Musings on Kazuo Ishiguro and tragedy

I think the reason why I love Kazuo Ishiguro as a writer is because he is ultimately a poet of nostalgia. An apologist for a time long gone by, of fading memories cobwebbed by faint fog, of realities that could have been had it not been for the obstinacy or propriety or star-crossed fate or bad luck of some of those involved. In that, he is a singularly Japanese author. The prose Ishiguro writes is quintessentially English, but the fate, the twists, the lack of salvation that is the undercurrent of tragedy in his stories, is something purely Japanese.
The concept of tragedy (and while we’re at it, comedy) is truly western. All characters in Japanese stories are tragic, there is almost no such thing as a happily ever after… or maybe I’m wrong. But the story about the crane woman who wove her feathers into a beautiful gown ends in her husband peeking out of greed and her having to abscond and abandon her love. The story of Urashima Taro, the boy who saved a turtle and was granted a glimpse of the undersea paradise, is the true story of time travel; all of his friends and his beloved mother have died thinking he died prematurely, and when he in despair opens the gift granted him by the princess of paradise, he turns the age he should have been (kind of like the youngest of the Knights Templar in the third Indie Jones movie) and joins the dust as he must. There are no villains or heroes in this kind of story, there is no one fatal flaw, the characters are all consistently human; noble sometimes, flawed mostly, and hungry always.
I love the nostalgia of a time long gone, never let me go, because ultimately we are all tragedies in the making. There is no happy ending for us, no matter the lies told to us by commercials, by social media, by our delusional companions in this life busying themselves towards their graves. The only existential question that confronts us is how we can exist with less pain as we inevitably die, and we try to protect ourselves against that pain (both physical and psychological) through wealth (physical), influence/ power (psychological), and conviction, be it religious or completely atheist. This is why the past is sweet as the pain that belongs to it has already passed. We can only experience pain in the present (even remembered pains do not exist into perpetuity), and so the past is the only painless place we can retreat to. The future promises more pain (do not go gently into the good night), the current carries the momentary problems we possess, and so our mind must retreat into the halcyon days which must once have been ours, because surely no God would be cruel enough to throw us into this pain without promising us the pleasures of being alive.

Consciousness is perhaps the most successful evolutionary gimmick so far conceived (suffering from its own success as far as current socio-economic-environmental problems are concerned), but it is a cruel gift. Any system of law or rules or morality should put limitation of suffering first (whether it is called crime or cruelty or sin is immaterial) but perhaps the curse of humanity is that we are predestined with the pain of extinguishment and no earthly punishment can truly equal that horror.