Kazuo Ishiguro and Ethics

Laura Colombino is Professor of English Literature at the University of Genova, Italy, and Member of the Academia Europaea. She has a longstanding focus on transdisciplinary studies, in particular, the relationship between writing and the visual arts; architectural spaces and their embodiment; the interplay of trauma, cultural memory and the city; and, most recently, the nonhuman. She is the author of Ford Madox Ford: Vision, Visuality and Writing (2008) and Spatial Politics in Contemporary London Literature: Writing Architecture and the Body (Routledge, 2013). She has edited and coedited books on Ford Madox Ford (2009, 2013; Routledge, 2019) and sits on the editorial board of the Ford Madox Ford: Complete Works (Oxford University Press). She has published essays and articles on Victorian and modernist novelists and travel writers (Thomas Hardy, Robert Byron, Ford Madox Ford and Aldous Huxley), contemporary writers (especially Ian McEwan, J.G. Ballard and Ian Sinclair) and visual artists (Massimiliano Pelletti and Lee Bul). Most recently, she has written a chapter for A Companion to Charles Dickens, Second Edition (forthcoming) and another for The Cambridge Companion to Kazuo Ishiguro (2023).

Deftly exploring its philosophical underpinnings, Laura Colombino’s incisive study addresses a central question in Ishiguro’s work: how to live ethically in a politically perilous and psychologically obdurate world. Colombino offers a profound meditation on Ishiguro’s career-long unflinching investigation of this most compelling of unresolved questions.— Andrew Bennett, Professor of English, University of Bristol, UKLaura Colombino’s Kazuo Ishiguro and Ethics is a rich and indispensable work for all those who, working at the intersection of philosophy and literature, want to explore the ethical questions and dilemmas posed by the work of Kazuo Ishiguro. Covering virtually the entirety of Ishiguro’s work to date, it is a rare combination of thematic depth, precision of thought, and a delightful attention to the stylistic specificities of one of our greatest living writers. It is deeply original and a pleasure to read. I can’t recommend it enough.— Miguel de Beistegui, ICREA Professor of Philosophy, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain… no previous study has tackled these questions with such range, such depth, such focus and such elegance as Colombino's; if others have gestured towards the ethical impasses of Ishiguro's morally fractious worlds, her deft and intellectually agile book provides the definitive handbook to Ishiguro and philosophy … The book is insightful, engagingly written, and most importantly articulates with great delicacy some of the unspoken conceptual and emotional subtleties of some of the most important novels in the contemporary canon.— Peter Sloane, English StudiesKazuo Ishiguro and Ethics (Routledge, 2025) is a highly nuanced, original, and riveting exploration of the philosophical dilemmas pertinent to Ishiguro’s fictional imaginings…. Employing a whole array of philosophical perspectives, in order to display Ishiguro’s profound interest in ethics as the foundation of our human existence, Colombino organizes her material in a punctiliously methodological and effective manner. Her book is a timely call on us to review the values we live by. It comes as a rare gift amidst the present-day chaos, geopolitical anxiety, and the weakening of the solid ethical ground, on which we can stand…. In sum, this stylish interdisciplinary book is an irreplaceable contribution to contemporary ethics, trauma studies, intercultural studies, philosophy of literature, and philosophy in literature. It is a captivating read that provokes us to stretch our imagination and reflect anew on the issues of dignity, responsibility, pride, loyalty, and the depth and importance of human relationships. — Małgorzata Hołda, Phainomena: Journal of Phenomenology and Hermeneutics

• List of illustrationsAcknowledgementsAbbreviationsIntroduction: Ishiguro’s ethical, existential and emotional worlds1. What is a Good Life? The Remains of the Day as an aporetic dialogue on dignity2. Wounded Idealists Travel the World: Anxiety, Responsibility and Retribution in The Unconsoled and When We Were Orphans3. Not at Home in the World: Longing for the Possible and Caring for the Other in Never Let Me Go4. Ethics, Myth and the Narrative Voice in The Buried Giant5. The Soul’s Desire for the Good: Heliotropic Mythology and Anamorphic Mirrors in Klara and the SunCoda: Ethics and the Arena of Conflicting EmotionsIndex