Klara and the Sun

by Kazuo Ishiguro

said: ‘It must be great. Not to miss things. Not to long to get back to something. Not to be looking back all the time. Everything must be so much more…’

‘Society? That sounds rather quaint. What’s it mean?’ ‘It means you walk into a store or get into a taxi and people take you seriously. Treat you well. Having society. Important, right?’

feelings. A part of us refuses to let go. The part that wants to keep believing there’s something unreachable inside each of us. Something that’s unique and won’t transfer. But there’s nothing like that, we know that now. You know that. For people our age it’s a hard one to let go. We have to let it go, Chrissie. There’s nothing there. Nothing inside Josie that’s beyond the Klaras of this world to continue.

I hate Capaldi because deep down I suspect he may be right. That what he claims is true. That science has now proved beyond doubt there’s nothing so unique about my daughter, nothing there our modern tools can’t excavate, copy, transfer. That people have been living with one another all this time, centuries, loving and hating each other, and all on a mistaken premise. A kind of superstition we kept going while we didn’t know better.