Kazuo Ishiguro

Kazuo Ishiguro
Kazuo Ishiguro in Kraków (Poland), 29 October 2005
Born	November 8, 1954 (1954-11-08) Nagasaki, Nagasaki, Japan
Occupation	Novelist
Nationality	British
Period	1981-present
Notable work(s)	The Remains of the Day, Never Let Me Go

Kazuo Ishiguro OBE (Japanese: カズオ・イシグロ (Kazuo Ishiguro) or 石黒 一雄 (Ishiguro Kazuo); born 8 November 1954) is a Japanese–British novelist. He was born in Nagasaki, Japan, and his family moved to England in 1960. Ishiguro obtained his Bachelor's degree from University of Kent in 1978 and his Master's from the University of East Anglia's creative writing course in 1980. He became a British citizen in 1982.

Ishiguro is one of the most celebrated contemporary fiction authors in the English-speaking world, having received four Man Booker Prize nominations, and winning the 1989 prize for his novel The Remains of the Day. In 2008, The Times ranked Ishiguro 32nd on their list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".

Recently, his novel Never Let Me Go has been adapted to film.

Early life and career

Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki on 8 November 1954, the son of Shizuo Ishiguro, a physical oceanographer, and his wife Shizuko. In 1960 his family, including his two sisters, moved to Guildford, Surrey so that his father could work on oil development in the North Sea. He attended Stoughton Primary School and then Woking County Grammar School in Surrey. After finishing school he took a 'gap year' and travelled through America and Canada, whilst writing a journal and sending demo tapes to record companies.

In 1974 he began at the University of Kent, Canterbury, and he graduated in 1978 with a Bachelor of Arts (honours) in English and Philosophy. After spending a year writing fiction, he resumed his studies at the University of East Anglia where he gained a Master of Arts in Creative Writing in 1980. He became a British citizen in 1982.

He co-wrote four of the songs on jazz singer Stacey Kent's 2009 Breakfast On the Morning Tram album. He also wrote the liner notes to Kent's 2003 album, In Love Again.

Literary characteristics

A number of his novels are set in the past. His most recent, Never Let Me Go, has science fiction qualities and a futuristic tone; however, it is set in the 1980s and 1990s, and thus takes place in a very similar yet alternate world. His fourth novel, The Unconsoled, takes place in an unnamed Central European city. The Remains of the Day is set in the large country house of an English lord in the period surrounding World War II.

An Artist of the Floating World is set in an unnamed Japanese city during the period of reconstruction following Japan's surrender in 1945. The narrator is forced to come to terms with his part in World War II. He finds himself blamed by the new generation who accuse him of being part of Japan's misguided foreign policy and is forced to confront the ideals of the modern times as represented by his grandson. Ishiguro said of his choice of time period, "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."

The novels are written in the first-person narrative style and the narrators often exhibit human failings. Ishiguro's technique is to allow these characters to reveal their flaws implicitly during the narrative. The author thus creates a sense of pathos by allowing the reader to see the narrator's flaws while being drawn to sympathize with the narrator as well. This pathos is often derived from the narrator's actions, or, more often, inaction. In The Remains of the Day, the butler Stevens fails to act on his romantic feelings toward housekeeper Miss Kenton because he cannot reconcile his sense of service with his personal life.

Ishiguro's novels often end without any sense of resolution. The issues his characters confront are buried in the past and remain unresolved. Thus Ishiguro ends many of his novels on a note of melancholic resignation. His characters accept their past and who they have become, typically discovering that this realization brings comfort and an ending to mental anguish. This can be seen as a literary reflection on the Japanese idea of mono no aware.

Ishiguro and Japan

Ishiguro was born in Japan and has a Japanese name (the characters in the surname Ishiguro mean 'rock' and 'black' respectively). He set his first two novels in Japan; however, in several interviews he has had to clarify to the reading audience that he has little familiarity with Japanese writing and that his works bear little resemblance to Japanese fiction. In a 1990 interview he said, "If I wrote under a pseudonym and got somebody else to pose for my jacket photographs, I'm sure nobody would think of saying, 'This guy reminds me of that Japanese writer.'" Although some Japanese writers have had a distant influence on his writing — Jun'ichirō Tanizaki is the one he most frequently cites — Ishiguro has said that Japanese films, especially those of Yasujirō Ozu and Mikio Naruse, have been a more significant influence.

Ishiguro left Japan in 1960 at the age of 5 and did not return until 1989, nearly 30 years later, as a participant in the Japan Foundation Short-Term Visitors Program. In an interview with Kenzaburo Oe, Ishiguro acknowledged that the Japanese settings of his first two novels were imaginary: "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[...]. In England I was all the time building up this picture in my head, an imaginary Japan."

Personal life

Ishiguro has been married to Lorna MacDougall, a social worker, since 1986. They met at the West London Cyrenians homelessness charity in Notting Hill, where Ishiguro was working as a residential resettlement worker. They live in London with their daughter Naomi.

Awards

He was featured in the first two Granta Best of Young British Novelists: in 1983 and in 1993. He won the Whitbread Prize in 1986 for his second novel, An Artist of the Floating World. He won the Booker Prize in 1989 for his third novel, The Remains of the Day. An Artist of the Floating World, When We Were Orphans and his most recent novel, Never Let Me Go, were all short-listed for the Booker Prize. A leaked account of a judging committee's meeting revealed that the committee found itself deciding between Never Let Me Go and John Banville's The Sea before awarding the prize to the latter.

He was appointed OBE for services to literature in 1995, and was awarded the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture in 1998. On Time magazine's 2005 list of the 100 greatest English language novels published since the magazine formed in 1923, Never Let Me Go was the most recent novel. In 2008, The Times named Ishiguro among their list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".

He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1989.

Works

Novels

• A Pale View of Hills (1982)
• An Artist of the Floating World (1986)
• The Remains of the Day (1989)
• The Unconsoled (1995)
• When We Were Orphans (2000)
• Never Let Me Go (2005)

Screenplays

• A Profile of Arthur J. Mason (Original Screenplay for Channel 4) (1984)
• The Gourmet (Original Screenplay for the BBC; the script was later published in Granta 43) (1987)
• The Saddest Music in the World (Original Story) (2003)
• The White Countess (Original Screenplay) (2005)

Short fiction

• Three short stories in Introduction 7: Stories by New Writers (1981): ‘A Strange and Sometimes Sadness’, ‘Waiting for J’ and ‘Getting Poisoned’
• A Family Supper - short story first published in 1982
• A Village After Dark
• Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall (2009)

Film adaptations

• The Remains of the Day, directed by James Ivory in 1993
• Never Let Me Go, directed by Mark Romanek in 2010

External links

• Kazuo Ishiguro at Contemporary Writers
• Faber and Faber page on Ishiguro
• VIDEO Kazuo Ishiguro talks about writing and music at the 2009 Sydney Writers Festival on ABC Fora
• National Portrait Gallery portraits

Interviews

• Susannah Hunnewell (Spring 2008). "Kazuo Ishiguro, The Art of Fiction No. 196". The Paris Review. http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/5829/the-art-of-fiction-no-196-kazuo-ishiguro. 
• 2000 January magazine interview with Ishiguro
• 2005 interview with Ishiguro in Sigla Magazine
• 2006 Guardian Book Club podcast with Ishiguro by John Mullan

Profiles

• 1989 "A Case of Cultural Misperception," a profile at the New York Times by Susan Chira
• 2005 "Living Memories," a profile at The Guardian by Nicholas Wroe