Sun After Dark (17 page)

A FOREIGNER AT HOME

“And this also,” said Marlow suddenly, “has been one of the dark places of the earth.”

—On the Thames, in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness

There is a moment, early on in Kazuo Ishiguro’s new novel, When We Were Orphans, that cuts to the heart of everything that’s odd—to use a favorite Ishiguro word—about this author’s not-quite-English fiction. The typically fussy, agonizingly self-conscious narrator, Christopher Banks, never quite sure of his place in the world around him, steps out of a London lunch to pursue a woman to whom he’s strongly (if always passively) attracted. When he catches up with her on the street, she starts to reminisce about the careless bus rides she took as a girl with her mother, now dead, and asks Banks if he rides the buses, too.

“ ‘I must confess,’ ” he replies, in the over-formal English that is an Ishiguro trademark, “ ‘I tend to walk or get a cab. I’m rather afraid of London buses. I’m convinced if I get on one, it’ll take me somewhere I don’t want to go, and I’ll spend the rest of the day trying to find my way back.’ ”

I can’t think of any one of Ishiguro’s contemporaries in England who would write in quite that tone of voice, let alone have a protagonist (who’s not supposed to be timorous—Banks, after all, is presented to us, without much evidence, as one of the great detectives of his day) confess to such a fear. Yet the response, with all its overlapping anxieties—of dislocation, of losing time, of being swept up in something outside one’s control—suggests something distinctive about the Ishiguro world, and something that can still make his maker seem an outsider in the England where he’s lived for forty years.

There is a practical reason why Banks might feel ill at ease in London—born to an ultra-British family in Shanghai, he’s a relative newcomer in the country of his forebears (and, besides, all his deepest hurts have to do with abandonment). Yet the air of apprehension goes deeper than that. The terror of doing the wrong thing, the elaborate unease attending even the most everyday of activities—take one wrong step and you’ll get lost— and the sense of being always on uncertain ground lie at the heart of Ishiguro’s poignant and often haunted vision. In his previous novel,
The Unconsoled,
Ishiguro gave us 535 pages about being lost in a foreign place where his narrator couldn’t read the signs.

When We Were Orphans
may well be Ishiguro’s richest and most capacious book so far, in part because it stitches together his almost microscopic examination of self-delusion, as it plays out in lost individuals, with a much larger, often metaphorical look at self-enclosure on a national scale. The story is told in the (slightly priggish) voice, and filtered through the highly fallible eyes and memory, of Banks, a typical Ishiguro protagonist who keeps assuring us how well adjusted and popular he is even as the prose reveals him to be “slightly alarmed” and “somewhat irritated,” irked and “somewhat overwrought.” Living on the fringes of London society in the early 1930s, in—as he takes pains to tell us—a “tasteful” Victorian house with “snug armchairs” and an “oak bookcase,” he longs to have some standing in the world. “My intention,” he declares with a typical (and dangerous) mix of innocence and self-satisfaction, “was to combat evil.”

More to the point, like all Ishiguro’s main characters, he is a foreigner wherever he happens to find himself, homeless even among those snug armchairs: in the Shanghai of his boyhood he is taken to be an Englishman, and in England he is taken to be an odd man out from China. Utterly in the dark, he searches and searches the small print of the world around him for clues as to how to act. (Ishiguro has spoken touchingly of how he, too, arriving in England from Nagasaki at the age of five, learned to “become” an English boy by copying the sounds he heard around him.) And yet, of course, the very deliberation he brings to every transaction ensures that he will never be a part of it. Much as Stevens the butler in Ishiguro’s best-known novel,
The
Remains of the Day,
laboriously practiced his “bantering” to fit in with the class he served, so Banks, before attending a party, “researched over and over how I would—modestly, but with a certain dignity—outline my ambitions.”

It is the foreigner’s plight, perhaps, to find himself a detective, as well as an actor, always on the lookout for signs and prompts, and Ishiguro, who is never careless with his details, actually dares to make Banks a would-be Sherlock Holmes (though we have to take much of his success in his profession on trust, since we hear much less about his job than about his advancement in society). Yet the abiding poignancy of Ishiguro’s work comes from the fact that his main characters are unsettled in both senses of the word: nervous because they don’t belong. The smallest thing (a bus ride, say) can throw them off completely.

