The Persistence of Realism: Form and Convention in Kazuo Ishiguro’s A Pale View of Hills, An Artist of the Floating World , and The Remains of the Day

Kazuo Ishiguro’s first three novels, A Pale View of Hills, An Artist of the Floating World, and The Remains of the Day, are usually read through the modernist categories of unreliable narration and interiority. This article argues the novels rest on a realist foundation that their modernist surface partly conceals. Drawing on David Shumway’s conventions of realism and Steven Earnshaw’s account of the nineteenth-century tradition, it traces four criteria: the here and now, quotidian concern, plausible narrative construction, and accessible language. Etsuko, Ono, and Stevens emerge as ordinary figures bound to specific histories and causal logic, even as their narration withholds and distorts. A comparison with the magical opening of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children shows Ishiguro signalling realism from the first page.