Ishiguro does not write up a storm. He does not have Updike’s exquisitely turned sentences; he does not have Chabon’s narrative drive; he does not have Roth’s eloquence. And yet he has become a major writer for reasons critics find difficult to point out. There is something elusive and eerie about what he writes that lingers in the mind, images and bits of dialogue that seemed off the mark come back to a reader long after one of his books has been put down. The capacity to do that is, of course, the mark of a real writer, even if Ishiguro may not be there because his novels and stories are so much about themselves and Ishiguro has only imperfectly learned to turn the Post-Modern aesthetic into art.

By Post-Modern is meant the need to understand the literature or art as a construction before it can be appreciated as a fiction or a description of life. Joyce is a Modernist rather than a Post-Modernist because you can enter the life of Ulysses without understanding that it is based on Homer; indeed, it is Joyce’s accomplishment that the seams do not show. Knowing the references helps the understanding but is not required to go with the flow of the story or the accuracy of his descriptions of Dublin cityscapes and Dublin conversations. Nabakov, on the other hand, is infinitely improved by knowing the kind of book he is bouncing off, whether the case study in Lolita or the poet’s biography in Pale Fire, or the Russian novel in Ada. The same can be said of Chabon and the later Roth.

And so an entry point to understanding Ishiguro is provided by the fact that there is a literary reference that provides a template against which to measure where Ishiguro has duplicated or reversed or created some typological transformation of his own upon the original. In Never Let Me Go, the reference was to Swift. The soulfulness of the Houyhnhnms provides a way to understand the clones, what the life of a clone might be like. Ishiguro, however, does not overtly let you in onto the fact that he is rewriting Swift. He merely shifts the good temper, devotion and amiability of horses to dogs, which are the species from which his clones have been mutated to the point that they have speech and, to a degree, intelligence. The author presents his story from the point of view of the clones who, like humans, understand the practicalities of their position, but have not much more than an inkling of what might be beyond that, which is the existential question of how to make a life meaningful under the circumstances of death, pain, love and art.

In the collection that has just appeared as Nocturne: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall, different keys unlock the individual stories. The references are easy enough to spot. The point of the stories, as in the rest of his work, is not to retell an old one in a new form; it is to make his own point, explore his own fresh themes, on the basis of creating a world in each story which is both spuriously real and spuriously literary. That method is used in this collection to lead the reader into an appreciation of popular culture, that omnipresent and omnivorous and most commented upon aspect of culture that remains as elusive as ever to accurate description, even after a century of commentary, from Apollinaire on. (What was purportedly a popular song of the time when the clones were young gives the title to Never Let Me Go. The sentimentality of popular culture provides a philosophy by which the clones guide themselves through their lives at school and when they are out in the world.)

The first story is entitled Crooner. It is set in Venice, where an older artist, if a world class popular crooner can be called that, is approached for an autograph by a young man who gets enlisted in the older man’s plot and thereby learns something of the ways of the world. The immediate reference of the story, based on setting and the givens of the plot, is, of course, Death in Venice, the initial association that any reader of Ishiguro will come up with, there probably being few readers of Ishiguro who do not have a university level education. That association is enough to set a reader off onto the ways Ishiguro has altered the plot to make it a commentary on Mann as well as to serve his own purposes.

It isn’t just that the boy rather than the artist is the one who makes the initial approach. Remember that Mann very long delayed the initial contact so as to open up the character of the artist. Here the story is told from the point of view of the boy, a young popular guitarist who is appearing with a local band out to entertain the visitors to the Plaza and who is made doubly naïve by having grown up in Eastern Europe and so knows the Western world only through the popular music of the West that was so popular in Iron Curtain countries. What the boy learns is that the older man wants to serenade his love from a gondola with some of the songs that he himself had made world famous. It seems to the boy and to the reader a very romantic thing to do. By the time they make their way to the balcony of the apartment in which his wife is staying, it occurs to the reader that there are darker motives at work and so perhaps the crooner’s wife had been entertaining a lover. The narrative cliché of delaying the completion of a journey is used here to allow the reader to complicate the story before the story is made more complicated by its author. (There are motives other than art at work in Mann as well. Rather than the beauty of the boy being only a metaphor for the beauty of art, it is also a metaphor for the distraction and the life of transgression that art also brings into the world.)

