2Kazuo Ishiguro’s retrofictions explore the labyrinth of memory. This paper explores the intricate relationship between trauma and memory. Caught in a time warp and struggling with dislocated memories, his narrators pursue a morbid cultivation of their trauma. They inhabit a liminal space, which is both part of society, but removed from society; it can be described as an experience of the ‘living dead’. The very names of two main protagonists of When We Were Orphans, Banks and Hemmings reflect marginalisation, an outsider’s reticence and instability, an identity granted by default.

3Trauma and memory seem to be mutually exclusive. Central to traumatic experience is that the past lingers unresolved, unremembered in a conventional sense. Unlike non-traumatic memories, which ‘are constantly combined with previous knowledge to form flexible mental schemas’ (Van der Kolk and Van der Hart 441–42), traumatic memories are often frozen in time and remain disconnected from previous contexts or from subsequent experience or reassessment and are therefore repressed from memory and replayed in repetitive, intrusive patterns. After a brief introduction, I shall discuss re-enactment in the light of Freud’s Trauerarbeit. Second, I study other ways of responding to trauma, particularly the different strategies of re-membering, dis-membering and misremembering the past negotiated by Ishiguro’s mnemonists. Finally, I examine aesthetic closure through public and private commemoration.

Spatiotemporal Displacement and Emotional Dislocation: Orphanhood

4A key word in the lexicon of When We Were Orphans is ‘Settlement’, or rather lack of settlement, instability which is applied to place, memory, character as well as rationale. The novel resonates with homelessness as it shifts from Edwardian London back to turn of the century Shanghai, to modern Hong Kong and London. A retired society detective leaves the anonymity of the Reading Room of the British Museum, which he considers as his home, to embark on a wild goose chase to revisit the labyrinths of his childhood in Asia. In the course of his peregrinations, he hallucinates that he stumbles across his native home in Shanghai (184–96). He finally confronts his mother who is incarcerated in a mental institution in Hong Kong.

6In When We Were Orphans, the confessional story is partly induced by a failed affaire de cœur, to a greater extent by the narrator’s loss of his parents, a profound rupture which accounts for Christopher Banks’s instability and lack of focus. The reader belatedly learns that other motives may have triggered the confession—the narrator’s taxing encounter with his mother who is institutionalised (301–05), the question of her final resting place (306) or the attempted suicide of his foster daughter (308). Not only do orphans attract one another in the novel (Christopher, Sarah Hemmings, Jennifer, even Akira, by his own admission, suffer the same kind of victimisation at the hands of their peers), they seem to proliferate to attain a universal symbolic relevance, as the narrator gathers from Sarah’s letter (313).

Re-enactment

9Narratives of trauma pose the problem of representation, or more precisely, that of the impossibility of representation, what Cathy Caruth designates ‘a crisis to whose truth there is no simple access’ (Caruth 6). The dilemma between the imperative to tell and the near-impossibility of storytelling, the attendant fluctuation between self-disclosure and protective camouflage are articulated in Ishiguro’s first novel around the Doppelgänger figures of Sachiko and Mariko who can be construed as doubles for Etsuko and Keiko. Etsuko can only come to terms with her trauma by re-membering her daughter, literally speaking, that is by incorporating her into her own script and by representing her death through a dual process of investment/disinvestment. The dynamics of memory in A Pale View of Hills operate an Ozu-like montage (Zinck, 2004, 147–48), underlined with an imagery of accommodation, close-up and distancing effects (blurred windows, binoculars, bridges, swing, turnstiles, fusuma sliding doors, cable car tracks).

10The symbolic motif of the rope which connects the framing and embedded texts of A Pale View of Hills (17, 84, 173) sutures the memories of Christopher Banks in When Were Orphans. It refers to the twine of kidnapping games or prisoners of war and, more significantly, to a prophetic umbilical fable that a monk taught Akira, the validity of which Banks spends his whole life assaying (73, 76, 135, 155). This central metaphor provides the narrator with Ariadne’s elusive thread to resurrect the labyrinth of his memories.

