I am a huge Kazuo Ishiguro fan. By the time I die I will have read all of his books at least multiple times; I'm currently two-sevenths there. (Which sounds so much less morbid when it's not put into fractions like that.) As a fan, I've set myself certain stringent restraints as to how I approach Nocturnes, his first short story collection. I will not read all of the stories at once (at least the first time through). Check. This is because he does not publish books often and if one of them is going to be a short story collection--the sort of thing that is built to be savored far more than any novel--then I will take advantage of that to the best of my ability. (I at one point considered reading only one story a year until his next book comes out. I did not consider that for long. Savor, yes. Torture, no.) I will also only read a story if I can sit down, read the story, and then stand up in a single swoop in a single afternoon. Check, so far, at least. I want to have the experience of reading something uninterrupted, of taking in a piece of literature the way I take in a film at the theater: whole, and without interruption. This latter restriction helps reinforce the former in that it's the rare afternoon (it has to be afternoon, as well, because the coffee has kicked in, but the evening is still distant, no threat to the present) these days when there's literally nothing to do but read as if life depended on it. Life always depends on it, but let us not go there.

This past weekend I had one of those afternoons and I read the third story from the collection, "Malvern Hills," and I enjoyed it, in and of itself. It is difficult to speak about the ways it may or may not relate to the other stories in the novel--said reading will have to happen when I do read the whole book all together over the span of a week--beyond the fact that there is music and that there are people and that there is the decided presence of Ishiguroian language made oddly more intriguing (rather than less intriguing as one might fear) by the decided absence of that thing he does--that thing he does in The Remains of the Day and the novels that preceded it, that thing that he does in The Unconsoled and When We Were Orphans, that thing he does in Never Let Me Go--as if he set out with the specific intent of writing wonderfully without making any "that thing" of it or critical to it. Though who knows, the second read-through may reveal the unrecognizable skin that holds the bones of the stories to each other; failing to notice this now makes me no less of a fan, and all the more someone who will, or at least fully well expects to, be continuously rewarded by the works of a writer for years to come. Which said, the next story in the book is the title story, and it is the longest story in the book, and perfect afternoons sometimes have to be made, not awaited.