Kazuo Ishiguro – his life and work

18th February 2021

Kazuo Ishiguro is one of our most respected contemporary literary figures. Any new novel from him is a big event in the book world, and he ranks alongside the likes of Ian McEwan and Hilary Mantel as writers who attract significant attention from the publishing world and readers alike when a new title appears.

Ishiguro’s latest novel Klara and the Sun – his first since being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature – will be published on 2nd March, and whilst the themes in his books might outweigh their sense of place, we hope the TripFiction audience will want to hear more about this new novel and about its famous author.

Kazuo was born in November 1954 in Nagasaki, Japan. He moved to England in 1960 when he was just five years old. Living in Guildford, Surrey, he went to nearby Woking Grammar School before studying English and philosophy at the University of Kent in Canterbury. After a year spent writing fiction he attended the University of East Anglia’s legendary creative writing course with Malcolm Bradbury and Angela Carter, and left there with an MA. His UEA thesis became his first novel, A Pale View of Hills, and the rest, as they say, is literary history. He has written short stories, screenplays and music lyrics, but it is his seven novels – Klara and the Sun is the 8th – that have garnered so many plaudits and prizes, including that Nobel Prize, the Whitbread Prize (in 1986) for An Artist of the Floating World and the Booker Prize (in 1989) for The Remains of the Day.

Kazuo has been married to Lorna since 1986. They live in London and their daughter Naomi is also pursuing a career as an author.

Ishiguro’s novels invariably have great emotional force and include themes of memory, dystopia, science fiction and love. Let’s take a look at some of his superlative body of work.

A Pale View of Hills – London and Nagasaki

In his highly acclaimed debut, Kazuo Ishiguro tells the story of Etsuko, a Japanese woman now living alone in England, dwelling on the recent suicide of her daughter.

Retreating into the past, she finds herself reliving one particular hot summer night in Nagasaki, when she and her friends struggled to rebuild their lives after the war. But then as she recalls her strange friendship with Sachiko – a wealthy woman reduced to vagrancy – the memories take on a disturbing cast.

An Artist of the Floating World – Japan

It is 1948. Japan is rebuilding her cities after the calamity of World War Two, her people putting defeat behind them and looking to the future. The celebrated artist, Masuji Ono, fills his days attending to his garden, his house repairs, his two grown daughters and his grandson; his evenings drinking with old associates in quiet lantern-lit bars.

His should be a tranquil retirement. But as his memories continually return to the past – to a life and career deeply touched by the rise of Japanese militarism – a dark shadow begins to grow over his serenity.

The Remains of the Day – Devon

In the summer of 1956, Stevens, the ageing butler of Darlington Hall, embarks on a leisurely holiday that will take him deep into the countryside and into his past…

A contemporary classic, The Remains of the Day is Kazuo Ishiguro’s beautiful and haunting evocation of life between the wars in a Great English House, of lost causes and lost love.

When We Were Orphans – Shanghai and London

England, the 1930s. Christopher Banks has become the country’s most celebrated detective, his cases the talk of London society. Yet one unsolved crime has always haunted him: the mysterious disappearance of his parents, in old Shanghai, when he was a small boy.

Moving between inter-war London and Shanghai, When We Were Orphans is a remarkable story of memory, intrigue and the need to return.

Never Let Me Go – Sussex

In one of the most acclaimed novels, Kazuo Ishiguro imagines the lives of a group of students growing up in a darkly skewed version of contemporary England. Narrated by Kathy, now thirty-one, Never Let Me Go dramatises her attempts to come to terms with her childhood at the seemingly idyllic Hailsham School and with the fate that has always awaited her and her closest friends in the wider world.

A story of love, friendship and memory, Never Let Me Go is charged throughout with a sense of the fragility of life.

The Buried Giant – England

The Romans have long since departed, and Britain is steadily declining into ruin. But at least the wars that once ravaged the country have ceased.

The Buried Giant begins as a couple, Axl and Beatrice, set off across a troubled land of mist and rain in the hope of finding a son they have not seen for years. They expect to face many hazards – some strange and other-worldly – but they cannot yet foresee how their journey will reveal to them dark and forgotten corners of their love for one another.

Sometimes savage, often intensely moving, Kazuo Ishiguro’s first novel in a decade is about lost memories, love, revenge and war.

Klara and the Sun – United Kingdom

‘The Sun always has ways to reach us.’

From her place in the store, Klara, an Artificial Friend with outstanding observational qualities, watches carefully the behaviour of those who come in to browse, and of those who pass in the street outside. She remains hopeful a customer will soon choose her, but when the possibility emerges that her circumstances may change for ever, Klara is warned not to invest too much in the promises of humans.

In Klara and the Sun, his first novel since winning the Nobel Prize in Literature, Kazuo Ishiguro looks at our rapidly-changing modern world through the eyes of an unforgettable narrator to explore a fundamental question: what does it mean to love?

What is your favourite Ishiguru book? Let us know in the Comments below…

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