A Divided World and the Journeys of Orphans: *Klara and the Sun* and the Novels of Kazuo Ishiguro
//Summary - Level-C1//
Kazuo Ishiguro’s novels repeatedly explore the loneliness of individuals who feel abandoned by disappearing systems, ideologies, or relationships. In Clara and the Sun, this “orphan” theme is developed through social inequality, parental love, and human isolation. Clara’s fragmented vision and memories symbolise a divided world in which people may briefly connect but ultimately remain separate. Similarly, Never Let Me Go portrays individuals resisting an unstoppable current through fleeting moments of love and nostalgia. Ultimately, Ishiguro suggests that although humans are inherently lonely, their temporary connections give their lives meaning and comfort.
1)
‘So, this may be a matter of privacy, but there’s something I’d like to ask Rick. Please tell me whether Rick and Josie's love is genuine, and whether it is a heartfelt love that will last forever. I must know. If the answer is yes, it will give me something to negotiate with, and I’ll be able to make amends for my mistake in town. So, Rick, please think carefully and tell me the truth.’
‘There’s no need to think about it. Josie and I grew up together; we’re both a part of each other. And we have plans for the future. So, of course, our love is genuine and eternal. It doesn’t matter to us that one of us has undergone the enhancement procedure whilst the other hasn’t. That’s the answer, Clara. There’s no other answer.’
‘Thank you. I’ve gained something very special. Now, don’t forget. At a quarter past seven this evening. Let’s meet again right here, where we’re standing now.”
(From Kazuo Ishiguro’s *Clara and the Sun*)
2)
The loneliness and affection of orphans.
I think this is ultimately the theme depicted by Kazuo Ishiguro, who weaves stories that transcend various genres. Reading his latest work, *Clara and the Sun*, makes me realise this.
I have the utmost trust in Ishiguro as a writer, and this is above all because he has championed the theme that ‘we, too, are orphans in this world’.
We, too, were simply orphans, abandoned in this world without even realising it.
3)
1. The theme of the orphan – Ishiguro’s works up to *When We Were Orphans*
Before discussing *Clara and the Sun*, I would like to write briefly about the themes explored in Ishiguro’s earlier works. What has Ishiguro been portraying up to *Clara and the Sun*?
4)
Ishiguro’s debut novel, *A Pale View of Hills*, and *An Artist of the Floating World* are often analysed primarily for being ‘set in Japan’. These works are often evaluated as stories of post-war Japan written by a British author of Japanese descent. However, I believe that the setting is not the crucial factor. This is because Ishiguro’s first three works—including his third novel, *The Remains of the Day*, set in post-war Britain—essentially tell the same story.
5)
*A Pale View of Hills* is the story of a mother who reflects on whether being forced to abandon her homeland and move to Britain after the war might have contributed to her daughter’s suicide. *The Painter of Modern Life*depicts a painter struggling to let go of a style that had brought him success under wartime values, even after the war. And *The Remains of the Day*, the story of a butler whose master had sided with Germany during the war, but who, in the post-war period, begins to wonder whether that ideology was, in fact, mistaken.
6)
In short, all three works were ‘stories of people who, although a great era defined by war had come to an end, were left bewildered, unable to accept the changes of that era fully’.
Ishiguro writes almost the same story, set in different places: Japan and Britain. —This is not to say that his work lacks originality; rather, I suspect that writers who have a particular message they wish to convey tend to go round in circles, repeating the same story over and over. Or rather, it is not just writers; we are probably the same. For some reason, we all end up repeating the stories that are important to us, in one form or another.
7)
The ideology one had believed in—in other words, the ‘parent’-like figure—suddenly vanishes. Yet this does not mean that one’s love for or attachment to that ‘parent’ disappears. Caught between these two extremes, people grapple with their anguish in solitude. The loneliness and love that follow a parent's disappearance—the strong, reassuring presence one had trusted—were the themes of these three works.
