26 Conflicted Memory, Irreversible Loss: Dissociative Projection in Kazuo Ishiguro’s A Pale View of Hills and Yasunari Kawabata’s The Sound of the Mountain Krystian Piotrowski Abstract The task of identifying main hallmarks of Ishiguro’s and Kawabata’s oeuvres is but of double-edged nature – one may be unconsciously driven to seemingly obvious and unequivocal categorisations, naming attempts at self- understanding and self-interpretation as the core of their narratives. Both writers are associated with highly poeticised, sensual, and atmospheric explorations of the past long gone. They thoroughly investigate and comment upon one’s personal loss, alienation, displacement, or falling into obsolescence. They depict the worlds that perished once and for all, simultaneously making them a mythologised locus of ultimate contentment, plenitude, and fulfilment. In this sense, the past is superimposable onto the present – it develops into a safe haven formed out of one’s innermost feelings and memories, a place where one takes refuge in one’s reminiscences. This paper surveys the role of memory, nostalgia, and loss in Ishiguro’s first novel, A Pale View of Hills, and Kawabata’s work from his mature period, The Sound of the Mountain. The former, a veritable attempt at recreating and re-orientalising the Orient, is subjected to a comparative analysis with the publication often assessed as the pinnacle of post-war Japanese literature. Characterial disintegration, dissociative symptoms, and affectivity that are present in both novels are analysed as determinants of their fragmentary narrative structure. Keywords memory studies, trauma studies, narrative identity, intertextuality, aesthetics, neo-sensualism, British literature, Japanese literature 1. In 1986 in an interview with Gregory Mason (only later published in Autumn 1989) Kazuo Ishiguro revealed his main sources of inspiration and authors whose literary output not only prompted him to pursue the path of a writer himself but also greatly influenced his still-developing style. He wistfully talks about the years he spent at the University of Kent and the University of East Anglia, mentioning devoting much of his free time to Charlotte Brontë, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, or Dickens. 1 Ishiguro goes to great lengths to emphasise that his education and writing style are predominantly rooted in the Western tradition, further voicing his surprise at being set side by side by critics with authors such as Yukio Mishima. 2 He does, though, admit that he actually acquainted himself with Japanese literary classics, naming Jun’ichirō Tanizaki, Masuji Ibuse, Sōseki Natsume, and Yasunari Kawabata as his primary influences. 3 Despite Ishiguro’s enduring reluctance to any authorial categorisations, it is particularly tempting to trace his early steps as a budding 1 Gregory Mason, “An Interview with Kazuo Ishiguro,” in Conversations with Kazuo Ishiguro, ed. Brian W. Schaffer and Cynthia F. Wong (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2008), 4. 2 All Japanese names in the article have been transcribed in a reversed order, i.e. the given name followed by the family name, with the exception of direct quotations, in which the original order (if applicable) has been preserved. 3 Mason, “Interview,” 4.