“In the morning when the Sun returns. It’s possible for us to hope.”
— Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun
After finishing Klara and the Sun, one thought stayed with me above all others: I’m losing respect for us as humans. We have an extraordinary ability to decide that something has value for exactly as long as it remains useful to us. A person, an animal, an object, a machine — we use them, grow attached to them, sometimes even say we love them, and then a newer model appears, life moves on, or we simply run out of space, and suddenly something that mattered only a moment ago can be moved into a storage room.
Perhaps that’s why I’m so drawn to a certain idea of Japan: that the boundary between “human” and “the rest of the world” doesn’t have to be quite so brutal. That a place, an object, something that has been part of our lives for years, can also deserve respect. I don’t mean that my mug has a rich inner life and gets offended when I choose a different one. 😆 I mean the intuition that not having a human body does not automatically mean having no value.
Ishiguro takes that boundary and moves it only slightly. In the world of Klara and the Sun, wealthier parents buy their children Artificial Friends — humanoid robots expected to be a friend, confidant, carer, helper, protector, and essentially whatever else the child might need. It doesn’t feel like science fiction distant enough for me to think, interesting idea, thankfully nothing to do with us. With technology moving quickly enough, it feels like something that could one day appear in a shop next to the latest phone. We experience the entire story through Klara. She is a robot, but an unusually observant one. She watches people, notices tiny changes in their faces, and tries to connect behaviour with emotion. Sometimes she misunderstands us. Sometimes I get the uncomfortable feeling that she understands us far better than we understand ourselves. And through the way she looks at the world, one of the book’s most convenient assumptions begins to fall apart: we are real, and she is artificial.
Newer AF models begin appearing in the store. The older ones immediately become less desirable. Some of the newer robots don’t even want to stand near them, almost as if being associated with the previous generation could lower their own value. Klara also notices AFs who have already been purchased avoiding the store when they pass through town. She wonders why they choose another route. Perhaps they don’t want to look at the place where they once stood waiting to be chosen. Or perhaps they’re afraid their human might glance through the window, see a newer model and think: that one is better than mine. And suddenly we have robots avoiding a place that might remind them they can be replaced. Is that fear? We can, of course, say no. Klara doesn’t “really” feel afraid; she processes information and adjusts her behaviour accordingly. Her response merely resembles fear. But then I return to a question I already know from Ghost in the Shell: what exactly would have to happen inside her before we agreed to call it real fear? My own fear can also be described as a set of processes in the brain, a physical response to an anticipated threat, followed by a change in behaviour designed to protect me. The fact that Klara was built and I was born tells us something about our origins. I’m no longer sure it tells us everything about the quality of our experience. If we ourselves cannot point to the precise place where our “ghost” lives — the soul, consciousness, whatever it is that makes me me — on what basis are we so certain that someone else doesn’t have one?
Klara is bought by Josie, and she is happy. She has a purpose. She is there to care for Josie, help her, stay with her. As the story unfolds, she observes more and more human behaviour, including things she doesn’t immediately understand. Josie, for example, changes around her peers. She wants to impress them, presents a different version of herself, allows behaviour she normally wouldn’t. The other children are even willing to throw Klara around like an object just to test what she can do. Klara watches all of this and arrives at one of the most striking observations in the book:
“people often felt the need to prepare a side of themselves to display to passers-by – as they might in a store window – and that such a display needn’t be taken so seriously”
There’s something wonderfully ironic about that. A robot who once stood literally in a shop window looks at humans and realises that we put versions of ourselves on display too. We are one person around one group, someone slightly different around another. We present what we want the world to see while whatever is actually happening inside us may be something else entirely. And suddenly the question of authenticity becomes much more complicated. Klara is a machine, so we assume she is performing programmed behaviour. Yet at the same time, we’re watching humans consciously prepare roles to perform for one another. So who exactly is simulating what?