What is fascinating about Ishiguro’s works is that ‘affection’ manifests as ‘fabricated memories’. Just because a parent is gone does not mean that the love or attachment towards them vanishes. Therefore, memory always lies. Unable to accept that their parent was wrong, they rewrite their memories of them into something beautiful.
8)
This theme—that ‘orphans whose parents have gone missing fabricate memories (out of loneliness or love)’—came to the fore in the fourth work, *The Unconsoled*, and the fifth, *When We Were Orphans*. *The Unconsoled* is a rather experimental novel; it is a story in which the regrets and setbacks of a world-renowned pianist from his past appear as characters in their own right.
Meanwhile, *When We Were Orphans* is the story of Christopher Banks, an orphan who lost his parents, as he recalls his past whilst working as a private detective. Both are novels depicting recollections of the past.
9)
I am very fond of the novel *When We Were Orphans*, and I also love the commentary by Hideo Furukawa included in the paperback edition. It reads as follows. (I remember shouting from the bottom of my heart, ‘Exactly! That’s exactly what this story is about!’ when I read this commentary).
10)
Orphans remember the very moment they became orphans. They think, ‘It was as if the world had crumbled around me.’ ‘It was as if the whole world had been shattered to pieces,’ they think. The orphans ruminate on that moment.
The orphans were children.
And so the orphans think: When I grow up, when I grow up, when I grow up.
(Hideo Furukawa, ‘Come on, stop it. Don’t pretend you’ve forgotten,’ from *When We Were Orphans*)
11)
Banks, the famous detective who was once an orphan, tries to prove that his memories are correct. But in reality, those memories are not correct. Yet if he accepted that they are incorrect, his world would crumble. He has worked so hard to build his world from scratch; he cannot bring himself to destroy it again. So Banks lies to his memories, whilst crying out, ‘I want to go back—I want to return to the world where I had parents.’
12)
2. The Turbulent Tides of the Age and the Individual: Individualet Me Go*
Whenever I visit a bookshop, I find myself thinking, ‘Ishiguro really is a popular author in Japan, isn’t he?’ I could list plausible reasons—such as the fact that the translations are quite easy to read, or his Nobel Prize—but even so, it’s quite rare for a work of contemporary foreign literature to have a Japanese live-action adaptation planned by TBS. I sometimes wonder why he’s so popular in Japan.
13)
Ishiguro debuted in 1982 and won the Nobel Prize in 2017. In Japanese terms, he is a writer of the Heisei era. And when I think about that era, I vaguely feel that Ishiguro’s theme—‘the reminiscences of people left behind by grand ideologies’—must have resonated with the atmosphere of a time when Japan’s ‘grand narratives’ (economic growth! large corporations! marriage! patriarchy!) were fading away.
Mind you, it’s probably not a good idea to reduce it all too much to the narrative of the times. Even so, I can’t help but feel that the ‘stories of people left behind by the post-war system’ in Ishiguro’s works overlap with the image of ‘us in Japan, bewildered by the disappearance of the grand Shōwa-era system’.
14)
For example, both Haruki Murakami and Ryu Murakami write on the theme of ‘the system and the individual’. W. Murakami depicts the individual standing up to the system, for instance, fighting alone without being swept up by corporations, organisations, or ‘big birds’. Ishiguro, by contrast, goes a step further and places ‘nostalgia for the system’ at the forefront. These stories are set in an era where no grand systems remain to fight against. All that exists is a world where the current flows rapidly, merely using us and discarding us.
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Of course, if we had to choose between being a wall or an egg, we’d be the egg; but I think there is a certain loneliness in not being able to become the wall.
However, Ishiguro’s strength lies in his romanticism. He believes that in a world where the system has disappeared, the most important thing is the love between individuals.
16)
‘You know, I often think about two people in a river—a river somewhere, with a really fast current. And there are two people in that water. They’re clinging to each other. Clinging on for dear life, but in the end, the current’s too strong; they can’t hold on. In the end, they let go of each other’s hands and are swept away separately. We’re just like that, aren’t we? It’s a shame, Cass. Because we’ve loved each other from the very beginning—for a very long time, but in the end… we can’t stay together forever.”
