Writing was Kazuo Ishiguro’s second-choice career: he really wanted to become a rock star. As a teenager he played guitar and piano, and wrote songs. He fired off demo tapes to producers — and was rebuffed every time: “They would listen to them for 15 seconds and say ‘Hideous! Don’t like it, mate. Get out!’” It was only when he published his first novel, A Pale View of Hills (1982), that he gave up his musical ambitions.

Ishiguro as teen rocker — who’d have thought it? The shouty atmosphere of a gig could hardly be more different to the veneered quiet of The Remains of the Day (1989), the dreamy fog-bordered world of The Unconsoled (1995), or the brackish uncanny of Never Let Me Go (2005). His friends’ nickname for him is “Ish”, and it’s a good moniker for a writer who specialises in a studied vagueness, in vision that’s just out of focus, in the -ishness of things. Over the course of six novels, Ishiguro has marked out this ­necessarily ill-defined territory as his own. Book after book has approached the same themes from different angles: the bittersweetness of nostalgia, the ­delusions of memory and the special lunacies of Englishness.

Through it all, though, music has­ ­lingered. It’s there in the concert pianist who haunts The Unconsoled; there in the cassette tape to which Kathy dances alone, repeatedly, in Never Let Me Go. In 2003, Ishiguro wrote the screenplay to The ­Saddest Music in the World, a dark comedy about a woman who sponsors a competition to find, well, the saddest music in the world. Music is always connected — like most things in Ishiguro’s fiction, in fact — to a part-articulated pathos.

Now comes Nocturnes: a musically structured, musically obsessed quintet of short stories, whose narrators are all musicians of one kind or another: a guitarist plucking away in the piazzas of Venice, a young man who retreats to the Malvern hills to compose love songs, a goofy TEFL teacher who is obsessed with Broadway ballads. The preoccupation of the book is regret, and more exactly the regret of late-middle age.

Each story focuses on people who have entered “the bridge passage” between middle and old age, and have realised that they’ve made “pigs’ arses” of their lives. The stories describe their attempts to set things right, or at least to incite their lives into moments of reck­oning. But these crux points all turn out to be inconsequential. The marriages continue to falter, the friendships go on floundering, and regret eventually smothers optimism.

The most curious thing about Nocturnes is how unremarkable it is. The prose is almost textureless. The plots are repetitive and wilfully uninvolving. And the voices of the five narrators are close to cloned. They all begin sentences with “On the whole”, “As I say”, and “I have to say”. They all “guess”, and “suppose” and “think”. They are all ruefully self-reflective. They all ask a lot of ­rhetorical questions. None of them has quite made it as a performer, and each retains a near-mystical awe for those who have. They’re sensitive to unease, but not articulate enough to define it. “I could see there was something not quite right here, something he wasn’t telling me,” thinks one narrator. “Something vaguely awkward hovered between them,” thinks another.

Repetitious then, you say? But repe­tition does make sense as a writerly method here, for the subject of this story cycle is repetition (the repetitions of marriage, the repetitions of performance), as both curse and blessing. And once you begin to realise that repetition is a deliberate strategy on Ishiguro’s part, you start to tolerate it more, and to notice it everywhere: iterated characters and phrases, recurrent motifs (bandages, strings, echoes). So intricate are the structures of recurrence within the book, in fact, that it feels as though you could score them onto a stave. The proof of this analogy between text and music comes in the final line of the last story, which loops the reader — da capo! — back to the first sentence of the first story.

If you did score Nocturnes, what would it sound like? I suspect Ishiguro would want to hear it as a Philip Glass operetta, haunting and recursive, or perhaps one of Leonard Cohen’s eerie carols. But to me it sounds more like a nameless work of high-grade, low-key muzak. Closing the book, it’s hard to recall much more than an atmosphere or an air; a few bars of music, half-heard, technically accomplished, quickly forgotten.

Nocturnes by Kazuo Ishiguro
Faber £14.99 pp240

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