Grief, Absence, and Presence Theme Analysis

“A Family Supper” centers around the death of the protagonist’s mother, and so it is clear from the start that grief is one Ishiguro’s primary thematic concerns. The consequences of the mother’s passing—as well as the circumstances that led up to that unexpected event—are present on every page. By highlighting both literal and figurative forms of absence in a brief depiction of an uncomfortable family dinner, Ishiguro demonstrates the way in which grief fixates on a departed person’s nonexistence, while simultaneously allowing their memory to haunt the spaces they have left behind. Though the narrator’s family cannot speak candidly with one another about the depth of their grief, they express their complicated experiences of grief by acknowledging other painful absences (and presences) in the family home. 

Ishiguro employs empty space as a motif to highlight the ways in which the physical absence of the narrator’s mother is felt by the members of his family. The sudden absence of the narrator’s mother is emphasized by the conspicuous quantity of empty rooms in the house. While giving the narrator a tour of the changes to his childhood home, the narrator’s father describes the empty rooms as useless and excessive, especially now that there is no one but him left to occupy them. Later, in a moment of vulnerability, the father suggests that his children move back into the home. In this way, not only is the mother’s death brought into relief by her physical disappearance from the rooms she once occupied, but the father’s largely unspoken grief is made apparent by his request that his children fill those unoccupied spaces once again.

The presence of ghosts and the phenomenon of “haunting” in Ishiguro’s narrative adds further depth to this tension between absence and presence. The ghost suggests that the characters in “A Family Supper” utilize the paranormal to navigate the irony of the fact that their mother is suddenly absent from their lives, but that the tragedy of her death makes them feel her presence more acutely than ever. The well in the backyard, which the siblings thought was haunted during their childhood, represents the narrator’s mother and her memory. The first time the siblings mention their mother is in reference to the stories she told about the ghosts in the backyard. Later, the narrator looks out at the well while having an emotional conversation about death with his father, suggesting that he is thinking about his mother’s passing.

The well is haunted by a ghost whom the narrator describes as an elderly woman wearing a white kimono. At the end of the story, during the family supper for which the story is named, the narrator finally recognizes an elderly woman of the same description in a photograph as his mother. Though the narrator has returned home because of his mother’s death, it is not until he recognizes the image of his elderly mother as “the ghost” that he appears to acknowledge the fact that by traveling to America, he missed a large portion of her life. Like his father’s description of the house’s empty rooms, the narrator’s acknowledgment of the painful absence of his mother’s death is mediated through entities that are still present: the ghost and its accompanying photograph.

“A Family Supper” is saturated with numerous silences and lengthy pauses in conversation. These silences—literal absences of words—further highlight that which is ultimately inexpressible about grief, as well as the family’s inability to verbally process the tragic nature of the mother’s death. Throughout the narrator’s visit, the family discusses the fact that their father’s law firm partner, Watanabe, disemboweled himself. The narrator eventually learns that Watanabe also murdered his wife and two children. Rather than focusing on the death that has brought them together, the family fixates on this murder-suicide, again using a proxy to confront the loss that affects them most.

The most significant silence in the short story occurs during the dinner itself. The lack of sustained conversation during the dinner seems to be primarily due to the family’s inability to address the uncomfortable fact that they are eating fish, the same food that killed their mother. When the narrator asks his father what kind of fish he has prepared, he refuses to answer him directly, responding that it is “just fish.” With the exception of a brief moment when the narrator’s father mentions his suspicion that the mother’s death was a suicide, the narrator’s family largely avoids the topic and conceals specific details about her “hideously painful” death. The family’s fixation on the violence of Watanabe’s own suicide—and their more substantive conversations about its ethical ramifications—proposes that they are all grappling with the mother’s death internally, but that they can only manage to articulate that struggle indirectly.

Employing several forms of presence and absence—in the materiality of the home and its rooms, in the mysterious occurrences of the paranormal, and in the revelations and omissions that form the family’s uncomfortable conversations—Ishiguro explores how grief seeks to understand and overcome the pain of losing a loved one. Though the family has difficulty frankly discussing the pain of the mother’s death, the fact that they focus their conversations on emptiness, haunting, and silence, qualities associated with the sudden absence of a human being, suggests that they are still navigating profound grief. However, they are doing so by using a less painful shared language: that of their home, their childhood memories, and stories about someone outside the family.