(From Kazuo Ishiguro’s *Never Let Me Go*)
17)
This metaphor appears several times in the novel *Never Let Me Go*. The protagonists find themselves on the verge of being swept away by a raging river. Yet, even as they are about to be carried away, they reach out to take someone’s hand. But in the end, their hands slip apart, and they are swept away.
…Given the context so far, I think you can probably grasp what this metaphor is meant to convey.
18)
Ultimately, the river represents a fast-flowing world that is constantly changing. Within it, individuals cling desperately to one another. In that fleeting moment of clinging, love is born. Yet love does not triumph in the end; the river sweeps them away. … Don’t you think that’s rather romantic? Ishiguro genuinely believes that there is meaning in individuals clinging to one another, even for just an instant, amidst the river’s current.
19)
I’ve gone into the details first, but Ishiguro’s sixth novel, *Never Let Me Go*, is a true masterpiece, so if you haven’t read it yet, I’d really urge you to. The protagonist is Kathy, a carer for the ‘donors’. She recalls her memories of life at the boarding facility, Hailsham. The children at Hailsham, where she grew up, are being raised to ‘donate’ something. Only when the children reach puberty do they learn this.
20)
When the meaning of ‘donation’ becomes clear, the reader is taken aback. Why were the children burdened with such a fate? What, exactly, were the memories of Kathy’s girlhood that we had been reading about? (This part is far too precious to spoil, so I really do hope you’ll read the novel for yourselves.)
21)
However, even readers who were shocked by the meaning of ‘provision’ will surely come to realise, upon finishing the novel, that what the ‘providers’—Cathy and the others—were saying was by no means a tale from another world or the setting of a science fiction story, but simply a metaphor for ourselves.
In *Never Let Me Go*, the motif of the ‘discarded plastic bag’ appears frequently.
22)
A plastic bag. Its sole purpose is to hold something. And once there is nothing left to put inside it, it is discarded. This plastic bag is, in short, a metaphor for Kathy and the others, who have finished ‘giving’. (And at the same time, it is also a metaphor for us, who were brought into this world to give something to it.)
23)
Towards the end of the novel, there is a scene where, just before the wind blows away the plastic bag, it catches slightly on some barbed wire. As she watches, Kathy recalls her hometown. This is probably much the same as clinging to someone just a little, in an attempt to resist the flow of the river. Whether someone is there or not, that fleeting moment of resistance—just before being swept away—that love, that nostalgia, makes us forget our loneliness. That is what *Never Let Me Go* tells us even if it’s nothing more than a moment’s resistance.
24)
A plastic bag clinging on for just a moment, trying not to be blown away by the wind, whilst recalling a place to return to. … It’s poignant, but I really do love this metaphor. Every time I reread it, I think from the bottom of my heart that to be novel is better than *Never Let Me Go*.
25)
3. In a Divided World—*Clara and the Sun*
Following his seventh novel, *The Forgotten Giant*, he published his latest work, *Clara and the Sun*. *The Forgotten Giant* is a story in which ‘even the system’s memories are fabricated’, so it was a tale that was very much in Ishiguro’s style. And *Clara and the Sun*, like *Never Let Me Go*, has a slight sci-fi flavour. It is a story featuring AI.
26)
However, as with *Never Let Me Go*, I suspect this is less a deliberate attempt at science fiction and more a result of Ishiguro’s recurring theme of ‘orphans’—which naturally leads to robots and clones taking centre stage in the novel. In essence, they are children without parents. That is what they are.
27)
*Clara and the Sun* is the story of Clara, an AI robot with no parents.
The protagonist, Clara, is an Artificial Friend (AF) robot. In this world, robots keep evolving, and Clara and her fellow older-generation AFs sit on the shelves alongside the more advanced B3-type robots. Because the latest B3-type robots are the most popular, people rarely buy Clara. So Clara stares intently at the human world visible outside the shop window.
