SOURCE: "Probing the Plight of Lives 'Trapped' in Others' Expectations," in Christian Science Monitor, Vol. 87, October 4, 1995, p. 14.

In the following review of The Unconsoled, Rubin argues that while the book may seem labyrinthine and nearly boring, it is also fascinating and skillfully written.

Kazuo Ishiguro's first novel, A Pale View of Hills (1981), portrays his native city, Nagasaki, in the wake of the bombing that devastated it nine years before his birth. His second novel An Artist of the Floating World (1986), unfolded in the alien milieu of prewar, imperialist Japan. In his third novel, the Booker Prize-winning Remains of the Day (1990), Ishiguro imagined the world seen through the eyes of a stuffy, repressed English butler on the verge of retirement.

Now, in his fourth novel, The Unconsoled, this gifted and versatile writer, raised and educated in England, takes on a theme of Kafkaesque complexity that is played out...