“O Eternal Children, Stand up for Yourselves!”: Self-advocacy and Human Rights in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go and Shirai Kaiu’s The Promised Neverland

<p> </p> <p>Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel<em> Never Let Me Go </em>and Shirai Kaiu’s manga <em>The Promised Neverland </em>share the bleak premise of children being systematically farmed for consumption, either as livestock (Kaiu) or organ donors (Ishiguro).  In each, the children occupy an effectively subhuman status which fails to trigger the application of universal human rights. The panoptically designed total institutions of Grace Field and Hailsham appear to provide the children with the accepted rights of the human child, undermining resistance by preventing the understanding that there is anything in their lives to <em>be</em> resisted. </p> <p>The response to discovering the truth is very different between the texts, however. Critics have noted that “none of [Ishiguro’s] [clones] even contemplates escape or revolt” (Pereira and Karunakar 4)<em>; </em>meanwhile, the Kaiu’s protagonists resist being consumed even unto suicide. We argue that while Kaiu and Ishiguro both explore the effectiveness of quelling resistance in the face of dehumanisation by offering <em>the appearance </em>of the rights of a child and the right to childhood, Kaiu further hypothesises that a successful human rights claim must involve an active <em>rejection </em>of the status of childhood  </p>