This chapter addresses two works set in post-war Japan: Kazuo Ishiguro’s short story ‘The Summer After the War’ (1983) and novel An Artist of the Floating World (1986). It begins with a survey of various forces (legal, social, and political) which convinced contemporary commentators that moral sense had been left bewildered and judgements rendered ephemeral by the events of the Second World War and early Cold War, and then goes on to trace how this crisis of faith influenced the style and ethical consciousness of Ishiguro’s early fiction. Together ‘The Summer After the War’ and An Artist of the Floating World display a powerful interest in those Japanese citizens who flourished in a society operating with transient and ultimately dangerous values, and whose lives were threatened and emptied of meaning following their nation’s defeat. The chapter contains close readings of both texts and shows how subtle stylistic features contribute to their presentation of individuals endeavouring, through imaginative acts of narration, to attain absolution and stability in the face of changing moral norms and shifting geopolitical alliances.

This final chapter engages with the difficulty of thinking about imaginative mechanisms as ‘I’-saving in the wake of the Holocaust, arguably the century’s most devasting act of mass murder. It offers a close reading of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005) and locates its conflicted defence of the imagination within the complex legacy of Theresienstadt: a Nazi concentration camp where inmates were encouraged to participate in cultural activities and carry on their pre-war professions in the hope that their example might trick the outside world into thinking that Europe’s Jews were not in danger. The chapter not only argues for Ishiguro’s indebtedness to two major accounts of that infamous site: H. G. Adler’s historical study Theresienstadt 1941-1945: The Face of a Coerced Community and W. G. Sebald’s 2001 novel Austerlitz. It also contends that Never Let Me Go registers, with arresting power, how knowledge of the combination of suffering, deception, and creativity that took place inside Theresienstadt’s walls has challenged ideas about the value of art and the ethics of attempting to console or distract persecuted populations

This Introduction offers a survey of how criticism to date has conceived of the relationship between mass violence and the creative imagination, arguing that little has been done to destabilise the view that when literary works take the destruction of bodies, minds, and ideals in times of war seriously, they find their structures and surfaces warped. Identifying Jay Winter’s pioneering work in the field of cultural history as running counter to this trend, it positions this study as likewise animated by a belief that the wars of the last century not only sparked aesthetic experiments and the abandonment of traditional imaginative structures; they also impelled forms of creative counterfactual thinking whose aims were reparative, preservatory, and consolatory. The concepts of ‘unlived lives’ and ‘lives unlived’ (which will be used to explore various imaginative modes of resistance to violence, loss, and change) are defined. The book’s aims are situated relative to the ethos of the ‘new modernist studies’ and its place periodisation debate explained. The combination of historical, biographical, and close readings deployed in the six chapters to come are given careful justification – as is the selection of Henry James, Elizabeth Bowen, and Kazuo Ishiguro as the book’s central writers.

At the heart of Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2021 novel Klara and the Sun is a singular act of imitation, in which Klara, a synthetic human, is asked to take the place of her owner, the sick child Josie.

This essay addresses this moment, in order to ask how far the novel form is able to perform this kind of ventriloquism, to undertake acts of imitation that might replace or supersede those that they imitate.

In order to respond to this question, the essay suggests, we need to put Klara and the Sun in conversation with the rest of Ishiguro’s oeuvre, which is itself in conversation with the longer history of the novel form. From Artist of the Floating World to The Unconsoled to Klara, Ishiguro has been concerned with the capacity of art to become the reality it imitates, and particularly with the capacity of the novel voice to pass through the boundary between original and copy. Klara might suggest that contemporary technologies have made this boundary newly porous; but the essay argues that the novel form has always sat at the difficult junction between voice and its replications. When he makes an artificial being speak in the voice of its owner, Ishiguro does not depart from the protocols of narrative voice, but rather gains access to its interior mechanisms, in a way that is illuminating for the critical power of fiction under contemporary biopolitical conditions.

Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, a biodystopia in which clones are raised to supply organs for donation to strangers, takes the form of a poignant bildungsroman. The novel is representative of recent fiction that uses the conceit of cloning to challenge readers to think about what makes us human. In the manner of canonical realist fiction, Ishiguro’s story provokes ethical reflection and deep emotion in its readers, a stark contrast with the more than 150 science fiction films featuring clones, which typically exploit clones as a source of horror, violent action, or laughter. If, as we saw in Chapters 6 through 8, the imaginative world building of science fiction can inform public policy through its challenging thought experiments, realist genres invite sympathetic identification and attention to the moral complexities of policy decisions. Never Let Me Go helps one understand the influences that shape organ transplant policies, which can ask a patient to choose between the time one has to live and the life one wants to live in time.

Rounding out the previous chapter’s treatment of Victorian narrative with the early modernist prose of Henry James, analysis returns to the ontology of language in Agamben, leading on to a more philologically oriented history of prose – pivoted on the Enlightenment rise of the “plain style” – in research by John Guillory. Such is a mode of discourse whose potential stranglehold on future developments in literary writing is contrasted with a recovered premium on the densities of rhythm and sonority. Literary examples extend from Whitman’s insurgent lexical poetics, through D. H. Lawrence’s grammatically impacted style, to the stripped-down phrasal ironies of Kazuo Ishiguro – before returning to Friedrich Kittler on the ideologies of speech as medium in the post-Enlightenment century. Discussion closes with an adapted Heideggerian model for the present-at-handness of language itself in medial disclosure – rather than just in scriptive use.

What brings speculative realism and posthumanism together is a mutual understanding that, while the non-human world might be unexpected or unknowable, it is nevertheless real. Strategies for confronting this reality are the focus of this chapter. Although there are different strands of speculative realism, all are based on the argument that while there is a divide between human and non-human worlds, this divide can be crossed, either directly or indirectly. Thus although we can never really know the other because it is outside of human experience, this does not mean there is an unbreachable gap, because art is created by the tension between humanity and the world-beyond-humanity, exceeding even the concepts of art’s creators. Work by Kazuo Ishiguro, Solmaz Sharif, Christian Bök, Denis Villeneuve, and Juliana Spahr is used to develop this thesis.