Thus in his first two novels, the Japan of post World War II is a historical backdrop which plays an important role, but what is actually at stake in these two novels is rather the process of delving i nto the past, the confrontation between two distinct periods in a protagonist's life and the way the self comes to terms with the past. 1ģOtherness is not inextricably linked with elsewhere and the sense of place informs a reflexion on the sense of self which transcends geographical boundaries. However, we will have to keep in mind that after The Remains of the Day (1989) and The Unconsoled (1995), the Eastern perspective is reintroduced in his fiction with When We Were Orphans (2000) but with a slightly different inflexion due to the more collective dimension of myth which dates back to The Remains. Obviously, the East, and more specifically his native land Japan, is much more present in the author's first two novels, A Pale View of Hills (1982) and An Artist of the Floating World (1986), than in his later fiction. 1 Thus The Remains, in which a geographical elsewhere is not represented, may paradoxically be the no (.)ĢTo begin with a geographical remark, we could say that Ishiguro moves from the East to the West in terms of fictional location.

From the East to the West: Probing into Ishiguro's Geography This diachronic approach is necessary to understand Never Let Me Go, and the creation of a deliberately non-referential elsewhere which has never been so close to our here and now. Thus, we will first focus on Ishiguro's novels from A Pale View of Hills to When We Were Orphans to show how reflection, refraction or mirror-effects lead to a reflexion on the specificity of the reader's position in Ishiguro's narratives.

Probing into the arcane of the self and self-representation tends to connect more and more with collective issues which relate to a society, and with his last novel, to humanity.

Ishiguro's work is also well known for the tension between memory and identity it systematically explores on different modes but with the constant backdrop of individuality versus collectivity. 1“Elsewhere” is everywhere to be found in Ishiguro's fiction, but this paper will try to contend that, in his latest work, there is a progression as he crosses a frontier in terms of referential reality.

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro