On Kazuo Ishiguro's Nocturnes
Five Stories of Music And Nightfall
Sep 14, 2009 Gail Mangold-Vine
Published in 2009, this collection of long short stories by that master of atmosphere and passing time, the English writer of Japanese descent Kazuo Ishiguro, is like a piece of beautiful music that conveys all sorts of feelings and moods, many undefined. Each story features not only musicians or music lovers, but the tales themselves are set up like variations on a theme.
The sense of atmosphere is heightened by different (and utterly cinematic) depictions of night. One memorable scene includes a gondola on velvety dark waters in Venice passing a bright, full restaurant and it feels to the narrator ‘’like we [in the gondola] were the stationary ones…as this glittering party boat slid by’’. Another features two head-bandaged patients recovering from plastic surgery exploring a posh California hotel in the deserted dead of the wee hours.
Equally memorable evocations: two friends dance on a roof terrace in London under the stars that somehow fuse with the city’s twinkling lights; a bejeweled woman in evening dress stands on an Italian piazza just beyond the reach of the illuminated facade of her luxury hotel saying goodbye to a young protégé; a man sits in a shabby spare room with a single light bulb hanging down from the ceiling casting gloomy shadows.
Underlying Theme In Ishiguro’s Story Collection
The theme that feeds through all five of Ishiguro’s stories is the pressure on all of us to be ‘successful’ in the way that is pre-defined in western society, and how this affects our lives. How does society view people who fail to be successful on its terms, how do they see themselves, how does it impact their relations with their families, partners, friends?
What is the cut-off point where dreams, potential, the feeling ’it’s still all ahead of me’, start to shift to being the sum of what was actually done? When should people be happy with what they have instead of pursuing greater achievement and self- realization? And what does all this do to love?
The locations the stories play out in are Los Angeles, Italy, the UK. The main protagonists are Americans, British, Eastern Europeans and Swiss. The stories take place some time after the fall of the Berlin Wall (1989) but before computers and the Internet became ubiquitous: there are CDs, mobile phones, but no mention of laptops, e-mails or the Web. This is a successful device to create another reminder of passing time, but also suggests a kind of innocence when contacts and events took place at a gentler pace.
Emotional Savagery In Nocturnes
A gentler pace perhaps, but a kind of brutality courses beneath all the stories like a dark stream. There is the couple willing to amputate their love in order to ‘trade up’ – get younger new partners to maintain an image of successful viability to the outside world. Then there’s the man who humiliates an old ‘failed’ college friend of his and his wife’s in a bid to get his wife to see that – while he may not be stellar like some of the men she holds before him as more successful – he’s not a loser like their old friend.
Another example of this is the rabid resentment the talented who are not recognized, and the less talented but hardworking who got where they are by sheer force of ambition and will, can feel for each other. Various other powerful negative attitudes – superiority, lack of commitment, parasitism, denial, repressed anger – preclude tackling dreams so that they remain in a latent state of ‘potential’, or realizing them fully, or develop as a result of trying and failing to realize them.
Dissonances In Ishiguro’s Stories
Ishiguro is such a master it sounds nitpicky to point out that there are some dissonances in Nocturnes. All the stories have first-person narration, and the narrators all sound rather the same. When the narrators are American, they sometimes use words an American wouldn’t use (‘’lounge’’ for living room, for example, although it’s possible this is different in the US edition of Nocturnes). In pre-Internet days, an Eastern European man who’s never been to the States or UK is unlikely to talk about a woman having ‘’great hair’’, and the way Swiss characters speak English is stilted in the wrong way. Finally, some of the plot twists don’t quite break down the suspension of disbelief barrier.
It could also be argued, however, that these wrong notes add extra richness and contrast to the narratives.
Nocturnes Is Wickedly Funny, Psychologically Sharp And Emotionally Brilliant
That said: story lines despite dissonances are engaging, in some cases wickedly funny. The psychology, always etched razor sharp yet fundamentally compassionate with this writer, is deliciously subtle. Melancholy, exhilaration, grief, anger, confusion, ambivalence, joy, mellowness, elation, irony, hypocrisy, denial, delusions and illusions, the list is as long and as rich as the panoply of human feelings which weave in and out in a matter of nano-seconds as one thing – a situation, a mood – is in the ineffable process of transforming into another.
There is a ‘multi-layeredness’ – of structure, of meaning, of insights – to Nocturnes that resonates. Like a fine wine, this book has a long finish.
Faber and Faber, London, 2009, ISBN 978-0-571-24499-7
Cover of Kazuo Ishiguro's Nocturnes
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