Two roads diverged in a wood, and I —I took the one less traveled by,And that has made all the difference.Robert Frost, “The Road not Taken” We have all gone away;There is no one to tell our story. Now there is only leftgreat land, wounded. No bird may fly above ituntil our return.Cheran, “Apocalypse” Unlike rebuilding which merely designates the act of restoring or replacing what has been damaged or destroyed, reconstruction is a more comprehensive and complex transformative process combinin...

‘I have in vain tried to recover the lines from the palimpsest tablet of my memory.’Samuel Taylor Coleridge In several interviews, Kazuo Ishiguro has indicated the preservation of his early childhood memories as the umbilical key to his fiction: ‘I never properly said goodbye to Japan, only a temporary goodbye. For a long time, I simply assumed that we would return. Maybe, had they known it was forever, there would have been a more conscious holding on to Japan. Or a proper bereavement. But a...