By the time they arrive below her window, the crooner in Ishiguro’s Venice story has told the boy a great deal about himself and his wife. The crooner has what appears to be a loony plan. This is to be their last time together. He is divorcing her after many years so that she can have one more chance at finding a person in the prime of his renown, the crooner well past his period of fame.  This plan would seem to violate the spirit of romantic love as that is presented in popular music, which is rich with references to an ideal of fidelity and growing old together. It is an unsettling plan as well because it violates the literary convention that an old marriage that ends in divorce is a source not only of grief but of bitterness. The crooner, to the contrary, thinks his decision a brave and self-sacrificing one, even if the reader is not ready to accept it as such, preferring to read in some malignant back story. The crooner makes his case with biography, describing how his wife had been trained in a kind of school for scandal, to work herself up through a line of ever more well placed lovers until she reached a person of renown. She did that, and the least he owes her, during his own decline, is that he set her free to do so again, though one would think that she is not capable any longer of doing that, or that the two of them had gotten beyond being the papier-mâché figures of show business icons, who do, in their prime, switch beds so as to be with someone of their own high level of fame. Think of Eddie and Elizabeth, Angelina and Brad.

What the crooner is speaking of is not the world of romance as that is portrayed in music. He is speaking of the world of those who produce the world of romance. He is speaking of popular culture as an enterprise which so engages its people that they become creatures of their fame and, more than that, lead their lives in ways contrary to conventional morality so as to serve the needs of fame.

There is a touch of Radio Days here. Woody Allen contrasts the radio stars with a normal family, the stars like Stoic figures raised to the heavens so that ordinary people can look up to them, apparently driven by different demons than ordinary people even if they look very ordinary when seen in real life. The humanizing touch Allen provides is that they are really not very different. They are driven by loneliness and ambition and a desire for money and the need to avoid shame and to make the best of only partly achieved goals. The heavens and earth are mirror images of one another, according to Allen.

But that is not Ishiguro’s view. For him, the stars have distorted themselves so much as to deny ordinary virtue and proclaim virtues that ordinary people, like the boy, might think of as evil. To be an artist is to lose one’s humanity; to be a popular artist is to make tragedy merely fustian overacting in the service of an emotion that has no resonance with real people. That is the education of the boy. He learns that the artist is corrupted by passions that ordinary people cannot understand and can therefore only regard as corrupt, however much they may, for the moment, consider them. This is a commentary on Mann’s story. Corruption is not an insight or a tragic inevitability; it is chosen as a way of being. The Ishiguro story is also a commentary on popular music. It posits how skewed are the emotions that move its creators from the emotions that motivate the people who listen to it and who wish to idealize their relations to one another for a moment, but not really.

The key to the second story, Come Rain or Come Shine, is obvious because Ishiguro makes direct reference to it. He says one of the characters is reading Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, and that makes it easy to unfold how Ishiguro has been true to Austen and altered the novel for his purposes. The story (like the book) is a comedy of misadventure, people unaware of their actions to the point that they don’t understand why they all act at cross purposes to one another. An old college friend is invited to spend some time in London with a couple he knew in university before beginning a second choice life as a teacher of English in Spain. Relations between the husband and wife seem frazzled when he arrives and he is asked by the husband to keep the wife company while the husband is away because that is likely to calm her. Uncomfortable in this position, he carries out a number of subterfuges to keep things on an even keel, which raises speculation that this has been an elaborate plot for him to become the wife’s lover or to cover up the husband’s infidelity or for some other reason that makes sense of why he, in his full passivity and failure to deal with the situation, has become so key to it. We do not realize fully until the end of the story that there is no scheme that is afoot. Rather, these people are all feckless, a model of people scheming badly to figure out what they are up to, whether individually or collectively, and that the anarchy that follows befits them.

