Kazuo Ishiguro
Born 8th November 1954, Kazuo Ishiguro OBE is a British novelist, screenwriter and short story writer, who in 2017 was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki, Japan and moved to Britain when he was five when his father started research at the National Institute of Oceanography. He was educated at Woking County Grammar School for Boys in Surrey and in 1974 he went on to study at the University of Kent, Canterbury, where he read English and Philosophy. In 1979, after spending a year writing fiction, he begun a Masters in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia, the thesis of which would go on to become his first novel A Pale View of Hills. It was on this course that he met fellow writers Malcolm Bradbury and Angela Carter.
Ishiguro had not initially wanted to write fiction, wanting instead to become a songwriter. From the age of fifteen he would sit in his bedroom and write songs on his guitar. When he was thirteen he bought would-be 2016 Nobel Prize for Literature winner Bob Dylan’s album ‘John Wesley Harding’ and has said the record was a huge inspiration for him as it gave him the notion that words could be used in mysterious ways and that you could use them to create whole worlds. He was also inspired by the literature found in work from artists such as Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell. He considers his time writing songs as a teenager as his apprenticeship for becoming a fiction writer, and his songwriting soon turned into writing short stories.
Aged twenty-four, while having little professional success as a songwriter, he had a number of short stories published and was spotted by Faber & Faber in London, who remain his publisher today. He published his first novel ‘A Pale View of Hills’ in 1982 and has since published a short story collection and seven other novels, including Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go which have both been adapted into award-winning films. Although writing fiction has become more of a priority for him, he still considers himself a songwriter and has written lyrics for a number of albums by singer Stacey Kent. He considers collaborative work to be an important part of his writing life. For him, working in another outlet with other artists stops his development from becoming static as it gives him opportunities to grow and develop in ways that he might not if he were to work alone, as writers may be prone to. He also cites films as a major influence on his work, particularly those from Japanese directors Yasujirō Ozu and Mikio Naruse.
Recurring themes in his novels include memory, guilt, and delusion. In an interview following his winning of the Nobel Prize, he discussed how he was interested in individuals who struggle with the past and memories. In many of his books, the reader meets the main character as they approach late middle age and are beginning to gain perspective on their lives, reflecting and realising that they may have backed the wrong values or causes. These characters then also have to grapple with the decision of whether it is best to leave the past buried or to somehow confront or rectify it. He said he is fascinated by this situation and has become interested in how this question can also be applied to countries, particularly the idea of a nation struggling to understand and deal with dark or shameful aspects of its past. Ishiguro has explored questions around national heritage and identity using the context of World War Two in a number of his novels. Remains of the Day is set in a large country house in England following the second world war, and his second novel An Artist of the Floating World is set during the Occupation of Japan following Japan’s surrender in 1945. The narrator is haunted by his role in the war and is forced to confront the nation’s more modern values that are represented by his grandson. Ishiguro’s first novel A Pale View of Hills is also concerned with Japan, and is about a Japanese widow now living in England, reflecting on the devastation caused in Nagasaki.
With regards to his writing style, he has expressed that he doesn’t usually think of his stories in terms of their genre to begin with. Instead, he will be drawn to write about a particular person with an issue, and this idea does not immediately take place in a specific time or location. He will then look back through history and genres to figure out the best way to express the story. He has said he never aims for a genre, rather he will use whatever he can to best express the particular idea.
His stories often remain detached from a specific location even once they are completed, for example in An Artist of the Floating World and The Unconsoled their locations are very general, the former set somewhere in Japan and the latter in an unspecific city in central Europe. A lack of distinction regarding setting gives Never Let Me Go a dystopian, futuristic feel even-though it is set in the 1980’s and 1990’s, in a reality parallel to our own.
On winning the Nobel Prize for Literature, Ishiguro has spoken about the responsibility he has felt after accepting such a well-known and respected award. He has spoken about how he accepted the prize because of the integrity of the prize and the history of the winners of whom he has a huge respect for. He has expressed his awareness for how prizes can be used as propaganda or promotional tools, and he has turned down prizes in the past because he did not feel aligned with the values behind the prizes or those of the previous winners. He felt that in accepting prizes authors undertake a certain amount of responsibility as a role model that younger people and fellow writers will look up to, and that becoming a Nobel Laureate and the attention it had brought him has made him even more aware of his responsibility as a public figure.
His most recent novel Klara and the Sun is his first since winning the Nobel Prize and tells the story of a very observant Artificial Intelligence who watches humans from her place in a shop window. She is fascinated by the customers that pass by her and hopes that one day she will be chosen by one of them. The novel offers an insight into our changing world from an unconventional perspective and posits questions about what it really means to love.
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