the remains of the day and never let me go

The strange music of Stevens’ narration is audible from the first sentence: ‘It seems increasingly likely that I really will undertake the expedition that has been preoccupying my imagination now for some days.’ Typing them out, the words that strike me are the hyperbolic ‘expedition’ and the surprising ‘really’. At a time when English writers with East Asian backgrounds were rare, this was enough of a connection to intrigue me. On top of that, he was an English writer with a Japanese name and I was an English person with a Chinese name. Ishiguro was doing something different but I couldn’t tell what it was. I wondered what I was missing and why Ishiguro’s prose style was so spare and, well, style-less.īefore then, I had been dazzled by Martin Amis’s flashy sentences and moved by Raymond Carver’s minimalism. I understood his debut’s historical context, and sensed its sinister edges, but I suspected I hadn’t appreciated it fully.

I had already read A Pale View of Hills (1982), Ishiguro’s haunting first novel which is set in Nagasaki in the aftermath of the Second World War. I read The Remains of the Day for the first time in 2002 when I was an undergraduate at Leeds University. His convoluted way of speaking (‘I venture to say, sir…’), and his preoccupation with ‘dignity in keeping with one’s position’, sounds comical today, but his narration is intimate and engaging from the novel’s first page to its last. Stevens’ story, as he reflects from 1956 on his decades of service in a large house during a journey to find the former housekeeper who he may or may not love, conveys multitudes about England. It is as though, rather than having invented his protagonist, Ishiguro recorded a real English butler’s words and put them on the page. The voice of Stevens, the narrator of Kazuo Ishiguro’s 1989 Booker Prize-winning novel The Remains of the Day, is so authentic and beautifully-sustained that you could believe it had always existed.

The remains of the day and never let me go