Published in Textual Intricacies: Essays on Structure and Intertextuality in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Fiction in English / Ch. Bimberg , I. Volkov (Eds.) – Trier: WVT Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2009. Pp. 73– 102. ISBN 978-3-86821-159-7. Olga Dzhumailo (Rostov-on-Don) “Never-Let-Me-Go” Wounds: Leitmotifs in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Novels In reading, one should notice and fondle details. There is nothing wrong about the moonshine of generalization when it comes after the sunny trifles of the book have been lovingly collected. (Vladimir Nabokov. Lectures on Literature) ‘These old wounds.’ He gave a shrug. ‘They stay the same for years. You think you’ve got the measure of it. Then you get old and they start to grow again’. (Kazuo Ishiguro. The Unconsoled) This essay proposes to add to the sustained close readings and analyses of Kazuo Ishiguro’s novels already published by B. Shaffer (1998), M. Petry (1999), B. Lewis (2000), and C. Wong (2000). My approach will be to introduce an analysis of leitmotifs as a promising way of revealing the specific laws of Ishiguro’s creative method. This study encompasses all the novels by Ishiguro including his latest Never Let me Go (2005). Key leitmotifs which recur in Ishiguro’s oeuvre fortify its thematic congruence and unity of design. They persist as sometimes hidden directions within unreliable narratives and can be discerned in every one of Ishiguro’s novels. Seemingly trifling elements, his leitmotifs emphatically point to wound metaphors, to signs of untold suffering, to a character’s loss of personal integrity and his/her hope of retrieving his/her happy past. Among the most repetitive motifs are boxes, suitcases, musical objects, trams and buses (especially, going on a circular route), trips through labyrinthian spaces, etc. These leitmotifs depend on an infinity of complex relations with other crucial elements of his texts such as their composition, time-and-space structures, and the constellation of characters. Through these groupings of relationships a set of coherent assumptions about Ishiguro’s oeuvre as an artistic whole can be produced. Thus, leitmotifs enable the reader to reaffirm the variety and richness of the author’s personal interpretation of the most universal themes. This study of Ishiguro’s leitmotifs involves different theoretical perspectives. Among them are the phenomenological and the so-called thematic approaches (G. Poulet, J.-P. Richard, M. Raymond, J. Starobinski, G. Bachelard), which stress the formative role of an individual author’s phenomenology in his creative process; more structure-oriented views of leitmotifs developed in the works by J. Faryno, B. Gasparov, Y. Shcheglov, and A. Zholkovsky; and, some selected works on the postmodernist frame of mind in its relation to the wounded self and experience (Ch. Nash, M. Ledbetter). The essay aims at introducing a new approach to the analysis of the textual intricacies and thematic intrigues of Kazuo Ishiguro’s oeuvre. By making sense of the discrepancies between a seemingly dispassionate narrative mode and a hidden plot of leitmotifs it brings to light the poignant vulnerability of fragile human experience. Wound metaphors Kazuo Ishiguro strikes a chord with today’s rediscovering of the painful human experience which emerges in recent British postmodernist fiction. The wound metaphor in his novels shapes the intimations of loss through discerning a specific postmodern mentality. In his most ambitious novel The Unconsoled (later in citations U), the character’s amnesiac perception shows itself as a blend of the real and the utterly imaginative, an incredible confusion of names and spaces. But what it all comes down to is that there is no difference if Mullery were to be a musician or a football player, Kazan a composer or a film director, and Brodsky a conductor or a poet. Perhaps, these and the other half-revealed characters of the five