‘The conflict of interpretation’ in Kazuo Ishiguro ‘Nocturne’ (2009)

The paper explores Kazuo Ishiguro’s short story Nocturne, which is placed in the short story collection, ‘Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall’ (2009) and, due to its oneiric and music narrative substance, may perplex a reader. We propose a draft of various hermeneutic strategies for reading this story. These strategies address the tale from different premises, leading to coherent yet seemingly ‘conflicting interpretations’ (Ricoeur). By application of the mimetic approach, we dwell on Marxist criticism, as well as celebrity studies, which help to reconstruct social and cultural contexts in their relation to the imagery of the story. In the framework of an expressive approach, phenomenological, psychoanalytical, and archetypal readings are shown as supported by symbolic imagery, sets of characters and surrealistic space, and place configurations. The critical tools of an objective approach - formalism, narratology, and intermediality studies - reveal leitmotif clusters, structural patterns, and musical nocturne remediation in the textual poetics. Finally, the reader’s perception of any intratextual relations of this story with Ishiguro’s oeuvre as a whole lead to one of the focal points of his writing - appraisal through mastery, through continuous rehearsing and a nocturnal strumming effect of the same intimate motives of longing for lost love and public recognition. The short story abandons the typical Ishiguro imagery easily found in his earlier novels, and can be viewed as a confessional ‘self-recollection’ remediation and narrative project.