28)
And she learns. She observes the behaviour of humans. —And finally, a young girl arrives. Josie, a frail girl, says she wants to buy Clara. Josie’s mother gives Clara a strange instruction. It would be a long time before Clara understood the true meaning of that strange instruction…
29)
One theme of *Clara and the Sun* is a parent’s love for their child. However, the way this is portrayed is by no means simple. For example, the term ‘enhancement procedure’ appears in this novel. ‘Enhancement procedure’. Although it is not explicitly stated what this is, judging by the text, it refers to ‘a gene-editing procedure that parents have their children undergo to make them more intelligent’.
30)
Children who have not undergone the enhancement procedure find it difficult to gain entry to university. In this world, university admission is determined not by innate ability, but by whether one has undergone this procedure. However, this procedure also carries risks. It also burdens children. In some cases, undergoing the enhancement procedure can lead to death or leave a child in poor health. Yet even so, without the procedure, they cannot progress to university.
31)
Whether it is the difference between ‘old models’ and ‘new models’ in Clara’s world of AF robots, or the difference between those who have undergone ‘enhancement procedures’ and those who have not in the world of George and the other children, the world of *Clara and the Sun* is marked by inequalities over which individuals have no control.
(Reading this, I cannot help but feel a sense of gloom, as it seems inevitable that sooner or later we will face a world where ‘the scientific power wielded by parents over their children creates disparities in ability that are beyond the children’s control’). The idea that parental love drives these disparities among children is both deeply convincing and deeply saddening.
32)
Yet Clara observes and learns about this complex parental love up close. Watching Josie’s mother, Clara analyses her behaviour. Eventually, she realises a slightly unsettling quality mixed into the gaze Josie’s mother occasionally directs at her. This describes the moment when Josie’s mother and Clara went to see the waterfall.
33)
Her mother narrowed her eyes and leaned forward over the table. The waterfall receded into the background, and her face became so intensely emphasised that it seemed to split into eight separate boxes; for a moment, it even felt as though her expression differed in each one. For instance, in one box her eyes laughed cruelly, whilst in the next they brimmed with sorrow.
(‘Clara and the Sun’, p. 151)
34)
Clara’s field of vision is divided into several boxes, and it seems she perceives the world through a combination of them. However, when she went to see the waterfall, her mother’s expression differed from box to box. Both the box of cruelty and the box of sorrow entered Clara’s field of vision.
Why is Clara’s field of vision box-like? I believe this is not merely a result of Clara’s characterisation as a robot, but a device designed to introduce the motif of a ‘divided field of vision’.
35)
This work frequently features the motif of ‘various blocks combining to form a single image’. For example, Clara’s field of vision. Or the cityscape. The sunlight streaming through the glass windows. And the human emotions reflected in Clara’s eyes.
What is particularly brilliant is that the ‘box’ device is not confined solely to the field of vision. Clara’s fragmented field of vision eventually seeps into her memories, too.
36)
Over the last few days, several fragments of my memory have begun to overlap strangely. For instance, the memory of that dark morning when the sun saved Jozy, the memory of our trip to Morgan’s Falls, and the memory of the intensely bright restaurant Mr Vance chose all somehow blend into a single scene. My mother stands with her back to me, watching the spray rising from the waterfall, yet I am watching it not from a wooden picnic bench, but from a table at Mr Vance’s restaurant.
37)
(…) I know this is not a disorder of memory or perception. For if I so choose, I can always separate the memories and return each to its proper context. Moreover, when such multiple memories merge into a single image, I am always aware of the rough boundary between them. It is like a child who cannot yet use scissors properly, tearing something apart with their fingers in frustration.
38)
I am conscious of an irregular tear, like the one created in that moment, lying between my mother in front of the waterfall and the restaurant table. If you look closely at the scene I described earlier, you will see that the scale of the dark clouds overhead is not the same as that of the mother standing before the waterfall. Even so, such composite memories have been coming to mind with striking clarity of late.
(From the text of *Clara and the Sun*)
39)
The ‘scene from when she went to see the waterfall’ and the ‘scene from when she was sitting at a table in a restaurant’—two scenes that would not normally mix—appear simultaneously before Clara’s eyes. Although Clara, being a robot, realises this is strange, she nevertheless recognises that blocks of memory combine to form a single scene.
