Introduction
In announcing the 2017 Nobel Prize in literature to Kazuo Ishiguro, the secretary of the Nobel committee referred to him as a novelist “who, in novels of great emotional force, has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world” (The Nobel Prize in Literature 2017, 2017 emphasis added). The word “our” in the accountment is significant in that it reinforced his oft-repeated claims that the themes of his novels transcend linguistic, national, or generic boundaries, and that readers failed to “take off” the metaphorical and universal import of his novels. As Ishiguro’s reply to a question that the dramatic parallels we discern, for instance, in some of the incidents in the life of Ono, the protagonist of An Artist of the Floating World, underlie the idea of universal themes he often suggests he tries to convey through his novels. That, he adds, his use of “Japan as a metaphor [and . . .] that the need to follow leaders” is not “something peculiar to Japan” but a “human phenomenon” (Mason, 1986, p. 10). His novels mostly concern the individuals flooded under the collective responsibility, about “people who feel an urge to do good work but fail terribly, with effects beyond their own welfare” (Shen, 2021, p. 7).