The trajectory of Kazuo Ishiguro's earlier work and the critical response to it accounts for the deliberateness with which his fourth novel is set nowhere — in a mysteriously unnamed and unnamable European city. After the reception of his first two "Japanese" novels, Ishiguro expressed his annoyance with a certain type of misreading which took their value to be the insider's view they gave of post-war Japanese life, as if the author were a "mediator to Japanese culture".¹ Ishiguro said, "I am not essentially concerned with a realist purpose in writing. I just invent a Japan which serves my needs". That there was something deliberately "inauthentic", in realist terms, about his recreation of Japanese life — that it was imagined rather than reported — should have been clearer from the start. In his first novel, A Pale View of Hills, the hinges of realism are unfastened in a well-known crux.² The negotiation between realist and fabulist codes, so stark in The Unconsoled, has been a consistent preoccupation from the start of Ishiguro's career.³