Kazuo Ishiguro

Japanese-born British novelist known for his lyrical tales of regret fused with subtle optimism. In 2017 he won the Nobel Prize for Literature for his works that “uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world.”

Kazuo Ishiguro, 2005.
Kazuo Ishiguro, 2005.
Mariusz Kubik
In 1960 Ishiguro’s family immigrated to Great Britain, where he attended the universities of Kent (B.A., 1978) and East Anglia (M.A., 1980). Upon graduation he worked at a homeless charity and began to write in his spare time. He initially gained literary notice when he contributed three short stories to the anthology Introduction 7: Stories by New Writers (1981).

Ishiguro’s first novel, A Pale View of Hills (1982), details the postwar memories of Etsuko, a Japanese woman trying to deal with the suicide of her daughter Keiko. Set in an increasingly Westernized Japan following World War II, An Artist of the Floating World (1986) chronicles the life of elderly Masuji Ono, who reviews his past career as a political artist of imperialist propaganda. Ishiguro’s Booker Prize-winning The Remains of the Day (1989; film 1993) is a first-person narrative, the reminiscences of Stevens, an elderly English butler whose prim mask of formality has shut him off from understanding and intimacy. With the publication of The Remains of the Day, Ishiguro became one of the best-known European novelists at just 35 years of age. His next novel, The Unconsoled (1995)—a radical stylistic departure from his early, conventional works that received passionately mixed reviews—focuses on lack of communication and absence of emotion as a concert pianist arrives in a European city to give a performance.

When We Were Orphans (2000), an exercise in the crime-fiction genre set against the backdrop of the Sino-Japanese War in the 1930s, traces a British man’s search for his parents, who disappeared during his childhood. In 2005 Ishiguro published Never Let Me Go (filmed 2010), which through the story of three human clones warns of the ethical quandries raised by genetic engineering. The Buried Giant (2015) is an existential fantasy tale inflected by Arthurian legend.

A short-story collection, Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall, was published in 2009. Ishiguro also wrote screenplays for British television as well as for the feature films The Saddest Music in the World (2003) and The White Countess (2005). He was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 1995.