11When We Were Orphans also deploys a retrospective or regressive strategy. The reader may wonder, though, whether it is more addictive than therapeutic as the novel is steeped in the opiate of nostalgia:

• 7 See When We Were Orphans, p. 263.

‘Our childhood seems so far away now [. . .] One of our Japanese poets, a court lady many years ago, wrote of how sad this was. She wrote of how our childhood becomes like a foreign land once we have grown.’
‘Well, Colonel, it’s hardly a foreign land to me. In many ways, it’s where I have continued to live all my life. It’s only now I’ve started to make my journey from it.’ (277)7

12Nostalgia is not restricted to the sepia scenes of a bygone era, but as its etymology suggests, it also indicates a pathology close to melancholy, the grief of homesickness and of the promised return forever out of reach. Although this bittersweet regret for an Arcadian past was expressed and explored in classical art, it describes the malaise of modernity: ‘Nostalgia [represents] memory with the pain removed. The pain is today. We shed tears for the landscape we find no longer what it was, what we thought it was, or what we hoped it would be. Nostalgia is often for past thoughts rather than past things, ‘a daydream in reverse’ [. . .] What pleases the nostalgist is not just the relic but his own recognition of it, not so much the past itself as its supposed aspirations, less the memory of what actually was than of what was once thought possible.’ (Lowenthal 8)

Amnesia, Misremembering and Remembering to Forget

15Two common scars of trauma, whether personal or collective, are memory impairment—total or partial (retrograde amnesia) as well as reluctance to bear witness. In An Artist of the Floating World, a tycoon who sank his fortune in grand property schemes has left dark holes in the townscape. These blank spaces are emblematic of memory loss and amnesia in Kazuo Ishiguro’s fiction.

16A Pale View of Hills is punctured with such gaps which are evidence of Trauerarbeit, of the narrator’s uncertainty about her status as well as her near-impossibility of articulating her trauma (22, 44). This punctuation is no mere speech interruption. It represents the void of a cloze text or the raw edges of a wound. These markers stop just short of voicing the unmentionable (i.e. infanticide). Elsewhere there are subliminal protestations that she did not kill her child.

17Together with double negation, the dash is another endemic sign of denial and censorship (91, 94).

18In When We Were Orphans the dash also represents a kind of signature. Like the narrator’s ‘secret door’ or ‘gap in the hedge’ (52), the endemic punctuation signals the need for a clean rupture and self-preservation from the contamination of the past. As he balks at the mention of ‘his lack of parents,’ which he regards as a gaffe, Banks denies more than he asserts, which implies that denials read like admissions, once redressed (6).

19Etsuko resorts to this punctuation emphatically when dealing with the epicentre of her trauma, Keiko’s death and her subsequent morbid nightmares (47, 54, 88). Similarly, Christopher Banks acknowledges his amnesia when trying to conjure up his mother from live memories or the mediation of photographs (56, 102).

20The narrator of When We Were Orphans, amplifies his detective past to posture as an ‘objective observer’ (16). Thus, he can pinpoint precise recollections:

I distinctly remember reproducing this mannerism on that same first day with sufficient expertise that not a single of my fellows noticed anything odd or thought to make fun. (7)
‘You know, it’s funny,’ he said. ‘I was thinking about it, before I came out tonight. That time you and I first met. I wonder if you remember, my boy. I don’t suppose you do. After all, you had so much else on your mind then.’
‘On the contrary,’ I said, ‘I have the most vivid memory of the occasion.’ This was no lie. (24)
[A]ccording to my own quite clear memory, I adapted very ably to the changed realities of my circumstances. I remember very well that [. . .] I was positively excited about life aboard the ship, as well as by the prospect of the future that lay before me. (27)

22On several occasions, the narrator grudgingly concedes his own inaccuracy as well as the right of others to contest his truth (198).

