Kazuo Ishiguro’s overarching interest in the workings of memory and remembering, as well as in uncovering “our illusory sense of connection with the world” is well-acknowledged. Haruki Murakami has built himself a reputation as a writer of strange, yet powerful and complex fiction—whether in short-story or novel form. Ishiguro’s earlier texts are full of words and details that remind readers of Japan, or rather his own half-remembered, half-imagined Japan.

Murakami’s writing, on the other hand, shows a conspicuous absence of Japanese culture and a marked preference for Western cultural icons, despite the texts being produced originally in Japanese and only afterwards published in English translation. How, then, do the two writers intersect across national and literary borders, beyond their presumably shared heritage as authors of Japanese descent?

This study explores the ways in which Ishiguro and Murakami— both celebrated contemporary writers based in very different cultural, linguistic and geographic areas—employ silence and remembering as narrative devices to pen two short stories as rife with potentialities for meaning and symbolism as they are tense and sparse in explicit communication.