Where to start with: Kazuo Ishiguro
The Japanese-born British novelist Kazuo Ishiguro is one of the most critically acclaimed authors writing in English today: the now 68-year-old was twice selected in the Granta Best of Young British Novelists issue, in 1983 and 1993, before going on to bag the Booker prize, the Nobel prize in literature and a knighthood. Earlier this year, he picked up Bafta and Oscar nominations too, for his adapted screenplay of Living, starring Bill Nighy. David Sexton suggests some good places to start for those who haven’t yet dipped in to his work.
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The entry point
Ishiguro’s first two novels, A Pale View of Hills and An Artist of the Floating World, had both directly addressed his lost Japanese background – he came to Britain with his family when he was five and did not visit Japan again for nearly 30 years, by which time he was a celebrated author. Both novels had developed his vision of people looking back on their lives in puzzlement and regret, leaving much to the reader to interpret.
Both are fine books, the second improving on the first, but it is his third take on much the same theme that remains the definitive entry point to his work: The Remains of the Day. Set this time wholly in Britain in the 1950s, Stevens the butler, a believer in the elusive concept of “dignity”, recalls his life of service to a man who was, we come to realize, a Nazi sympathizer. Stevens’s misplaced dedication has cost him his own chance of love and fulfilment, a realisation he comes to all too late.
The Remains of the Day is wonderfully funny and sad at the same time, “both beautiful and cruel”, as Salman Rushdie said. It won the Booker prize and was turned into a successful film, starring Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson, winning eight Oscar nominations.
Ishiguro admitted that he had in effect written the same novel three times, getting closer and closer to what he wanted to say. The result is a book that is perfection in its own terms.
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The challenge
Having accomplished that plan so successfully, with his next novel Ishiguro moved on to a hero who is not looking back, but is in the midst of his confusions. In The Unconsoled, Ryder, a musician, arrives to give a concert somewhere in central Europe, but everything around him shifts bewilderingly. As long as Ishiguro’s three previous books put together, this novel has the logic of dreams, in which time, place and identity constantly mutate. Many initial reviewers were aghast: Guardian critic James Wood said the book had “invented its own category of badness”. But it is Ishiguro’s most radical expression of his profound sense that none of us really know where we’re going in life, and looks increasingly like a masterpiece, a kind of Kafka for today.
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The weird one
Throughout his career, Ishiguro has taken familiar genres, such as the butler comedy or the detective story, and turned them to his own ends. The Buried Giant is, quite weirdly, a late, great addition to Arthurian literature. The setting is Britain around 450AD, long after the Romans have departed. An elderly couple, Axl and Beatrice, set off on a quest to find a long-lost son they no longer remember clearly and, after many trials, enter the land of a she-dragon whose breath casts a mist of forgetfulness. But perhaps this is to the good? For if the dragon is slain, as the knight Sir Gawain is planning to do, a buried giant will arise, releasing terrible memories.
Ishiguro’s daughter, on reading a first draft, told her father he had gone too far this time, prompting an extensive rewrite. It is certainly a peculiar romance, not at all the literary Game of Thrones it was promoted as in the US – but it has its own unforgettable beauty. Perhaps the most revealing of all Ishiguro’s remarks about his work is the apparently offhand statement that for him, “the essence doesn’t lie in the setting”.
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The post-Nobel novel
“The Nobel is a ticket to one’s own funeral. No one has ever done anything after he got it,” TS Eliot said, on winning in 1948. Ishiguro won the Nobel prize for literature in 2017, delivering a lovely, low-key acceptance speech that was published as My Twentieth Century Evening and Other Small Breakthroughs, and he was knighted the following year.
Klara and the Sun was published in 2021, and showed no sign at all that he felt he needed to become any kind of figurehead or sage. The narrator this time (all Ishiguro’s novels are firstperson narratives) is Klara, a solar-powered Artificial Friend, naive but observant, who describes her attempts to do her best for the girl she has been bought to care for. Like all Ishiguro’s work, it is written in neutral, gentle language that never quite rises to the events it describes – events that we, however, can clearly perceive and grieve. Once again, the effect is moving in a particular way no other novelist commands.
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If you only read one, it should be
Ostensibly, Never Let Me Go is science fiction: a novel about clones, raised for the sole purpose of being carved up for body parts until they die. Yet the question at its core is how we all behave in the knowledge that we have only limited time and no escape from the sentence of death.
Far from being futuristic or technological, it is set in the past, narrated in the late 1990s, looking back to the previous decades. Kathy, 31, is a “carer” for her fellow clones, destined to become a “donor” herself and so, in a dreadful euphemism, “complete” soon enough. She tells us about what has mattered to her in her life, her friendships, loves and disappointments.
Never Let Me Go is a deeply disturbing book (far more so than the film adaptation, good though it is). On first reading, it became a part of my dreamlife, in a way few other novels ever have. Yet it is not a horror story. Ishiguro even maintains that it is his most cheerful book, “trying to celebrate the small decencies of human beings set against this dark background that’s in all our lives”. It is now blindingly obvious that Never Let Me Go should have won the Booker Prize, for which it was shortlisted, in 2005. I was a judge that year. Mea culpa, then. Having been asked to write the introduction for a new edition, I have tried to make amends.
• A new edition of Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro, with an introduction by David Sexton, is published by Everyman (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.