Kazuo IshiguroKazuo Ishiguro
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Biography
Kazuo Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki, Japan, on 8 November 1954. He came to Britain in 1960 when his father began research at the National Institute of Oceanography, and was educated at a grammar school for boys in Surrey. Afterwards he worked as a grouse-beater for the Queen Mother at Balmoral before enrolling at the University of Kent, Canterbury, where he read English and Philosophy. He was also employed as a community worker in Glasgow (1976), and after graduating worked as a residential social worker in London. He studied Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia, a member of the postgraduate course run by Malcolm Bradbury, where he met Angela Carter, who became an early mentor. He has been writing full-time since 1982. In 1983, shortly after the publication of his first novel, Kazuo Ishiguro was nominated by Granta magazine as one of the 20 'Best of Young British Writers'. He was also included in the same promotion when it was repeated in 1993.
In 1981 three of his short stories were published in Introductions 7: Stories by New Writers. His first novel, A Pale View of Hills (1982), narrated by a Japanese widow living in England, draws on the destruction and rehabilitation of Nagasaki. It was awarded the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize. It was followed by An Artist of the Floating World (1986), which explores Japanese national attitudes to the Second World War through the story of former artist Masuji Ono, haunted by his military past. It won the Whitbread Book of the Year award and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction.
Ishiguro's third novel, The Remains of the Day (1989), is set in post-war England, and tells the story of an elderly English butler confronting disillusionment as he recalls a life spent in service, memories viewed against a backdrop of war and the rise of Fascism. It was awarded the Booker Prize for Fiction, and was subsequently made into an award-winning film starring Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson. His next novel, The Unconsoled (1995), a formally inventive narrative in which a concert pianist struggles to fulfil a schedule of rehearsals and performances in an unnamed European city, was awarded the Cheltenham Prize in 1995.
Kazuo Ishiguro's fifth novel, When We Were Orphans (2000), is set in Shanghai in the early part of the twentieth century, and is narrated by a private detective investigating his parents' disappearance in the city some 20 years earlier. It was shortlisted for both the Whitbread Novel Award and the Booker Prize for Fiction.
He has also written two original screenplays for Channel 4 Television, A Profile of Arthur J. Mason, broadcast in 1984, and The Gourmet, broadcast in 1986. He was awarded the OBE in 1995 for services to literature and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He was awarded the Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government in 1998. His work has been translated into over 30 languages.
Kazuo Ishiguro lives in London with his wife and daughter. His latest novel is Never Let Me Go (2005) and he collaborated with George Toles and Guy Maddin on the screenplay for The Saddest Music in the World, a melodrama set in the 1930s, starring Isabella Rossellini. In 2009, his first short story collection, Noctures: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall, was published.
Genres (in alphabetical order)
Fiction, Screenplay, Short stories
Bibliography
Introductions 7: Stories by New Writers (contributor) Faber and Faber, 1981
A Pale View of Hills Faber and Faber, 1982
An Artist of the Floating World Faber and Faber, 1986
The Remains of the Day Faber and Faber, 1989
The Unconsoled Faber and Faber, 1995
When We Were Orphans Faber and Faber, 2000
Never Let Me Go Faber and Faber, 2005
Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall Faber and Faber, 2009
Prizes and awards
1982 Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize A Pale View of Hills
1986 Booker Prize for Fiction (shortlist) An Artist of the Floating World
1986 Whitbread Book of the Year An Artist of the Floating World
1989 Booker Prize for Fiction The Remains of the Day
1989 Irish Times International Fiction Prize (shortlist) The Remains of the Day
1995 OBE
1995 Premio Scanno (Italy) An Artist of the Floating World
1995 The Cheltenham Prize The Unconsoled
1995 Whitbread Novel Award (shortlist) The Unconsoled
1998 Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (France)
1998 Premio Mantova (Italy)
2000 Booker Prize for Fiction (shortlist) When We Were Orphans
2000 Whitbread Novel Award (shortlist) When We Were Orphans
2005 Man Booker Prize for Fiction (shortlist) Never Let Me Go
2006 British Book Awards Author of the Year (shortlist) Never Let Me Go
2006 Commonwealth Writers Prize (Eurasia Region, Best Book) (shortlist) Never Let Me Go
2006 James Tait Black Memorial Prize (for fiction) (shortlist) Never Let Me Go
Critical Perspective
Ishiguro's narratives center on memories and their potential to digress and distort, to forget and to silence the past, and above all to haunt the present. The protagonists of his fiction seek to overcome loss (the personal loss of family members and lovers; the losses resulting from war) by making sense of the past through acts of remembrance.
