Kazuo Ishiguro

1956 -

K. Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki, Japan but in 1960 his family emigrated to Britain. At the time, his parents thought that they would soon return to Japan and they prepared him to resume life in his native land. They ended up staying, and Ishiguro grew up straddling two societies, the Japan of his parents and his adopted England.. Ishiguro attended University of Kent in East Anglia where he studied creative writing. He also studied philosophy and literature at the University of Canterbury. He spoke at home in Japanese and at school in English. His novels are read as "Japanese" in England , and "English" in Japan.

He now lives in London. All three of his novels have received critical acclaim. His first novel, A Pale View of Hills, won the Winifred Holtby Prize of the Royal Society of Literature; his second, An Artist of the Floating World, won the 1986 Whitbread Book of the year Award; The Remains of the Day was awarded the 1989 Booker Prize.

Ishiguro is mainly interested in depths of characters' consciousness and their realisation of responsibility for one's deeds and actions. Characters' memory is the key for their understanding. They perform auto analysis in search for the connection between the past and the present. They are at the same time narrators of the stories making constant comments to their actions and in this way discovering hidden emotions and meanings. The character's self is undefined. The past and present are concurrent.

Sources for this information:

Literature Classics

UTC English Dept.

Norfolk School Resource

Introduction 7: Stories by New Writers (contributor), 1981

Pale View of Hills, 1982, winner of the Winifred Holtby Award from the Royal Society of Literature in 1983, and named "Notable Book of 1982" by the American Library Association

"A Profile of Arthur J. Mason," television script, broadcast in 1984

An Artist of the Floating World, 1986, winner of Whitbread Book of the Year prize

"The Gourmet," television script, broadcast in 1986

The Remains of the Day, 1989, winner of the Booker Prize

The Unconsoled, 1995

When We Were Orphans, 2000

"A ghost story. With love itself as the elusive phantom. Looking for, being surprised by one or the other, believing, being certain, doubting, sooner or later everyone is taken up with it. Looking for the evidence calls into play the whole gamut of human emotions. I've been mesmerized by the old butler's tale, haunted myself by his ghost, appearing, reappearing, glimpsed at every turn in his corkscrew memory-lane. Caught in the offered flowers, recognized in his nervous little laughs, sensed behind the tit for tat, the 'talk' of the professional confidantes over their cocoa, one would have to be totally blind and unfeeling not to glimpse the fleeting spirit. Sighted first, unequivocally, by the worldly, sophisticated Farraday, love leads the butler on. To the strangest denouement of them all. Arrived at the object of his love, having relived so many happy/unhappy scenes with her, but now beyond reach, the sincerest profession of his love for her comes with the concern: had he ill-treated her during those years at Darlington Hall? It's made to look like he is wondering if the ill-treatment had occurred during her married life; but we can't believe that for a minute. We know him and his ways well enough."

---Jonathan

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"The largest irony in the book, I believe, that when she was available, he wasn't and when he was available, she wasn't. "

Betty

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He grieves, how deeply he grieves, "I gave it everything I had, he says, and I have nothing left to give." Can anybody read those lines and not be moved? But he does, he goes back and tries again, the "life of perfect service," and this time he's dancing, cognisant, on the ashes of his former dream but still he goes on, and in so doing justifies the former effort by his own integrity.

Don't you see it was his own integrity all the time which mattered, but like the man who spent his life looking for the tiger or whatever it was, he never realized it. "