Beyond "One-World Thinking": Ishiguro's Early Novels as a "Two-World Literature"

Scholarly evaluation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s initial literary output frequently relies on post-colonial theory or evaluates his fiction as globally accessible "world literature". Such interpretive frameworks, however, risk oversimplifying the intricate cultural friction and renegotiation present in his narratives. Utilizing Rebecca Suter’s paradigm of "two-world literature," this study posits that Ishiguro's initial trio of novels, A Pale View of Hills (1982), An Artist of the Floating World (1986), and The Remains of the Day (1989), actively counter the uniform, homogenizing impulses that Aamir Mufti classifies as "one-world thinking". Instead of engineering a centralized, Eurocentric vantage point designed to categorize and evaluate peripheral societies, Ishiguro’s early prose operates within a highly fertile intersection of British and Japanese cultural modes, choosing to preserve rather than dissolve the structural discords of this liminal space. This investigation explores how Ishiguro destabilizes Eurocentric preconceptions of Japan in his first two texts by utilizing the setting as a metaphorical construct, while in The Remains of the Day, he establishes a narrative architecture readable across both English and Japanese socio-cultural codes, compelling audiences to interrogate their internalized cultural biases. By unpacking his formal strategies—such as narrative unreliability, systemic cultural opacity, and the friction between institutional conditioning and personal autonomy—this paper demonstrates that Ishiguro’s early bibliography functions as a calculated disruption within global literary studies, subverting simplistic explanations and demanding a sophisticated engagement with individual identity, historical trauma, and memory.