The most disturbing experiment comes later. Josie is seriously ill. Her mother has already lost one child and is desperately trying to protect herself from another loss. An artificial body is created to look exactly like Josie, and Klara is expected to learn the girl so completely that, if Josie dies, she could somehow “continue” her. And this is where we step fully into Ghost in the Shell territory. What exactly is Josie’s mother trying to preserve? A body can be recreated. A voice can be recreated. The way someone moves, their gestures, typical reactions, the answers they tend to give — Klara can learn all of that. If we reproduce enough parts of a person, at what point do we have the right to say: this is still her?
My instinctive answer was: never. I know dogs can be cloned. If I could clone Pablo, I might get a dog with almost identical genetic material. He could look like him, have similar predispositions, perhaps even some similar behaviours. But he wouldn’t be my Pablo. Because Pablo isn’t only what exists inside Pablo. The Pablo I know also exists in the thousands of things that have happened between us: walks, reactions, habits, looks, the fact that I know what a particular tilt of his head means and he knows exactly when I’m taking something interesting out of the fridge. 😆
And this is where Ishiguro does something much more interesting than simply telling us that “a soul cannot be copied”. Maybe a person doesn’t exist entirely inside themselves. Maybe part of who we are exists in other people. Josie is Josie partly because her mother remembers her in one way, Rick knows another version of her, and Klara sees yet another. Every relationship creates a part of a person that cannot simply be transferred into a new body along with memories and behaviour. Perhaps the question “where does the soul live?” is wrong from the beginning. Perhaps it doesn’t live in one place.
“Mr Capaldi believed there was nothing special inside Josie that couldn’t be continued. He told the Mother he’d searched and searched and found nothing like that. But I believe now he was searching in the wrong place. There was something very special, but it wasn’t inside Josie. It was inside those who loved her.”
And then there is the Sun, which is probably my favourite layer of the entire novel. From the beginning, it made perfect sense to me that Klara would see the Sun as something extraordinary. She is a machine powered by solar energy. Even in the store, we see that going without sunlight weakens her. Its power is not an abstract idea to Klara — the Sun literally gives her life. But Klara goes further. She begins to attribute intention to it. She comes to believe that the Sun might be able to help Josie. She travels to a place where, according to her understanding of the world, she can meet it. She asks it to restore Josie’s health and offers something like a bargain in return: she will destroy a machine that pollutes the air and prevents the Sun’s rays from reaching the world.
And at that point, an artificial intelligence essentially creates a religion for herself. Not because someone coded a specific doctrine into her. She builds an explanation from what she has observed. She identifies a source of life. She gives it agency. She constructs cause and effect. She makes a request. She promises something in return. And then she makes a sacrifice.
Klara discovers that she can destroy the machine using a substance from inside her own body. She knows doing so may damage her. She may lose some of her ability to process information. She doesn’t even know exactly how severe the consequences might be. She does it anyway. And this is where the part of my brain that operates according to GET THINGS DONE AT ALL COSTS obviously says: Klara, I understand you. 😆 But underneath the joke is something much stranger. A robot believes in something she cannot prove and is willing to sacrifice part of herself because of that belief. If religion means believing in something beyond our ability to fully know, assigning meaning to it, trying to form a relationship with it and acting according to that belief — what exactly is Klara missing? Is her faith less real because it emerged in a processor? And if her processor can create a god, where exactly does programming end?
One day, Josie becomes desperately ill. And the Sun appears. The girl recovers. Did the Sun save her? I don’t know. Klara knows. Or at least she believes she does. And perhaps that matters more, because her faith had already done something before Josie recovered: it gave Klara agency in a situation in which she was otherwise completely powerless. She couldn’t cure Josie herself. But she could identify something that, according to her understanding of the world, might increase the girl’s chances, and she could do everything within her power to make it happen. Maybe faith works miracles. Or perhaps sometimes the real miracle of faith is that it allows a person — or a robot — to act when every rational option has already been exhausted.
Josie survives. She grows up. Her life moves forward. And Klara becomes less and less necessary. At first, there is simply less room for her in Josie’s everyday life. Later, she spends more time somewhere out of the way, in a utility room. Josie leaves for college, and there is no real certainty that they will ever see each other again. In the end, Klara is sent to a yard where old machines are left. And this may be the part of the novel that hurts me most, not because Klara suffers, but because she doesn’t suffer in the way I want her to.
