This post is part of my series on Kazuo Ishiguro. This post does not yet have notes from the Harry Ransom Center.

This book has a special place in my heart as the first Ishiguro novel I ever read. But I do remember feeling a bit bored when I started reading this for the first time—it was just so slow, so many small details about their school life and relationships. Some people have described being really frustrated with these characters, because they just wanted to scream and shake them and ask them why they’re wasting their short, precious life on such silly matters when they should be trying to escape or something.

But that is part of why the revelation in the book is so great. You sort of always know all along what’s going to happen to these characters, but it doesn’t really hit you until suddenly one of the teachers just acknowledges it—and that weird, jarring moment of the truth being real but not quite feeling real is such a good mirror of the characters’ own experiences. This strange reality to us is so normal to them, which is why all they care about is who likes who or which teacher did what.

This could be interpreted with regards to oppression and how it’s so hard to rebel against a system you’ve always been immersed in. But it could also reflect the way we all (or at least I) react in the face of our own mortalities—we know it will happen eventually, but it never feels quite real even when acknowledged.

Interestingly, Ishiguro has said that he was surprised people found this book sad. To him, this is a cheerful book. He believes it is a book about how life is finite and we make the most of our time, and that the setting in this book provides a way to artificially compress a human’s lifespan. Though the setting is of course depressing, he believes that the fact that we still manage to care and love for each other despite all of our flaws and our is a celebration of human nature. What is important at the end our lives is how we loved others, and our memories are what end up becoming our most precious things (source for this paragraph: an interview with Cynthia Wong from Conversations with Kazuo Ishiguro).

Personally, I pretty devastated when I read this book (and even more the second time), which matches up with the reactions of the people I know who also had an emotional reaction to the book. I think there is just too much loss on the narrator’s part that is felt so keenly. I also could not forget that image of Kathy that the headmistress projected, the one of the little girl asking the cruel world to never let her go.

But it has been a while since I last read this book. I think rereading it with that perspective in mind, of how it is ultimately a celebration of human nature, will be an interesting experience.