‘‘Why would you play a game like that?’: Community and the pandemic in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun’

Abstract

Copyright © 2022 Emily Horton. Over one year on from the first arrival of the Covid-19 virus, and with a ‘third wave’ now spreading across the globe, it may seem early to announce the beginnings of a new ‘pandemic literature’. To be sure, popular cultural interest in pandemic-related fictions and films is readily visible across the internet (Doherty and Giordano 2020) , and one recent publication even suggests that those individuals reading and watching such outputs may actually experience more psychological preparedness to face pandemic-related difficulties (Scrivner et al. 2021) . Nevertheless, when it comes to literary fiction, authors and critics have been more reticent to position their work in this way, asserting instead the importance of time and retrospection as necessary conditions for critical and creative assessment. As Lily Meyer (2020) writes, ‘No one has had time to truly refine their ideas about personal life in a state of widespread isolation and...