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PARTISAN REVIEW
Japan and, as it happens, is a novel about six unexceptional days in the
cloistered life of an English butler in 1956. Yet the author, Kazuo Ishig–
uro, is one of those lucky individuals with one foot on either side of the
widening gap between Japan and the world at large: born to a samurai
family in Nagasaki, but resident in England since the age of five, he is as
Japanese as his name, and as English as the flawless prose he writes. Janus–
minded, he is perfectly positioned to see how one island of shopkeepers,
bound by a rigid sense of class and an unbending sense of nationalism,
can shed light on another; how one monarchy, bent on keeping up ap–
pearances, in part by polishing nuances, is not so different from another;
and, in fact, how the staff of an English country house, with its stiff–
backed sense of "self-training," its precisely stratified hierarchy, its uni–
forms and rites and stress on self-negation, might almost belong to Sony
or Toshiba. No man may be a hero to his valet, but every valet is a
samurai hero to his man.
The Remains oj the Day
is, as its title suggests, written in that fa–
vorite Japanese form, the elegy for vanished rites; it is a vespers novel, set
in an England made more lovely and more lulling by the late-afternoon
light in which it is seen, dark shadows lengthening across the empty
rolling lawns. And, to all appearances, the novel, which recently won the
Booker Prize, the highest literary award in Britain, is nothing more, re–
ally, than a portrait of a gentleman, reflected in the elaborately formal
diary of a butler as he takes himself on a motoring holiday through the
English countryside, doing nothing more dramatic than looking in on a
former colleague, peering, in some perplexity, at the ways of the ordi–
nary world and wondering what "dignity" in a butler truly means.
The
Remains oj the Day
may seem just a small, private English novel done to -
Japanese - perfection; a vale from a valet. To anyone familiar with Japan,
however, the author's real intention slips out as surely as a business card
from a Savile Row suit.
For Ishiguro's butler is so English that he could be Japanese, in his
finely calibrated sense of rank, his attention to minutiae, his perfectionism
and his eagerness to please; his pride is his subservience, and his home is
only in the past. Stevens has no self outside his job, and no thought for
anything except his job; he even - like a good company man - gives
"military-style pep-talks" to his staff, and surrenders now and then to
"wishful thinking of a professional kind." His is the gentleness of inno–
cence as well as self-delusion.
In
smaller ways too, he reminds one of a
sararil1lan :
solemnly prac–
ticing witticisms in the hope of putting his new employer at ease, and
deriving his great - his only - emotional excitement from excruciatingly
impersonal daily chats over cocoa in the parlor with the housekeeper.
Sometimes, when he addresses his dying parent as "Father" (and never
