Kazuo’s trademark estrangement paradoxically brings his characters closer to us.
A Tale of Two Ishiguros
Review by Cody Poulton
Once upon a time there were two men who shared the same surname and an interest in robots. One of them, Kazuo, left Japan and became a little Englishman, but he always felt like an outsider, which is a good thing for a writer, which is what he became. He impersonated Japanese people in his first two novels but really didn’t find his voice until he became the English butler “Stevens” in his very popular novel The Remains of the Day (1989), for which he won the Booker Prize. That was made into a movie, as was Never Let Me Go (2005). He was awarded an even bigger prize, the Nobel, in 2017, and even knighted by the Queen.
His latest novel, Klara and the Sun, is about an android, though in the novel she’s called an AF, short for Artificial Friend. Klara tells the reader how she becomes companion to a sick young girl called Josie (who is just a typo away from becoming josei, “female” in Japanese). Many other children have AFs in the novel, that is if they can afford them. Some children are “lifted,” which gives them a head start on life. Rick, Josie’s friend, is gifted, but the better schools only take the lifted ones. (There is a common theme about genetic mutations in a play called “The Sun,” by Maekawa Tomihiro, which had a staged reading at RADA in London, in 2016).
The other Ishiguro, Hiroshi, stayed in Japan and became a famous engineer, making android twins of real people, which he calls Geminoids. Hiroshi is a little like Mr. Capaldi in Kazuo’s novel, who is an echo (or do we call it a kind of copy? Imitation is the name of this game) of Coppelius/Coppola in The Sandman, E.T.A Hoffmann’s 1816 weird tale about an automaton. Hiroshi first made a copy of his daughter, which was so creepy that when the girl met her Geminoid she said she didn’t want to go to daddy’s school any more. (Hiroshi likes telling that story). Then he made a copy of himself, but found he had to undergo cosmetic surgery so he could stay as young as his Geminoid, who never gets old. Asked why he made these Geminoids he explained that the best way to understand what a human is was to build one. His Geminoid F (F stands for female) starred in “Sayonara,” a play written by Oriza Hirata, his colleague at Osaka University. This play was about an android companion given by a father to his sick daughter, played by American actress Bryerly Long. It was later developed into a movie by Fukada Kōji about a Japan that had become uninhabitable after a nuclear accident like the one in Fukushima. Geminoid F was nominated for best actress in the Japan Academy Awards for 2015 but didn’t win.
Robots are already a crowded literary genre. On the first page of Ian McEwan’s 2018 novel Machines Like Us (a novel Kazuo studiously avoided reading when writing Klara) his protagonist remarks that, “artificial humans were a cliché long before they arrived.” Mary Shelley, who invented science fiction, was also the first to write a narrative in the voice of someone who is not human, a character she calls the Creature, in Frankenstein (1818). Karel Čapek’s play “RUR” (Rossum’s Universal Robots), first staged in Prague in 1921, coined the word “robot.” It used the idea of the automaton to explore twentieth-century fears about the effects of mass production. When it was staged in Tokyo just three years later, it was translated as Jinzō Ningen (artificial humans). A Japanese film adaptation of “RUR” is being released this month. Čapek’s play kicked off a century-long fascination with robots in Japan. Usually, like Astro Boy and Pepper, they are friendly, as Fred Schodt and others have pointed out. Even Major Kusanagi in Masamune Shirow’s Ghost in the Shell (manga version, 1989-90; anime version by Ōtomo Katsuhiro in 1995) is a sympathetic cyborg. Hiroshi’s quest for human verisimilitude, however, plunges his bots straight into what roboticist Mori Masahiro called the Uncanny Valley. The closer they seem like us, the more repellent they are.
In contrast, Kazuo’s trademark estrangement paradoxically brings his characters closer to us. The author has a way of using the most ordinary language to make the world seem very strange indeed. Klara calls parties “interaction meetings,” for example, and every once in a while the world through her eyes becomes pixilated, devolving into cubes and cones. Yet Klara’s keen power of observation (she looks, she learns) is the very source of her uncanny sense of empathy for the human beings she comes in contact with. She would do anything for Josie, but like so many Kazuo characters, she seems to miss the bigger picture until the story pretty much swallows her whole. As is usual in Kazuo’s novels, the truth is hiding in plain sight. Klara is very smart but she’s also quite naive. She thinks the Sun (which she always capitalizes, like God) is a sentient being that cares for her. (Klara is, after all, solar powered, so she’s not totally wrong). So strong is her faith in the Sun that it brings about a kind of deus ex machina that takes the course of the story in an unexpected, salvific direction, which some readers may feel is a cop-out.
Will humans be replaced? Rendered obsolete? This is the perennial, and now rather tiresome theme of the robot genre, especially for Hollywood. Kazuo takes a rather different tack, by using the Artificial Friend as a means to explore the mysteries of human intimacy. (So, essentially, does McEwan). At one point Paul, Josie’s father, asks Klara if she believes in the human heart, to which Klara replies she certainly believes that it is complex, but it must be limited and therefore can be understood, even imitated. Paul, an engineer, remains skeptical. For him, the heart is like Artificial Intelligence’s black box, something we really cannot look inside to figure out how it arrives at the computations it makes. Like Hiroshi, Kazuo also asks what it means to be human, but in order to go somewhere toward answering this big question he tackles other hard, ethical questions about love, loneliness, mortality, the fear of losing control—of being, as this novel calls it, “substituted.” Hiroshi should read Kazuo. So should you. You might say Kazuo has beaten Hiroshi at his own game.