The very notion of foreignness has changed, you could say, in the global age (this is one of Ishiguro’s implicit themes, and one that would no doubt impress itself on a Japanese writer who can’t write in Japanese). The person who looks and sounds like us may (as in Banks’s case) be a complete alien; the one who looks quite different from us, and has a funny name to boot, may (as in Ishiguro’s case) be so close to us that he sees through all our games. Foreignness has gone underground in our times— become invisible, in a sense—and yet it has never lost its age-old terrors, of being left out or left behind.

In the case of Banks, this suppressed panic comes out in the exile’s habit of consoling himself with memories of a place he tells himself is home; however much he is an outsider in England, he can take refuge in the place he lost. Thus, over and over, in his mind, he returns to haunted memories of his boyhood in the International Settlement in Shanghai. One day, seemingly out of the blue, Banks’s father (working for a British trading company here disguised as “Morganbrook and Byatt”) goes to work, and never returns; a little later, his beloved mother, often recalled laughing in a swing, also vanishes, leaving Banks, at the age of ten, alone in a very foreign country. The boy’s one playmate in Shanghai, constantly remembered, is the six-year-old next door, Akira Yamashita, with whom he seems mostly to share a sense of disconnection. “ ‘Christopher. You not enough Englishman,’ ” says the Japanese boy (in his strange—and to me implausible—English); but Akira, too, returning to Japan, is “mercilessly ostracised for his ‘foreignness.’ ”

Anyone who’s read an Ishiguro novel before—and even those who haven’t—will feel at home with the sadnesses of a pathetically self-involved character, longing to keep the truth of his loneliness at bay, and training a magnifying glass, in this case quite literally, on the alien world around him: part of Ishiguro’s skill is to bring the senses of “pathetically” together (in characters who are moving without always being likable). Yet this relatively precise, and housebound, story breaks into something much bigger when, in 1937, the woman Banks admires (from a distance)— another orphan, called Sarah Hemmings—suddenly goes off with her new husband to Shanghai. Abruptly, and more than a little belatedly, Banks decides that he must go there too—to solve the case of his parents’ disappearance, he says (though that happened twenty-five years before), and to bring order, as he somehow believes, to a disintegrating world. When he returns to the lovingly recalled place he thinks of as home, it is, of course, to find it a blacked-out chaos, with Japanese soldiers assaulting the city even as local Communists and the Kuomintang conduct a brutal civil war.

Up to this point, roughly halfway through the book, the reader could be forgiven for thinking he’s reading
The Remains
of the Day Revisited:
a straightforward (and expert) portrait of a man possessed by truths he can’t acknowledge, and missing the boat at every turn (the metaphor becomes an actual event here). Yet as it returns to Shanghai, the narrative acquires a political fury that is not shy of trafficking in the word “evil.” Ishiguro has long turned a shrewd and attentive eye—a foreigner’s eye, really—on the British specimens he has found himself among, and in
The Remains of the Day
he famously exposed the blind loyalties and vanities of a single butler as a way of pointing up the naiveté of a whole society that invited Nazis to its dinner parties in the 1930s. Here, the assault on perfidious Albion and its “air of refined duplicity” becomes pitiless.

British traders like Banks’s father were, of course, deriving much of their income from smuggling Indian opium into China—an activity that had the secondary function of keeping the local populace helplessly sedated. Yet as Banks continues his investigations, he finds that the corruption goes well beyond that: British companies like his father’s (which seems to stand in for a well-known trading house still prominent in Hong Kong) were dealing with warlords and, in some cases, sending others off to their deaths in order to protect themselves. And when Banks arrives in war-ravaged Shanghai, it is to find the international elite complaining about chauffeurs and languidly comparing the shells outside to “shooting stars” as they watch Japanese warships turn the city to rubble outside their bathroom window.

Banks is hardly the most assertive of souls, but even he is moved to “a wave of revulsion” by the studied obliviousness:

During this fortnight I have been here, throughout all my dealings with these citizens, high or low, I have not witnessed—not once—anything that could pass for honest shame. Here, in other words, at the heart of the maelstrom threatening to suck in the whole of the civilised world, is a pathetic conspiracy of denial; a denial of responsibility which has turned in on itself and gone sour, manifesting itself in the sort of pompous defensiveness I have encountered so often.

