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The novels of Kazuo Ishiguro, from A Pale View of Hills (1982) to The Unconsoled (1995), all bear a powerful and sustained interest in the relationship between history and memory.1 Ishiguro seems fascinated with the uneasy coexistence of private and public memories in his characters. One of the structuring conflicts of each of his novels emerges from the main character's struggle--usually unsuccessful--to reconcile his private memories with the public memories of the nation and his fellow citizens. Each narrator's efforts provide the reader with a glimpse of the way that public and collective historical accounts can suppress and deform private memory; each novel seems to assert the important role that private memories can play in helping us recapture and relive the openness and contingency of historical moments in the face of the deterministic tendencies of the national collective memory. And yet in each novel we have reason to resist the narrators' private claims upon the past, because all four narrators are telling their stories--some acknowledge this more openly than others--in order to explain or excuse their own past behavior.
Cynthia Wong has identified the conflict between public and private memories as a fundamental one in Ishiguro's work, and traces it back through his first novel, A Pale View of Hills. In general, Wong argues, Ishiguro's novels suggest that private memory can help us recapture moments and experiences which public history may elide or suppress: "All of Ishiguro's narrators structure their tales according to discernible historical events and, in the unfolding of their texts, the narrators appear to arrive closer at uncovering some missing version of truth about that period."2 But the recovery of that truth is complicated by the self interest of the narrators. As the narrators seek to reconstruct, through private memories, a public historical context which they have experienced, they do so at least in part in order to excuse their own behavior in that public context. Hence the recapturing of that "missing version of the truth" must continually be tempered by the reader's awareness of the potential self interests of the narrator. Etsuko, the narrator of A Pale View of Hills, reconstructs the historical context of Nagasaki after the war, in part, to understand and explain the reasons for her daughter's recent...