Ishiguro’s story is also a reading of Mansfield Park. The Bertram family, for all its clever and cutting repartee, is also hopelessly conventional. They manage their lives through adages that have long turned to clichés. These observations, however true and however tart, do not deal with the situation in front of them, for which they have no words. Fanny is clearly infatuated with Edmund, and Sir Thomas Bertram does not want to recognize that, preferring to draw his blinders back on rather than face up to what would seem perfectly natural—a younger son taken with an attractive ward—rather than read it as incest and therefore not to be mentioned. The family’s fortune, as radical critics have argued, is built on the slave plantations in the West Indies which Sir Thomas rushes off to rescue, though why there is need to rescue natural money makers is never made clear, nor is why the family seems on the verge of anarchy when Sir Thomas is away. A bit of Measure For Measure here, Austen using Shakespeare as Ishiguro uses Austen? The troubles in the family run deep. It goes back to the time when Fanny was a child of a ne’er do well relative, and runs forward to the time when the family fortunes are ruined and the whole pack of cards falls apart, people running about as excitedly and as fecklessly as the people in Ishiguro’s story. Fanny, however, gets what she wants. She gets Edmund, even though his future is sadly diminished, but she never cared all that much about the wealth, only to make a place for herself, and Edward is both easy to manipulate and likely to make a living adequate to her needs. She has found her Mr. Collins.

Knowing that Ishiguro’s story of a visiting friend who now lives in Spain is a reading of Mansfield Park helps the reader understand the story. It contains the same moral that there is a natural justice whereby central characters, at least, get what they deserve, even if that is rather ironic, known only after it happens, and that what anyone deserves, at least in this Jane Austen novel and this Austen-like story, is not very much at all, because the people are so very limited. That accounts for why popular culture, which is the culture of the poorly educated, is so thin: it settles for spectacular but not very illuminating fantasies: winning the lottery and retiring to your McMansion, or getting mentioned in some news dispatches or being regarded in a small circle as an arbiter of taste. That everything falls apart is a fear of everyone; the recognition that awaits readers of both the novel and the story is that everything has already fallen apart, long ago, when you were born into your social class with a limited set of abilities and maybe only somewhat passing social skills. We pine for a more perfect origin so that we know how far we have fallen and so we can know how high we might rise, if only we were better people. Jan Austen understood this idea well, having been a close reader of Milton; Ishiguro understands it as well, being, as he is, a close reader of Austen.

The original sin which makes the Ishiguro story depart from the happy one it might otherwise have been is that the schoolteacher and the wife had once been perhaps in love or at least on the brink of love before she had gotten involved with the man who would be her husband. She took a wrong turn by not sticking with the man who would become the schoolteacher, his life over, broken, once she had left him. The spark between them was symbolized and realized by the fact that they were both jazz aficionados of a sort sophisticated enough, so they thought not to like the popular Ella Fitzgerald and Frank Sinatra but prefer Peggy Lee and Sarah Vaughn. The reader is left to note that these were also popular singers rather than singers just known to jazz buffs. The two friends lived together on a certain level of popular culture: knowledgeable enough to know who they knew better than, not knowing, and none of the rest of us knowing, a state even more knowledgeable that would lead people to look down on us in a similar way. At least that is the way it is in disciplines subject to taste rather than to abstract knowledge. You know who is even a not much better physicist than you; you may even know how a literary critic from the nineteenth or twentieth century is more knowledgeable than you. But it is very difficult to put aside your own sense of how literature works and so regard your own taste as lower than that rather than just different from someone plying the same trade. The same is the case with hobbies. Everyone has a thumb green enough to do what they want with plants or an artistic bent strong enough to be a scrapbook maker.

Popular culture is therefore that very useful thing that helps a modern person be free. That is not because it works, like art, to enlarge the soul, though it does that too; it is because it allows you to think your purchase on the art manqué is sufficient for it to enlarge your soul, like someone who is a baseball fan without having mastered what every baseball announcer knows, which is when a pitcher should throw inside low rather than outside high. Popular culture reinforces a sense of self, makes you therefore have a grand ride to a significant life even if everywhere behind you is left only disaster, which is exactly what also happens in Mansfield Park, where the relatively unknowing Fanny still knows that keeping silent amidst the mess is likely to protect you from the mess. Let other people flail around. It may be difficult to read Mansfield Park as merely a farce on inadequate people because these are the people that after all do populate the more successful part of the world and so are by definition adequate, as well as clever and mean and all the other things that make fictional people larger than life even when they are not. On the other hand, it is easy to read the Ishiguro story as a farce, it being, first of all, merely a short story and so the declaration of a mood rather than a worked out history of a family and, second, because that is the intention of the author so as to undercut both Austen and the popular tragedians such as Woody Allen who gives the complete human condition to his farceurs, the range of human emotions intact, as in Annie Hall and Hannah and Her Sisters, rather than the popular culture equivalent Ishiguro most closely imitates, which is the lacerating slapstick of Jackie Gleason and Carol Burnett.

