Maybe my (partially) poor review of this book is partially due to the fact that it was assigned. I typically love contemporary Japanese fiction a-la-Murakami (Kafka on the Shore especially, even Norwegian Wood, regardless of off-putting misogynistic overtones and graphic descriptions of 13-year-old naked bodies).
And yet, I couldn’t force myself to completely like Klara and the Sun by acclaimed author and Nobel-Prize winner Kazuo Ishiguro, and most of this was due to the actual firsthand experience of reading it. The prose is stilted and fifth-grader-esque, the fictional world is barely elucidated until the last hundred-or-so pages, and various random symbols and events (the bull?????) aren’t connected to the plot, characters, or themes (obviously, at least). It’s not a pleasant experience to attempt understanding of a 300-page robot narrative while stumbling through phrases like “oblong”, “lifted”, “AF”, and “interaction meeting”—the list goes on ad nauseam— that are never fully unpacked in a non-opaque way.
That said, the things that I don’t like about it are why it is—in retrospect— such a well-written narrative. Klara is a robot. Of course she isn’t going to be endowed with the authorial faculties of Morrison, or write flowery prose like Fitzgerald. And it makes complete sense that the phrases I mention would remain mysterious, because Klara is just writing as she experiences the world. She might never think to explain what an AF is because she is one— she lacks the human faculties (that’s a can of worms if there ever was one) to comprehend that things have not always been like this: why would she explain what an oblong is when she can’t comprehend that there is a reader to explain it to, or that they are living in a different world from hers?
(Allow me to add that I probably would have enjoyed it a lot more if I had read it slower, and taken time to sit with and consider each character and the themes they introduce. In my opinion, enjoyment of this book is entirely character-driven, and though the plot is compelling, racing through it doesn’t allow Ishiguro’s intelligence to shine through. It requires a mature reader to understand a mature writer. On a first read, it’s both overwrought and simplistic, but the vagueness will start to make a little more sense after reading some of Ishiguro’s other work.)
(Interesting but perhaps not completely relevant connection to follow: though I’m
definitely not any sort of authority on this, I notice a pattern in this book/other Ishiguro/other Japanese fiction that I’ve read, even Tales of the Genji, that not everything means something. I find that in American English classes, we are trained to find the symbol in literally EVERYTHING. Someone I know got pop-quizzed on the color of a character’s shirt. But in Murakami’s especially (Kafka on the Shore!), and even in his interviews, he makes many statements to the effect of “you need to read it multiple times for it to make sense”, “not everything means something”, etc. For example, in the aforementioned book Kafka, fish and leeches fall from the sky on various occasions. It has no obvious connection to anything else in the book, and garners many perplexed comments on Murakami Reddit forums. But, as someone on one of these forums put it, “sometimes, there is no point, and Murakami is just obscure to be obscure.” Ishiguro seems to echo this sentiment, repeatedly mentioning a bull that has a tenuous connection—at best—with Josie, the main character, and her mother, without giving it any metaphorical weight at other points in the book.)
Anyways, now that my lengthy asides are out of the way, my actual point: regardless of how readable it is, this book is incredibly topical and addresses a plethora of different themes seemingly effortlessly. The one that I want to hone in on is religion/faith/worship. Though some themes are more page-turning and dystopian, and relevant to today’s typical love-hate relationship with technology, (did Ishiguro inadvertently predict post-COVID-education with interaction meetings and individual online “oblong” tutoring? Perhaps…) I find that the book being written from the perspective of a robot makes the huge theme of faith so much more interesting. There exists a dramatic dichotomy between basically everything in the book and Klara’s feverish worship of the sun (the importance of which is partially evidenced in the actual title, Klara and the Sun… duh).
It makes perfect sense that Klara would worship the sun— she is a solar powered robot, so she needs the sun’s “nourishment” to subsist. However, she soon begins to endow the capitalized-into-a-proper-noun Sun with the God-like powers to heal Josie, who is sick after a genetic enhancement process. This continues Ishiguro’s pattern of exposing dichotomies in this fictional world: Klara, a robot, acting on a (debatably) human impulse to believe in something bigger than her/itself. The second layer: belief in the sun is a markedly ancient practice, and belongs to the greater trend of Native American and Mayan civilizations using nature as a key element of religion (think the Great Serpent Mound, the Calendar Stone, even Stonehenge!). The barn in which she tries to have conversations with the sun becomes a sort of religious site, even a ziggurat (a Mesopotamian temple where the higher you get, the better you can supposedly communicate with God). In Klara’s case, the sun sets directly over this barn, so she is closest to her god, the Sun, in said barn.
Not only does Klara’s belief in the sun defy her status as unfeeling piece of robot technology, there is a huge contrast between the futuristic technology required for Klara herself to exist and the ancient practices of spirituality that her fervent beliefs recall. It supports one of the books central questions, one that is reinforced by various other instances in the text as well (for one, the mother asking Klara to “continue” Josie)—just how human is Klara? Is there truth to what Mr. Capaldi says? That humans can be replicated with advanced enough technology, that there isn’t really the soul we believe there is? Is this belief— that something gives us humanity and makes us fundamentally different from technologies made to replicate it— just to spare our own feelings?
Regardless of the answers to these complicated questions, ones that Ishiguro artfully suggests rather than expounds, Klara’s childlike belief in a God is the highlight of the book for me. Her long conversations with the Sun, begging him to heal Josie, reading questions and answers in the changing colors of the light, give me hope in the face of whatever inevitably dystopian future we’re collectively headed towards. Even when robots take over, and children have “artificial friends” instead of real ones, robots and humans alike will still see the sun travel over the horizon.
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