4 - Immigration and Emigration in Ishiguro

Summary

Ishiguro’s fiction is pervasively concerned with questions of home and homelessness, and with the kinds of displacement, un-belonging, and cultural otherness that are characteristic of the immigrant condition and that can be traced to Ishiguro’s own experience of being relocated, at the age of five, from Nagasaki, Japan to England. There is an irony in how Ishiguro’s characters are often constantly on the move as their movement is juxtaposed against their internal stasis. Yet, the motif of travel helps reflect the ungrounded or displaced condition of the immigrant. This chapter focuses on two novels that directly and explicitly address the question of migration from one country (and one continent) to another – A Pale View of Hills concerns the trauma of moving from Japan to England; When We Were Orphans centres around an intercontinental move, from pre-communist Shanghai to pre-war Britain – in order to consider the importance of immigration and the condition of being nationally and ethnically ungrounded in Ishiguro’s work. The chapter will also consider Ishiguro’s latest novel, Klara and the Sun, to consider immigration alongside attendant issues of race and labour.