23Christopher Banks’s repeated admissions of his own unreliability must be examined in the wider context of memory. Throughout When We Were Orphans, his home truths supersede the truth about his social engagement: ‘For the truth is, over this past year, I have become increasingly preoccupied with my memories, a preoccupation encouraged by the discovery that these memories—of my childhood, of my parents—have lately begun to blur. A number of times recently I have found myself struggling to recall something that only two or three years ago I believed was ingrained in my mind for ever.’ (67)

25Basically, memory is a three-stage process that can be defined as encoding (how memories are formed), storage (how memories are retained) and retrieval (how memories are recalled). Reconstruction is one of Banks’s major concerns as a professional detective as well as a private individual. In fact, there are a number of hints indicating that the narrator is penning his elusive memories as a draft for his memoirs (123–24). This can also account for his newfound ‘home’ at the British Museum, a most unlikely hunting ground for a private eye (63, 113, 313). As in previous novels, the memoirs seem to be an excuse and they remain inconclusive.

26For traumatic memory to transcend its disconnectedness and for it to be integrated into memory, a form of narrative reconstruction has to occur (Felman and Laub 69). Reconstruction conflates two different meanings. It can indicate a need for chronological order to limit memory loss (67, 79, 134). It equally implies a kind of montage, not only to supply the missing pieces of the jigsaw (25, 108, 145, 149), but also to substitute an alternative retrospective image (13). Both readings can be applied. Memory failure is often equated with an ‘overall recollection’ (101) or fragmented retrieval:

[M]y recollection of it is not as detailed. In fact, I cannot remember at all what came before and after this particular moment. (9)
I do not remember now if the dining-room episode occurred before or after the health inspector’s visit. What I recall is that it was raining hard that afternoon, making it gloomy throughout the house, and that I had been sitting in the library, watched over by Mei Li as I went through my arithmetic books. (69)
I have no further memory of the episode. And of course, I cannot be sure of the exact sentiments, let alone the exact words, my father was uttering that day. But this is how, admittedly with some hindsight, I have come to shape that memory. (86–87, emphasis mine)
I have down the years gone over many times everything I can remember of that day, trying to put the various details in some coherent order. I cannot remember a great deal about the first part of the morning. I have a picture of how I said goodbye to my father as he went off to work. (100, emphasis mine)
I do not remember much about the days immediately following my father’s disappearance, other than that I was often so concerned about Akira—in particular, what I would say when I next saw him—that I could not settle to anything. (105)

27The recurrent blanks can be ascribed to memory failure or erasure, especially due to Post Trauma Stress Disorder (67). As in Ishiguro’s first novel, the jumbled chronology reflects the spectral memories that simmer under the surface, as they cannot be fully re-membered and laid to rest. Thus, the story of Christopher’s outings to the racecourse or to the Public Gardens at the age of nine, circa 1911, (81, 83–84) precedes his parents’ rift and showdown which he witnessed when he was ‘no older than four or five,’ circa 1906/1907 (85–86).

28Ishiguro has indicated Proust as a major influence on his latest fiction. The ‘cathédrale engloutie’ of La Recherche is resurrected amongst other agents by the tea-dipped madeleine cake. Not only do teacakes or scones appear in When We Were Orphans (7–8), the different layers of wrapping paper sheathing the magnifying glass can even reflect the embedding of memory. Surprisingly, Proust re-emerges almost obliquely in the guise of ‘Marcell’s Tea Room’ (94). Banks’s misremembrance of things past is filtered through strong emotional perceptions such as his mother’s voice and ‘conspiratorial giggle’ (62, 74, 186, 196, 304), ‘the texture of [her] pale summer frock’ (102), ‘the rustle of her skirt’ (196), ‘the smell of her special beige dress [. . .] like mouldering leaves’ (107), his father’s white suit and hat vanishing out of sight, soon to be followed by Uncle Philip’s white jacket (101, 122), the picture of the manicured ‘English’ lawn (51), ‘the feel of [. . .] silky fabric’ (187) or the redolence of the Butterfield and Swire oak and leather chair (24), to quote Christopher’s most enduring memories. This store of ‘impressions’ (13, 18, 118) plays an essential part in the elaboration (encoding enhancement), the retrieval of memory (reinstatement of context cues) and the act of embroidering the Familien Roman (Freud 237–41). Most of these filtered fragments are treasured because they magnify the narrator’s loss.

