Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall
Kazuo Ishiguro
Knopf, 2009
Hardcover, first U.S. edition
ISBN 978-0-307-27102-0
240 pages; $25.00

I’ve read none of Kazuo Ishiguro’s novels; I haven’t even seen the famous Merchant & Ivory film production of The Remains of the Day. I thought Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall might be a good introduction to this writer’s work, especially given my love of novella-length fiction.

I was very wrong.

Nocturnes is disappointing in many ways. The stories are neither realistic nor surrealistic, but merely present sketchily drawn characters in unbelievable circumstances. The writing is not particularly special; there are no passages I would point to as being beautifully written or particularly apt or insightful. Though the setting of two of the stories is Venice, there is no real sense of place conveyed by anything more than a reference to pigeons in the square and canals carrying boats manned by gondoliers. Each story purports to be about music in some fashion, but the music is incidental, rather than the core of the story. On the evidence of this book, it is difficult for me to understand why Ishiguro is so well-regarded that he has been knighted in England and named a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government.

This book goes wrong from the very first story, “Crooner.” This tale of an American singer, Tony Gardner, who specializes in the old standards, famous in the days when we still listened to music on turntables, is about the end of a marriage. I presume Ishiguro meant the story to be bittersweet, but the denouement undercuts this intention by replacing sweetness with Gardner’s stupidity about love and his overwhelming desire to make a comeback, and his beliefs about how love and fame interact. If the world really works the way Gardner believes it does – something that seems completely unrealistic to me – then I’m glad fame and fortune are not on my to-do list. None of the characters is likable in the least, with the possible exception of the narrator, a guitar player hired by the singer to help him serenade his soon-to-be ex-wife.

“Come Rain or Come Shine” is even more unbelievable. The narrator in this first-person tale visits a pair of college friends who are married to one another, but apparently going through a hard time in their marriage. The narrator has little in common with this couple except for a shared love of the American songbook with the wife, Emily – a love that seems to have died over the years, but which still lingers as a link between the three. The husband thinks that the narrator can help rekindle his marriage by keeping his wife company while the husband goes on a business trip. He hopes to return and greet his wife as if nothing ever happened, and that she will accept this after a few days entertaining the narrator, a plan so stupid that there can’t be a husband alive who really believes it would work. It gets worse when the narrator looks at the wife’s forbidden diary, and, in anger at what was written there about him, scrunches a page. He decides he has to hide his indiscretion at peering at the diary, but can’t get the page to return to its previous smooth and uncrumpled state; so he decides he needs to destroy the entire house and claim it was all done by a dog – including the scrunched page – in order to hide his indiscretion. There is no point to all this, no credible plot to follow, no consequences from anything any of the characters do. This isn’t a story; it’s a postmodern bit of nothing.

“Malvern Hills” is similarly disappointing. The narrator, a self-absorbed guitarist leeching off his sister for a summer, points a couple of tourists who have annoyed him to a bed and breakfast that he believes to be the worst in the area. When he meets up with the couple again on a hike, he feels guilty about what he did, but it relieved to hear that the husband actually thinks he’s gotten a good lead. The wife knows what the narrator has done, as she reveals later, but once again there are no consequences for anyone, no actual plot; nothing happens, and it happens at length.

“Nocturne” features Lindy Gardner, the wife of the crooner in the first story, and the narrator, a saxophonist, both immediately post-plastic surgery in an exclusive and expensive clinic. Lindy has had surgery in order to help her find a new husband; the narrator has had surgery because he’s allowed himself to be persuaded that the only reason his career has never taken off is because he’s ugly. The two strike up an acquaintance and get into a scrape while wandering the hospital in the middle of the night. Again, there are no consequences, no point, unattractive characters incompletely drawn, and no saving grace in the form of beautiful writing.

“Cellists” takes us back to St. Mark’s Square in Venice, where a young man is mentored by a woman who claims to be a cello virtuoso, though he never sees her play and she doesn’t even seem to have an instrument with her. There is some mystery as to her claim to virtuosity, but it’s relatively transparent (though her explanation is absurd).

The theme of this book, music and the night, led me to expect so much more from this book than I got. I do not know what Ishiguro intended with his recurring musical allusions, but it comes across as nothing but a gimmick by which to sell an interlinked group of stories. I expected sublimity, and got the worst sort of absurdity – not the absurdity of a Kafka story, but absurdity as pointlessness. I expected beautiful writing, and got workmanlike prose. I expected actual stories, or at least interesting postmodern experimentation, and got neither. This is, by far, the most disappointing book I’ve read this year.