Made in Translation: Language, “Japaneseness,” “Englishness,” and “Global Culture” in Ishiguro

My paper aims to highlight an inherently translated quality—an “originary translatedness”—of the Japanese British author Kazuo Ishiguro’s prose, which has often been read in terms of its supposed “English” and/or “Japanese” characteristics and that works on the levels of realism, genre, mood, and visuality. More specifically, focusing on the author’s first three novels, A Pale View of Hills (1982), An Artist of the Floating World (1986), and The Remains of the Day (1989), my article examines a type of translational realism at work in Ishiguro’s fiction that thwarts the “Englishness” and “Japaneseness” it simultaneously invokes, thus foregrounding the cultural–mythological construction of its images of “Japan” and “England.” In this way, as I argue, Ishiguro’s texts introduce readers to their own cultural preconceptions and stereotypes, providing the basis for the culturalist approaches dominating the critical response to his oeuvre. The final part of the article turns to a discussion of another of the author’s novels, When We Were Orphans (2000), highlighting how Ishiguro, through manipulation of traditional narrative categories—especially unreliability and realism—as well as through recycling of images and the language of mass media, constructs an inherently mediated fictional world of “global culture.”