I came to Kazuo Ishiguro's work late, but after he won the Nobel Prize in Literature, I bought a dog eared copy of The Remains of the Day from the used bookstore in town. It wasn't what I had expected. Though very British. For all its descriptions of estate servility, reserved emotion and unrequited longing, there was something about the voice and style I connected with. I had grown up in Evansville, Indiana, a small city, though it still boasts the title of third largest in the state. My family was lower middle class at best. Divorced parents. My dad currently works at Menards. My mom is retired, but had been a secretary for the same doctor's office for over forty years. As a Hoosier, I knew nothing about butlers, estates or closely confided romance. But, I grew up skateboarding, so I did learn a thing or two about shame.
I started skating in the 5th grade. I was ten. By the time I was in middle school I was walking the halls in shoes that showed all the tricks I had learned in that short time. The torn suede on the side and the broken laces meant I knew how to ollie, and the scuff marks on the toe meant I could manage a few flip tricks: kickflips, shuv it flips, but nothing to really brag about.
All that put me a little ahead of the curve, which meant I was lucky enough to skip the part where everyone called me a poser for a few months. I'm hesitant to call it hazing, because that would imply even a small level of organization, but no matter what you call it, either you got good and everyone stopped calling you a poser or you quit and no one ever saw you again. At least, that's how I remember it.
There was one kid, though, who thought he could buck the system, and instead of getting good enough to show off those fashionable marks on his shoe to prove it, he had tried to doctor his shoe. When someone called him out, he was heckled until he stood there in front of everyone, stepped on his skateboard and fumbled an attempted ollie. The sky may as well have cracked open with a hammer of lightning to strike him blind on the spot. Middle school was a crucible, especially that first year.
I should say here that even though I never had the pleasure of being called a poser, I do remember, with a sharp tinge of shame, doing some of the name calling. I was eleven/twelve, and it was stupid, I admit. But I can't ignore it, because it helped conflate two very distinct things for me at that age: shame and appearance.
Skateboarding comes with its own value system, and it gets confused with fashion often. There are message boards right now debating the lesser points of a certain pants' inseam or the superiority of one shoe brand's cup sole over another, and from the outside looking in, one might think, wow, skateboarders are obsessed with appearance. But, I'm here to say it's more complicated than that. And I think that is one of the reasons why I've been so drawn to Ishiguro's writing.
After reading The Remains, I searched out Ishiguro's other titles, and out of his books, I keep coming back to his 2005 novel Never Let Me Go. It's sci-fi, and yet it's not. It's a romance, and yet it's not. And yet every time I think I have a good way of thinking about it, I read it again, and still, I don't know how it exists. The plot follows three friends at a British boarding school who grow up and go their separate ways. Without too many spoilers, there are sci-fi elements that are explained without much detail, and even though one picks up on the alternate reality Ishiguro is creating, there is no clear explanation about how any of it works. The narrative, told first-person through Kathy H., is driven by a sense of curiosity about the world around her, but the tension in the book doesn't come from her interest in the geo-political causes of her situation. Instead, she focuses on what is directly in front of her.
There is a phrase that pops up in the book a few times, and it's this idea of being "told and not told." None of the children in the boarding school have parents, but they're taken care of by a handful of instructors often referred to as "the guardians." Most of the time the guardians give lessons on British geography, reading and math, as well as art, which plays a large role in the theme of the book. The guardians for the most part, become the only conduit Kathy H. has to the outside world, and all these lessons are designed to keep the students engaged and enlightened to a certain degree, but there are no lessons that explain why they are where they are or what they will do after. This is where the phrase "told and not told" comes in, because Kathy H. and her friends are aware that they are actually meant for one specific job--that is (spoilers) to stay healthy so when they are old enough they can donate their organs--but not one of them can really remember how they know all this. It's understood that they've pieced it all together from stories from older kids, lessons from guardians that have gotten off track and their own personal experience. This of course leads to some misunderstandings, and eventually Kathy H. finds herself caught in a conspiracy of her own making.
Here is an example of Kathy H. talking about all this with her friend Tommy:
"Tommy thought it possible that the guardians had, throughout all our years at Hailsham, timed very carefully and deliberately everything they told us, so that we were always just too young to understand properly the latest piece of information. But of course we'd take it in at some level, so that before long all that stuff was there in our heads without us ever having examined it properly."
This is followed by Kathy H. dismantling Tommy's logic. She explains, "It's a bit too much like a conspiracy theory for me--I don't think our guardians were that crafty--but there's probably something in it." She dismantles it, grounds it in reality but then lets herself get carried away by it regardless. This example shows how much of Ishiguro's world is veiled in hearsay, but it also helps show how Kathy H. embodies this concept of "told and not told."
Kathy H. proves this over and over throughout the book. She takes in what little information she can from older students and her guardians, and parses through the scuttlebutt with the caveat that she feels as though she is always just a little behind what she should know, and yet still just a little ahead of what everyone around her seems to know. It reads like an alternate version of the idiom "You don't need to be faster than the bear, just faster than your friend." Though, in reality the bear is able to take down more than one at a time, and Ishiguro's novel ultimately proves this to be true.
For all these reasons I find Kathy H. to be a compelling character, one that I keep coming back to over and over again. I say this because as a skateboarder entering into the golden years of skating, I've seen trends come and go, and I've witnessed the way social media and online spaces have democratized the industry, at least to a certain degree. But I would say one thing has stayed constant, and it's that same sense I had when I was in middle school: the undeniable connection between shame and appearance.
I'm not sure if I thought about it in this way when I was eleven, but I see now how I was told but not told about the definition of a poser. And I see now how those marks on my shoe weren't necessarily shorthand for being a skater, either. All of this crosses over into what we might think of as style. My style is my style, and there's nothing I can do about it, really. I could wear different clothes and I could throw up caution hands as much as I want, but my underlying style would come through, and that underlying style is one's interpretation of what one has been told and not told. I could simplify it and call it world building, but I don't like that term, so I won't. Instead, I want to point to that earlier quote from Ishiguro's text. It is Kathy's style. It's an indirect quote from her friend Tommy. It's something he's told her, but she is delivering it to us, the reader, through her narrative voice.
I'm not sure how many times I've read Never Let Me Go. Often I pick it up to read a random chapter or section. Sometimes I'll spend a week reading it all the way through. It's a quiet novel, one that helps me set my mind straight. If I start to think about all the things I could have done or all the things I still have to do, I check in with Kathy H., and she's still there sleuthing through what she's been told and not told. The thing that helps me is that she never holds a grudge about the situation she's in. Instead, she writes it down to help herself understand it better. And in the same way she reflects on her own experience, I try to look at my own and see what it is I've been trying to tell myself.