Chapter Text
as promised, the list of direct and indirect inspirations.
ARTICLES
Ishiguro, Kazuo. (5 May 2025). "Kazuo Ishiguro Reflects on Never Let Me Go, 20 Years Later" in Literary Hub, online: lithub.com/kazuo-ishiguro-reflects-on-never-let-me-go-20-years-later/.
Liquori, Donna. (17 April 2005). “Texture of memory: Ishiguro finds in the fog of recollection a device to craft novels” in Times Union, online: www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/tu_ishiguro_kazuo.html.
BOOKS/WRITTEN WORKS
Camus, Albert. The Stranger. Translated by Stuart Gilbert (New York: Vintage Books, 1942).
from the cens party scene about family responsibility. not mentioned explicitly, but it’s a subtle reference to presque vu (see below) and the translation i read. the original french goes, “Je lui ai demandé si on pouvait éteindre une des lampes. L'éclat de la lumière sur les murs blancs me fatiguait. Il m'a dit que ce n'était pas possible.” which i would have translated to "i asked [the keeper] if it was possible to turn off one of the lamps. the reflection of the light on the white walls fatigued me. he told me it wasn't possible." but for some reason gilbert added a line of dialogue and made the keeper say, "nothing doing" ??? wyatt's response, "deep sympathy," is also a quirky translation from part of the opening line, which really is, "sentiments distingué." i fucking love comparing original works with their translations--seeing what gets lost or added in translation specifically seemed to match the themes i was writing and how the scene fits into the story as a whole. ilya's coping with another loss, this time the loss of a game, and trying to rally the troops / pick them up / move them on, but he's running headlong into a (language) barrier the way he runs into cultural barriers with elijah and his own personal barriers, trying to keep shane "alive."
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor. The Brothers Karamazov. Translated by Constance Garnett (New York: The Lowell Press, 2009).
word on the street is that dostoyevsky's son died while he was writing this, and it irrevocably altered the direction of the work. this is made pretty clear in part 2, which is mostly about the inappropriateness of an inheritance dispute, but then you get to chapter 3 and it's suddenly about a woman who lost her 3-yr-old son. throughout the whole novel, dostoyevsky keeps circling back to his loss. and ilya’s not canonically devout, but during the plane scene in the long game, reid hints that he still believes in god to some extent, so i like to think he read the book at some point in his adolescence and had to hide it for fear of feeling too much. the full reference:
There is silent and long‐suffering sorrow to be met with among the peasantry. It withdraws into itself and is still. But there is a grief that breaks out, and from that minute it bursts into tears and finds vent in wailing. This is particularly common with women. But it is no lighter a grief than the silent. Lamentations comfort only by lacerating the heart still more. Such grief does not desire consolation. It feeds on the sense of its hopelessness. Lamentations spring only from the constant craving to reopen the wound.
Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby (London: Penguin Books, 1926).
while ilya connects to gatsby in a number of ways, primarily where he's chasing the past when the past has long moved on, to me he ended up on the positive side, where he took the lessons that tgg imparts and moved on with his life. i tried to write shane more as a foil—somebody who also chases a past, but a past that doesn't belong to him (whether it's the nhl career that prematurely ended and the life therein or arthur's past), so like wilson, the narrative kills him for it when he refuses to move on.
shane's actually more gatsby than ilya is, at least on the theme of self-invention. also, part of gatsby's unmaking is that he takes the fall for daisy's jealous rage that ends in myrtle wilson's death by car crash. shane's unmaking is that he tries to burrow deeper into arthur and protect a past that went up in flames via car crash as well. where elijah would have been wilson with a gun, ilya--who is elijah's direct mirror--is the one who ends the cycle.
i like as well nick's unreliability. it's such a key feature of the narrative ofc and discussed to death in high school classrooms, but i just thought it fit perfectly with the overarching meditation on the malleability of history and memory.
Ishiguro, Kazuo. Klara and the Sun (London: Faber, 2021).
i'm taking a seminar in ai regulation now and dissecting the circumstances that led to chatgpt, and one point of discussion that really struck me is how humans give life to inanimate things if they can communicate, or successfully perform the illusion of communication. we saw it with eliza; we see it now. anyway, that was on my mind during my never let me go reread, and what do you know, kazuo ishiguro has a whole book about it.
one theme that i've tried to build stories around is what it means to be human, but i haven't succeeded yet. i don't think i'll have the chops for another decade at least. in that sense the book's appearance is a promise to myself to write about something different.
