Abstract
This essay treats Ishiguro’s first three novels, A Pale View of Hills, An Artist of the Floating World and The Remains of the Day as a post-war trilogy. It takes an interest in why America is employed as the mutual alien of Britain and Japan, how America’s alterity operates in the three narrators’ accounts of the post-war years, what this accentuated otherness discloses regarding the entanglement of identity and loyalty, and where each of these English-language narrations positions America in relation to its narrator, narratee and international readership. The essay argues that America serves as a discursive hub around which the three narrators circuitously divulge shame and regret; that English narrations of America’s alterity trouble the divide between we the native and they the foreigner; and that for the international readership America allegorizes the critical distance Ishiguro maintains with Japan and Britain and the familiar foreignness alterity has become in an age of globalization.