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No matter what the British novelist Kazuo Ishiguro writes about - a painter in post-World War II Japan in An Artist of the Floating World , an English butler remembering his long years of service The Remains of the Day , a young woman coming of age in a dystopic version of late 1990s England in Never Let Me Go - his concerns remain the same: memory, repression, reticence, and resignation. In his novels, Ishiguro explores what we don't know about ourselves and our own pasts - or more accurately, what we can't let ourselves know about these things: what it is that we refuse to see or to understand, what we cannot tell others when we narrate the story of our lives because we've never been able to say it even to ourselves.
Character psychology motivates Ishiguro's concerns with things forgotten and things withheld, but only in part. His preoccupations are driven just as strongly by narrative form. Over and over again, Ishiguro has constructed his novels in the same way. The central character also serves as the book's first-person narrator, one who looks back over his or her own life and takes stock, describing compelling moments from the past and teasing out their significance. The narration is calm and even-toned - almost unsettlingly so. These narrators describe traumatic events, but do not quite seem to register their emotional impact; they focus on minute details of interpersonal interaction, but never acknowledge their larger implications. Ishiguro's prose is so simple and flawless, and the narrator's observations so seemingly neutral, that we assume that the account is accurate. But the narrator is not disclosing all. As we read, we realize that something is being left unsaid, that part of the story remains untold. Beneath the still surface of the narration, there is a level of significance that it is up to the reader to gather: about collaboration with fascist governments in An Artist of the Floating World and The Remains of the Day, about resignation to an abbre