335- ] English Literature - Kazuo Ishiguro

335- ] English Literature

Kazuo Ishiguro

 When is the best time to start doing the actual writing, the writing of the words that go into the book? You’re just improvising. But you can get some kind of strange force out of that serendipity and improvisation, and you can bypass your own senses in a way and surprise and even shock yourself.

Novels of Discovery and Revelation

Date of Birth  

November 8, 1954

Kazuo Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki, Japan. His mother had survived the atomic bomb attack on the city that ended World War II; his father had spent the war years in Shanghai. When Kazuo was five years old, his father, an oceanographer, accepted an invitation from the British government to conduct research in England, what he thought at the time was a temporary assignment in England. The family moved to Guildford, in the south of England. The temporary assignment became a permanent position, and though the Ishiguros continued to speak Japanese at home, young Kazuo grew up in an English town, attending English schools and singing in the church choir. When he was 15, his family decided to remain in Britain permanently. He did not see the country of his birth again until his mid-30s.

British novelist Kazuo Ishiguro playing the electric piano at his home in London. Ishiguro was born in the city of Nagasaki, southwestern Japan, and moved to Surrey, England, when he was 5. (Ⓒ Kyodo News via Getty Images)

As a boy, Kazuo Ishiguro enjoyed television Westerns and spy stories and wrote easily without entertaining any serious ambition of becoming a writer. The great creative awakening of his adolescence came at age 13 when he discovered the songs of Bob Dylan. He spent the next years learning to play guitar, writing songs, and studying the work of Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell and other singer-songwriters of the era. After graduating from Woking Grammar School in Surrey, he took a year off to travel in the United States and Canada, and to make the round of record companies with demos of his songs.

Although he still planned a career in music, Ishiguro studied literature and philosophy at the University of Kent in Canterbury. He began to read more seriously in college, taking a special interest in the novels of Charlotte Brontë and Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Of contemporary novelists, he remembers enjoying the work of Margaret Drabble.

1982: In his highly acclaimed debut novel, A Pale View of Hills, 27-year-old Kazuo Ishiguro tells the story of Etsuko, a Japanese woman now living alone in England, dwelling on the recent suicide of her daughter. Etsuko then relives scenes of Japan’s devastation in the wake of World War II. The novel won the 1982 Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize.

On graduating, he moved to London, still hoping to pursue his songwriting career. He supported himself by working at a homeless shelter in Notting Hill, operated by the Cyrenians charitable organization.  He played his music in bars and coffee houses and made the rounds of agents and record labels with demo tapes, but a recording contract eluded him. Meanwhile, at the homeless shelter, he was getting a second education — in the hardships of life and the mysteries of human character.  While working at the shelter, he also met a young social worker named Lorna McDougall. They fell in love and in time would plan a life together.

Thwarted in his music career, and uncertain of his future direction, he wrote a short radio play called Potatoes and Lovers and submitted it to the BBC. The script was not accepted, but the readers at the BBC saw potential in his work and encouraged him to pursue writing further.

An advertisement drew his attention to the master’s program in creative writing at the University of East Anglia. Graduate writing programs were a novelty in Britain at the time — a previous year’s course had been canceled for lack of applicants — but Ishiguro was intrigued that one of his favorite contemporary authors, Ian McEwan, had studied there. Ishiguro submitted his radio play as a writing sample, and to his surprise, was accepted into the program.

1986: An Artist of the Floating World by Kazuo Ishiguro. Set in post-World War II Japan, narrator Masuji Ono, a respected artist in the 1930s and during the war, but now retired, is garrulously recalling the past. He notices how his once great reputation has faltered since the war and how the attitudes towards him and his paintings have changed. The novel was shortlisted for the 1986 Booker Prize and won the Whitbread Book of the Year Award.

He now became nervous that he was unprepared for the course, so he spent the summer of 1979 in a rented cottage in a remote area of Cornwall, reading, writing, and studying the short story form. With two stories completed, he felt more confident in entering the program. His tutors, Malcolm Bradbury and Angela Carter, were encouraging, but his efforts to write about the life he knew in Guildford and London fell flat. Recalling his mother’s stories of her youth in Nagasaki, he set a story there, describing the atomic bombing of Nagasaki from the point of view of a young woman. The necessity of describing a city and era he had not experienced stimulated his imagination. His fellow students were excited by the results. With a new energy in his writing, he reworked one of his earlier story ideas, setting it partly in Japan, and as the story grew beyond the limits of a short story, he made it his master’s thesis.