Ishiguro, Kazuo. Never Let Me Go (Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2006).
this is probably one of my favourite books of all time. for as gutwrenching as the dystopian plot beats are, i'm haunted by every character's acceptance of their circumstances; the way kathy, tommy, and ruth all experience the unfairness and react in anger, but the way they all resign themselves to their fate nonetheless. life doesn't need to be the way it is, but when that's all you know--well, you get really beautiful and heartbreaking stories like this one, i guess. anyway, i tried to capture that feeling of preemptive grief, or mourning something that hasn't happened yet, but inevitably will.
also, the mundanity gets me every time. the characters live otherwise peaceful lives. hailsham is idyllic for as much as it's a prison. ilya's life post-retirement is ordinary, but for the inevitability of shane's "death" that he eventually comes to accept. like watching his mother's downward spiral, y'know? preemptive grief.
Jackson, Shirley. The Haunting of Hill House (London: Penguin Publishing Group, 2006).
the ending of this. god. it’s a passing mention in the fic, mostly to be a surface-level wink at the ghost story that ilya finds himself in, but i chose it also in thinking of a parallel to irina's death. eleanor is blamed for the supernatural phenomena happening around the house, phenomena that have haunted her since childhood, and her only real / self-proclaimed moment of "agency" is the moment she decides to crash headlong into a tree. we don't know what irina thought before the end; it might have been the same thing as eleanor.
I am really doing it, she thought, turning the wheel to send the car directly at the great tree at the curve of the driveway, I am really doing it, I am doing this all by myself, now, at last; this is me, I am really really really doing it by myself.
In the unending, crashing second before the car hurled into the tree she thought clearly, Why am I doing this? Why am I doing this? Why don‟t they stop me?
King, Stephen. (22 January 2001). "All That You Love Will Be Carried Away" in The New Yorker, online: www.newyorker.com/magazine/2001/01/29/all-that-you-love-will-be-carried-away.
i think i first read this in high school while on a kylux kick, and i've had the title in my head ever since. my opinion of king has diminished considerably, though, so it's bittersweet to read. more relevantly, i headcanon that ilya wasn't joking when he said he reads the new yorker. that boy only leans into the politics of his position as a russian playboy himbo because it's a matter of survival! he is Not Shallow!! i know in my soul he's a writer. he's a romantic. i will campaign for this. i believe this so strongly.
Laffoley, Steven. The Blue Tattoo (Lawrencetown Beach: Pottersfield Press, 2014).
see chapter 2.
Vonnegut, Kurt. Slaughterhouse-Five, or, The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death (New York: Dial Press Trade Paperback, 1999).
i thought this tied in quite nicely with the theme of preemptive grief and never let me go's quiet acceptance of terrible circumstances. but beyond the idea of everything in the world being predetermined, i also continue to be obsessed with the idea of being unstuck in time. isn't that beautiful and terrifying? i think loss makes us feel that same way, where the concept of time hops into the world of unreality.
Yamada, Taichi. Strangers. Translated by Wayne P. Lammers (London: Faber, 2006).
i actually only discovered this book later in the writing process, but it was like meeting a soulmate. hideo harada is similarly haunted by the parents he lost when he was a child, and also coming off a divorce. he’s a black hole of a person. but where hideo’s story is a commentary on misogyny and the rotten isolation therein, however, i think ilya would focus on the way ghosts from the past both physically and emotionally drain a person. take away the last 20-ish pages of the novel, and that’s the thesis, right? that to linger on the past is to kill ourselves in the present? (though i personally don’t think we can take away the plot twist.)
SONGS & AUDIOVISUAL MEDIA
Archambault, Chantal. "Le jeu des accroires." Released 2015. Track 4 on À hauteur d'homme, Duprince.
i was listening to this song a lot while writing my other fic by the same name. it's my obligatory reference to the artifice extended universe, lol.
