Kazuo Ishiguro

Author

• Born: November 8, 1954
• Place of Birth: Nagasaki, Japan

• Place of birth: Nagasaki, Japan

BRITISH NOVELIST

Biography

Kazuo Ishiguro, a renowned British novelist, was born November 8, 1954, in Nagasaki, Japan, to parents Shizuko Michida and Shizuo Ishiguro. On May 9, 1986, he married Lorna Anne MacDougall. Their daughter, Naomi, was born in 1992.

A key event in Ishiguro’s life was when his family left Japan in 1960 to move to England, where his father was employed by the British government as an oceanographer. Although the family expected to return in a year or two, they remained in England, and Ishiguro did not return to Japan until 1989, when he was thirty-five. He graduated from the University of Kent in 1978 with an honors degree in English and philosophy and then completed a master's degree in creative writing at the University of East Anglia.

Ishiguro’s distinguished reputation as a major novelist rests on a comparatively small literary output—eight novels in just under four decades, which have garnered numerous prizes and recognitions. His first novel, A Pale View of Hills (1982), received the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize from the Royal Society of Literature; An Artist of the Floating World (1986) received the 1986 Whitbread Book Award for the year's best book by a British- or Irish-based writer; The Remains of the Day (1989) won the 1989 Booker-McConnell Prize (later the Man Booker Prize for Fiction and then just the Booker Prize); and When We Were Orphans (2000) and Never Let Me Go (2005) were both short-listed for the Booker Prize.

Ishiguro’s novels are heavily invested in the past. Typically, they involve first-person narrators attempting to establish the past, despite the unreliability of memory in confronting past errors and sins of omission. A Pale View of Hills and An Artist of the Floating World are major accomplishments in their representation of a culture for which Ishiguro’s parents were his only resources. The first novel focuses on a Japanese mother, Etsuko, living in England, telling a story in which she explores her memory for the causes of her daughter’s suicide. The second novel, An Artist of the Floating World, is set in postwar Japan. Its narrator, Masuji Ono, is a painter confronting his complicity in the imperialist regime he represented as an official artist.

Although both novels were well received, it was The Remains of the Day, Ishiguro’s third novel, that launched him into international fame, later enhanced by the 1993 film adaptation starring Emma Thompson and Anthony Hopkins. Concerned that he was being pigeonholed as the author of “Japanese novels,” Ishiguro had made a radical break with his earlier literary production to write The Remains of the Day, a novel he described as “more English than English.” Its narrator, Stevens, is a butler adjusting to the American sense of humor of his new master, Farraday. Stevens is struggling with the notoriety of his former master, Darlington, whose Nazi sympathies before World War II brought him shame and an early death after the war. The narrative is Stevens’s effort to explain and vindicate Darlington. Also, Stevens wants to establish himself as a “great” butler. To qualify, he must serve a “great” master, committed to the betterment of humanity; he must serve that master with “grace under pressure.” Stevens offers two episodes in which he passed that test. During two international conferences, he maintained his butler’s aplomb, even though in one episode his father was dying upstairs and in the other the housekeeper, Miss Kenton, whom he loves, warned him that she was leaving that evening to accept a proposal of marriage. Once again, Ishiguro is working with issues of unreliable memory, especially in dealing with guilt and shame.

Despite his efforts to distance himself in The Remains of the Day from the “Japanese” elements of his first two novels, reviewers commented on the Japanese rendering of the English countryside or the values of Stevens being similar to “prominent aspects of the Japanese collective psyche,” as David Gurewich put it. Readers who might know little more about Japanese literature than haiku would also be struck by the compression and self-restraint of Ishiguro’s first three novels, whether “Japanese” or “English.” His fourth novel, The Unconsoled (1995), might be understood in part as a further rejection of being pigeonholed as both a Japanese writer and a writer of realist novels.

Like the earlier novels, The Unconsoled is narrated in the first person, but there the similarities end. This novel is longer than the first three novels combined, and it aims at a surrealistic or fantasy structure in time and space, violating narrative conventions. Its narrator, the pianist Charles Ryder, turns up in an unnamed European city with no notion of what he is doing there. Ishiguro uses a dozen pages to describe a conversation which supposedly occurred while Ryder was going up to his room in an elevator. During the ride, the porter asks him to talk to the porter’s daughter, Sophie, who turns out to be the mother of Ryder’s son.

Readers and critics were generally not pleased with Ishiguro’s postmodern narrative in The Unconsoled. Michiko Kakutani, writing for the New York Times, found it disappointing compared to his earlier novel, writing, “Where The Remains of the Day was a narrative tour de force attesting to Mr. Ishiguro’s virtuosic control of the language, tone and character, The Unconsoled remains an awkward if admirably ambitious experiment weighed down by its own schematic structure.” Writing for the New York Times Book Review, Louis Menand felt the novel suffered from invidious comparison with The Remains of the Day, which, he wrote, makes The Unconsoled seem “oblique, underpowered and, because of its length, slightly pretentious,” while in reverse, one might see The Remains of the Day as “predictable and heavy-handed” and The Unconsoled as “the most original and remarkable” of his first four novels.

