Ishiguro Releases an Accomplished But Mild Collection

“In general it is a matter of experimenting with the different arrangements of one color,” Debussy wrote in 1894 concerning the composition of his three “nocturnes,” “which, in painting, for example, would be a study in grey.” Debussy’s vision of grey is not flat or dull; instead, it is a tone that remains mysterious, though it partially reveals itself in beautiful and distinct flashes. In the same manner, this delicate nuance of a singular emotional mode underlies Kazuo Ishiguro’s first collection of stories, itself entitled “Nocturnes.” But in lieu of Debussy’s tonal complexity or depth, Ishiguro’s collection merely evokes a neatly executed cadenza, which, though brilliant, only skims the surface of its characters’ emotional lives.

In “Nocturnes,” Ishiguro examines that dreaded moment in which people arrive at middle age and have to confront their mediocrity. Characters drift apart as they realize that they have not fulfilled their individual ambitions: the marriage between trophy wife Lindy Gardner and her fading American crooner husband unravels; the apprenticeship of a young Russian cellist under a woman who professes to be an accomplished musician dissolves; a struggling jazz musician, seeking notoriety, undergoes an unnecessary facelift and befriends Gardner while recovering from his surgery in a futile attempt to achieve celebrity.

It is significant that this is Ishiguro’s first collection of short stories. He is known for novels that chronicle the internal lives of their protagonists, allowing the narrators to reveal themselves to the audience. He notably employed this technique in “Remains of the Day,” which won him the Man Booker Prize in 1989. In that novel, the main character conceals as much of his psyche as he reveals, leading to a gradual but profound understanding of his life. Ishiguro depicts the characters that form “Nocturnes” in a similar way; he uses the first person throughout. But perhaps because of the constraints of short form fiction, he doesn’t allow his character to undergo a full emotional unfolding.

Nonetheless, Ishiguro remains a master at sketching out environments and characters through minimal, precise language. The struggling songwriter manages to conjure a grimy, lethargic music scene with characteristically British wit: “But the majority of auditions happened at a much more shambolic level. In fact, when you saw the way most bands went about things, it was no mystery why the whole scene in London was dying on its feet.” In the same way, the American jazz musician who befriends Gardner, has a completely different syntax that instantly identifies him as a member of the L.A. music scene: “If it’s pop they want, it’s pop I play. R&B? Fine. Car commercials, the walk-on theme for a talk show, I’ll do it. I’m a jazz player only when I’m inside my cubicle.” Ishiguro’s on-the-spot prose makes for a delicious reading experience, but it functions better as a placeholder for the characters’ context than as a vehicle for their development.

As the characters come to recognize that they must be content with their failures, they cope in frustratingly deadpan ways, lending the narrative a puzzling emotional flatness. Tony Gardner explains the seemingly tragic dissolution of his marriage to Lindy in sterile, practical terms, saying, “I’m no longer a major name. Now I could just accept that and fade away. Live on past glories. Or I could say, no, I’m not finished yet.… You have to be prepared to make a lot of changes, some of them hard ones. You change the way you are. You even change some things you love.” It is frustrating to watch Ishiguro’s characters push away their small share of contentment or achievement—the one saving grace against the mediocrity of middle age—in such a mundane and illogical manner. This makes up the simultaneously brilliant and irritating quality of Ishiguro’s work; his characters may not delve deeply into their inner emotional complexities, but they are true to their real life counterparts, who often similarly cope with loss and failure in utterly banal ways.

While Ishiguro’s depiction of the confrontation with failure appears wanting, his examination of protective psychological mechanisms remains one of the strongest points of the collection, underscoring both life’s pathos and surrealism. Ishiguro examines the absurdity of how humans protect themselves from the outside world and the moment in which this protection begins to wear down. Eloise McCormack, the self-professed virtuoso cellist who coaches young Tibor on his technique, eventually confesses that she cannot play the cello. She justifies this by claiming that other, less-gifted teachers would have destroyed her innate gift if she had taken lessons with them: “I knew I had to protect my gift against people who, however well-intentioned they were, could completely destroy it.” Yet this confession diminishes her into a pathetic figure leading a stunted musical life because of her own absurd desire for protection.

A scene that recasts this moment of blind, frozen protection in a hilariously surreal mode occurs when Steve and Lindy become friends after their plastic surgeries and wander around the surgeon’s building complex at night. At one point, they find themselves on the stage of a convention room by the catering table, when one of the organizers opens the curtains and comments, “It’s a man. With a bandaged head, wearing a night-gown. 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.” This seems to be Ishiguro’s conceptualization of the human protective mechanism: the bizarrely funny and nonsensical vision of two people with mummified heads standing on a stage, subjected to the fierce currents of the outside world while barely reacting to them.

Ishiguro’s short stories are well-executed, witty, and will not fail to disappoint his past readers. However, the stories still feel more like the technical toying of a master musician than a lyrical melodic narrative. Unlike Debussy’s carefully nuanced grey that covers the whole of the emotional spectrum, Ishiguro’s “Nocturnes” are filled with the grey of blanketed emotion. Shimmering scenes occasionally rise up out of the narrative, only to be dragged back into the monotony of ordinary life.