Heritage and Tradition Theme Analysis

“A Family Supper” follows an unnamed narrator returning to his native Japan from the United States two years after learning of his mother’s death. Though the story is not clearly set during a particular period of time, readers can assume that the story is set in the modern day due to the presence of modern technology and language familiar to 21st-century readers. This modern setting creates a clear tension between the progressive sensibilities of the story’s unnamed narrator and the perspective of his parents’ generation. The narrator’s observations about the circumstances of his mother’s passing, as well as his conversations with his father and younger sister Kikuko, reveal conflicting perspectives on the role of traditional values in modern life. Ishiguro questions the value of upholding tradition for tradition’s sake by demonstrating the ways in which his characters’ tendency to fulfill traditional cultural expectations has painful consequences in their lives.

Ishiguro quickly establishes the commitment to honor and self-sacrifice prioritized by Japan’s older generations. Central to the story is the death of the protagonist’s mother, who died after eating a fish called fugu that is poisonous to humans if prepared incorrectly. According to the narrator, the mother did not typically eat fugu—a traditional Japanese dish popularized during the war—but ate it in order to avoid offending a friend who invited her to dinner. Her resultant death must have been “hideously painful.” Another key event is the suicide of Watanabe, the narrator’s father’s business partner. During the car ride home from the airport, the narrator’s father explains that his law firm’s collapse led Watanabe to commit suicide, an act that corresponds with the long history of honor suicide in Japan. In imperial Japan, the act of killing oneself after committing an unethical or shameful act was an acceptable, and even obligatory, form of penance. The ritual form of honor suicide practiced by Japanese samurai, called seppuku in Japan and hara-kiri in the West, entailed disemboweling one’s stomach with a knife. The narrator’s father, himself “particularly proud of the samurai blood that ran in the family,” praises Watanabe on two occasions throughout the story, calling him a “man of principle and honour.” The father’s praise suggests that he approves of his partner’s decision to kill himself after the dissolution of the law firm. For both Watanabe and the narrator’s mother, it’s clear that rigid respect for tradition has led to immense suffering. The story thus implicitly questions the worth of continuing to honor to such cultural expectations.

By populating “A Family Supper” with intimate conversations between the narrator and his father about ethics and family values, Ishiguro demonstrates the narrator’s youthful individualism and highlights how it contrasts with traditional Japanese cultural expectations. While discussing his father’s new hobby, building model battleships, the narrator and his father briefly talk about his father’s time serving in the Japanese Navy. The father assumes that his son doesn’t “believe in war,” which the son admits is true. Their differences in opinion demonstrate a marked contrast between the institutions and values that father and son respect, which Ishiguro suggests is at least partly due to their generational differences. The narrator’s father’s respect for Watanabe is complicated by the fact that he seems to adjust his assessment of the suicide at the end of the short story. When he finally opens up about the suicide during a private moment with his son, he admits that Watanabe brutally killed his wife and two children before killing himself, and concludes that “there are other things besides work” that one should value in life. The father’s revelation suggests that the murder-suicide has him to reconsider what he once thought was honorable: self-sacrifice, stoicism, and a firm commitment to one’s career. This incident, coupled with the death of his unhappy wife and the absence of his adult children, seems to have convinced the father that his generation’s loyalty to these qualities may have destructive consequences in the lives of individuals and their loved ones.

Furthermore, Ishiguro’s decision to include a paranormal element in the story, the presence of a “ghost” in the backyard of the narrator’s childhood home, illustrates that the death of traditional values is perhaps inevitable. When they were children, the narrator and his sister believed that the well in their backyard was haunted by a ghost. When Kikuko asks her brother if he sees a ghost by the well during his visit, he claims that he does, and describes an old woman in a white kimono. Kikuko cannot see the woman and thinks that her brother is trying to scare her. Later in the story, the narrator’s father is surprised to find that the narrator does not recognize an old woman in a photograph as his mother. The woman in the photograph matches the description of the ghost. The narrator’s failure to recognize his own mother is a result of the amount of time he has spent away from Japan, as well as the way in which his mother’s face has changed due to the aging process. In this way, the narrator’s moment of misrecognition represents the way in which he has become distanced from his cultural and familial roots. Unlike her brother, the narrator’s sister Kikuko cannot see the ghost—which represents both the siblings’ mother and the past itself (given that the siblings associate it with childhood memories). The fact that Kikuko, the youngest child in the family, is not “haunted” by the specter of the past suggests that traditions fade despite attempts to uphold them. This theme is even further evidenced by the fact that the siblings’ father wants them to move back home to care for him, but that they have both set their sights on futures outside of Japan.

Throughout “A Family Supper,” Ishiguro questions the worth of cultural expectations and socially constructed values, especially when those values lead to suffering. By juxtaposing his young, Westernized narrator’s views with those of the narrator’s aging father, Ishiguro suggests that his characters’ ideas about ethics are shaped by their ages, generations, and cultures. Furthermore, by demonstrating the ways in which his young characters are alienated from the “haunting” presence of their mother, and how they are largely uninterested in their father’s traditional ways, Ishiguro illustrates the difficulty—and perhaps even impossibility—of preserving traditions in a more globalized generation of Japanese youth.