Kazuo Ishiguro’s (The Remains of the Day, A Pale View of Hills) first short fiction collection — Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall — introduces an interconnected series of worlds in which music and love have failed.
While the title of the collection suggests something melancholy and epiphanic — an experience that transforms between the fall of dusk and wake of dawn — the epiphanies of Nocturnes are marred by stereotyped characters and fade quickly.
The first story,”Crooner,” tells of Janeck — a young, displaced “gypsy” guitarist who plays for tourists in a Venetian piazza — who has a chance encounter with a waning jazz star, Mr. Gardner. Together they try to serenade Mr. Gardner’s diva wife, Lindy, to keep her from leaving.
The sweet-talking Lindy Gardner makes a return as a divorcee in “Nocturne,” in which a cuckolded saxophonist recovering from plastic surgery finds a companion in the charming but frivolous actress.
As neighbors in recuperation from surgery, the two bond over music, and soon find themselves on a quirky adventure involving an ambiguously shaped statuette and a turkey. The ridiculousness and comedy of the situation try to put a light spin on its emptiness, but ultimately it trails off with “unimportant stuff,” as Steve says.
In “Malvern Hills” a grass-roots guitarist/songwriter rails against the “shallow and inauthentic” and meets a quarreling couple on holiday. He becomes childishly preoccupied with the possibility of having broken up their marriage when he advises them on which hotel to stay at for their vacation. Again, the narrator becomes an insignificant chunk in orbit of incompatible lovers, and it leaves us questioning why he is there in the first place.
The stories are told in second person, with the carefree and naïve voice — essentially the same in each one — casually explaining his intentions, as if he were talking over coffee.
While the “you know” tone made for easy reading and a few humorous situations, the narrators’ somewhat scatterbrained attitude and distance from the real situation left the reader without any strong emotional investment in the quaint cafes and romanticized piazzas that Ishiguro places us.
Rather than delving deeper into the situations that we are given, such as authentic creation and discordant relationships, the portrayal of the starving artist trying to make it simply on faith of his musical talent fails to avoid falling into cliché.
As if Ishiguro were strumming a few chords and calling it a song, the stories’ conflicts are skirted rather than directly addressed. A pronounced sigh here, a tense silence there is all we’re expected to work with.
The prose is beautiful, particularly when Ishiguro describes the European city life, and the dialogue, when not obviously unoriginal, is entertaining.
The redeeming piece in Nocturnes is the last story, “Cellists,” in which a proud and gifted cellist becomes entangled in a strange relationship with an older woman who coaches him in his playing.
As their lessons become more intense, the young Tibor discovers the fatal pull in his mentor, Eloise, but dares not unravel the relationship.
“Cellists” adopts a more melancholic and bittersweet shade and lays bare some of the sequences’ recurring themes, as both student and teacher futilely depend on the other to produce to produce the self-affirming acknowledgment of their “virtuosity” — the “unwrapping” of the genius, Eloise calls it.
The narrator is barely present; instead, it seems like the music itself has been made into a character that Eloise secretly fears, Tibor loves, but neither of which can fully embrace.
Nocturnes contains stories of regret and delusion, nostalgia and humor. Ishiguro presents a world where possibility and probability have long gone. Dreams dangerously cling on to some, while for others, the reality that the only choice left is to part has already hit.