By the end of the Ishiguro story, Ray, the narrator of his friendship with Emily, has made an ass of himself—or rather a dog, in that he is caught by the woman he loved (loves?) on all fours, biting into magazines, after having gone into a bit of a frenzy in which he tore up her magazines and boiled a shoe all for the purpose of covering up the fact that he had stolen a look into her diary. She is unperturbed. It is just a mess to be cleaned up, and they end the story by dancing with one another, he uncertain how this will end up, whether out of a moment of passion brought on by a return to their old pleasure or out of a recognition that both have changed too much, he descended so much, she only older and settled with her husband, for them to enact the alternative history that they might have lived that looms over both of them. He is left in the moment, which is what a dog always is, and what we all in a way yearn for, though people cannot nor want to do that, lose their consciousness, even if popular music is a way to appeal to that yearning, a perpetual nostalgia for what might have been.

The key to the third story, Malvern Hills, is The Sound of Music, an appropriate reference for a short story about the music that is found in popular culture. A German looking couple who identify themselves as Swiss are vacationing in England and visit a tea shop settled on a hill. The Swiss go on and on about how wonderful are the inn and the English countryside, which is either a lie told so as to build up topography far less majestic than that seen in Switzerland and so please their hosts, or else because these people are lying about other things as well and so are being condescending to the English. They address these remarks to a young unsuccessful musician who may not understand that he has been rejected in London because he is just not very good and is working for his sister at the tea shop to earn his keep, though he helps out as little as he can get away with because he wants to take time to compose his own songs, the ones rejected in London as “original”, which means something anyone could compose, when what is commercially required are musicians who can play rock standards. The Swiss, on the other hand, praise him for writing his own stuff and reveal themselves also to be musicians who play folk music at various camps and conventions.

The point of this story, as of the first two, is that the main protagonists are all losers who have a diminished sense that they are so because they have a diminished sense of everything. It isn’t just that whether his music is any good is left ambiguous; it is that he gives away his diminished capacities by talking in clichés, which means that you cannot ask what the terms mean, where they come to ground, what they in fact describe. Ishiguro has given away a lot by writing deliberately in a style full of wrong word choices so as to indicate the flatness of the thinking of his protagonists. It is very different from entering into the mind of an idiot or a near idiot, such as Faulkner does, so as to give the reader the information needed to understand what is going on. In that case, the insight is gleamed from among the statements made by the mentally deficient individual, while here the purpose of the flattened language is to allow the reader to experience the cloud of unknowing from which his leading characters do not emerge, and thereby convey what how it is for ordinary people rather than literary people to live, what their consciousnesses are like and, by the way, what role music plays in such consciousnesses. We are very far away from Mann’s Dr. Faustus who knows what deal he makes with the devil for his own insightful purposes. Here, people are banal and not even all that evil, just trying to sound the way they think people are supposed to sound.

The play on the Alps, Germans, little inns run with the help of folksingers, is of course all that is needed to see the association with The Sound of Music. So there is parody here, the Van Trapp family reduced either to a few Swiss or a few Brits who also settle down to run an inn. But the questions reside that are always nagging about the Van Trapp family. What they did after the war was to perform concerts and run an inn? The Captain couldn’t have been such a big deal in Austria as he is made out to be in the musical if that is all he could manage—though the truth is that most heroes of the war, from Schindler to Audie Murphy to the resistance heroes in Defiance, settled down to humdrum lives. The real question is the one raised many years ago by Pauline Kael. What if some of the children didn’t like singing or being part of a family chorus? Look what happened to that other family of musicians, the Jacksons. Life is not so easy that everyone embarks on a project in unison. There is life beyond the Rogers and Hammerstein clichés, and that is what Ishiguro is trying to plumb, though he does so in a limited way, largely by allowing the clichés, after a while, to ring hollow.

