Ishiguro’s fictions are peopled by individuals for whom affect, and the expression of affect, is compromised by their own emotional opacity, by their adherence to strictly if arbitrarily constructed social codes, and by their overwhelming but therefore hardly acknowledged sense of remorse or regret. While the protagonist-butler Stevens in The Remains of the Day is the most famous instance of the dilemma, the chapter focuses on An Artist of the Floating World and The Buried Giant in order to work through the consequences of emotional upheaval in the novels. Ishiguro writes paradoxically affecting first-person narratives by individuals who pride themselves on maintaining a seemingly affectless rhetorical deportment.