Summary
The novel is told from the perspective of Klara, an AF, or Artificial Friend. When it opens, she is in a store with her AF friend, Rosa. They are in the middle of the store and can see some of what is going on outside, such as how tall the RPO building is, people walking by, and where the Sun is on his journey. Klara loves the Sun and tries to soak up as much of his nutrients as she can. She tells Rosa to do the same.
Manager moves their friend, Boy AF Rex, to the front of the store. This is the best spot, but she says that every spot is a good place to get chosen. One day a mother and her daughter come in and the girl wants Rex, but the mother is reluctant since he is a B2 model, or one that has trouble absorbing the sun. The two leave, and Klara guesses that Rex is sad. All the models are okay if they are away from the Sun for a bit, but after a couple of hours they grow lethargic. It is one of the reasons why they all like the window.
Klara and Rosa are thrilled when it is their turn for the window. When they sit down the Sun touches their feet, and when Manager opens the grid, the Sun warms their whole bodies. Klara, unlike Rosa, has always wanted to see more and know more about the outside world. Now she can see the tall RPO building, the passersby, and the taxis. Rosa looks outside occasionally, but mostly holds her gaze in the neutral way that Manager instructed.
Klara can tell when children come up to the window if they are happy or sad, but noticing these nuances does not come easy to Rosa. Manager tells Klara she is quite remarkable, and to continue to be as wonderful the next day as she was today, because she and Rosa represent the store to the whole street.
On the morning of the fourth day, Josie and her mother come to the store. Josie is pale, thin, and has a stilted walk. She looks to be about fourteen and a half. She starts talking to Klara through the glass, and says she’d seen her yesterday when she drove by in a taxi. Josie is friendly, lively, and talks to Klara about the Sun at her house.
The Mother was talking to a friend, and now looks over at Klara with a piercing stare. Josie whispers goodbye to Klara and says she will see her again soon. The Mother, who has dark hair, is thin, and looks both angry and exhausted, guides Josie away. Josie waves at Klara and they are gone.
Later, Rosa comments that she thought she’d see more AFs out there in the world. Klara too is surprised; they’ve only seen a couple outside their window. She does notice that the AFs tend to not look at their window or move by quickly. First, she assumes they are embarrassed, then she decides they are probably afraid they’ll be thrown away and replaced. Klara doesn’t say this to Rosa, but just watches. Rosa misses so many signals that Klara does not. One example is when Klara sees a girl walking impatiently ahead and an AF trailing behind; she wonders “what it might be like to have found a home and yet to know that your child didn’t want you” (18).
Time passes in the window. Klara is glad to have Rosa there, but they are so different. Klara realizes that she is more “puzzled, then increasingly fascinated by the more mysterious emotions passers-by would display in front of us” (18). She knows she cannot really help her child if she does not understand the world, so she dedicates herself to watching the behavior she needs to learn.
She watches a fight one day, which Rosa does not pick up on. She also watches a powerful moment between a woman with a coffee cup looking across the street at a man, and then cross to him. He is astonished by her, and they embrace while the Sun pours his nourishment down on them. Klara tells Manager about this, and the woman quietly speculates that maybe they had lost each other, and that there was probably pain alongside pleasure. Klara wonders if she will ever feel this amalgam.
One day at the end of the second week, Klara notices Josie looking at her again excitedly through the window. The Mother is leaning down and talking seriously to Josie, and finally straightens up. She has an unwavering gaze directed at Klara, but lets Josie approach the window. Josie says she is happy to be back and missed her, and that she bets a lot of other kids came to see her. She says she’d like to have Klara come to her house, but not against her will. She thinks Klara will like her house, and they’ll do fun things together. Yet, she adds, sometimes she is not well and thinks something is going on but she is not sure what it is. She says she is telling Klara this because people always say things will be perfect but that is not true and she does not want to mislead her. The Mother calls her away, and she promises to be back soon.
However, days pass and she does not return. Manager had always been warm and encouraging, but is clearly disappointed that neither Rosa nor Klara were selling at the front. Thus begins their second period together, now mid-store. There is still a section of the window visible, which is where Klara can see the Cootings Machine.
The Cootings Machine, which she names for the big letters on the side, is a huge machine that makes pollution from the three funnels protruding from its roof. The smoke is dark and thick and becomes worse and worse.
The two boy AFs now in the window are obviously disappointed, since it is harder for customers to see them in there. Manager tries to reassure all the AFs, but they are still bothered. The machine stays for four days and its absence makes everyone’s spirits rise.
One day a girl with spiky hair comes in and is interested in Klara, but her father would rather have her get one of the new B3 models. Manager says Klara is one of the best, but Klara does not engage with the girl in the way she should. Later Manager reprimands her and Klara says that she thought she would not be the best choice for that particular child. Manager understands, but tells her not to do that again. Manager also realizes that Kalra thinks she might have an arrangement with Josie, but gently warns her that children make promises all the time and do not keep them.
