Kazuo Ishiguro

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Kazuo Ishiguro (カズオ・イシグロ Kazuo Ishiguro, originally 石黒一雄 Ishiguro Kazuo, born November 8, 1954) is a British author of Japanese origin. He was born in Nagasaki, Japan, and his family moved to England in 1960. Ishiguro obtained his Bachelor's degree from University of Kent in 1978 and his Masters from the University of East Anglia in 1980. He now lives in London with his wife and daughter.

He won the Whitbread Prize in 1986 for his second novel An Artist of the Floating World, and the Booker Prize in 1989 for his third, The Remains of the Day (ISBN 0679731725).

His other novels include A Pale View of Hills, The Unconsoled, When We Were Orphans, and his most recent book Never Let Me Go. The latter two books were both short-listed for the Booker Prize, with Never Let Me Go named the runner-up.

In 2005, Time Magazine released its list of the 100 greatest English language books since the magazine formed in 1923. Never Let Me Go was the most recently published book on the list.

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Literary Characteristics

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Ishiguro's novels share certain distinctive qualities. The chronology of his plotting can be varied and elaborate; the narration is often highly subjective; and he employs a delicate and historically accurate descriptive technique. His ability to capture the details and atmosphere of a period has received high praise

A number of his novels are set in the past. (His most recent, Never Let Me Go, had science-fiction qualities and was set in the near-future). His fourth novel, The Unconsoled, takes place in an unnamed Central European city. The Remains of the Day is set in the large country house of an English lord, in the period leading up to, and the period after, the Second World War.

An Artist of the Floating World is set in Ishiguro's home town of Nagasaki during the period of reconstruction following the detonation of the atomic bomb there in 1945. The narrator is forced to come to terms with his part in the Second World War. He finds himself blamed by the new generation who accuse him of being part of Japan's misguided foreign policy, and is forced to confront the ideals of the modern world as represented in his grandson.

The novels are written in the first person and the narrators often exhibit human failings. Ishiguro's technique is to allow these characters to reveal their flaws implicitly during the narrative. The author thus creates a sense of pathos by allowing the reader to see the narrator's flaws while being drawn into sympathy with him. That pathos is often derived from the narrator's actions, or, more often, inaction. In The Remains of the Day, the butler Stevens fails to act on his romantic feelings toward the housekeeper Miss Kenton because he fails to reconcile his sense of service and his personal life.

The novels end without a sense of resolution. The issues his characters confront are buried in the past, and those issues remain unresolved. Thus Ishiguro ends many of his novels on a note of melancholic resignation, whereby his characters accept their past and who they have become, and find comfort in that realization by a relief from mental anguish.

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