“Nocturnes” by Kazuo Ishiguro

‘Nocturne’ is an unusual word.  Merriam-Webster defines it as “a work of art dealing with evening or night”.

The climactic point for each of these stories by Kazuo Ishiguro occurs during night time, so these stories are nocturnes.  As well, each story concerns itself with music and/or musicians.  I think Ishiguro was playing on the musical idea of ‘variations’ when writing these stories, because although each of these stories has a unique setting and plot, there are many similarities between all five stories.  They are all written in the first person.  The main protagonist in each of these stories is a not-so-young-anymore guy, a journeyman musician who sort of makes a living playing music none too successfully, but music is his life.  He meets up with a not-so-young-anymore woman, and hilarity and/or heartbreak ensues.

Kazuo Ishiguro is a stylist.  There is a stillness at the center of each of these five stories that makes them compelling.   In this book, he is being playful and charming.  One quality I greatly enjoy in Ishiguro’s writing is what I call “the unreliable protagonist”.  Whenever you read any story or novel by Ishiguro, it will always be in the first person, and you always get the sense that the main protagonist is severely fooling himself.  That’s the sense I got from each of these stories.

Nocturnes are also supposed to be pensive and dreamy.  Just as a good musician does not play his notes mushy to achieve a dream-like quality, Ishiguro does not get vague or unfocused like so much bad dream fiction does.  Instead every scene and detail is precise, note for note.

Here Ishiguro is playful and at ease, not like in some of his novels.  Ishiguro’s “Remains of the Day” published in 1989 was a major event in modern literary history.  That novel was also written in the first person. I still remember the impact this novel had on me, this story of a head servant who managed his mansion magnificently.   This was the first great example of the unreliable protagonist that I had encountered. As the novel progressed, you got the sense that this head servant was deliberately not seeing what was actually going on in the house where the Lord was trying to drum up support for the Nazis among the upper classes of England. This situation reminded me of all the people who work magnificently on their company jobs, but know enough about their company to know it is doing some very rotten things.  I also fondly remember the movie, where for once the movie with its leading actors Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson got it right.

Ishiguro won the Booker prize for “Remains of the Day” and has been nominated for the Booker three more times since, so when you are reading him you know you are in rarefied quality territory.

“Nocturnes” probably won’t be nominated for a Booker.  I don’t think they nominate books of stories, do they?  Anyhow this is not an ambitious book.  Instead this is a charming way to spend a few evenings with one of our great literary stylists.