Kazuo Ishiguro
nocturia
transl.: Argyro Mantoglu
ed. Psychogios, page 246

In general, lovable characters move in and out of the same micronarrative easily. They defy all the comforts of modernism.

This is a collection of five short stories by Nobel Prize winner Kazuo Ishiguro (1954 – ). We first got to know them in our language from the publications of Kastaniotis in 2009. I remember the title and subtitle of the quintet in question: “Night. Five stories about music and the night. Revising these works today through the mediation of the experienced Argyros Mantoglu, we are once again convinced of their textual merits. The osmosis of various musical idioms with prose of high distillations is considered appropriate from all points of view. In general, lovable characters move in and out of the same micronarrative easily. They do not lend themselves, I emphasize, to any conveniences of modernism. Nor do they fall into the traps of conventional, ostensibly realistically correct reconstructions of some of the crucial adventures that characterize the lives of true artists. A strict structure is, after all, a necessary safety net. Intrapsychic tensions are projected with the clarity, brevity, and sobriety known to distinguish the experienced human observer. Thus, the textual authority is indeed kept intact from the first to the last page of the book.

I note that the decoration is changing intensively. From Venice, and in particular from the emblematic Piazza San Marco, a common attraction of many literary roots, we are transported both to the “reassuring” countryside of the United Kingdom and to the interiors of a typical apartment in its polyphonic capital. Then the author will also not fail to lead us, with the same consolation and verbal alertness, as always, to the influential centers of Hollywood. Intensive dramaturgy is intelligently integrated into the space-time given to him. As a result, the true stories of the musicians that irrigated the Nights turned into territories for the enjoyment of reading. On the other hand, the famous diegetic “pragmatism” of the famous Kobo Abbe (1924-1993), the decisive economy of ambiguity of Anton Chekhov (1860-1904), the verbal enteleche of Raymond Carver (1938-1988), but also the unalterable immediacy of manifestations adopted by another Nobel laureate awards, Kenzaburo Oe (1935), seems to be a clear relative indicator of the Nights’ more specific stylistic preferences. Kazuo Ishiguro manages his primary material, that is, the life and fortune of famous or completely insignificant, usually hopeless musicians, in a penetrating, systematic way, and at the same time exemplary-clear. It remains, I mean, true to the tradition that programmatically insists not only on a complete understanding of objective reality, but also on its absolute use. Through detailed reports on the causes and culprits of multiple psycho-spiritual fluctuations of aesthetic being, the author in this case is looking for a non-doctrinal explanation of cheilor tragedy, which characterizes the behavior of the bearers of an undeniable, lifelong musical passion. Which, in short, brings the chosen archetypal characters of Nichtodias to any of their artistic ensembles.

Luck and necessity, in short, the democracy of life, once again form the framework of the stage action. Both the rise and inevitable fall of the characters circulating in the Nights certainly depend on their roots in the purely erotic realm. I argue that their ultimately unattainable juxtaposition remains sharp throughout the range of narratives. Thus confirming in practice the seemingly paradoxical Lacanian verdict that “to love means to give what you don’t have to someone who doesn’t want it.” In short, the music or songs that are always heard during the symbolic night are nothing but fragments of a polygynous ode to the absolutely unattainable identification of lovers.