Word: kazuo
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...first glance, Kazuo Ishiguro's novel The Remains of the Day seems the ideal subject for a Merchant Ivory adaptation. Like many of the E.M. Forster works which Merchant Ivory has produced in the past, The Remains of the Day takes place in the English countryside in a time of lost glory; each of the novel's eight sections, as in E.M. Forster's novels, even assume the name of the locale in which they are set. Likewise, Ishiguro's work is preoccupied with moral questions, just as Howard's End is. Compared to Forster's novels, though, The Remains...
Stevens is the narrator of Kazuo Ishiguro's 1988 novel, The Remains of the Day, a drama so delicate that it touches the reader deeply without applying the pressure of sentiment. The story runs on parallel tracks: the years before World War II, when Stevens worked for his beloved Lord Darlington, an aristocrat who falls into an alliance with the Nazis; and the late '50s, when ! Stevens seeks out Miss Kenton in hopes she will return as housekeeper and, perhaps, something more. In his own ornate, unknowing words, Stevens condemns himself as the English version of a "good German...
Yeoman service of a different sort came from bureau driver Kazuo Tsubaki, a % former octopus salesman at the vast Tokyo fish market. Recalls Makihara: "At my request, Tsubaki-san chatted up several fishmongers to find out how the imperial household collects 2,700 fresh sea bream for its six wedding banquets." Answer: it asks fishing ports nationwide to set aside their entire catch of foot-long bream...
...speaks to his father in the third person, talks of "military-style pep talks" to his staff and resolves to practice "bantering" -- might almost be translated from the Japanese. Yet here are all these values, in the midst of an instantly recognizable England, in 1956! The book's author, Kazuo Ishiguro, who moved to England from Nagasaki at the age of five, grew up simultaneously as a Japanese and an English schoolboy, and so can see that the two are scarcely different. "I think there are a lot of things about the Japanese way of communicating that...
Does all this reflect unalloyed good attitudes? Well, no. In detecting evidence of trouble in the U.S. that Americans themselves see, many Japanese react with sorrow more than anything like contempt. Explains Kazuo Ogura, a senior Foreign Ministry official and expert on U.S.-Japanese relations: "Because Japanese like America and want to admire it, they are frustrated. When they look at America, they see disintegration of the family, drugs, AIDS, middle-class values collapsing. Traditional values are what many Japanese still respect and think important...