Kazuo Ishiguro’s Nocturnes of these days

Abstract

Some musicologists consider that the notion of narrative brought into interpretative relationship with instrumental music is ‘neither heroic nor scandalously naïve’ on the grounds that it invites an experimental exploratory approach to the performances of music-critical thought. In my essay on Kazuo Ishiguro’s Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall (2009), I shall reverse the paradigm music and the narrative effect and construct an argument meant to prove that the effect of music in the five
narratives by Ishiguro is due to how the writer manages, through a subtle concatenation of character, slant/path, and discourse, to instantiate a multi-movement “plot archetype” similar to that in a nocturne. The under-current movement in Ishiguro’s Nocturnes eludes resolution and definitive thought just as musical nocturnes’ tranquility evokes a range of lyrical expressions depending on both the performance/performer and the listener. Such movement then allows into being the frisson of modern civilization and its avatars, of ideological crisscrossing, which may undercut the brightest of intention.