The Echoes of Young Kazuo in Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go

In his 2005 novel Never Let Me Go , Kazuo Ishiguro symbolically presents the ‘young Kazuo’ as a fading, distinctly Japanese part of himself that he left behind when he moved to England at the age of five. Rather than imagining an alternative life, as John Freeman suggests, the novel mourns the disappearance of Ishiguro’s purely Japanese self – a childhood memory gradually dissolving. Kathy mirrors this fate; her inevitable disappearance mirrors that of the young Kazuo. Through parallel structures in the novel and across Ishiguro’s body of work, I argue that Kathy embodies the young Ishiguro who is destined to fade from memory.