Jorge Luis Borges once described Henry James as a deeply strange artist who appears at first sight “to be no more than a mundane novelist, less colorful than others.”
Much the same could be said about Kazuo Ishiguro, one of the most respected and covertly enigmatic of the British writers who made their names in the 1980s. Ishiguro’s novels can look on the surface like rather bloodless exercises in mainstream good taste, judiciously crafted and Merchant-Ivory-friendly. Yet his voice on the page is oddly elusive (he always uses obliquely characterized first-person narrators); his settings are more dreamlike than they initially seem; and the center of thematic interest in each novel is rarely located where the reader expects to find it. His slightly distant tone also adds extra weirdness to his unpredictable shifts into dark, dry farce, which occur most often in The Unconsoled, a vast incursion into Kafka’s territory that’s probably the bravest project undertaken by a big-name English writer in recent years.
Several shifts of this kind take place in Nocturnes, a carefully arranged sequence of interlocking stories. In Come Rain or Come Shine, the narrator is having lunch with an overbearing friend. “Suddenly he began eating again, and I realized with astonishment he was sobbing quietly. I reached across the table and prodded his shoulder, but he just kept shoveling pasta into his mouth without looking up.” (Later, the narrator pretends to be a dog.) For complicated reasons, the title story’s main character sneaks into an empty ballroom and starts trying to remove an award statuette from a roast turkey’s body cavity. A man talking on a phone walks in and stops talking. There’s a pause. “It’s all right,” the man says into his phone. “It’s a man ... I thought for a moment it was something else. But it’s a man ... That’s all it is, I see it now. It’s just that he’s got a chicken or something on the end of his arm.”
There are five stories in the book; these two — both lightly surreal, both narrated by men being pressured to pull their socks up — come second and fourth in Ishiguro’s set list. Crooner, the first story, and Cellists, the last, also reflect one another. One features a successful singer late in his career who’s about to get divorced, the other a would-be cellist whose career never started and who’s about to get married. Both are also narrated by jobbing musicians in Italian cafe bands that entertain tourists by playing the theme from The Godfather. In other words, the book has a symmetrical structure, with loosely paired stories radiating out from the center. The aim seems to be to remind the reader that each story is only part of the overall design: we’re meant to read them as variations on the same themes and motifs, not as freestanding compositions.
The main themes are stated in Malvern Hills, the story in the middle of the book, in which an aspiring singer-songwriter encounters a middle-aged couple while grumpily serving tourists in his sister’s cafe. The couple — he thinks they’re German at first, but they turn out to be faintly comically Swiss — are professional musicians who scrape by on restaurant gigs. Tilo, the man, is filled with praise for everything, while Sonja, the woman, is filled with bitterness and anger: their peripatetic life has cut them off from their son. Having done them a bad turn more or less on a whim, the narrator is rewarded with praise and encouragement when they overhear him playing his guitar. But the next time he sees them, Sonja and Tilo have quarreled. Sonja warns the narrator about disappointments to come. He seems unfazed by their unhappiness; we’re left pondering questions about self-centeredness and talent, youth and age, aspirations and outcomes, with few suggested answers.
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