His first two novels, A Pale View of Hills (1982) and An Artist of the Floating World (1986) are typical in this sense. These impressive early works take the reader on compelling journeys into the minds and memories of their Japanese protagonists, Etsuko and Ono. Such 'personal' memories do not unravel within a political vacuum, but share complex relationships with wider historical events shaking the world. A Pale View of Hills and An Artist of the Floating World are set in the aftermath of the bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima respectively. These traumatic events structure and scar the two narratives, which are skillfully composed around strategic silences and suppressions.
A Pale View of Hills and An Artist of the Floating World are not straightforward 'historical' novels then. In fact what is so intriguing and puzzling about them is the way in which they make no attempt to narrate the catastrophic events which are central to them. They are less investigations into the historical conditions of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, than they are psychological portraits of how characters cope with such traumatic events. Similarly, in more recent fiction like Remains of the Day (1989) and When We Were Orphans (2000) the First and Second World Wars exist just beyond the horizon of their narratives.
Ishiguro's narratives typically contain characters that deceive, rather than reveal themselves through story telling. Like all of Ishiguro's novels to date, narration is, at least partly, a therapeutic process. The novels are not attempts to render the past convincingly, but rather to pursue how individuals interpret and construct that past. For example, A Pale View of Hills is narrated by Etsuko who is living in England. Her memories of the past and of her dead daughter Keiko (who committed suicide in Manchester) have been stirred by the arrival in England of her second child, Niki. While Etsuko's tale seems keener to discuss her old friendship with Sachiko and her daughter Mariko in Japan, the novel also implies that Sachiko and the narrator, Mariko and Keiko are the same person. To what extent Etsuko is concealing or revealing the past through her recollections is ultimately left up to the reader to decide.
A similar narrative emerges in An Artist of the Floating World. Ono is another narrator haunted by the past. His wife is dead following a bombing raid that destroyed large sections of their house. His son dies fighting the Chinese. Ono does not dwell explicitly on these personal losses. Like Etsuko he seems oddly detached from them. However, as he strolls through the shattered remains of his home he also circles around this past, which appears to the reader obliquely, through glimpses and side-glances.
As the powerful physical and psychological detail of An Artist of the Floating World suggests, Ishiguro's work is often preoccupied with interiors. Not simply with journeys into the mind and memory, but also with domestic interiors. It is upon the private rather than the public realm that Ishiguro's work tends to dwell, from the powerful image of Ono's broken home in Japan to the faded grandeur of the quintessentially 'English' Darlington Hall in Remains of the Day.
At the same time the protagonists of these texts are all radioactive with the fallout of such momentous events. In The Remains of the Day, the most critically successful of Ishiguro's novels to date, we are offered the narrative of Stevens, a butler. The privileged, isolated world of Darlington Hall reveals a society seemingly detached from national and international affairs. Yet it gradually becomes clear that the late Lord Darlington was himself a Nazi sympathiser during the war, a fact that Stevens struggles throughout the text to reconcile with his own view of his employer as a great man. It is 1956 and Darlington Hall has a new master, an American businessman, who encourages Stevens to take some time off. As he travels by motor car to the West Country to visit former housekeeper, Miss Kenton, Stevens' memories unfold in the form of a travelogue/journal. Yet, as with Etsuko and Ono's narratives, Stevens' flashbacks help us to make sense of his past and simultaneously expose that past as provisional, partial and unreliable. As the text progresses, we learn that Stevens helped his master entertain Fascist leaders like Mosley and that his visit to Miss Kenton (a former lover) has an ulterior motive. Stevens is a deluded character whom we as readers sympathise with but cannot quite place our faith in. The stunning precision and clarity of Ishiguro's prose in The Remains of the Day belies the fact that it is also a fiction about imprecision and the distortions of language.
