Nocturne:Five Stories of Music and Nightfall

By Khoo Kok Kian

Nocturne is derived from the French word, Noctunal and from Latin, Nocturnus. People usually interpret it as a music piece which is inspired by night. A very famous classical music piece by Frederic Chopin was also named based on this word. Kazuo Ishiguro, a prominent author, who is also penned The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go followed suit and produced Nocturne: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall.

The novel, as the title states, consists of 5 short stories. The setting of the stories flies from the piazzas of Italy to the beautiful Malvern Hill in the United Kingdom, to the “secret floor” of an exclusive Hollywood hotel. The characters are nicely depicted from a café guitarist to a young but lost musician to a talented young cellist. All of them share a common interest and ambition but all of them also have some moments which will reckon your past, present or perhaps future.

In the last story of the novel, “Cellists”, is set somewhere in an Italian city. A young promising cellist gets to know a famous female cellist. She agrees to tutor him, gives comments and critics but never plays in front of him. In actuality, she pretends to be a cellist but cannot play the cello at all. She just merely believes in her own potential to be a great cellist.

“You have to understand, I am a virtuoso,” she tells him. “But I’m one who’s yet to be unwrapped.” Thus, we can see that she is seeing her ideal self which has nothing to do with her reality. She is not a cellist after all. In the end, she marries someone she does not love and the young cellist ends up in a second class chamber group at a hotel restaurant.

A feeling of romantic and melancholy is presumptuous in the first story, “Crooner”. Jan, the narrator who plays guitar in Piazza San Marco, is hired to accompany an ageing American singer, Tony Gardner, to serenade his wife, Lindy, from a gondola beneath their hotel window.

The story is sad as Tony is not only singing a love song to Lindy but a song of goodbye. He is leaving her for his career. He is going to divorce her to make into the front page, to create news value for himself even though they are still in love.

After the first story, Lindy makes her appearance again in the story, “Nocturne”. It is a thrill to see there is a connection of the same character from one story to another even though the setting and storyline is totally different from each other.

The above are the stories that I liked the most from the novel, and great stories are not meant to be spoiled so I will not summarize the whole novel. However, I would say each story is heartbreaking in its own way but with some moments of joy. In summary, “Nocturne”, is an exploration of love and loss. This happens to everyone, everywhere and every day, not exactly in the same track but by ironically by parallelism.