29Memories can be altered as a result of proactive interference, namely the stories that Banks intends to swap with Akira (124). The use of photographs to retrieve memories (56) can also be interpreted as ‘fake memory syndrome,’ to borrow Elizabeth Loftus’s concept. In Eyewitness Testimony, the American psychologist describes how people, who do not have an original memory, can and do accept misinformation and adopt it as their own memory. Thus, Banks’s fictions to humour Colonel Chamberlain (27) and his improvisations with Akira in the warren of Shanghai can be interpreted as giving credence or legitimacy to the past. A strategy of ‘fake memories’ is closely related to maternal conditioning:

I cannot be sure today how much of my memory of that morning derives from what I actually witnessed from the landing, and to what extent it has merged over time with my mother’s accounts of the episode. (58, emphasis mine)
Now I do not actually remember this myself, but my mother often told me how, when I was very young, she and I would stand in front of these pictures and entertain ourselves giving amusing names to the various vessels in the water.
According to my mother, I would quickly be in fits of laughter and would sometimes refuse to abandon the game. (84, emphasis mine)

30In this respect, the narrator provides a clue to his stereo-amnesia in a quasi- Pavlovian context (287, 288, Confer 220–21). In other cases involving his mother, memory failure can also be due to retrieval malfunction. Sometimes we fail to remember something which at other times we can remember, in other words we misread the context cues or the retrieval cues:

While I am fairly sure I have remembered its essence accurately enough, turning it over in my mind again, I find myself less certain about some of the details. [. . .] In fact, it is even possible I have remembered incorrectly the context in which she uttered those words; that it was not to the health inspector that she had put this question, but to my father. (68)
The reason for my delay was that annoyingly, though I was certain I had seen the plump man somewhere in my past, I could not for a long time remember anything about the context in which I had done so. The man was associated for me with some embarrassment or unpleasantness, but beyond that my memory would yield nothing. [. . .] Then one morning, quite unexpectedly, as I was strolling along Kensington High Street in search of a taxicab, it all suddenly came back to me. (115)

31The circumstances of recall can significantly alter what is being remembered. Sarah Hemmings, who triggers off childhood memories like the opening of Pandora’s box (48, 63–64), provides an obvious example of misusing memory as emotional blackmail in order to reach out to the inscrutable arriviste. The case of Wang Ku is a more interesting instance of ‘fake memory syndrome’ and post-event misinformation. Despite his equivocations, the narrator may have a vested interest in identifying his mother’s kidnapper as the warlord in the newspaper report: ‘I will have to admit, incidentally, that I cannot say with complete certainty that the plump Chinese man I saw that day was one and the same man in the newspaper photograph—the man now identified as the warlord Wang Ku. All I can say is that from the moment I first set eyes on the photograph, that face and it was the face, not the gown, cap and pigtail, which of course could have been that of any Chinese gentleman—struck me unmistakably as one I had seen during the days of my father’s disappearance. And the more I have turned that particular incident over in my mind, the more convinced I have become that the man in the photograph was the one who visited our house that day.’ (117, emphasis mine)

33Unlike his supersleuth counterparts, Banks appears all too eager to misread signs. As he is taken to visit a house in the inter-war years, he decides that the minstrels’ gallery ‘used to be the entrance hall of [his] old Shanghai house.’ (186) He is also quite ready to believe a drunken and doped former detective who confesses that the house in which his parents have been detained for the past twenty years is situated opposite that of blind actor, Yeh Chen, another Œdipal reference (217–18). Towards the end of the novel, the narrator embarks on a pilgrimage to see his mother in a mental institution in Hong Kong. Banks’s own incarceration in the British Museum can cast doubt on his sanity as can his hypermnesia and inability to forget.