After the deserved critical acclaim of the Booker Prize winning The Remains of the Day, Ishiguro's next novel represents a surprising and controversial departure. The Unconsoled (1995) bravely breaks with the conventions and themes of his earlier work. If the characters of the first three novels could be said to be 'looking back and ordering ... experience' then Ishiguro has noted that Ryder of The Unconsoled is 'someone in the midst of chaos'. The narrative unfolds within an unspecified European city and there is a dislocated, dreamlike quality to Ryder's narrative. If the protagonists of Ishiguro's earlier novels supplied memory with an imaginary coherence, a unifying order, then this novel abandons the idea of a stable identity completely as the text shifts, unexpectedly and incoherently between different accounts of Ryder's existence. The epistemological questions raised by the first three novels become ontological questions in The Unconsoled, a deft, disorientating text that reveals the novelist's commitment to narrative innovation and experiment.
Silencing those critics who found the ambition and abstraction of The Unconsoled difficult to swallow, Ishiguro's most recent novel represents a return to realism and the prevailing theme of memory that characterises the earlier work. When We Were Orphans (2000), which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, is the story of London-based detective Christopher Banks in the 1930s. Returning to Shanghai in an attempt to solve the mystery of his missing parents, who disappeared when he was ten, the novel takes us on a journey into personal memory and the past with which readers of Ishiguro will now be familiar. However, this novel is more than a rehash of earlier texts as the novel's imaginative use of the detective genre suggests. Ishiguro parodies the speech patterns of classic detective fiction only to suggest that the act detection is more elusive than it first appears. The closing lines of the novel, in which the narrator appears both contented and at home in London and discontented and restless 'a sort of emptiness fills my hours, and I shall continue to give Jennifer's invitation serious thought.' refuse any easy sense of closure.
Never Let Me Go (2005) takes its name from a fictional pop song to which the protagonist, Kathy H., dances during her days at the mysterious boarding school of Hailsham. The youthful, innocent Kathy imagines the lyric as a mother calling out to her child, and she is often to be found swaying to the words while embracing a pillow. What detaches the words and actions from cliché is the woman who looks on at Kathy, the mysterious figure known simply as Madame, who is reduced to tears by the apparently banal scene. Much later in the novel we discover why. Hailsham is an experimental school for clones reared to provide organs for human transplantation. Madame explains to Kathy later in life that the reason she cried is because the dancing girl appeared to her to be asking an older, more humane world not to let her go. Shortlisted for the 2005 Man Booker Prize for Fiction and other prestigious literary awards, the novel has been translated into more than a dozen languages and is currently being adapted into a film starring Keira Knightley.
Ishiguro’s latest work is also haunted by music. Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall (2009) is a poetic short story cycle, and an unexpected break with the novel form. At the same time Ishiguro manages to exploit the craft, control, and economy which helped secure his growing reputation over the previous six novels. In actual fact, Nocturnes is more a return to form than a departure: his earliest published work being short stories (‘A Strange and Sometimes Sadness’, ‘Waiting for J’ ‘Getting Poisoned’ (1981) and ‘A Family Supper’ (1982)), most of which are collected in Introduction 7: Stories by New Writers (1981). The stories move from tourist Venice, to the Malvern Hills, from London to Hollywood. Connecting all of them, as the title suggests, is music and dusk. The various stories evoke cellists, guitarists, saxophonists, and crooners in a carefully orchestrated narrative that is itself a sort of quintet. By turns tragic, comic and absurd, this is a collection that has repertoire, variation and resonance in abundance.
Dr James Procter, 2009
For an in-depth critical review see Kazuo Ishiguro by Cynthia F. Wong 2nd edition (Northcote House, 2003: Writers and their Work Series).
Author statement
'I am a writer who wishes to write international novels. What is an 'international' novel? I believe it to be one, quite simply, that contains a vision of life that is of importance to people of varied backgrounds around the world. It may concern characters who jet across continents, but may just as easily be set firmly in one small locality.'
Further reading on this site
The Man Booker Prize 2005
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