Outrageous Game 
Frank Kermode
All of Kazuo Ishiguro’s six novels are first-person narratives. For the most part the voices of these narrators are quiet, civilised, rather formal. This is so whether the speaker is the obsessive butler of the most famous of the books, The Remains of the Day (1989); or one of the somewhat demented heroes of The Unconsoled (1995) or When We Were Orphans (2000); or the Japanese, guilty or exiled, of the first two books, A Pale View of Hills (1982) and An Artist of the Floating World (1986). Indeed this way of speaking seems appropriate to Japanese conversation, to the talk of a society in which manners are always important, and in which they might sometimes take precedence over candour. The characters do a lot of deferring and apologising, and even when they aren’t expressly said to be bowing gently to one another you can easily imagine they are.
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Frank Kermode’s books include The Sense of an Ending and The Uses of Error.
Other articles by this contributor:
‘It’s the way people like us don’t talk’ · Andrew Motion’s Boyhood
Nutmegged · The War against Cliché: Essays and Reviews 1971-2000 by Martin Amis.
Our Muddy Vesture · Frank Kermode watches Pacino’s Merchant of Venice
Nothing for Ever and Ever · Housman’s Pleasures
Complicated Detours · Darwin’s Worms by Adam Phillips
Here she is · Zadie Smith
Maximum Assistance from Good Cooking, Good Clothes, Good Drink · Auden’s Shakespeare
Point of View · Atonement by Ian McEwan
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