Stranger on Earth

Link to Part 1: http://ed-is-a-stranger-on-earth.blogspot.nl/2013/01/the-deceptive-voice-of-remorse-kazuos.html   In the climax of the novel when Sachiko drowned Mariko’s kittens in a river, Etsuko tried to comfort the child on the riverbank. Mariko was reluctant to move to America with her mother and “Frank” (whom the reader never met). During her attempt to console Mariko, she utters the following puzzling words: “If you don’t like it over there, we can always come back” (173, italics mine). This may not sound out of the ordinary at first, but she goes on when Mariko looks at her “questioningly”: “If you don’t like it over there, we’ll come straight back. But we have to try it and see if we like it there. I’m sure we will” (173). Her language here indicates she has assumed Sachiko’s role, speaking and acting as the child’s mother. In the following chapter, Etsuko “confesses” to Niki that perhaps Keiko’s suicide by hanging was her fault: “But you see, Niki, I knew all...

Make no mistake about Kazuo Ishiguro, the author of uniquely restrained works such as The Remains of the Day and When We Were Orphans . His Japanese background suggests we should see him in the same light as the other Japanese literary colossus: Haruki Murakami. But Ishiguro, whose family emigrated to the UK when he was only five, is oceans away from Murakami. He does not deal with time warps, ghostly apparitions or talking cats. His fictional world is (on the surface) realistically rendered, populated by characters with emotions and motives that largely resemble our own. Ishiguro’s award-winning debut A Pale View of Hills (1982) introduces to us an author whose chief concern is the inner landscape – that twilight region of the human mind where shadows threaten to erase reality. The novel’s protagonist Etsuko, a middle-aged Japanese woman residing in England, is having to cope with the aftermath of her elder daughter Keiko’s suicide. Her English-born second daughter, Niki, is ...