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Article: Minority Report. (novels of Kazuo Ishiguro) (column)
- Article from:
- The Nation
- Article date:
- June 11, 1990
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1990 The Nation Company L.P. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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When I read Kazuo Ishiguro's novel An Artist of the Floating World, I had already heard that he was about to publish The Remains of the Day. All I knew about the impending book was that it took a minute interest in English social relations. It turns out to be an advantage to read the books in this order, close together, because they disclose an intriguing latent similarity.
The resemblance is superficial to begin with. Both novels take the form of unmediated retrospective monologue. In An Artist of the floating World, the narrator is Masuji Ono, a Japanese painter from a bourgeois background. In The Remains of the Day, the raconteur is Stevens"-we never learn his ...