Aesthetic Closure

34Like Keiko’s sanctuary in A Pale View of Hills, the narrator’s war zone is ‘forbidden entry’ (53). Etsuko deploys a discursive strategy to distance herself from the past and deflect attention from her former madness (58, 75, 111). Apart from death imagery and minimal references to US occupation, the nuclear holocaust is almost obliterated from the novel (111).

35Etsuko’s lacunar memory is all the more noteworthy as she can conjure up graphic scenes of forbearance and solidarity. Private and public erasure is exemplified in the cutout photographs of Nagasaki that Etsuko gives as a memento or source of inspiration to a poet friend of Niki’s. The Nagasaki war memorial is further evidence of this aesthetic closure. The narrator and her father-in-law revisit the past as alienated tourists. ‘Another arena of societal struggles over memory centres on the physical markers of past violence and repression. Monuments and museums, plaques and other markers are some of the ways in which governments as well as social actors try to embody memories. Other social forces, meanwhile, try to erase and transform these physical markers, as if by changing the shape and function of a place one can banish it from memory.’ (Jelin 26)

36Seibo Kitamura’s statue, which resembles the avatar of a foreign divinity, is perceived by Etsuko as a clownish policeman (137–38). Here Kazuo Ishiguro apparently implies that public commemoration brings people superficially together as a focus for the grieving process. Individual trauma cannot be reconciled with public attempts to construct memory as a unified, static and official version, as Etsuko’s comic distancing or struggle over the representation of the past demonstrates. The keepsake postcard of the memorial on which Ogata-San fails to inscribe personal meaning extends the process of disembodiment.

37Rather than preserve the past, the photographs of When We Were Orphans undermine it. Their ambivalent cosmetic appeal should be noted, as the narrator turns their anonymity into personal mementos (56, 113–15, 220). Such trickery is also the engine of The Emigrants: ‘Again and again, from front to back and from back to front, I leafed through the album that afternoon, and since then I have returned to it time and time again, because, looking at the pictures in it, it truly seemed to me, and still does, as if the dead were coming back, or as if we were on the point of joining them.’ (Sebald 45–46) By pursuing his own private vendetta, the narrator of When We Were Orphans lays himself open to the charge of denial—the same criticism he identified in the expatriate community of Shanghai (162). He presides over the impending hostilities between the Japanese and Kuomintang ‘as though a cricket match had resumed outside’ (159). Despite his self-proclaimed objectivity and empathy for the suffering victims, Banks readily accepts the opera glasses to survey the conflict (160). Symbolically he cannot get his focussing right, as he picks out a peripheral boatman passing under a bridge: ‘For the next few seconds, I went on staring through the glasses at the boat, having quite forgotten the fighting. I noted with interest the boatman, who like me was utterly absorbed by the fate of his cargo and oblivious of the war not sixty yards to his right. Then the boat had vanished under the bridge, and when I saw it glide gracefully out the other side, the precarious bundles still intact, I lowered the glasses with a sigh.’ (160)

40Kazuo Ishiguro‘s fiction is emblematic of fin-de-siècle obsession with memory and identity. Trauma and memory are intricately related in When We Were Orphans. Trauma not only shatters his characters’ most basic assumptions, it also tears apart their carefully cultivated stories of safety and durability. Practices of re-enactment and remembrance are deployed to provide a sense of consolation, if not healing. Hence the novel’s incomplete ‘pilgrim’s progress’. At the same time, strategies of amnesia and aestheticisation impose a contradictory demand. They compel the narrators to close the book, to settle for an inchoate, homogenised or even artificial script, as though nothing out of the ordinary had ever happened.

42In the world of representation, healing, ultimately, matters less than keeping the wound raw (Tyler XVI).