This third story is better constructed than the first two because while sticking, like them, to the basic premise of a short story, which is to remain in a single setting and strike a single mood, it has enough inventions and surprises in plot to keep an interest beyond that in the atmospheric. You don’t always know what the characters will say next. The story is also successful because it has a succinct point, another characteristic of the short story. It moves along the discussion about the relation of popular music to ordinary, cliché filled life by providing the following answer: People support one another’s fantasies about their talent and their heroic attempts to vindicate that talent by making allowances for them. That is the case for both the young musician and the Swiss duet. Popular music is not only one of those venues in which people think themselves to have talent. It also legitimates the idea that everyone has talent, can make something of themselves, that everyone can become a rock musician, because its lyrics speak of the success of the individual against the crowd and also because it is a discipline in which something a person of little talent can ape their betters. The Trapp Family singers are a delusion because they are an idealized version of what popular music success is, a success minus all its problems, and also because their story makes Bobby Brady think he can sing—never mind whether they themselves could sing all that well. It was their story that they sold, not themselves.

The fourth story, Nocturne, and so the central story of the collection because its title gives the collection its title, overtly refers to Raymond Chandler, who infiltrates every part of the Ishiguro story. The hero is a fellow who, like Philip Marlowe, wanders into people’s lives and tries to help manage them for the better out of his stock of knowledge of how the real world operates. But the hero, like Marlowe, is more a bumbler than a problem solver. He is the one who is taken in by the people around him who may not know very much but enough to fool him. The Ishiguro hero is a musician who is told by his agent to have cosmetic surgery because he is so ugly that he will never be recognized for being a fine musician. He meets a movie star at a hotel where he is to rehabilitate from the surgery (which had been paid for by his ex wife, perhaps to pay off her guilt for having left the poor sucker). The movie star listens to his music and apparently, she later reveals, takes away from that the notion that they are two of a kind: personalities rather than great talents, their talent in knowing how to present themselves. The surgery, by that reading, is in that way justified, though you do not know if that is Ishiguro’s view because the movie star, after all, is all into justifying whatever she does after the fact.

The story uses a number of Chandler devices. People are met when they are at a low point, and then, after enticing the hero, descend even further. There is the Hollywood setting, glamorous, sleek, met mostly at night. There is a mad chase after god knows what. And through these devices, the hero is stripped of even the little he thought he knew about life at the beginning of the story. He is reduced to a solipsistic creature whose sense of prestige comes from never comparing himself, except negatively, to everyone else, and by settling for a sense of ignorance about what he is actually worth, as a talent and as a person, none of that mattering anymore. That is the wisdom drawn from the adventure. It is not much to cling to, a bloodless version of Chandler’s nihilism.

The last story, Cellists, starts out as a repeat of the first story, and maybe began life as a draft of it. It has a Venice like city, a band of not so good musicians playing at a café in a plaza not far from a canal. It has a person who intrudes in the life of one of the musicians, who also happens to be from Eastern Europe and so cannot be expected to understand the ways of the West, and so has an excuse for his own bad manners as well as for inquiring about the manners of others. When the story unfolds, however, it can be understood as moving off in a very different direction than the one from which the series of short stories departed. It is less about the meaning of fame, or whether, as in the later stories, one has the perspective to judge whether one has talent, than it is about what happens to the soul as a result of having to come to terms with the uncertainty that accompanies such matters. The soul retreats into itself, becoming mature enough to think there is something special about one’s own existence that requires no proof, both the performing cellist and the woman who becomes his music coach even though she cannot play music, regarding as each their own little secret that they are really artists, far beyond what their surroundings confer on them. He deserves better than to play at a café; she deserves better than an American husband.

Every person is like that musician in developing some version of a twisted smile whereby people give away that they think themselves above it all. The nondescript academic who thinks himself wise; the butcher who has mastered the art of carving raw meat when other people can barely carve their turkey at Thanksgiving; the sanitation worker who feels he is superior to those who have not found out a way to make a living that supports a family as well as to those who have not had to do it from scratch and from good sense and diligence rather than because they have been born with money or given good educations. That is the edge everyone finds their way to. A belief in it is the price and nature of maturity. It is Ishiguro’s irony that Mann’s reverse bildunsroman—of a man brought low rather than raised high by encounters that deform rather than create his soul—is reversed into being the ordinary bildunsroman whereby everyone comes to accept the flimsiness of their claim on reality.

