Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall
By Kazuo Ishiguro
Faber £14.99, 240 pages
FT Bookshop price: £11.99

“Writing about music,” somebody once said, “is like dancing about architecture.” The quotation – which has been variously attributed to Elvis Costello, Frank Zappa and Clara Schumann among others – stands as a warning to writers who might want to use musicians as their central characters. It may seem an appealing way of exploring themes of creativity and artistic endeavour without slipping into the terrible self-indulgence of “writing about writing”. But chances are you will find yourself bogged down either in meaningless abstraction or, at the other extreme, technical impenetrability.

In his new story cycle, Nocturnes, Kazuo Ishiguro sidesteps these pitfalls with his characteristic, unassuming elegance. He has been careful with his choice of musical reference points. Most of the characters are writers or performers of music: a washed-up lounge singer; the guitarist in a café orchestra in Venice’s St Mark’s Square; a brilliant saxophone player who has never quite made it to the big time. Crucially, their repertoire consists of jazz standards and light orchestral favourites, and in this way Ishiguro manages to dodge the near-impossible task of describing the music in words: the soundscape of the stories is already embedded in our collective consciousness.

These are not really stories about music, in any case, but relationship studies, with an emphasis on celebrity and what it takes to be a success or a failure in the modern world. Humour has always been a feature of Ishiguro’s work – I happen to find The Unconsoled and The Remains of the Day two of the funniest books of the past 20 years. But perhaps never so strongly as here: all five tales have a rueful, melancholy wit, and two of them are out-and-out farces. Their recurrent procedure is to keep the characters’ motivation concealed for as long as possible, beneath a veneer of polite, oblique conversation, and then – when it is finally disclosed – to surprise the reader with the extent of their venality or cold-heartedness.

Each story throws its own quiet curveball, so it would be unfair to discuss the plots in detail. The first one, however, entitled simply “Crooner”, might stand as a kind of template for the whole collection. Entertaining the tourists at a café in St Mark’s Square, a guitarist from an unnamed former communist country spots a famous American singer, Tony Gardner, sitting at one of the tables. He joins him, falls into conversation, and is soon aware of a certain tension between Gardner and his wife.

These stories will often zoom in on the relationship between romantic partners or a married couple, and adopt the perspective of a watchful third party, observing alertly from the sidelines, a little bit puzzled as to what is really going on.

When he is asked to accompany Gardner that night as he serenades his wife beneath the balcony of their palazzo, the guitarist assumes that this is a sentimental gesture aimed at winning back her affections. The reverse is true: this is a valediction, because, regretfully but ruthlessly, Gardner has decided to leave his wife, sensing that to trade her in for a younger model will provide a boost to his flagging career.

Gardner’s serenade is beautifully described, in such a way that there’s no doubting its warmth and sincerity. That it is a loving gesture, which nonetheless coincides with an utterly heartless decision, is all part of the absurd nature of human relationships which Ishiguro observes so coolly. Music, he implies, provides one of the few possible oases of stillness and respite from this absurdity, and from the chaos it unleashes.

This sense is conveyed even more in the second story, “Come Rain or Come Shine”. Two old university friends, whose reunion has already descended into farcical embarrassment, take a few minutes out to dance together to the tune of Sarah Vaughan singing “April in Paris”, before attempting to rebuild their shattered relationship. “I knew it was a long track, at least eight minutes. I felt pleased about that, because I knew after the song ended, we wouldn’t dance any more ... But for another few minutes at least, we were safe, and we kept dancing under the starlit sky.”

That mention of “starlit sky”, incidentally, is about as poetic as Ishiguro gets. One of the many remarkable features of his writing is its glorious plainness: each of these stories is told in the voice of a laconic, colloquial first-person narrator, with no recourse to metaphor or extravagant figures of speech, and yet comes loaded with enormous emotional weight. Most bad literary writing is bad because it is too fussy, too showy on the surface: in order to see through clearly to the depths beneath, you need something much harder to achieve – a perfect stillness. Ishiguro is a master of that stillness, and each one of these five delightful stories shows why.

Jonathan Coe is author of ‘The Rain Before It Falls’ (Viking)