1989: The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro’s third novel — which he wrote in four weeks — is a portrait of a perfect English butler and his fading, insular world in post-war England. At the end of three decades of service at Darlington Hall, Stevens embarks on a country drive, during which he looks back over his career to reassure himself that he has served humanity by serving “a great gentleman.” But lurking in his memory are doubts about the true nature of Lord Darlington’s “greatness” and graver doubts about his own faith in the man he has served. Kazuo Ishiguro was awarded the Man Booker Prize for The Remains of the Day in 1989, and the novel was adapted into an eight-time Oscar-nominated motion picture in 1993 starring Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson.

Before he graduated from the program, three of his stories were accepted for Introductions 7, an anthology of young British authors published by the historic publishing firm of Faber and Faber. Robert McCrum — an editor at Faber only a few years older than Ishiguro — took an interest in his work. McCrum offered Ishiguro a £1,000 advance to expand his master’s thesis story into a full-length novel. Ishiguro completed his course at East Anglia and returned to London and his old job at the homeless shelter while completing his first book.

October 10, 1989: Kazuo Ishiguro, with his book The Remains of the Day, at an awards ceremony held at medieval Guildhall in London, where he was awarded the Man Booker Prize. (Photo Credit: PA Images via Getty Images)

Ishiguro’s first novel, A Pale View of Hills, was published in 1982 when he was 27. In its pages, a Japanese woman living in England recalls her earlier life in Japan, while trying to come to terms with a daughter’s suicide. The memories of Japan are interwoven with observations of life in England “through Japanese eyes.” Ishiguro’s first novel won the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize from the Royal Society of Literature, awarded specifically for its depiction of an English setting. The following year, he was chosen alongside Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, William Boyd, Salman Rushdie and his East Anglia predecessor Ian McEwan for the literary journal Granta’s list of the best young British novelists. Having become a recognized British author, he knew his future lay in Britain, and he became a British citizen as well.

Ishiguro and McDougall married in 1986, the year he published his second novel, An Artist of the Floating World. Set in Japan in the years following World War II, its narrator is a painter and printmaker struggling to live with the consequences of his support for the pre-war militarist government. The novel is driven in part by the tension between the reader’s judgment of the narrator’s actions and his effort to justify himself. This second novel won the Whitbread Book Award (now known as the Costa Book Award) and was shortlisted for the even more prestigious Booker Prize.

2000: When We Were Orphans by Kazuo Ishiguro tells the story of Christopher Banks, an English boy born in early 20th-century Shanghai, who is orphaned at age nine when his mother and father both vanish under suspicious circumstances. Sent to live in England, he grows up to become a renowned detective and, more than twenty years later, returns to Shanghai, where the Sino-Japanese War is raging, to solve the mystery of the disappearances.

Having won praise for his two novels set in Japan, Ishiguro decided to write a novel set firmly in the country where he had spent almost all of his life. In reading the history of 20th-century England, he became fascinated by the life of the pre-war aristocracy and their servants, and particularly by the set of extremely conservative nobles, some of them sympathetic to Nazi Germany, who opposed Britain’s entry into World War II. He read numerous memoirs of the period, steeping himself in the milieu of the great English country house. An idea for a novel had taken hold of him. When the time came to start the actual writing, he made an unusual decision. Lorna agreed to take over his share of the housework, while he would cancel all other commitments and do nothing but write, take his meals, and sleep, for a period of four weeks while he worked up a first draft of the book that became The Remains of the Day.

2005: Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro is a gripping mystery, a beautiful love story, and also a scathing critique of human arrogance and a moral examination of how we treat the vulnerable and different in our society. In 2010, the film adaptation of the novel was released, co-starring actors Carey Mulligan, Keira Knightley, and Andrew Garfield.

The story was told in the voice of Mr. Stevens, a retired butler who spent his adult life in the service of Lord Darlington. Stevens takes pride in his service; he admires his employer and has difficulty recognizing the implications of his master’s ill-judged political involvement. Out of a misguided sense of duty and a temperamental inability to express his emotions — including his love for a former colleague, the housekeeper Miss Kenton — Stevens has sacrificed his last chance for love, family, and independence.

Ishiguro’s crash program of writing accomplished its purpose. He had completed the essential elements of his book in four weeks and spent the next months revising and refining it. Shortly before publication, he made one last addition. He was so moved by an unexpected declaration of emotion in a song by Tom Waits that he decided Stevens too could be allowed one moment of self-awareness — a realization of all he has lost.

