ALTHOUGH AN AUTHOR’S NAME rarely becomes famous enough to give rise to its own adjective, this honor comes with a price. The phrase is now subject to vague and broad usage that sheds light on neither its object nor its origin. The expression “Kafkaesque” is a case in point. As Rainer Nägele observes, Duden’s definition (“in the manner of Kafka’s description; uncanny and threatening in an enigmatic fashion”) manages to combine tautology with awkwardness. In the English-speaking world the term also denotes the mysterious and unsettling qualities associated with Kafka’s texts, whether manifested in Gregor Samsa’s transformation in The Metamorphosis (Die Verwandlung, 1915) or the arcane bureaucracies of The Trial (Der Process, 1925) or The Castle (Das Schloss, 1926). As such, the term “Kafkaesque” gestures toward both the content and the form of his narratives, their creation of enigmas and refusal to resolve them. The term can be usefully compared to the more rigorous and restrictive adjective “Kafkan,” which implies a greater degree of similarity with, and/or the direct, attributable influence of, Kafka’s actual works. My purpose here is to use this distinction between the Kafkaesque and Kafkan to consider the thematic and narrative correlations between Kafka’s works and Kazuo Ishiguro’s 1995 novel The Unconsoled. While critics agree that Ishiguro’s novel possesses broadly Kafkaesque characteristics, such as an indeterminate setting, a dream-like tone, and the absence of a conventional narrative resolution, this study will consider the work as more narrowly Kafkan in its themes of music, ethnology, and familial conflict and in its references to extra-diegetic reality. Moreover, I will argue that Ishiguro’s novel combines two modes of narration associated with Kafka — the circumscribed perspective of the first-person narratives found in his shorter fiction and the endless detours and diversions experienced by the third-person protagonists of the novels — to produce a hybrid Kafkan text. Finally, we will examine how Ishiguro’s text departs from Kafka’s modes of narration in its violation of diegetic convention. In particular, we will consider how Ishiguro grants his protagonist, Ryder, direct access to people, places, and objects from Ryder’s distant past and moments of superhuman, omniscient insight in order to provide the reader with the comforting prospect of a comprehensible, if thoroughly unconventional, resolution to the novel’s themes and plot.