Ishiguro’s collection is, as a whole, and the final story most of all, very bleak and cold. None of the characters are appealing and their lives are all going nowhere. The moment of revelation in each story turns out, as the title of the collection suggests, to be a nightfall, an entry into a deeper darkness, as each one reveals how limited are the people involved and, more, how there is no escaping one’s limitations in understanding one’s limitations. The only recompense is a rhetoric by which only the immature and those past their prime will be taken in. There is no sweetness to the characters, only naïveté replaced, with maturity, by implacability.

Going beyond the life of the musician, the stories are about the human condition. To paraphrase Becket, one goes on only because one does not know what else to do. There is no softness, no grace, other than in playing the music which even the musicians do not respect, but keep at, because it is the only thing they know how to do, and so, for a moment, provides them with some meaning for those moments before they drift out of one another’s lives. They are atomic rather than communal. This is a twist on the idea of the artist as embodying all of our quests for creativity, everyone warming to the artist within themselves. We all play for the hotel guests and for ourselves, in no particular order. We are all artists of our own limited competence in our own occupations. The artist fools himself who thinks he is more than that—and yet, what more than that is there to be?

The clones in Never Let Me Go are a metaphor for the human condition. The special case comes to include everything else. A clone dies early and after much pain and thinks it knows what love is when it may only be going through the motions of love which, of course, can be said of any human. The musician is, in similar fashion, a metaphor in Nocturne and Other Stories for the social condition. Musicians are driven, prestige conscious and uncertain about where they each stand as to their talents. The same is true of everyone else. Ishiguro’s talent is to encourage us to make the generalization.

There is no life in the villainy or helplessness of Ishiguro’s characters. Not Conrad nor Shakespeare nor even Sartre, whose characters at least struggle against their meaninglessness. Ishiguro’s characters succeed only in accepting their abstract nature as ideas of themselves and their roles and have no feelings about such resignation. No blood, no mess; only stasis interrupted by fleeting thoughts of something else. It is remarkable that anyone would want to pick up and read such a merciless portrait of humanity. Dogs may be sweet, but people aren’t. Ishiguro’s stories are not a pleasure to read. The grim irony is not enough of a pleasure to compensate for the seedy and dishonorable motives, the undiscerning characters, and the march of everyone to a pathetic rather than a tragic doom. Nor are the stories vividly existential as is the case in Nathanial West’s Miss Lonelyhearts, where the disfigured soul is imagined as a disfigured body. The stories are about the desire for prestige and fame as those are rendered fanciful and self-destructive. The stories unsettle us by making such goals very remote from the substance of things, all the while nothing else held out as a worthy object of engagement. And so we follow sports and the stock market and various other fandoms not for the purpose of dreaming of a better life but only because we cannot dream of anything better to do than chase prestige and fame. Those are the substance of social life, as so much of social science tells us, and yet they are paltry things.

What has been said about Ishiguro has more to do with his distinctive and hard earned effects and his elicitation that there is something not quite right about the confusions of life than with how he provides a fresh description of life, which is what Mann and Tolstoy and the modern greats provide. Once you have lived in Updike’s world, you must remember to climb out or suspend it; you stop thinking of it as a contrivance. Ishiguro, for his part, is middlebrow like Chandler. You are entertained and also a bit startled and unsettled by contrivances that slowly settle into a world of their own that you have no difficulty recognizing as not the real world. The middlebrow, is another name for an entertainment, to borrow Graham Greene’s term for a story that gives pleasure by the way it is worked out according to the author’s design, rather than for its meaning. The entertainment what has become the major chord of Post-Modernism. Miami Beach architecture is pleasing because it is so over the top, so obvious in its attempts at creating grand effects. You enjoy the illusion of grandness rather than its reality, while Radio City Music Hall or Versailles is truly grand. Yet the entertainment is a long established way of being a novel. Think of Robert Louis Stevenson and Alexander Dumas. Yet, after a while and some sixty years later, the Benbow Inn and the pirates of Treasure Island have long since come to reside in the minds of schoolchildren and adults as primary images, the reality the book portrays more vivid than most people’s much poorer sense of reality. So in our own darker time, Ishiguro provides tropes that will emerge from being merely that, we all leading the limited lives of dogs and popular musicians.