Sinking into an Unfamiliar Sofa

Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall – Kazuo Ishiguro

Four of the five longish short stories are first-person narratives by musicians. The time settings are the early and middle 2000s.

In the first, a young guitarist is hired by an American crooner to serenade his wife. The guitarist is eager to play for the crooner because his mother enjoyed the crooner’s records back in what sounds like Poland or Czech Republic. The guitarist finds out that the crooner is using a dishonorable tactic to mount a comeback, sacrificing genuine emotion for commercial success. There’s also an interesting sub-theme of the casual disregard and derision Western Europeans feel for Eastern Europeans.

The third story stars another young and ambitious singer-songwriter-guitarist. Finding the London music scene stodgy and crassly commercial, he leaves London to return to Malvern Hills (Herefordshire) and spend the summer with his sister, who runs a café with her husband. The deal is live rent-free but work in the café at peak times. Things gets strained in the family business because he feels his art – making a great song, not a hit song - trumps making sandwiches. He meets a middle-aged couple who have been entertainers all over middle Europe. The woman warns him she never used get angry but nowadays everything upsets her. Mixing marriage with professional obligations is taking its toll. Art takes a lot out of people as they negotiate with other artists, impresarios, and kinfolk.

The fourth story also presents the choice of expediency versus virtue. A middle-aged sax man is pressured by his ex and his agent into getting cosmetic surgery to improve his career prospects. He convalesces with a female star whose celebrity he despises. She leads him into an embarrassing adventure (she has impulse control problems) and gets into his face about the trials of the less talented who have to exploit their looks and networks to hit and stay in the big time.

The fifth story tells of the meeting between a promising Hungarian male cellist and an American female who considers herself a virtuoso. The woman helps the man improve through listening and advice though in fact, she never plays and her behavior makes the young musician suspicious. A bittersweet tale, it is the only story that is not told from the point of view of the protagonist.

To my mind, the second story was the best story because it starred an expatriate English teacher, which I used to be until I was 42 years old. The protagonist in this one, however, is 47-years-old, which is a long long time to be away from one’s native culture, one’s family, one’s network, even if one is in Spain and home is the UK. Anyway, our hero is invited to London by a couple of college friends who got married. They consider our hero a loser because of his precarious career and single status, with no prospects for money, house, stuff, status, respect, etc. Our hero reassures them more than once by saying that he is fine but he suffers from restlessness (FOMO), which can't be a good symptom. The story is funny but the theme of consequences of choices made and worry about the judgements of others is another sharp exploration of worldly success and reputation versus doing what you want versus going with the flow versus inertia versus whatever it is that keeps expatriate teachers overseas way too long.

The motif of this particular anthology is the love for music and the tension between art and success but the author also underlines how fast life goes by. Trust me - blink and they’re sending you junk mail about Medicare Part B.