'Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall,' by Kazuo Ishiguro. Knopf; 221 pages; $25. WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. -- There's a preternatural hush in Kazuo Ishiguro's writing. The sentences are murmured rather than declaimed, and there's always more going on then the narrator will admit, because said narrator is often unreliable or misinformed. 'Nocturnes' is a collection of five stories, several of which are interrelated and take place in Venice, all of which involve musicians of varying levels of expertise and emotional honesty. 'Crooner' is a sad tale about Tony Gardner, a passe singer who hires a musician from the Piazza San Marco so he can serenade the wife he loves but whom he's nevertheless divorcing, so he can goose his career by shacking up with a younger, more au courant woman. 'Malvern Hills' is about a young singer-songwriter who is moonlighting at his sister's restaurant while doing as little work as possible. He meets a couple of cruise-ship entertainers and finds himself drawn into their lives, at least as much as a man as narcissistic as he is can be drawn into anybody's life but their own. 'Come Rain or Come Shine' is probably the least of the stories, about a notable underachiever who visits a couple of old school chums and walks right into a bad marriage hailstorm. Ishiguro saves his most ambitious stories for the end. 'Nocturne' concerns itself with a relatively unsuccessful sax player who undergoes plastic surgery to make himself more photogenic. While recuperating, he runs into the ex-wife of Tony Gardner, of 'Crooner.' The story flirts with sex and does an end-around into farce, which is decidedly not Ishiguro's forte -- he lacks the necessary antic spirit -- and ends with a sad dying fall. 'Cellists' is about another young Venice musician who's mentored by an attractive older woman with issues that involve more than cello technique. In a very strange sort of way, Ishiguro's virtues allow his faults to sail past unremarked. Viewed strictly in narrative terms, nothing happens in 'Malvern Hills' and very little happens in 'Cellists,' but the pages keep flipping by because Ishiguro's subtle, ominous tone implies something momentous is about to happen. A number of the stories turn on the gap between excellence in art and excellence as the world defines it, that is to say, money. The narrators are on the outside looking in, wondering when it's time for their 15 minutes. 'How was this all achieved?' wonders the narrator of the title story. 'The usual way, of course. The right love affairs, the right marriages, the right divorces. All leading to the right magazine covers, the right talk shows. ...You hear people talk about 'star quality,' but the spell's easy enough to analyze. It's the sheer accumulation of TV appearances and glossy covers, of all the photos you've seen at premiers and parties.' Cumulatively, these stories are oddly reminiscent of Somerset Maugham -- far-away places; personalities who are simultanenously vivid and emotionally complacent and who have a way of fatalistically settling for whatever fate has in store for them; bemused narrators who hesitate to get involved -- all culminating in a mood of muted malevolence: literary noir. That said, Maugham's stories are more believable on the psychological level -- a singer, for instance, might divorce a wife he loves for the sake of his career, but his character would need a much finer polish to set up the denouement than Ishiguro gives him. All of Ishiguro's characters get lost in their music, but they also get lost in their dreams of themselves. That's where the trouble comes in. Scott Eyman writes for The Palm Beach Post. E-mail: scott(underscore)eyman@pbpost.com. 