September 13, 2010: Producer Andrew Macdonald, actress Carey Mulligan, writer Alex Garland, director Mark Romanek, producer Allon Reich and author Kazuo Ishiguro from Never Let Me Go, during the Toronto International Film Festival in Guess Portrait Studio at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Toronto, Canada. (© Jeff Vespa/WireImage)

The book was published in 1989 to enthusiastic critical acclaim and enormous sales on both sides of the Atlantic. Any concern about supporting himself at a day job was now over, and he would be able to devote the rest of his working life to literature. The Remains of the Day received the English-speaking world’s highest literary honor, the Booker Prize (now known as the Man Booker Prize). A sensitive film adaptation of the novel was a commercial success and received eight Oscar nominations.

2015: The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro. In post-Arthurian Britain, the wars that once raged between the Saxons and the Britons have finally ceased. Axl and Beatrice, an elderly British couple, set off to visit their son, whom they haven’t seen in years. And because a strange mist has caused mass amnesia throughout the land, they can scarcely remember anything about him. As they are joined on their journey by a Saxon warrior, his orphan charge, and an illustrious knight, Axl and Beatrice slowly begin to remember the dark and troubled past they all share.

By age 35, Ishiguro had won Britain’s top literary honors. He was a bestselling author and entitled to enjoy the fruits of his success. Not only was he eager to keep writing, he now had the extra challenge of living up to an exalted reputation. Ishiguro startled critics and readers with his next novel, The Unconsoled (1995), a challenging work in stream-of-consciousness prose, describing the travels and travails of a concert pianist in an unnamed Central European country. Critics were sharply divided on the book’s merits — both admirers and detractors invoked the ghost of Franz Kafka — and sales were nowhere near those of The Remains of the Day, but its reputation has grown with the passing years.

2017: Awards Council member and British cosmologist Lord Martin Rees presents the Golden Plate Award to Kazuo Ishiguro during the Academy of Achievement’s 52nd annual International Achievement Summit at Claridge’s Hotel.

Ishiguro knew popular success again, experimenting with elements of genre fiction in his next two novels. When We Were Orphans (2000) borrows the form of the detective story for other purposes, while Never Let Me Go (2005) adopts the method of dystopian science fiction. Set in an otherwise recognizable recent past, Never Let Me Go portrays a society where human clones are created and raised to young adulthood, only to be killed so that their organs can be harvested for transplant. The gruesome premise supports a haunting tale of doomed young love. A critical and popular success, it was also made into a compelling motion picture.

December 10, 2017: Kazuo Ishiguro, 63, Nobel Laureate in Literature, receiving his Nobel Prize medal and diploma from King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden at an awards ceremony in the Concert House in Stockholm. In selecting Ishiguro, the Swedish Academy said the author, “in novels of great emotional force, has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world.” (© TT News Agency/Jonas Ekströmer/Getty Images)

Over the years, Ishiguro continued to publish short stories in Granta and The New Yorker. In 2009, he published a collection of new tales: Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall. Ishiguro’s success also enabled him to resume his first creative love, songwriting. With composer and saxophonist Jim Tomlinson, he has written lyrics for a series of acclaimed albums by the jazz vocalist Stacey Kent. Ishiguro credits the discipline of lyric writing with teaching him a number of values he has carried over into his prose writing: a preference for the first-person narrator, compression, and the power of things left unsaid.

2017: Kazuo Ishiguro showing the Nobel medal to his wife, Lorna MacDougall, and daughter, Naomi Ishiguro, after the Nobel Prize Award Ceremony at the Stockholm Concert Hall in Stockholm, Sweden. (© Jonas Ekströmer/Getty)

Kazuo Ishiguro created an original variation on another popular genre with The Buried Giant (2015), a magical fantasy of Britain in the Dark Ages, praised by The Guardian newspaper as “brave and bizarre.” With his works translated into nearly every language, Ishiguro’s popularity as a writer has grown while his critical reputation remains secure. In 2017, just weeks before attending the Academy of Achievement’s International Achievement Summit in London, Ishiguro learned that he had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. In making the award, the Swedish Nobel Committee noted that his “novels of great emotional force have uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world.”

2021: Klara and the Sun, the first novel by Kazuo Ishiguro since he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, tells the story of Klara, an Artificial Friend with outstanding observational qualities, who, from her place in the store, watches carefully the behavior of those who come in to browse, and of those who pass on the street outside. She remains hopeful that a customer will soon choose her. The book offers a look at our changing world through the eyes of an unforgettable narrator, and one that explores the fundamental question: what does it mean to love?

In Klara and the Sun, his first novel since winning the Nobel Prize, we see the world of the near future through the eyes of an “Artificial Friend,” a synthetic human endowed with artificial intelligence who struggles to make sense of a human society very like our own.  Back in the present, Kazuo Ishiguro lives in London with his wife, Lorna. They have one daughter, Naomi. He continues to write novels and songs, as the world awaits fresh surprises from this master storyteller.