Remains of the Day author wins Nobel
British author Kazuo Ishiguro, whose emotional uprooting from his native Japan has left an indelible stamp on his work, is named for the prestigious literature prize
Who is Kazuo Ishiguro • Born in in Nagasaki, Japan in 1954 and raised in Britain, Ishiguro, 62, won the Man Booker Prize for the The Remains of the Day that was made into an Oscar-nominated movie starring Anthony Hopkins as a fastidious and repressed butler in postwar Britain • Ishiguro has written eight books as well as scripts for film and television. • In 1995, he was awarded the Order of the British Empire for his services to literature. • Sara Danius, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, said: “He is an exquisite novelist. I would say if you mix Jane Austen and Franz Kafka you get Ishiguro in a nutshell.”
It’s a magnificent honour, mainly because it means that I’m in the footsteps of the greatest authors that have lived. So that’s a terrific commendation — Kazuo Ishiguro
British author Kazuo Ishiguro, best known for his novel “The Remains of the Day” and whose emotional uprooting from his native Japan has left an indelible stamp on his work, won the 2017 Nobel Literature Prize on Thursday.
The 62-year-old, “in novels of great emotional force, has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world,” the Academy wrote in its citation.
Contacted by the BBC, Ishiguro said he was “flabbergastingly flattered” by the award.
“It’s a magnificent honour, mainly because it means that I’m in the footsteps of the greatest authors that have lived. So that’s a terrific commendation,” he said.
Ishiguro has written eight books as well as scripts for film and television. In 1989, he won the Man Booker Prize for The Remains of the Day, which was published the same year, and in 1995, he was awarded the Order of the British Empire for his services to literature.
“This year’s laureate is a brilliant and even exquisite novelist,” Sara Danius, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, told the TT news agency after the announcement.
She called The Remains of the Day a “masterpiece”.
“It was huge already when it was released. The movie is good too. But it has grown with time, it’s a reflection of a class society that has disappeared,” she added.
Born in Nagasaki in 1954, nine years after the US dropped a nuclear bomb on the city, Ishiguro moved to Britain with his family when he was five years old. He only returned to visit Japan as an adult some three decades later.
Both his first novel A Pale View of Hills from 1982 and the subsequent one, An Artist of the Floating World from 1986, take place in Nagasaki a few years after World War II.
“The themes Ishiguro is most associated with are already present here: memory, time, and self-delusion,” the Academy said.
“This is particularly notable in his most renowned novel, The Remains of the Day,” which was turned into a 1993 film starring Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson. Charting the life of a painfully shy, dutyobsessed English butler, the film was nominated for eight Oscars.
“Ishiguro’s writings are marked by a carefully restrained mode of expression, independent of whatever events are taking place,” the Academy said.
In a 1989 interview with Bomb Magazine, Ishiguro said: “I tend to be attracted to pre-war and postwar settings because I’m interested in this business of values and ideals being tested, and people having to face up to the notion that their ideals weren’t quite what they thought they were before the test came.”
In a 1991 interview with former Nobel laureate Kenzaburo Oe of Japan, he said the Japan he wrote about in An Artist In the Floating World was “very much my own personal, imaginary Japan.”
“This may have a lot to do with my own personal history. As a small child, I was taken away from the people I knew, like my grandparents and my friends.
“I couldn’t forget Japan because I had to prepare myself for returning to it. So I grew up with a very strong image in my head of this other country, a very important other country to which I had a strong emotional tie,” he said.
“I’m beginning to see as I get older that my leaving Japan at the point when I did was, in complicated ways, a key defining thing,” he said in a 1995 interview with the Financial Times.
His more recent fiction contains elements of fantasy.
With the critically-acclaimed dystopian work Never Let Me Go from 2005, Ishiguro introduced “a cold undercurrent” of science fiction into his work.
Inspired by Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Marcel Proust, Ishiguro’s characters often painfully come to terms with who they are without closure.
His latest novel, The Buried Giant from 2015 explores “in a moving manner, how memory relates to oblivion, history to the present, and fantasy to reality,” the Academy noted.
In the book, an elderly couple go on a road trip through an archaic English landscape, hoping to reunite with their adult son, whom they have not seen for years.
His publisher Faber & Faber wrote on Twitter after the announcement, “We’re THRILLED Kazuo Ishiguro has won the Nobel Prize!”
Ishiguro, who early in his life wanted to be a rock star, “a new Dylan or something”, was not among those tipped as a favourite for this year’s Nobel. —
I thought it was a hoax in this time of fake news, I didn’t believe it for a long time. The award means that I’m in the footsteps of the greatest authors that have lived.” The world is in a very uncertain moment and I would hope all the Nobel prizes would be a force for something positive in the world as it is at the moment.” I’ll be deeply moved if I could in some way be part of some sort of climate this year in contributing to some sort of positive atmosphere at a very uncertain time.” Sara Danius, the academy’s permanent secretary He’s a very interesting writer. .. if you mix Jane Austen — her comedy of manners and her psychological insights — with Kafka, then I think you have Ishiguro.”