Never Let Me Go

　　海爾森是一所迷人的英國寄宿學校。
　　然而，海爾森隱藏了一個大祕密！
　　在海爾森，每個學生都有一名監護人；學生們每星期都得接受某種健康檢查；他們從未學習任何有關外面世界的事物，與外界也少有接觸。
　　他們知道總有一天會發生在他們身上的事─器官捐贈！
　　他們的未來沒有任何可能！
　　在海爾森，凱西從女孩蛻變為少女，但直到她和好友露絲、湯米離開這個安全國度以後，
　　他們才真正明瞭全部的真相，而且逐漸發現，記憶中美好的成長過程，處處皆是無法追尋的駭人問號；
　　他們的壽命將隨著「器官捐獻」而慢慢步入死亡……

　　本書中譯本《別讓我走》由商周出版。
　　本書已改編為電影【別讓我走】，由英國女星凱莉墨里根與綺拉奈特莉合作演出。

　　From the acclaimed author of The Remains of the Day and When We Were Orphans, a moving new novel that subtly reimagines our world and time in a haunting story of friendship and love.

　　As a child, Kathy-now thirty-one years old-lived at Hailsham, a private school in the scenic English countryside where the children were sheltered from the outside world, brought up to believe that they were special and that their well-being was crucial not only for themselves but for the society they would eventually enter. Kathy had long ago put this idyllic past behind her, but when two of her Hailsham friends come back into her life, she stops resisting the pull of memory.
　　
　　And so, as her friendship with Ruth is rekindled, and as the feelings that long ago fueled her adolescent crush on Tommy begin to deepen into love, Kathy recalls their years at Hailsham. She describes happy scenes of boys and girls growing up together, unperturbed-even comforted-by their isolation. But she describes other scenes as well: of discord and misunderstanding that hint at a dark secret behind Hailsham� nurturing facade. With the dawning clarity of hindsight, the three friends are compelled to face the truth about their childhood-and about their lives now.

　　A tale of deceptive simplicity, Never Let Me Go slowly reveals an extraordinary emotional depth and resonance-and takes its place among Kazuo Ishiguro’s finest work.

作者簡介

石黑一雄Kazuo Ishiguro

　　1989年布克獎得主，日裔英國作家，以文體細膩優美著稱，幾乎每部小說都被提名或得獎，作品已被翻譯達二十八種語言。

　　石黑一雄非常年輕即享譽世界文壇，與魯西迪、奈波爾被稱為「英國文壇移民三雄」，以「國際主義作家」自稱。曾被英國皇室授勳為文學騎士，並獲授法國藝術文學騎士勳章。石黑一雄是亞裔作家中，少數在創作上不以移民背景或文化差異的題材為主，而著重在更具普遍細膩的人性刻劃的作者。

　　石黑一雄共出版了六部作品：1982年《群山淡景》（A Pale View of Hills），　獲得「英國皇家學會」（Royal Society of Literature）溫尼弗雷德．霍爾比獎（Winifred Holtby Prize）。1986年《浮世畫家》（An Artist of the Floating World），獲英國及愛爾蘭圖書協會頒發的「惠特布萊德」年度最佳小說獎（Whitbread Book of the Year Award）和英國布克獎（Booker Prize）的提名。1989年《長日將盡》（The Remains of the Day），榮獲英國布克獎，並榮登《出版家週刊》的暢銷排行榜。1995年《無法安慰》（The Unconsoled）贏得了「契爾特納姆」文學藝術獎（Cheltenham Prize）。 2000年《我輩孤雛》（When We Were Orphans），再次獲得布克獎提名。以及2005年新作《別讓我走》（Never Let Me Go），也入圍了布克獎最後決選名單，並獲全世界文學獎獎金最高的「歐洲小說獎」（European Novel Award）。

Chapter One



My name is Kathy H. I’m thirty-one years old, and I’ve been a carer now for over eleven years. That sounds long enough, I know, but actually they want me to go on for another eight months, until the end of this year. That’ll make it almost exactly twelve years. Now I know my being a carer so long isn’t necessarily because they think I’m fantastic at what I do. There are some really good carers who’ve been told to stop after just two or three years. And I can think of one carer at least who went on for all of fourteen years despite being a complete waste of space. So I’m not trying to boast. But then I do know for a fact they’ve been pleased with my work, and by and large, I have too. My donors have always tended to do much better than expected. Their recovery times have been impressive, and hardly any of them have been classified as “agitated,” even before fourth donation. Okay, maybe I am boasting now. But it means a lot to me, being able to do my work well, especially that bit about my donors staying “calm.” I’ve developed a kind of instinct around donors. I know when to hang around and comfort them, when to leave them to themselves; when to listen to everything they have to say, and when just to shrug and tell them to snap out of it.



Anyway, I’m not making any big claims for myself. I know carers, working now, who are just as good and don’t get half the credit. If you’re one of them, I can understand how you might get resentful—about my bedsit, my car, above all, the way I get to pick and choose who I look after. And I’m a Hailsham student—which is enough by itself sometimes to get people’s backs up. Kathy H., they say, she gets to pick and choose, and she always chooses her own kind: people from Hailsham, or one of the other privileged estates. No wonder she has a great record. I’ve heard it said enough, so I’m sure you’ve heard it plenty more, and maybe there’s something in it. But I’m not the first to be allowed to pick and choose, and I doubt if I’ll be the last. And anyway, I’ve done my share of looking after donors brought up in every kind of place. By the time I finish, remember, I’ll have done twelve years of this, and it’s only for the last six they’ve let me choose.



And why shouldn’t they? Carers aren’t machines. You try and do your best for every donor, but in the end, it wears you down. You don’t have unlimited patience and energy. So when you get a chance to choose, of course, you choose your own kind. That’s natural. There’s no way I could have gone on for as long as I have if I’d stopped feeling for my donors every step of the way. And anyway, if I’d never started choosing, how would I ever have got close again to Ruth and Tommy after all those years?



But these days, of course, there are fewer and fewer donors left who I remember, and so in practice, I haven’t been choosing that much. As I say, the work gets a lot harder when you don’t have that deeper link with the donor, and though I’ll miss being a carer, it feels just about right to be finishing at last come the end of the year.



Ruth, incidentally, was only the third or fourth donor I got to choose. She already had a carer assigned to her at the time, and I remember it taking a bit of nerve on my part. But in the end I managed it, and the instant I saw her again, at that recovery centre in Dover, all our differences—while they didn’t exactly vanish—seemed not nearly as important as all the other things: like the fact that we’d grown up together at Hailsham, the fact that we knew and remembered things no one else did. It’s ever since then, I suppose, I started seeking out for my donors people from the past, and whenever I could, people from Hailsham.



There have been times over the years when I’ve tried to leave Hailsham behind, when I’ve told myself I shouldn’t look back so much. But then there came a point when I just stopped resisting. It had to do with this particular donor I had once, in my third year as a carer; it was his reaction when I mentioned I was from Hailsham. He’d just come through his third donation, it hadn’t gone well, and he must have known he wasn’t going to make it. He could hardly breathe, but he looked towards me and said: “Hailsham. I bet that was a beautiful place.” Then the next morning, when I was making conversation to keep his mind off it all, and I asked where he’d grown up, he mentioned some place in Dorset and his face beneath the blotches went into a completely new kind of grimace. And I realised then how desperately he didn’t want reminded. Instead, he wanted to hear about Hailsham.