Reading Kazuo Ishiguro in Times of Crisis

International crises are central to Kazuo Ishiguro's work. This introduction situates Ishiguro alongside contemporary global emergencies, including the COVD-19 pandemic, climate change, and reactions to emancipatory movements. It suggests that Ishiguro's work interrogates ‘crisis' by confronting his characters with both individual and collective crises, a theme explored in Catherine Charlwood's essay here. It shows how Ishiguro's work indirectly relates to the vast health crisis of COVID-19, which Sebastian Groes explores in his essay on empathy, (robot) ethics, digital well-being, and inequality. Connected to the pandemic, the introduction traces how Ishiguro's writing evidences growing concern for the climate crisis. The politics of migration are a key theme in Ishiguro: here Dominic Dean explores their longstanding and dangerous relationship with conspiracy theories, while Ivan Stacy, Melinda Dabis and Richard Robinson all connect Ishiguro to anxieties over resurgent nationalisms, cosmopolitan internationalisms, and complex transnationalisms. This introduction sets out how the essays in this Special Issue collectively explore the ethical difficulties in Ishiguro's crisis narratives, their refusals of easily satisfying resolutions, and their implicit critique of crisis frameworks for understanding political and historical problems. Sharply distinct from passivity or disinterest, Ishiguro's work elicits an attitude of humility against apparently perpetual, end-dominated crises. © 2022 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Health Warnings: Reading Kazuo Ishiguro in Times of Crisis

This essay rereads Kazuo Ishiguro's depiction of the relationship between health, care and socio-economic inequality against the backdrop of our present time of crisis in which the COVID-19 pandemic features centrally. The pandemic has directly and indirectly laid bare and exacerbated various international crises and injustices that are shaping the structure of feeling of our times. Although Ishiguro's work does not (yet) address or represent the pandemic directly, the oeuvre is interesting for the ways it frames and responds to the many societal crises that characterise the early twenty-first century – and which the pandemic revealed and intensified. This essay explores specifically the ways in which Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go (2005) thinks about health, well-being and care in contemporary society, and how it depicts our own troubled empathetic relationship to institutions like the NHS and its workers. It will proceed to explore how Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun (2021) considers a new kind of crisis, namely, the interrelation of digital inequality and digital well-being, a problem the COVID-19 crisis intensified and accelerated. It concludes with an analysis of Ishiguro's call for a new social contract that is rooted in a new attitude towards others and the world that is open and dialogic.

Health Warnings: Reading Kazuo Ishiguro in Times of Crisis

This essay rereads Kazuo Ishiguro's depiction of the relationship between health, care and socio-economic inequality against the backdrop of our present time of crisis in which the COVID-19 pandemic features centrally. The pandemic has directly and indirectly laid bare and exacerbated various international crises and injustices that are shaping the structure of feeling of our times. Although Ishiguro's work does not (yet) address or represent the pandemic directly, the oeuvre is interesting for the ways it frames and responds to the many societal crises that characterise the early twenty-first century - and which the pandemic revealed and intensified. This essay explores specifically the ways in which Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go (2005) thinks about health, well-being and care in contemporary society, and how it depicts our own troubled empathetic relationship to institutions like the NHS and its workers. It will proceed to explore how Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun (2021) considers a new kind of crisis, namely, the interrelation of digital inequality and digital well-being, a problem the COVID-19 crisis intensified and accelerated. It concludes with an analysis of Ishiguro's call for a new social contract that is rooted in a new attitude towards others and the world that is open and dialogic.