Rosa is finally purchased and Klara wishes to remind her of all the things she needs to remember to be a good AF, but Rosa is too excited to listen. After Rosa leaves, Manager decides to give Klara some more time in the window. One of the things Klara notices is Beggar Man and his dog lying on the ground, and she assumes they are dead. But then the Sun shines brightly on them and provides them with enough nourishment to survive, and they get up, laughing and happy.
Eventually Klara is moved back to the rear alcove, and that is when she hears Josie return to the store. She is nervous that Josie will not find her. She also hears the Mother trying to get Josie interested in a B3, Sung Yi, but Josie does not want her. Manager asks if Josie is looking for the AF she liked before and Josie says yes, and Manager brings her to Klara. Josie is thrilled and tells the Mother to come quickly, as she’d found Klara. Josie apologizes to Klara for being gone for so long, and says she had been sick.
The Mother is skeptical because she is not a B3, but Manager says Klara has an incredible “appetite for observing and learning… and has the most sophisticated understanding of any AF in this store, B3s not excepted” (43). The Mother listens and then tells Klara she is going to talk to her. She asks her questions about Josie, like her eye color, her voice tone, and her walk. She even asks Klara to do the walk, to which Klara complies. The Mother stares off into space, as if she were trying to see something beyond. Josie begs her mother to let her have Klara, and the Mother finally agrees.
Analysis
Klara and the Sun drops the reader right into Klara’s consciousness and her world, and leaves us with the task of figuring out exactly what is happening in both. Klara is a straightforward narrator in that her prose is simple and clear, but she is much more complicated than she appears on the surface. In the New York Times, Radhika Jones notes that “the stilted affect that so often characterizes Ishiguro’s prose and dialogue — an incantatory flatness that belies its revelatory ability — serves its literal function” and Dennis Lim writes in Bookforum that despite her “impressive capacity for mimesis and spongelike powers of absorption, we never forget Klara’s obvious limitations. Her view of the world is circumscribed, her vocabulary stilted, her agency virtually nonexistent. All of which make her an oddly perfect fit for Ishiguro, who has long specialized in the blinkered protagonist. What his tentative narrators tell us, about themselves and the worlds they inhabit, is never the full picture; in fact, the pathos of his work routinely derives from how little his characters are able to admit or understand.”
Klara is a very observant AF, or Artificial Friend, but she does not always understand what she is seeing, or what to call things. For example, she sees complicated emotions in people’s faces as “boxes,” where a smiling mouth might be in one and flared nostrils in another. She can tell us very little about the pollution-spewing machine, calling it the “Cootings Machine” after the label on the side, or about what has happened technologically, politically, economically, and socially in her world to bring us to this present moment.
Book critic Anita Felicelli writes that “Kazuo Ishiguro makes use of a bomb under the table. The novel cannily uses delay and withheld information to ratchet up our worry, taking time to disclose the source of the menace. We know something horrifying is going to be uncovered, but we don’t know when.” Because we only know what Klara knows—and what she knows is often limited, imprecise, misunderstood, or irrelevant to her–we must be fleet, canny readers. We must put the pieces together to answer fundamental questions, such as why is Josie sick? Why is her mother behaving so oddly? What does it mean to be “lifted” or “substituted”? What exactly is going on in the Father’s community? How bad is the environment? What else can robots do?
Critic Yiqun Xiao writes about Ishiguro’s narrative technique and its goals, explaining that as Klara in particular talks about her emotions and desires, she is performing a type of narration called “circumnarration,” which is defined by Helen Davis as a subcategory of the unnarratable, “that either evades the report of what actually happened / is happening through various means—substituted narratives, metalepses, misdirections, etc.—or only obliquely or indirectly reports it.” He suggests that “Klara manages to simultaneously to present herself as an emotionless AF and to avoid violating the boundaries between human and AF that might trigger unease in readers.”
Klara wants her readers to think of and remember her as a good, observant, and successful AF, and deliberately tries to obfuscate or circumnarrate the times in which she is disturbed or upset. There are a few examples in which she refuses to respond to a query or command, or to look at someone; instead, she smiles and allows it to “function as a mask that guides her emotions from outside perception.” She also sometimes tries to misreport or hide truth, repeatedly denying Josie’s faults and telling Rick later that the Mother is always kind to her even though she is not. And at the end of the novel, she skips over several years of life with Josie and the Mother, years putatively full of highs and lows that may have caused us to change our opinions about various characters. As readers, we feel affection and sympathy for Klara, and do not doubt her intentions, but we ultimately approach her narration with a healthy dose of skepticism.
