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Ishiguro, Kazuo

Entry updated 10 March 2025. Tagged: Author.

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(1954-    ) Japanese-born author in the UK since 1960, his first work being three stories, all ostensibly nonfantastic, for Invitation 7: Stories by New Writers (anth 1981) edited anonymously. He soon became known as a novelist of fictions only superficially obedient to the strictures against the fantastic maintained (in the twentieth century) by an insecure British literary establishment. Indeed, since the publication of his most famous tale, The Remains of the Day (1989), none of his subsequent novels has adhered to traditional canons of realism, beginning with perhaps the most ambitious of these, The Unconsoled (1995), the protagonist of which visits an unnamed Central European City whose contours are an ominous echolalia of his interior state, evoking Franz Kafka in the dreamlike recursions and seeming distractions that mark its narrator's seemingly no-exit hegira through his world [for Arabian Nightmare see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below]. A reading of the tale as being as relentlessly literal as Kafka himself (see Fantastika) may nevertheless generate a sense – as the cover of the UK edition clearly hints [see Picture Gallery under links below] – that the protagonist is not in fact the victim of his exfoliating encounters: that rather he is a Secret Master controlling the moves of the tale's passive-aggressive cast across an immense Board Game: though, unlike the protagonist of Groundhog Day (1993), he does not in the end awaken to save himself. When We Were Orphans (2000) presents a not-dissimilar search for meaning in terms increasingly surreal, within the frame of an assumption that when the protagonist solves his past the world of the future will be saved. The narrator's bewildered passage through wartorn Shanghai in 1937 as the Japanese invade – a significant early moment in a genuinely planetary description of the extent and reach of World War Two – savagely echoes similar dislocated and dislocating moments in the previous novel.

Ishiguro's first sf novel, Never Let Me Go (2005), is set in an Alternate History 1990s England, where Clones – like the narrator herself – are bred as organ donors (see Organlegging) in cod-rural enclaves (see Keeps; Prisons); it was filmed as Never Let Me Go (2010). Ishiguro's subtle sf narrative may not articulate but does nothing to disguise the ultimate savagery of the world he depicts, a Dystopia which, constructed as it is on the unstated but pervasive assumption that some lives are more valuable than others, may be difficult at times to distinguish from ours; indeed, so deadly quiet is the tale it is possible to miss the fact that its narrator, who describes her life in retrospect, has understood her fate from the very beginning, and that her seeming recessiveness is a shield against terror (see Horror in SF). She never sees the free-living human person of whom she is a clone. An example of the misprision this novel has been subjected to can be found in comments by the usually supple critic Frank Kermode (1919-2010) in "Outrageous Game" (20 April 2005 London Review of Books), where – perhaps lulled by the conspicuously deceptive Young Adult cadences of the first few pages of the tale – he describes her narrative as "chatty" and the book consequently as a failure.

The Buried Giant (2015) is also conducted in a narrative voice of uncanny calm (as intermittently voiced by a chthonic boatman who ferries humans across a dark river; unusually for Ishiguro, there is no sustained first-person narrator), and movingly describes the quest of an old married couple for their lost child through a Britain haunted by an imposed and traumatic Amnesia, amidst the fog of which revived ogres and doomed caricature knights drift through the vastated aftermath of Camelot [for Arthur, Gawain, Matter and Myth of Origin again see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below]. The Buried Giant is a dragon; but is clearly more than a dragon. But although cultural and historical meanings can be extracted, Ishiguro hauntingly eschews any allegorical lockdown, similarly in this to the late songs from aftermath of Bob Dylan, whose influence he has acknowledged, and whose eerie quiescence when the workings of time are at issue he shares.

Klara and the Sun (2021), which is sf, comprises the reflective memories of an AI-powered "robot" (more properly Android) known as an Artificial Friend, who is blessed or afflicted with programming that induces in her mind patterns of sacrificial or redemptive love for the girl to whom she has been sold as a companion and monitor (see Slavery). At the fringes of Klara's understanding as here falteringly expressed – she may have deliberately impaired her cognitive facilities through a loving sacrifice she has made to the Sun – can be perceived a lightly populated Dystopian world, almost certainly devastated by Climate Change, where normal children are "lifted" through an unexplained process of "genetic editing" (see Genetic Engineering). Klara, who cannot smell or taste, understands this world partly through eavesdropping but primarily via lines of sight, though her visual capacities are frequently overwhelmed (see Perception) when what she sees is too complex or too moving: at which points the world fractures into cubist fragments: each a stripped-down "reading" of the world around her. Like most Ishiguro protagonists, she could be described as living in Prison; her ultimate fate, hauntingly adumbrated, is to be dismantled. It is a fate very close to that about to be suffered by the narrator of Never Let Me Go as discussed above: both are designed to be wholly consumed by their users.

Kazuo Ishiguro was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2017; his acceptance speech, published as My Twentieth Century Evening and Other Small Breakthroughs: Nobel Lecture Delivered in Stockholm on 7 December 2017 (2017 chap), ends with a characteristically unexaggerated plea that writers address the future, without obeying generic shibboleths or established criteria as to what constitutes "good literature". He was knighted in 2018, and appointed member of the Order of the Companions of Honour in 2024. [JC]

Sir Kazuo Ishiguro

born Nagasaki, Japan: 8 November 1954

works (selected)

nonfiction

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