Typical Japanese: Kazuo Ishiguro and the Asian Anglophone Historical Novel

This essay intervenes in recent claims about Kazuo Ishiguro's affective and narrative universalism as writer of global Anglophone literature. It does so by situating his work as crucially mediated by a generic Asianness. Specifically, it reads his first two Japanese historical novels (A Pale Vi...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:	Modern fiction studies 2021-03, Vol.67 (1), p.123-148
Main Author:	Hu, Jane
Format:	Article
Language:	eng
Subjects:	Aesthetics Allegory Ambiguity Anglophones Authorship Bildungsroman Contemporary literature Cosmopolitanism Ethnicity Eurocentrism Fate Flexibility Genre Geopolitics Gothic fiction Hegemony Heroism & heroes Historical fiction Ishiguro, Kazuo (1954- ) Japanese language Literary characters Literary devices Literary translation Literature Logic Narrative structure Narrative techniques Narratives Narratology Novels Palimpsests Plot (Narrative) Publishing Publishing industry Stagnation Stereotypes World history World literature Writers
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Summary:	This essay intervenes in recent claims about Kazuo Ishiguro's affective and narrative universalism as writer of global Anglophone literature. It does so by situating his work as crucially mediated by a generic Asianness. Specifically, it reads his first two Japanese historical novels (A Pale View of Hills and An Artist of the Floating World) alongside his last two hyper-specific British historical novels (Never Let Me Go and The Buried Giant). While this arc might be read in terms of a shift from ethnographic realism to speculative genre fiction, this essay reads Ishiguro's early and later work dialectically through his recurring melancholic narrator to show how his later British novels allows us to reexamine his earlier Japanese fictions as also deeply generic
ISSN:	0026-7724 1080-658X 1080-658X