when his father, 3 an oceanographer, was invited to participate in a British government research project in the North Sea. 3 As lshiguro recounts it, the expatriation was originally intended to be short-term. 4 Well into his adolescence the family apparently had plans to return to Japan, and hence his subsequent turn to fiction-writing was his way of coming to terms with a sojourn which became permanent: Japan was a very strong place for me because I always believed I would eventually return there, but as it turned out, I never went back. This very important place called Japan which was a mixture of memory, speculation, and imagination was fading with every year that went by. I think there was a very urgent need for me to get it down on paper before it disappeared altogether.5 In other interviews lshiguro has also couched the fiction-writing process in terms of his personal dislocation, a lengthy citation from which is necessary for our discussion: The creative process for me is never about anger or violence, but regret and melancholy. I had very strong emotional relationships in Japan that were severed at a formative age - especially with my grandfather. I've only recently become 4 aware that there's this other life I might have had, a whole person I was supposed to become;6 I think most writers do write out of some part of themselves - that is, I wouldn't say 'unbalanced', but where there is a kind of lack of equilibrium...Writing is kind of a consolation or a therapy. Quite often, bad writing comes out of this kind of therapy. The best writing comes out of a situation where I think the artist or writer has to some extent come to terms with the fact that it is too late. The wound has come, and it hasn't healed, but it's not going to get any worse; yet, the wound is there. It's a kind of consolation that the world isn't quite the way you wanted it but you can somehow reorder it or try and come to terms with it by actually creating your own world and own versions of it.. .1 think serious writers have to try, in some way or the other, to keep moving in a direction that moves them toward this area of irresolution.' As such we might say Ishiguro's early work, particularly the first two novels set wholly or primarily in Japan, could be deemed exemplars of what Elleke Boehmer in the related area of postcolonial writing calls the literature of 'fictional returns'. 8 This exilic dimension surfaces it would seem in the underwriting of a narrative strategy where spatial dislocation is transposed to the temporal realm, such that all of Ishiguro's central protagonists are 5 situationally exiled, or generally out-of-sync with the worlds they find themselves in. Elements of this dynamic also emerge, I believe, in the preoccupation of the protagonists with events in the past, in the abundance of flashback sequences in lshiguro's fiction, in recurrent pronouncements in the novels about the uncertainty and malleability of memory, and also in the general melancholic tone suffusing them. But more important than the exigencies of exilic and/or immigrant self- fashioning per se is that it forms an integral part of an authorial trajectory which questions in fundamental terms the critical trend mentioned above. By itself the presence of exilic motifs in Ishiguro's fiction proves little; one may well argue that it is the exception that proves the case regarding the epochal significance of a claimed general deterritorialisation of cultural forms and experiences.