The point is so alive to him that, fifty-three pages later, he delivers a version of the same tirade, even repeating (a rarity in Ishiguro’s perfectionist prose) the phrase about “honest shame.” He’s so busy haranguing the world around him that he never stops to register that what he’s saying applies largely to himself.

And as the novel takes us out of Banks’s head, and into the wider world, it also, paradoxically perhaps, rises out of domestic realism to a vivid and often daring surrealism. (At the white-tie gathering under the chandeliers, Banks is actually handed a pair of opera glasses with which to inspect the war outside. “ ‘Most interesting,’ he observes, as shells destroy the city. ‘Are there many casualties, do you suppose?’ ”) Nearly all of Ishiguro’s fiction is set just before or after war, the reverberations of a larger struggle rumbling underneath the action like a distant train; and his great political theme, of nationalism, offers us the shadow side, as it were, of his protagonists’ longing to belong. Indeed, the heart of Ishiguro’s strength is to bring the two forces into intricate collision, and to show how displaced characters like Banks, precisely because they want to be part of a larger whole, and to serve a cause, attach themselves to the very forces that are tearing the world apart.

Here, as Banks stumbles out into a derelict city of corpses, struggling to find his parents in the midst of all the fighting, it feels almost as if Ishiguro is daring himself to break out of his habitual control and move onto uncharted ground. The writing begins to feel dreamed as much as plotted, and there is an exhilarating sense of its taking on a life of its own and pulling the author into places where he hadn’t expected to find himself. (In that small moment on the London street, it’s worth noting, Banks finally does get on the bus.)

In the most remarkable scenes in the book, lit up by a sense of outrage and social compassion quite unlike anything Ishiguro has given us before (though he began his professional life working with the homeless), Banks follows a policeman up into a broom cupboard and emerges, essentially, into history. All around him is a wasteland that looks like “some vast, ruined mansion with endless rooms,” in his characteristic phrase, and the all but unimaginable suffering and poverty of the “warrens” that the British have taken pains not to see. The very inadequacy of the society detective in the face of real life becomes as harrowing as it is painful: “ ‘Look here . . . All of this’—I gestured at the carnage, of which she seemed completely oblivious—‘it’s awfully bad luck.’ ”

This abandoning of solid ground, for writer and character alike, clearly comes with risks. Ishiguro’s talk often has to me the feeling of having been as much worked up from research as everything else here (“ ‘Look, old chap, . . . I’m going along tonight to a bash,’ ” says one character). And as Banks moves through the ruins of the city, more than ever subject to the foreigner’s inability to tell friend from foe, or to see the larger picture, some of the dialogue sounds as if it had been mugged up from some black-and-white film about stiff upper lip. “ ‘Now, look here,’ ” Banks tells a dying Japanese soldier (after attending to his wounds with his trusty magnifying glass), “ ‘I don’t want any of that nonsense. You’re going to be fit as a fiddle in no time.’ ” The soldier, whom Banks takes to be his old friend Akira, grunts and, recalling his distant son, says, “ ‘You tell him. I die for country. Tell him, be good to mother. Protect. And build good world.’ ” Sometimes, here, it is only the Japanese who don’t sound Japanese.

Yet for all the occasional awkwardness, the mixing of effects—the poignancy and absurdity of country-house manners brought to people fighting with meat cleavers and spades—turns Ishiguro’s gift for blending tones to rending advantage. “Most annoyingly,” Banks says, recalling stumbling through the debris with the dying soldier, “my right shoe had split apart, and my foot was badly gashed, causing a searing pain to rise with each step.” That mix of “annoyingly” and “searing” says everything that needs be said about Banks: the farce that can break one’s heart.

The denouement of Banks’s private drama is effected rather too tidily—Ishiguro always has to fight the foreigner’s temptation to be overpolite—and the creaking of the stage intensifies when a character we’ve seen described as an “admirable beacon of rectitude” suddenly tears off his mask to reveal a “haunted old man, consumed with self-hatred.” It is everything that is unresolved, mysterious, and in the shadows that gives Ishiguro’s writing its power, everything that comes to him strangely, you could say, because he is an outsider. When the bewilderment is cleared up—when the character begins to settle down—the spell begins to fade.