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The Remains of the Day is one of my favourite books. Haunting, beautiful, a window onto a reality I knew little about, having grown up in republican France, away from manor houses. Kazuo Ishiguro’s genius is to invite the reader to enter someone else’s world, in its beauty, ugliness and ambiguity. Good writers give us a chance to inhabit, however fleetingly, another’s world.

Ishiguro has recently spoken of his concern that young writers may fear writing characters they have little personal insight into, and therefore choose not to write, cancelling their own voices. Writers never solely write from personal experience; otherwise, there would be no historical novels! But patient research and attentive listening extend their reach beyond their own experience, and they offer these insights as a gift to readers. But even research has its limits – no writer can write about everything. And I don’t think that anyone, writer or not, can always understand everyone, far less represent this otherness fairly or accessibly. Ishiguro points to the fragility of art and creation, poised between expanding our boundaries, and working with our limitations.

Today, with questions of power and identity ever-present, maybe this fragility is highly relevant; we all have boundaries that need expanding, by listening to those so different from us that we often prefer not to hear them, or reduce their perspective to little less than caricature. Yet there are limits, too, that are not safe to push – because it would cause harm, or just because we can’t understand complete otherness. I guess that wisdom is about knowing the difference, and knowing ourselves well-enough to accept our own limitations and need for challenge.

Meeting the other is rarely successful if we don’t know ourselves well-enough; I often think this is part of Jesus’ aphorism, love your neighbour as yourself. Not more, not less. Attending to ourselves and attending to the other go hand-in-hand. If I am aware of my limitations, I am more likely to listen rather than assume, and not just learn to meet the other, but also learn something about myself in the encounter. Real encounters can be difficult, and meeting the other through books and stories can be the first step to expand our imaginations. It hardly comes as a surprise to me, as a Christian theologian, that answers often come through a good book.

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