40)
Separate blocks. And when they come together, they form a single scene—a memory.
As I mentioned in the previous chapter, Ishiguro depicts the fabrication of memory. Yet surely, when we lie to ourselves about our memories, we do not set out to tell a lie ‘just here’ in a fragmentary way. Humans, too, end up with combinations that differ from reality at some point whilst layering several blocks of memory on top of one another. Clara’s block-like memories likely reflect this structure, rendered with Ishiguro’s characteristic touch.
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And perhaps this motif of ‘combined, segmented blocks’ also ties in with the division between robots and the division between humans.
Josie’s childhood friend Rick has a vague inkling that, even though he and Josie are together now, their paths will diverge as they go through life. This is because Rick has not undergone the enhancement procedure that Josie has. Rick knows that, even though they may appear to be the same kind of human, a ‘division of blocks’ undoubtedly exists within them. Just as a landscape that ought to fit within a single field of vision appears divided into blocks when seen through Clara’s eyes.
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Yet Rick, while realising that his and Josie’s paths will diverge, still says their love will never fade.
‘Even if Josie and I go out into the world and can no longer meet, on some level—a deep level—we’ll always be together. I can’t speak for Josie, but as for myself, I think I’ll always keep searching for someone just like her.
(From the text of *Clara and the Sun*)
43)
Individuals meet and part ways. It is perhaps like separate blocks that sometimes fit together, yet eventually drift apart again. This is how such people appear to Clara. For example, two people who joyfully embrace when they meet again on the street. Or Jozy and Rick, who are together now but will one day part ways (though they believe they remain connected in their hearts).
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Or Josie and her mother, who go about their daily lives whilst vaguely sensing that the time may come when they must part. To Clara, this might appear just as if individual blocks were to come together for a single moment—for instance, only when the sunlight streams in—to form a single scene.
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On a grand scale, the division of the blocks speaks of social inequality; on a smaller scale, it speaks of the loneliness of the individual—individualisation that, even between parent and child, we are not the same person. We, humans, are all lonely, mere individuals; perhaps that is precisely why we long to be part of the same landscape, even if only for a fleeting moment.
The loneliness of the blocks.
Even with our parents, we are lonely orphans, cast into this world entirely alone.
Hasn’t Ishiguro always depicted the stories of such people?
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In Conclusion
I have been reading on, all the while wondering just how far the journey of the orphans depicted by Kazuo Ishiguro will take them. *Clara and the Sun* is a story that is as gentle and dazzling as a children’s novel, yet it also possesses that tranquil cruelty so characteristic of Ishiguro; as I read, I found myself nodding in agreement, thinking, ‘This is it, this is exactly it.’
47)
To all the orphans cast out into this fragmented world.
The story of *Clara and the Sun* is one in which you can almost hear the author saying those very words.
It is undoubtedly a story written as if to gently hold up a ray of sunlight to us, living in this world where the current flows ever faster.
A Divided World and the Journeys of Orphans: *Klara and the Sun* and the Novels of Kazuo Ishiguro
https://note.com/nyake/n/naf8c46003608
The Question of Humanity in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Latest Work, *Klara and the Sun*
https://www.vogue.co.jp/change/article/vogue-book-club-klara-and-the-sun
*Klara and the Sun*: Synopsis and Commentary—Why Do Some Call It Boring?
https://nomidoku.com/klara-and-the-sun/
KLARA AND THE SUN – Official Trailer (4K)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wixzainceAE
Kazuo Ishiguro’s *Klara and the Sun* Explained: Can the Human Soul Be Replicated in a Robot?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5E6m4oWaAbM
*Klara and the Sun* by Kazuo Ishiguro
Auto-dubbed Version
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6GJ7mrqo9nQ
[Kunihiko Takeda - October 4] Wonderful news! Some incredibly bright and welcome news has just arrived for the Japanese people!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JSjZ4veMx_E&t=310s
