Imaginary Homelands Reimagined in the Novels of Kazuo Ishiguro

Abstract

Taking as a point of departure Salman Rushdie’s essay “Imaginary Homelands,” this paper will analyze the three novels of Japanese-born English writer Kazuo Ishiguro in order to demonstrate how the peculiarities of memory and a cross-cultural imagination work to create novels in which Japan and the Japanese culture, either physically or subliminally, plays a vital role. Each novel is analyzed separately to reveal the cross-cultural elements, as well as how aspects of one culture shed light on another. To perceive parallels and articulate similarities in differences is perhaps the specific territory of the between-world writer. Kazuo Ishiguro’s principal commitment in his novels is to observe interaction of the past and present, of East and West, and capture the evocative texture of memory.