Chihiro Ishiguro

Or, an escape that so thoroughly knows it is an escape becomes a form of realism, and asks to be judged like any other form of activity. The individual death is important, though, dignified or not. The most urgent argument in the book is that death is not, as the genre so often suggests, "only a mystery." A policeman calls a rotting female -971- corpse a thing, and is severely rebuked by Dalgliesh: "Sergeant, the word is 'body. Or, if you prefer, there's 'cadaver, 'corpse, 'victim, even 'deceased. … What you are looking at was a woman. She was not a thing when she was alive and she is not a thing now." This is a little preacherly, but the question, I take it, is not about words only. It is about our feelings on the subject of endings, the abrupt crossing from life into death, the sudden absence of human identity. This is no longer the excuse for a story of detection, it is what stalks detection itself, the story behind the stories. The End of History A strand of rope, a child on a swing, a hanging body: these images, in Kazuo Ishiguro's Pale View of Hills (1982), haunt the mind of a Japanese woman thinking back over her life in Nagasaki after the war ...»