How compact, self-contained, and mysterious they were; how little they disclosed of him, whoever he was, an English-language writer with the name “Kazuo Ishiguro.” How compassionate and imaginative of him to write novels about either super-English-sounding people living in a country house in England in the 1930s (who could not have been named Kazuo Ishiguro), or super-Japanese-sounding printmakers in Osaka in the 1940s (who could not have written a novel in English). Ishiguro wrote first-person, but the narrator was always “unreliable,” i.e., crazy or ignorant, and different from the author.
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