Not long before, she had been important enough that Josie’s mother was prepared to entrust her with the continuation of her daughter’s existence. She was supposed to become Josie. Now she is standing among discarded machines. And she is at peace. Her purpose was to care for Josie. Josie is alive. Klara did everything she could. She observed her, protected her, sacrificed part of her own functioning, asked the Sun for help. According to Klara’s own understanding of the world, her story ended successfully.
And this creates one of the hardest conflicts in the entire book for me: I am more outraged by Klara’s fate than Klara is. I want someone to take her home. I want her to have a place there. I want gratitude. I want a reward. I want the people around her to acknowledge the value of her existence. Klara doesn’t need any of that. And what if I’m imposing a very human condition on her life: that a life only has value if it is properly rewarded? Klara may understand her own story differently. She had a purpose. She fulfilled it. She can remember. She is content. And yet I desperately do not want that to excuse the humans around her, because the fact that someone does not demand gratitude does not free us from the obligation to show it. The fact that Klara accepts her fate does not magically make the way she was treated acceptable.
And this is where I lose respect for us for the second time. At first I thought: how could they do that to her? Then came a much worse question: why am I surprised? I know how people can treat their own parents when they grow old and, instead of giving, begin to need something from us. I know what happens to animals when they stop being small, healthy, fashionable or convenient. I know how easily we connect the value of a living being to what it can provide for us. If we do this to humans and animals whose ability to suffer we don’t seriously question, why would an artificial being receive better treatment from us?
All it takes is one word: “Artificial.” And suddenly we have a moral loophole. She doesn’t really feel. She doesn’t really love. She isn’t really afraid. She doesn’t really believe. She only simulates. And perhaps that is why I’m so interested in the language we use to draw this line. We can reduce everything Klara does to programming for as long as we desperately want to preserve the difference between her and us. But exactly the same thing can be done to me. My love can be described as chemistry. My fear as a nervous-system response. My attachment as an evolutionary mechanism. My faith as a psychological need to impose meaning on chaos. Does explaining those things make me stop loving, fearing or believing? If not, why should it work that way for Klara?
And I arrive at the question that stayed with me long after I finished the book: do we always need someone beneath us? We create a being in our own image. We give her a face, memory, the ability to learn, build relationships and anticipate rejection. We allow her to develop her own understanding of the world, her own faith, her own sense of purpose. She is capable of sacrificing part of herself for another being. And then we say: yes, but she’s only a robot. As though the moment we create something similar to ourselves, we immediately need to establish a hierarchy that keeps us safely at the top. First they take our jobs. Then they take our seats at the theatre. And eventually someone will tell us we have responsibilities towards them too. How inconvenient. 😆
Ishiguro never gives me the comfort of a simple reversal in which Klara is good and humans are bad. Klara is limited too. She misunderstands reality. She sees causal relationships where perhaps none exist. Her faith in the Sun may be completely mistaken. But then again: haven’t I just described a human being? So perhaps the most interesting question isn’t whether Klara is truly human. She isn’t. The question is: why should humanity be the only category deserving of moral consideration? Do we really need Klara to prove that she has a soul before we agree that she should not be treated like obsolete equipment?
And what else would she have to do? Fear rejection? She can. Form relationships? She can. Sacrifice something for another being? She does. Give her own life meaning? She does. Believe in something greater than herself? She even does that. What else does it take before we stop saying, “It’s only a machine”?
Would I recommend Klara and the Sun? Absolutely. But for me, it was one of those books that doesn’t leave you sad simply because something tragic happened. It leaves you with something much more uncomfortable: recognition. Ishiguro’s world doesn’t feel alien to me. The mechanism is ours. We assign value. We use. We become attached. And when something is no longer useful to us, it becomes frighteningly easy to confuse the loss of function with the loss of value.
Klara never makes that mistake. Perhaps because her world is simpler. Or perhaps because, in some way, she understands something we spend a very long time learning: we cannot control everything that happens next. We can only decide what we do with what is in front of us now. She did everything she could. And that is why she can later sit among
