Kazuo Ishiguro - Genre Bender

Another writer it took imprisonment to get me to read is Kazuo Ishiguro. He was another to point out to me how fluid is genre. Amongst Katie Fitzpatrick's review of his latest novel, Klara and the Sun, in The Nation she makes no bones about Ishiguro's efforts at speculative fiction 

Despite its futuristic premise, Klara and the Sun is aimed at our present. It explores many of the subjects that fill our news feeds, from artificial intelligence to meritocracy. Yet its real political power lies not in these topical references but in its quietly eviscerating treatment of love. Through Klara, Josie, and Chrissie, Ishiguro shows how care is often intertwined with exploitation, how love is often grounded in selfishness. And this dynamic is not only interpersonal but central to today’s politics as well. Love, Ishiguro reminds us, is not always an antidote to exploitation and repression; it may even be the thing that makes us complicit in large-scale violence.

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Klara and the Sun also allows us to draw similar parallels between Ishiguro’s science fiction and real-world exploitation. But there is one striking difference in the way these books depict oppression: In Never Let Me Go, the clones’ exploitation by humans hinges on people’s ability to dehumanize and forget them. Their lives are invisible to those who will one day use their organs. But in Klara and the Sun, the AFs’ exploitation hinges on people’s ability to humanize and know them. The AFs are harvested precisely for the kinds of human interactions they provide their human owners. While both novels consider the exploitation of so-called disposable workers, this book focuses on those we exploit primarily for emotional labor and care work—a timely commentary during a pandemic in which the essential workers who care for us are too often treated as disposable.

Anne Whitehead notes that in Never Let Me Go, empathy produces cruelty as much as care; empathizing with those close to us may be our justification for harming others. In Klara and the Sun, Ishiguro makes a related argument: When our affection for others emerges from our own loneliness and desire for connection, it may never shed itself of selfishness and violence. Josie empathizes with Klara enough to solicit her consent (“I don’t want you coming against your will,” she tells her at the store) and to treat her as a confidante and friend, but this kind of empathy is not enough to undo the uneven basis of their relationship. If Never Let Me Go demonstrates how easily we can exploit those we never have to see, Klara and the Sun shows how easily we can exploit even those we claim to love.

And is that not the essence of what we should be doing with any type of writing: fight dehumanization?

The review ends with:

...Klara and the Sun is a story as much about our own world as about any imagined future, and it reminds us that violence and dehumanization can also come wrapped in the guise of love.

Read the review. Read Ishiguro.