Reconstructing the Past: Memory and War in the novels When We Were Orphans and The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro

Kazuo Ishiguro, the British-Japanese writer applies some specific and selected topics for his novels. Among them, memory comes first as his personal sentiment and emotion are combinedly found in memory. In most of his novels, he brings memory through the characters and plots. He deals with a plentiful touch of memory with specific signs; such as human feelings, emotions, trauma, love, attraction, forgetting, rewriting memory and anomaly of the story or narrator and many more. Through memory, a bridge or connection is made between the past and present life of man. Like memory, another unavoidable topic of Ishiguro is war. He writes about the occurrences of war which keeps an unforgettable connection with the characters of his novels. In the novels When We Were Orphans and The Remains of the Day, the Second Sino Japanese War, Opium War and the Second World War are described through which both the protagonists gain a lot of memory. Qualitative research methods are utilized effectively in this paper to explore the complex and intertwined relationship between memory and war. This research explores the deep impact of war on the characters, examining how they regain their memories to reconstruct the past in these two novels.