Writing in Translationese: Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day and the Uncanny Dialect of the Diasporic Writer

Abstract

This essay argues that with his third novel, Kazuo Ishiguro has crafted a postcolonial work that illustrates how the crisis of decolonization is linked inextricably to the crisis of subjectivity itself. Unlike the novels of Achebe, Rushdie, and other postcolonial writers who represent colonial and postcolonial conditions by focusing on the actual postcolonial contexts, Ishiguro accomplishes his postcolonial critique by focusing more on the issue of cultural difference within the developed world than on issues explicitly resulting from the decolonizing process in the colonized parts of the world. Furthermore, his focus on the issue of cultural difference in Britain is not articulated around issues of immigration and assimilation of the other but, rather, around the internal otherness of the British subject itself. Ishiguro’s novel in effect argues that this internal otherness, always present to some degree, emerges most prominently during the breakdown of the Empire, when the traditional symbolic coordinates for British identity are weakened. Ishiguro expresses this perspective in his novel (1) by ever so faintly re-inscribing a traditional narrative form to reflect its internal strangeness or foreignness, (2) by providing an uncanny narrative documentation of the consciousness of a second-class British subject during the height of the decolonization period, and (3) by constructing a narrative that sublimates his own unique diasporic position as a means of coming to grips with his somewhat unique and personal ethnic and cultural conflicts.