‘The Remains’ of Charlotte Brontë in the Early Novels of Kazuo Ishiguro

In this chapter, Hiromi Nagara, referring to the archives of the Ishiguro Papers, clarifies the process of the establishment of the narrative techniques Ishiguro has applied to his fiction under the influence of other writers. Charlotte Brontë was once referred to by Ishiguro himself as one such writer, but their relationship has not been closely verified. Nagara identifies the characteristics of Ishiguro’s narrative in his early works using such phrases as ‘inner feelings reflected in the eyes of others’, ‘oozing of private feeling’, and ‘spikes of words’, and she compares them with those of Jane Eyre and Villette by Charlotte Brontë. She then picks up Ishiguro’s undergraduate essays about Brontë’s narrative technique. Among young Ishiguro’s profound considerations about Jane Eyre and Villette, Nagara finds his preference of ‘understatement’ to ‘the straight reveal of emotions’, which is the primal interest of the later Ishiguro as a writer.