Near the end of Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled (1995), when Ryder talks of looking “forward to Helsinki with pride and confidence” (535), it is apparent that the novel sees a future that lies beyond the end of the book. This future, however, is in many ways a repetition of what has already occurred, namely of an arrival at a hotel and a planned performance. Uncannily, Ishiguro’s following novel, When We Were Orphans (2000), is also in many ways a repetition of what has already occurred, since there are a number of striking similarities, as well as repeated details, between the two novels. Never Let Me Go (2005) engages even more directly with repetition in the form of the clones, while echoes of earlier works occur throughout The Buried Giant (2015). This paper argues that Ishiguro is challenging us to read the family tree of his related novels in terms of their lineage, asking what one novel remembers of, or inherits from, the others and addressing the issue of legacy, or what remains. Because a legacy must be interpreted, then through his secret legacy, Ishiguro in fact bequeaths to us the challenging role of reader. Ishiguro’s repetitions, which make the strange familiar, are only one of the ways in which he foregrounds the constructedness of his fictional worlds and the reader’s part in constructing those worlds. The burden of the legacy becomes apparent, then, when these strange worlds repeat familiar patterns of psychological, social, and historical violence that seem destined to repeat unless the reader learns from the secret.