In Ishiguro’s first novel, A Pale View of Hills, the narrator, Etsuko, looks out at the view of the surrounding countryside from her English garden and comments ‘I always think it’s so truly like England out here’. The phrase ‘truly like’ emphasizes a central topic in Ishiguro’s work: the question of England, or of what it is ‘truly like’ that is evoked especially in The Remains of the Day, When We Were Orphans, Never Let Me Go, and The Buried Giant. Such novels underscore the idea that human communities are permanent only in their heterogeneity and instability, in their fragile and conflicted status, and in the varied and ever-changing terms in which they talk to themselves about themselves. Ishiguro’s novels repeatedly return to and continually reinvent forms of Englishness because they recognize that England is an invention, a phantasm that can therefore only be ‘truly like’ itself, not itself. His narratives are not only about the exilic, ungrounded condition of the immigrant or of the cultural stranger within a society, but also (and therefore) about the ersatz, ungrounded condition of us all.

This chapter is devoted to Ishiguro’s archive and aims to suggest ways in which our understanding of the author’s work can be developed and enhanced by an examination of his drafts, notes, plans and other documents. It first offers a brief description of the scope and contents of Ishiguro’s papers, which the author carefully selected, organized, and prepared before their transfer to the Harry Ransom Center. It then discusses his conscientious methods of composition as revealed by the archives and as presented by Ishiguro himself in an explanatory piece entitled ‘How I Write’: months or years of planning precede the first formal drafts, which are extensively revised or sometimes discarded altogether. As a case study, the chapter examines some of the ‘precursors’ to The Remains of the Day in order to show how access to the archives and preliminary steps to a published text may illuminate the complex process of creation.