Fantastic Metropolis

At the outset of the book, Ryder arrives at his hotel and is shown around his room by an elderly hotel porter by the name of Gustav. As Gustav is explaining the conveniences of the room, the reader is suddenly confronted with an example of Ryder’s exceptional mental abilities. While listening to the porter describe the features of the hotel room, Ryder becomes aware that the porter is thinking about something else:

a certain matter that had been preoccupying him throughout the day had again pushed its way to the front of his mind. He was… worrying about his daughter and her little boy. (4)

Reading the porter’s mind, Ryder than relates the precise nature of the troubling matter, while the porter continues with his description of the room. Ryder feels a wave of sympathy for Gustav and resolves to assist him with his problems.

On another occasion Ryder attends a dinner party where he gains knowledge of what has occurred prior to his arrival from the atmosphere within the room:

Then after a while I noticed there was an odd quality to the whole atmosphere… though I was unable to immediately put my finger on it. (5)

A short time later he informs the reader:

Then, as I continued to cast my gaze about me, I began steadily to realise just what had taken place before my arrival. (6)

Ryder then proceeds to relate a series of events, including detailed conversations, of what has taken place previously. He is able to move back into the past and narrate what has occurred.

Through this technique Ishiguro lifts Ryder beyond the limitations of the first person narrator and gives him some of the powers of the detached omniscient third person narrator, those of the writer of the book himself. Ryder’s powers, however, as well as being sporadic are also limited by the fact that he is ultimately a character in a story—he is not the writer incarnate.

This is displayed clearly in another scene where we find Ryder waiting in a car outside an apartment block while the hotel manager’s son, Stephan, delivers a message to Miss Collins, a friend of his father. Ryder watches Stephan leave the car and enter the apartment block. He then carefully relates the conversation between Stephan and Miss Collins as if he had been standing next to them. On this occasion it appears that Ryder can do more than just read the minds of those that he comes into contact with. It is as if he has relocated his conscious mind into the apartment where the conversation takes place. It is made clear in the novel that this takes a considerable degree of concentration on Ryder’s part. He is totally absorbed in narrating the conversation which is occurring and is unaware of anything which is happening in his own physical environment. But at one point, Ryder becomes distracted from the conversation between Stephan and Miss Collins:

Miss Collins sipped her sherry thoughtfully. She seemed about to reply, but just at this point I heard Boris shift behind me in the back of the car. (7)

Ryder’s concentration is broken and his consciousness is pulled back to the interior of the car he is sitting in. When his mind returns to the apartment, he finds that the conversation has ceased and “something in both their manners suggested that their meeting had concluded on an uneasy note.” (8)

Unlike a third person narrator, Ryder is unable to pick up the events where he left off. He missed the final minutes of the conversation because his mind was elsewhere and he was unable to exercise his unique powers of concentration.

Throughout the story Ryder’s unusual mental talents occur spontaneously and without any narrative comment. Ryder never says, for example, I know what happened because I have this talent for being able to do these sorts of things. Yet the fact that he does possess these talents, and they are not commented on, lends a certain arrogance to Ryder’s character which seems to fit naturally with his superior position in the world. He is a world famous concert pianist, he understands and has insights into things that escape others, and he believes himself to be on a mission. Quite early in the book he states his value to the world:

...the fact is that people need me. I arrive in a place and more often than not find terrible problems. Deep-seated, seemingly intractable problems, and people are so grateful I’ve come. (9)