This chapter considers the question of Ishiguro and Japan by discussing the author’s engagement with Japanese history in An Artist of the Floating World. Ishiguro says that he is not interested in documenting detailed history in his novels: rather, history is little more than a general background against which characters’ psychological dramas are staged. Set in Japan immediately after the end of the Pacific War, Ishiguro’s second novel is intended to be no exception. However, in view of the way that the novel thematizes such a sensitive issue as artists’ war responsibility, it is important to know about the historical reality and to understand how Ishiguro adapts and fictionalizes it. The chapter focuses on the way artists’ war responsibility was debated in post-war Japan and places Masuji Ono, the narrator Ishiguro created, in that historical context. In the process, Ishiguro’s particular concerns are thrown into relief. This kind of historical reading is necessary not least because problems of the period depicted by the novel haunt the Japanese even now.

Ishiguro’s fictions are peopled by individuals for whom affect, and the expression of affect, is compromised by their own emotional opacity, by their adherence to strictly if arbitrarily constructed social codes, and by their overwhelming but therefore hardly acknowledged sense of remorse or regret. While the protagonist-butler Stevens in The Remains of the Day is the most famous instance of the dilemma, the chapter focuses on An Artist of the Floating World and The Buried Giant in order to work through the consequences of emotional upheaval in the novels. Ishiguro writes paradoxically affecting first-person narratives by individuals who pride themselves on maintaining a seemingly affectless rhetorical deportment.

This chapter revisits the classic issue of the origins of Latin American independence and questions a set of prevailing historiographic assumptions. From a review of political conspiracies and mobilizations in eighteenth-century Latin America, it argues that Spanish and Portuguese colonial sovereignty faced significant challenges well before the Napoleonic invasion of the Iberian Peninsula in 1807; that the role of popular sectors was crucial to revolutionary and counterrevolutionary politics in the eighteenth century; and that the conflicts in Iberian American territory were linked to wider political dynamics in the Atlantic world. Without adopting a determinist argument that Bourbon reform or American identity explains Latin American independence in the nineteenth century, the chapter disputes the idea that a stable and legitimate “old regime” only unraveled after 1808. It also suggests that significant patterns of political contestation in the late colonial period found new expression in the novel context of the early nineteenth century.

While not typically considered a postcolonial writer, Ishiguro’s work often engages with the question of British and Japanese imperialism and colonialism, either directly in works such as An Artist of the Floating World, When We Were Orphans, and the Ishiguro-scripted film The White Countess, or through subtle allusion to the American post-war occupation of Japan in A Pale View of Hills or the Suez Crisis in The Remains of the Day. Writing from the ‘inside’, from the perspective of individuals who are unwittingly complicit in the structures of oppression entailed by colonial rule, Ishiguro offers complex and unsettlingly sympathetic depictions of the psychological denials and displacements that allow individuals to operate within these regimes. Focusing on An Artist of the Floating World, When We Were Orphans, and The White Countess, this chapter responds to the ways in which Ishiguro’s fiction attends to the relationship between individual and collective responsibility and historico-political forces.

This introductory chapter offers a synthetic approach to the current state of the field of study about Latin American independence and outlines the Companion’s contributions to that field. It does so by presenting a historical narrative of the process of independence to frame the Companion’s chapters and their specific thematic approaches to the intellectual, social, political, and economic changes brought about by the independence of Brazil and Spanish American in the nineteenth century.

This chapter is primarily interested in exploring the origins and development of liberalism during the revolutionary and early republican period of nineteenth century Spanish America. It first considers the peculiarities of the Spanish crisis of 1808 in the context of the Atlantic crisis of the European monarchies and also evaluates the assimilation of the Enlightened agenda by the Catholic Spanish political culture. The second part the chapter introduces the relevance of the idea of emancipation and considers the characteristics it adopted in the Spanish World as a keystone of the constitutional cultures that flourished in the area. The last part of this chapter shows the limits of a theory of emancipation in Catholic societies and how the new republics (and the Spanish liberal monarchy as well) had to deal with limits to constituent power posed by the assumption that the Spanish were societies with a “national God.” Depending on the solutions proposed and adopted to the limits of emancipation different branches of liberalism developed, debated among them and very often went to civil wars.

This chapter considers the place of Ishiguro’s work within the novel tradition. It traces Ishiguro’s dialogue with the novel form, as this extends from Artist of the Floating World to Klara and the Sun, in order to examine the means by which he adapts the tradition to his own ends. The chapter begins and concludes with a reading of Klara and the Sun that focuses on the role of imitation. How far can Klara, the ‘artificial friend’, be regarded as a copy of an existing form of life, and how far does she manifest a new mode of being? And how does Ishiguro adapt the apparatuses of the novel in order to explore the difference, between the imitation of an existing life and the creation, in prose, of an unprecedented one, a fictional life without a model in the world?

The objective of this chapter is to draw the route map followed both by constitutions and the representation of the electoral base in Spanish and Portuguese America from the Napoleonic occupation of the Peninsula (1807/1808) until the creation of new sovereign states at the end of the wars of independence (ca. 1824). The argument that articulates the discussion here and the dialogue between the Hispanic and Lusitanian world is that the constitutional and representative question assumed, jointly and with many variants, a constructivist dimension regarding the dilemma of sovereignty. In the context of the crisis of the Iberian monarchies, representation of the territories played a central role in constitutional experiments and electoral regulations. Faced with the fact, or danger, of dismemberment of preexisting political bodies, the adoption of a constructivist stance was manifest as much in the leaders who attempted to restore and safeguard the unity of the bi-oceanic monarchies as in those who sought to legitimize the emergence of new communities aspiring to be sovereign.

In Ishiguro’s first novel, A Pale View of Hills, the narrator, Etsuko, looks out at the view of the surrounding countryside from her English garden and comments ‘I always think it’s so truly like England out here’. The phrase ‘truly like’ emphasizes a central topic in Ishiguro’s work: the question of England, or of what it is ‘truly like’ that is evoked especially in The Remains of the Day, When We Were Orphans, Never Let Me Go, and The Buried Giant. Such novels underscore the idea that human communities are permanent only in their heterogeneity and instability, in their fragile and conflicted status, and in the varied and ever-changing terms in which they talk to themselves about themselves. Ishiguro’s novels repeatedly return to and continually reinvent forms of Englishness because they recognize that England is an invention, a phantasm that can therefore only be ‘truly like’ itself, not itself. His narratives are not only about the exilic, ungrounded condition of the immigrant or of the cultural stranger within a society, but also (and therefore) about the ersatz, ungrounded condition of us all.

This chapter considers the formal and thematic legacy of Dostoevsky, Proust, Kafka, and Beckett on Kazuo Ishiguro’s late-modernist work. Situating Ishiguro’s lengthiest, most digressive, most formally challenging and funniest novel within the European modernist tradition, the chapter analyses its marked formal experimentation in the light of its idiosyncratic and often highly disturbing blend of humour and mishap, of comedy and adversity. The chapter proposes that The Unconsoled can be considered not only Ishiguro’s but also one of late-modernism’s great comic novels. As such, Ishiguro’s novel may be said successfully to resist the major consolation of meaning-making, parting company with narrative as a calmative and leaving behind the affirmations of consolation and solace.