Clarkson, Kelly. "The Trouble with Love Is." Released November 2003. Track 1 on Thankful, RCA.
Fall Out Boy. "20 Dollar Nose Bleed." Released December 2008. Track 12 on Folie à Deux, Island Records.
Gould, Glenn. Bach: Goldberg Variations, BWV 988 (The 1955 & 1981 Recordings), released 2013. Sony Music.
Team Silent. Silent Hill 2. 2001; Konami.
it's a blink and you miss it sort of reference that could be taken at face value, seeing as shane says it while they drive through fog. but sh2 specifically i thought about for how it paralleled ilya and shane's story, where ilya is james and shane is mary/maria. the original characters in this all take on each other’s traits that orbit around ilya’s inability to cope with grief and mesh so smoothly with the question of whether he’s dreaming. concerns about caretaker exhaustion that shane cites during the beach scene were also not so subtly inspired by this entry in the franchise.
moreover, i’m obsessed with silent hill as a concept, and that definitely bleeds into the premise of this entire story. broken people washing up at the edge of a foggy town and inexorably being pulled in to face the worst of their demons? everything being a metaphor? fuck, but i love these games. i don’t think i intentionally tried to make a silent hill story, but articulating it now is making me laugh. of course i inadvertently made a silent hill story. you fucking one trick pony, you.
The Goo Goo Dolls. "Iris." Released April 1998. Track 11 on Dizzy Up the Girl, Warner Bros.
i had to ask jess whether this was too cringe a needle drop and she was like. well dads listen to cheesy music so it would fit. and that was all the enabling i needed.
in all seriousness, i mostly thought the lyrics were perfect to describe both ilya and shane's headspace at the end. i just want you to know who i am!
Les Trois Accords. "Saskatchewan." Released March 2004. Track 6 on Gros Mammouth Album, Indica Records.
Nolan, Christopher, dir. Inception. 2010; US, Warner Bros. Pictures.
so, some of the ideas here were originally imagined for an inception fic i wrote last year (and have since anonymized). but the fic was like 2.5k words and wholly inadequate, and written overnight in a haze of exam stress besides. arthur, of course, is a reference to inception's arthur, who is a veritable chameleon, and who i personally headcanon as half-asian. then there is ofc the dream aspect. i don’t think i need to elaborate.
Maxwell, Matt. "Louis la grenouille." Released 1987. Track 9 on Le Loup du Nord, MRC.
Romanek, Mark, dir. Never Let Me Go. 2010; UK, Fox Searchlight Pictures.
Wells, Charlotte, dir. Aftersun. 2022; US, A24.
while the whole movie speaks to the same melancholy that ilya feels when combing through his memories of shane, i was specifically inspired by the under pressure dance scene for the kingfisher karaoke scene. it's such a poignant moment, one where everything coalesces for sophie, who understands her depressed father in flashes and subsequently tries to cling to him, only for the memory of him to push her away. i believe i was quite heavyhanded about the shane-irina parallels, but in case it wasn't clear enough, here you go.
in the fic, the karaoke scene is really the last proper flashback before everything switches to the present. shane's reappearance is the catalyst for ilya moving on; the karaoke scene is then the start of ilya's goodbye to the old shane.
OTHER INSPIRATIONS
rageprufrock. Presque Vu (Archive of Our Own, 2010). archiveofourown.org/works/133555.
in addition to the sneaky camus quote, there’s a cigarette joke near the beginning that’s also a reference to this story, which i have read religiously. change your life by clicking the link above.
eleventy7. Running on Air (Archive of Our Own, 2014). archiveofourown.org/works/3171550/chapters/6887378.
i hesitate to link this because of the fandom, but i also can’t deny that some of the scenes and lines here have haunted me for like ten years, so here we are. the first time i read it, i was in my childhood bedroom hiding under the covers and crying, which is kind of how writing this fic made me feel too. some things stick with you, even if they shouldn’t.
elwenyere. Takes Time to Kick In (Archive of Our Own, 2025). archiveofourown.org/works/62787697.
easter egg in the line, “if i’d remembered you, i would have stopped at nothing to get back to you.” different narrative and thematic context, but arthur says something similar in elwenyere's work.