She comes into awareness in a shop, waiting to be bought, and all she knows of the world is what she glimpses through the window of the shop. We see the world as it appears to Klara, and must accept it that way since Klara has no backstory to tell us. We know no more than the narrator, at least until we start to make connections that the protagonist is ill-equipped to make.

37), and this conviction that the sun can even raise the dead persists throughout the book.Īs in many of his other novels, Ishiguro is rigorous in presenting the world through a limited viewpoint. We don’t know what happened, the world as mediated through Klara’s eyes is lacking a lot of detail, but Klara is convinced that “a special kind of nourishment from the Sun had saved them” (p. One day she sees the beggar and his dog collapsed in the street and is convinced they have died, but the next day they are both somewhat recovered. Tellingly, early in the novel, she sees a homeless man begging in the street, our first hint perhaps that all is not socially progressive in this perfect world, though Klara fails to pick up on this. And learning the truth is never easy.įor Klara, an “Artificial Friend” who is literally powered by sunshine, the sun is all healing.

Alas for Klara, she is, like all of us, unaware that the same thing could be said of her. Here, as Klara remarks of her fellow “Artificial Friend,” Rosa: “She could fail to notice so much, and even when I pointed something out to her, she’d still not see what was special or interesting about it” (p. Stevens cannot see the betrayals of his so good, so noble employer (a Nazi sympathiser) the children cannot grasp that their happy childhood is a preparation for a short life as involuntary organ donors. Ishiguro’s characters are not stupid or ignorant, but they are so dazzled by the sunny world they inhabit that they fail to notice truths that are only found in shadow. Theirs is a bright and happy world, or at least it is until their story gets going and they embark on the journey that will demonstrate that where there is sunshine there is also shade. His characters, from Stevens the butler in The Remains of the Day (1989) to the children in Never Let Me Go (2005) and the old couple in The Buried Giant (2015), live in the sunshine. The title of Kazuo Ishiguro’s first novel since he won the Nobel Prize for Literature makes explicit a metaphor that has run through much of his work.

Review klara and the sun