Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: In his 2005 novel Never Let Me Go , Kazuo Ishiguro symbolically presents the ‘young Kazuo’ as a fading, distinctly Japanese part of himself that he left behind when he moved to England at the age of five. Rather than imagining an alternative life, as John Freeman suggests, the novel mourns the disappearance of Ishiguro’s purely Japanese self – a childhood memory gradually dissolving. Kathy mirrors this fate; her inevitable disappearance mirrors that of the young Kazuo. Through parallel structures in the novel and across Ishiguro’s body of work, I argue that Kathy embodies the young Ishiguro who is destined to fade from memory.
Source: English Literature
Author: Shigeo Kikuchi
Institution: Kansai Gaidai University
Language: English
Subfield: Philosophy
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W7160831024