Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall
Kazuo Ishiguro
Faber and Faber, Rs 499
Kazuo Ishiguro’s short stories compare with the best of his novels
The streets of Venice, they say, change direction at night. And as “Crooner”, the first of Kazuo Ishiguro’s five short stories, builds up to a game-changing revelation, that contention comes to mind. It’s evening and a gondolier is taking two men to their pre-appointed destination: Tony Gardner, an ageing American pop icon with a plan to serenade his wife outside their palazzo, and Jan, a young guitarist from a formerly communist country making a living at whichever of San Marco’s cafes will have him on that day and now drafted for the American’s plan. Jan’s mother had survived her dreary circumstances listening to Gardner’s records, and Jan, conscious of an emotional debt to the singer, had earlier in the day struck up an acquaintance when he came to Caffe Lavena. But by now Jan, who is the narrator, is also sensing that the serenade is not as uncomplicatedly romantic as he expected it to be.

To arrive at the appointed hour, the gondolier is circling around the canal, and at one point they pass a busy restaurant: “After the quiet and the darkness we’d been travelling through, the restaurant was kind of unsettling. It felt like we were the stationary ones, watching from the quay, as this glittering party boat slid by.”

That disorienting sense of who or what it is that is moving forward binds the five stories in this remarkable collection. In each story someone is attempting to measure the time and distance that now separate him from long-held aspirations. Most of them are musicians, some (like Gardner) trying to regain a semblance of that old star feeling but most just getting by on odd jobs (like Jan). Others (like the two main characters in the second story, “Come Rain or Come Shine”) are finding the parameters that could explain their discontent with how life’s turned out, and a momentary anchor with a song they’d loved in university.

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