Dear All!
As you know, I currently try to learn about Japanese culture. I attempt to get a feeling, particularly, for the sense of duty that seems to permeate Japanese culture.
I currently begin to understand and appreciate the advantages of this sense of duty (a society where services work much better than I have experienced elsewhere), and its disadvantages (lack of individual judgement).
Kazuo Ishiguro (1954-) has written a novel, The Remains of the Day (1989), that has been turned into a very impressive film (1993) with Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson.
Greg O'Dea (UC Foundation Associate Professor of English, Director, University Honors Program, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, Chattanooga, TN USA) was so kind as to explain the following: "Kazuo Ishiguro is the son of Japanese immigrants to the UK. He was born in Nagasaki, but at age five moved with his parents to England, where he grew up, was educated, and still lives. He is a British citizen, and English is his language."
In this novel/film the dilemma of duty is highlighted in the most subtle and touching ways. More importantly perhaps, the fact that the novel is written by a Japanese writer and set in England opens a door for cross-cultural understanding. It becomes clear that a particularly high sense of duty is not a Japanese cultural trait, but a possible choice every human being may take, including the price to be paid for this choice. Viewing the film is like receiving a nuanced introduction in both Japanese culture as well as into the human condition that allows for, as one might formulate it, choosing oneself "away." Or, for humbleness that goes too far and turns into some kind of voluntary self-humiliation, a humiliation of the human capacity for judgment.
The Remains of the Day was selected by the New York Times Book Review as one of the best books of 1989 and won the prestigious Booker Prize in England.
Most warmly!
Evelin

Kazuo Ishiguro says about himself:
'I am a writer who wishes to write international novels. What is an 'international' novel? I believe it to be one, quite simply, that contains a vision of life that is of importance to people of varied backgrounds around the world. It may concern characters who jet across continents, but may just as easily be set firmly in one small locality.'
Taken from http://www.contemporarywriters.com/authors/?p=auth52

The Remains of the Day (1989), Kazuo Ishiguro
What history is to a nation, memory is to the individual. Both serve to locate us, to tell us who we are by reminding us of what we have been and done. And both, as Kazuo Ishiguro suggests, are open to selection, repression and revision.

The Remains of the Day, Ishiguro's third novel, examines the intersections of individual memory and national history through the mind of Stevens, a model English butler who believes that he has served humanity by devoting his life to the service of a "great" man, Lord Darlington. The time is 1956; Darlington has died, and Darlington Hall has been let by an American businessman. As Stevens begins a solitary motor trip to the west country, traveling farther and farther from familiar surroundings, he also embarks on a harrowing journey through his own memory. What he discovers there causes him to question not only Lord Darlington's greatness, but also the meaning of his own insular life.

The journey motif is a deceptively simple structural device; the farther Stevens travels from Darlington Hall, it seems, the closer he comes to understanding his life there. But in Stevens's travel journal Ishiguro shapes an ironic, elliptical narrative that reveals far more to the reader than it does to Stevens. The butler believes, for instance, that he makes his trip for "professional" reasons, to persuade a former housekeeper, Miss Kenton, to return to Darlington Hall. But through deftly managed flashbacks and Stevens's naive admissions, the reader sees instead that the matter is highly personal: Stevens had loved Miss Kenton but let her marry another man; he now wishes to make up for lost time, to correct the mistakes of his past.

More important than that veiled love story--but intimately connected with it--is the matter of Lord Darlington, and the degree to which Stevens's sense of self is founded upon his belief in Darlington's greatness. It becomes clear enough to the reader, though Stevens is long in admitting it to himself, that Darlington had been a political pawn of fascism and the Nazis--unwitting perhaps, misguided no doubt, but hardly the "great man" that Stevens had deceived himself into believing he served. These revelations are made through a delicate and powerful process: as Stevens's journal shifts between travelogue, personal memoir and reflections on his profession, his memory slides continually between Darlington Hall in the ruined, empty present, the height of Darlington's influence (and Stevens's pride) in the 1920s, and the tense, disturbing pre-war 1930s. Carefully elided from consideration, repressed and hidden, are the war years themselves and their immediate aftermath. We know they are there, of course, and we may guess what they meant at Darlington Hall, but Stevens's memorial archaeology leaves that particular tomb unexcavated.

In the end, Stevens must come to some sense of resignation and resolution, both about Darlington and about himself. The source of Stevens's pride is also, after all, potentially the source of his shame. He was willing enough to shine in the light of Darlington's greatness, and now must either share in his disgrace, or--what is perhaps more difficult--admit that his own dedicated and deeply considered "professionalism" has had no real part to play on the stage of world history.

Like all great novels, The Remains of the Day is an organic work, its parts perfectly integrated, every scene imaging the whole. In his carefully controlled prose, so perfectly suited to his narrator, in his effortless movement among several different time settings, in his almost magical evocation of simultaneous humor and pathos, Ishiguro proves himself a masterful artist in full command of his elements. And in this novel, those elements combine to form a profound psychological and cultural portrait that reveals the author's great abiding theme: the art and artifice of memory.

Dr. Gregory O'Dea
UC Foundation Associate Professor of English, UTC
Copyright, 1995.

The film
Remains of the Day, The (1993)
Directed by James Ivory
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0107943/