Ishiguro’s floating world

As Kazuo Ishiguro wins the Nobel Prize in Literature, here’s reflecting on his works and life

Japanese-born British writer Kazuo Ishiguro — the 2017 Nobel Literature Laureate — is a living example that literary art has no national landscapes or limitations. His range of evocative works isn’t in his mother tongue, and deals with situations and settings far from his old and new homelands and times.

The narration in all but one of his seven books is in first person, and the works usually deal with the past of the protagonists.

As noted in an interview, he was more “interested in memory because it’s a filter through which we see our lives, and because it’s foggy and obscure, the opportunities for self-deception are there. In the end, as a writer, I’m more interested in what people tell themselves happened rather than what actually happened”.

The narrator of his first novel, A Pale View of Hills (1982), is a middle-aged woman whose daughter has committed suicide.

Ishiguro deals with Japan’s uncomfortable past in his novel, An Artist of the Floating World (1986) — where protagonist’s pro-militarist stance haunts him.

The endings in his works are almost always about protagonists gradually revealing their failings, but without clearly stating they’re even aware of them.

It’s this sentiment of a gradual and nostalgic alienation that the Swedish Academy cited while lauding Ishiguro for having “uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world” in his “novels of great emotional force”.

Ishiguro’s Booker-winning

As a writer, I’m more interested in what people tell themselves happened rather than what actually happened. KAZUO ISHIGURO, AUTHOR

novel The Remains of the Day (1989) — is about a dignified butler pondering over his past and future after a life devoted to serve the other person — remains his most famous — perhaps after its 1993 film adaptation. And soon, Ishiguro may surprise us again.

Covers of some of Ishiguro’s books