ANNA ROSE MCINTYRE / READING mUsIC IN kAzUo IsHIGURo
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contemporary music, key for fostering a yearning, suspended sense of unful-
fillment. A similar mood saturates Nocturnes, with the lucid unfulfillment
of its characters, all of whom are “musicians who didn’t quite fulfill their
dreams, or the ones who are young enough to think that perhaps one day
their dreams will be fulfilled, but time is moving on” (Ishiguro, “Nocturnes:
Part 1 of 2”). These apparent appoggiaturas—unfulfilled and ringing into
the ambiguous void—function almost as painful fermatas, the musical term
that comes from the Italian word for “to stay” or “to stop.” In sheet music,
the fermata, when placed over a note or rest, signals the musician to hold
the action for an unspecified number of beats. Fermatas build tension,
create suspense for the listener, and even the musician, for neither knows
how long the note, chord, or rest will persist until the conductor gives the
signal to proceed—or, in some cases, for the song to end abruptly.
Along with these situational appoggiaturas or fermatas, Nocturnes incor-
porates the Da Capo al Coda. The Da Capo al Coda instructs the musician
to return to the song’s beginning. Ishiguro’s collection contains numerous
phrases that gesture back to the opening story. For example, “Cellists,”
the final story, also takes place in Venice. Its first line—“It was our third
time playing the Godfather theme since lunch”—clearly parallel Janeck’s
complaint, in “Crooner,” that he had played the Godfather theme song
nine times in one day (189, 5). Like Da Capo al Codas directing us back
to the composition’s beginning, the stories contain multiple reprises. In
music, a reprise calls for the repetition of specific measures, or even entire
songs. Reprises create continuity within a piece, which Nocturnes does with
dreamlike tropes resurfacing in the tales: broken marriages, latent poten-
tial, wasted time, and unrecoverable memories.
In his Nobel lecture, Ishiguro expresses passion for music, confessing that
in order to “allow a vast and tragic yearning to be glimpsed underneath” he
had to glean “crucial lessons from the voices of singers . . . catching some-
thing in their voices, I’ve said to myself, ‘yes that’s it, that’s what I need
to capture in this scene.’” This vocal musicality does not go untapped in
Nocturnes. Pi-Li Hsaio, for example, argues that the interplay of characters
and stories in Ishiguro’s collection “opens up a double-voiced discourse”
and exemplifies Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of the “polyphonic novel” (23).
Ishiguro has been widely celebrated for his blending of readable and
(almost) audible art forms, but, as Smyth observes, the dishonest cello
expert, Eloise in “Cellists,” serves as “the vehicle through which Ishiguro