‘The Remains’ of Charlotte Brontë

A new scholarly book with Brontë-related content:

Japanese Perspectives on Kazuo Ishiguro

Editors: Takayuki Shonaka, Takahiro Mimura, Shinya Morikawa

Palgrave Macmillan Cham

978-3-031-24997-6

Published: 05 January 2024

This collection of essays offers new perspectives from Japan on Nobel Prize–winning author Kazuo Ishiguro. It analyses the Japanese-born British author from the vantage point of his birthplace, showing how Ishiguro remains greatly indebted to Japanese culture and sensibilities. The influence of Japanese literature and film is evident in Ishiguro’s early novels as he deals with the problem of the atomic bomb and Japan’s war responsibility, yet his later works also engage with folk tales and the modern popular culture of Japan. The chapters consider a range of Japanese influences on Ishiguro and adaptations of Ishiguro’s work, including literary, cinematic and animated representations. The book makes use of newly archived drafts of Ishiguro’s manuscripts at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas to explore the origins of his oeuvre. It also offers sharp, new examinations of Ishiguro’s work in relation to memory studies, especially in relation to Japan.  ​ 

 The book includes the chapter:

‘The Remains’ of Charlotte Brontë in the Early Novels of Kazuo Ishiguro

Hiromi Nagara 

In this chapter, Hiromi Nagara, referring to the archives of the Ishiguro Papers, clarifies the process of the establishment of the narrative techniques Ishiguro has applied to his fiction under the influence of other writers. Charlotte Brontë was once referred to by Ishiguro himself as one such writer, but their relationship has not been closely verified. Nagara identifies the characteristics of Ishiguro’s narrative in his early works using such phrases as ‘inner feelings reflected in the eyes of others’, ‘oozing of private feeling’, and ‘spikes of words’, and she compares them with those of Jane Eyre and Villette by Charlotte Brontë. She then picks up Ishiguro’s undergraduate essays about Brontë’s narrative technique. Among young Ishiguro’s profound considerations about Jane Eyre and Villette, Nagara finds his preference of ‘understatement’ to ‘the straight reveal of emotions’, which is the primal interest of the later Ishiguro as a writer.