8 - Parody and Performance in Nocturnes

Summary

Kazuo Ishiguro's 2009 short story collection, Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall, returns to themes about music that were first explored in his 1995 novel, The Unconsoled, but these stories focus on some of the degrading aspects that arise from the commercialization of music. Imagined or remembered cities or villages, unappreciated musicians, unpredictable musical performances, unspoken disappointments associated with life, pleasures and perils of intimate or business relationships, and the nature of work or employment occupy these stories as well. Ishiguro invites readers to examine how characters deal emotionally with their stifled artistic dreams. Instead of presenting musicians simply dedicated to art, though, or facing challenges at the peak of their career (like Ryder in The Unconsoled), Nocturnes presents its musicians as driven mostly by commercial interests and industrious endeavours. They subsequently find themselves entangled in the subaltern status that comes with their failure to position themselves favourably in the field. In stories that strive for more comedy than in his previous works, Ishiguro once again weaves the poignant with the mundane. His characters must mask their desires for recognition while suppressing their disappointment and anguish.

The first story, ‘Crooner’, is told by a young street musician. He encounters an older, very successful singer, Tony Gardner, who is about to leave his current wife for a younger one, and who solicits the narrator 's help with staging the dismissal. The narrator Janeck returns in the last story, ‘Cellists’, to report the events of another street musician named Tibor who had fallen under the unusual tutelage of a self-proclaimed prodigy, a middle-aged woman named Eloise McCormack. Tony Gardner's cast-off wife, Lindy, reappears in the fourth story, ‘Nocturne’, apparently still in love with Tony and his successful musical career but ready to move on with her own ambitions. In ‘Nocturne’ she has had facial surgery and is recovering at an exclusive hotel where she meets another musician who has been advised to have surgery, so that he can become more attractive and subsequently more successful in the profession. It is this musician, Steve, who narrates his and Lindy 's twilight encounters and shares her unanticipated wisdom about musical talent and commercial success. The middle stories, ‘Come Rain or Come Shine’ and ‘Malvern Hills’, are stand-alone, first-person narratives that focus on young adults in a variety of jobs together with the tribulations that come from managing their desires amidst their mundane realities.