Monumental Moments: Narrative Complicity in the Novels of Kazuo Ishiguro

In this chapter, Takahiro Mimura analyses the potential capacity of monumental devices that are depicted in Ishiguro’s novels to capture the memories of certain events and transfer them to other people or generations. He focuses on such devices as the cairn in The Buried Giant, the Peace Statue in Nagasaki in A Pale View of Hills, and the Sattler Monument in The Unconsoled to highlight that the narratives that are expected to be stored there often get diversified or conflict with each other. He discusses these novels with critical models such as ‘place and identity’ and ‘remembering and forgetting’. Moreover, he explains that the active selection and retention of the preferable narratives, which can be called ‘narrative complicity’ or the ‘public secret’, play a vital role in such a process.