In Ishiguro’s first novel, A Pale View of Hills, the narrator, Etsuko, looks out at the view of the surrounding countryside from her English garden and comments ‘I always think it’s so truly like England out here’. The phrase ‘truly like’ emphasizes a central topic in Ishiguro’s work: the question of England, or of what it is ‘truly like’ that is evoked especially in The Remains of the Day, When We Were Orphans, Never Let Me Go, and The Buried Giant. Such novels underscore the idea that human communities are permanent only in their heterogeneity and instability, in their fragile and conflicted status, and in the varied and ever-changing terms in which they talk to themselves about themselves. Ishiguro’s novels repeatedly return to and continually reinvent forms of Englishness because they recognize that England is an invention, a phantasm that can therefore only be ‘truly like’ itself, not itself. His narratives are not only about the exilic, ungrounded condition of the immigrant or of the cultural stranger within a society, but also (and therefore) about the ersatz, ungrounded condition of us all.

The Introduction to The Cambridge Companion to Kazuo Ishiguro offers a brief overview of Ishiguro’s remarkable oeuvre. The Introduction touches on the key themes and concerns of Ishiguro’s work as well as on the deceptively innovative formal narrative and linguistic qualities of his works; it offers a brief survey of the author’s career by following the successive ‘turning points’ that he adduces in his 2017 Nobel Lecture; and it considers the ways in which, in focusing so often on the ethics of professionalism, the novels also reflect on the profession of authorship itself – a role that Ishiguro has both embodied and performed with such adroitness and style, and with such admirable literary inventiveness and integrity, for more than forty years.

Andrew Bennett help us think about what steps are necessary to use case studies to identify causal relationships and draw contingent generalizations. He suggests that case study research employs Bayesian logic rather than frequentist logic. “Bayesian logic treats probabilities as degrees of belief in alternative explanations, and it updates initial degrees of belief (called ‘priors’) by using assessments of the probative value of new evidence vis-à-vis alternative explanations (the updated degree of belief is known as the ‘posterior’).” Bennett sketches four approaches: generalization from ‘typical’ cases, generalization from most- or least-likely cases, mechanism-based generalization, and typological theorizing, with special attention to the last two. The study of deviant, or outlier, cases and cases that have high values on the independent variable of interest (theory of change) may prove helpful, Bennett suggests, aiding the identification of scope conditions, new explanations, and omitted variables.

“Process tracing and program evaluation, or contribution analysis, have much in common, as they both involve causal inference on alternative explanations for the outcome of a single case,” Bennett says. “Evaluators are often interested in whether one particular explanation – the implicit or explicit theory of change behind a program – accounts for the outcome. Yet they still need to consider whether exogenous non-program factors … account for the outcome, whether the program generated the outcome through some process other than the theory of change, and whether the program had additional or unintended consequences, either good or bad.” Bennett discusses how to develop a process-tracing case study to meet these demands and walks the reader through several key elements of this enterprise, including types of confounding explanations and the basics of Bayesian analysis.