When We Were Orphans also met with lukewarm reviews. Its narrator, Christopher Banks, is a private detective who eventually returns to Shanghai, China, in the late 1930s to search for his parents, who disappeared there when he was a child. Although the narrative is closer to the illusory “realism” of the first three novels, it borrows some surreal elements from The Unconsoled. Banks, for example, is a great detective reminiscent of Sherlock Holmes, yet readers never learn the solutions to the mysteries he solves. Although the puzzle of his parents’ disappearance is eventually disentangled, readers may have difficulty recalling what happened to them and why.

Ishiguro’s sixth novel, Never Let Me Go, is a dystopian science fiction novel, representing a significant departure from his earlier work. It was adapted into a 2010 film of the same name, starring Keira Knightley, Carey Mulligan, and Andrew Garfield, as well as a Japanese stage adaptation (2014) and later television drama (2016) titled Watashi wo Hanasanaide. In 2015 Ishiguro released his seventh novel, The Buried Giant, a historical fantasy novel set in post-Arthurian Britain.

In October 2017, Ishiguro was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in recognition of his body of work. In a press release announcing the winners, the Swedish Academy praised Ishiguro as an author “who, in novels of great emotional force, has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world.” In further recognition of his literary services, he received knighthood from Prince Charles in 2019.

Klara and the Sun, Ishiguro's eighth novel, did not arrive until early 2021. With a dystopian setting and theme reminiscent of Never Let Me Go, the novel, which is told from the perspective of an "Artificial Friend" waiting to be selected by a customer from a store display, was largely well received by reviewers. The novel was also longlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize.

The following year, Ishiguro completed the screenplay for the adaptation of a 1952 Japanese film titled Ikiru. The British film adaptation written by Ishiguro was titled Living. Set in 1950s Japan, the film tells the story of a businessman who receives a terminal diagnosis. It starred award-winning actor Bill Nighy. Ishiguro's screenplay was nominated for a 2023 Academy Award as best adapted screenplay.

Bibliography

Alter, Alexandra, and Dan Bilefsky. "Kazuo Ishiguro Is Awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature." The New York Times, 5 Oct. 2017, www.nytimes.com/2017/10/05/books/nobel-prize-literature.html. Accessed 26 Sept. 2024.

Beedham, Matthew. The Novels of Kazuo Ishiguro. Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.

Bryson, Bill. “Between Two Worlds.” The New York Times Magazine, 29 Apr. 1990, www.nytimes.com/1990/04/29/magazine/between-two-worlds.html. Accessed 26 Sept. 2024.

Gurewich, David. “Upstairs, Downstairs.” Review of The Remains of the Day, by Kazuo Ishiguro. New Criterion, Dec. 1989, pp. 77–80.

Ishiguro, Kazuo. Interview. By Gregory Mason. Contemporary Literature, vol. 30, no. 3, 1989, pp. 335–47. Academic Search Complete, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=5037256&site=ehost-live. Accessed 14 Nov. 2017.

Ishiguro, Kazuo. Interview. By Allan Vorda and Kim Herzinger. Mississippi Review, vol. 20, no. 1–2, 1991, pp. 131–54.

"Kazuo Ishiguro: Nobel Literature Prize Is 'a Magnificent Honour.'" BBC News, BBC, 5 Oct. 2017, www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-41513246. Accessed Accessed 26 Sept. 2024.

McGovern, Joe. "Nobel Laureate and ‘Living’ Oscar Nominee Kazuo Ishiguro Loves His Fellow Noms ‘Top Gun’ and ‘Glass Onion’." Wrap, 24 Jan. 2023, www.thewrap.com/living-oscar-nominee-kazuo-ishiguro-loves-top-gun-glass-onion-interview/. Accessed 26 Sept. 2024.

Qureshi, Bilal. "How should we be 'Living'? Kurosawa and Ishiguro tackle the question, 70 years apart." NPR, 6 Mar. 2023, www.npr.org/2023/03/06/1161482211/kazuo-ishiguro-living-ikiru-oscars. Accessed 26 Sept. 2024.

Review of Klara and the Sun, by Kazuo Ishiguro. Kirkus, 27 Nov. 2020, www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/kazuo-ishiguro/klara-and-the-sun/. Accessed 26 Sept. 2024.

Mason, Gregory. “Inspiring Images: The Influence of the Japanese Cinema on the Writings of Kazuo Ishiguro.” East-West Film Journal, vol. 3, no. 2, 1989, pp. 39–52.

Matthews, Sean, and Sebastian Groes, editors. Kazuo Ishiguro. Continuum, 2009. Contemporary Critical Perspectives.

Menand, Louis. “Anxious in Dreamland.” Review of The Unconsoled, by Kazuo Ishiguro. The New York Times Book Review, 15 Oct. 1995, p. 7.

Shaffer, Brian W. Understanding Kazuo Ishiguro. U of South Carolina P, 1998.

Wong, Cynthia F., and Hülya Yildiz, editors. Kazuo Ishiguro in a Global Context. Ashgate Publishing, 2015.