“I keep thinking about this river somewhere, with the water moving really fast. And these two people in the water, trying to hold onto each other, holding on as hard as they can, but in the end it’s just too much. The current’s too strong. They’ve got to let go, drift apart."
- Never Let Me Go

Ishiguro is a Japanese author brought up in the UK. As a hybrid of the two island nations he writes this book with the tenderness of the Japanese and the dreaminess of the English. You’re aware of the rainy afternoons and foggy soccer fields of the English island, but the characters are piercingly honest and incisive about their feelings, and are very much resigned to their fate, distinctly Japanese.

The premise of this book is extremely dystopian. I started reading this book expecting it to be like the other sci-fi novels I’ve read, but no, this is not a sci-fi novel, it’s just set in an alternate reality.

This is only the second novel I’ve read that is written by a Japanese author, and I’m already both attracted to and unsettled by their writings. This novel is profoundly sad. I’ve never read anything that comes close to the gloom and melancholy this novel invokes, and what makes it worse is the reaction of the protagonists to their grief, but what makes this believable is that Ishiguro very intelligently chooses his heroes to be kids, and we are but forced to see and accept their actions from behind a screen of innocence and naivity.

The characters in this novel, especially the protagonist, are masterfully written. You can see all the small quirks that Kathy has as she revisits her memories, her mannerisms, small habits, her way of constantly detouring from the main line of thought, the weird innocent thoughts in her head than we can all easily identify with, and then there is the scene from which the book derives it’s name, all of which make her ever so real and human.

There is also a dream world woven ever so subtly in the plot, the stories about Norfolk, the mysterious Madame and her gallery, the wild outbursts of Miss Lucy and her cryptic messages, the fate of the students at Hailsham. These dreams become the foundation onto which the entire story is built, and as such the world itself seems mystical and surreal.

But perhaps the thing that makes this book so great is the vividness of it all, the metaphors, the descriptions, the innermost thoughts of Kathy, the nuance with which everything is portrayed. It’s like you’re driving alone on a featureless road for a long long time, almost merging with the background, and suddenly you pass by this colorful house on the roadside, and you’re forced to halt and turn around, admire it’s striking beauty and then reluctantly move on as you have somewhere else to be. Ishiguro takes his sweet time setting the stage up and the deep conversations happen when you least expect them, and then all the patience pays off.

Even as I try recalling the parts of this novel I get the warm tingling sensation you get when you’re too excited about something, not excited in the way of anticipating getting a new present, but excited in a more distant way, like you’re waiting to meet a separated loved one, a gentle and soft sensation like a gust that brings with it a spray of the morning dew, that wakes you up and takes you away.