Kazuo Ishiguro Wins The 2017 Nobel Prize in Literature

A Citizen of the World and Nowhere
Born in Nagasaki, Ishiguro moved with his family to England when he was six years old and become a British citizen in 1982 as his first novel was published. This mixture of background shaped Ishiguro’s literary sense; the characters in Ishiguro’s literary world are often painfully alone and unable to bridge the gap between themselves and people standing just a few feet away from them. His best-known novel, The Remains of the Day (which won the Booker prize that year), is consumed by this. The story centers on an English butler, Stevens, who falls in love with the Housekeeper Miss Kenton over the course of years but never acts on his feelings. Stevens is dedicated to the ideals of service, and this commitment leaves him alone and pondering whether or not he has wasted much of his life. Then Ishiguro ends on a beautiful, complex note as Stevens decides to focus on the “remains of the day”—the time he has left—which would be an optimistic note if he was going on an adventure or making a bold play for happiness and not simply going back to his work as a butler. Ishiguro is a master of making characters feel like real people who are revealing their inner selves almost by accident as they tell you their story. The pervasive sense of being unable to truly connect with people or pursue your true self is the pathos that every reader can understand.

The Chameleon
Ishiguro effortlessly flirts with genre conventions in his work; his 2005 novel Never Let Me Go explores science fiction themes in a story about children at a special school who realize they are clones created to provide organs for their originals, doomed to die and to care for each other as they suffer. His 2000 novel When We Were Orphans is a detective story. His most recent novel, 2015’s The Buried Giant, trades in elements of fantasy in a story set in Arthurian Britain, playing with the idea that monsters and magic seem real to the people of the time and thus might actually be real in a sense. Ishiguro doesn’t just cynically adopt a genre’s tricks in order to put a twist on things, he uses these elements in service to a deeper story. These books can’t be called straight-up sci-fi, fantasy, or detective novels. They’re Ishiguro novels.

A Dash of Darkness
Ultimately, what makes an Ishiguro story so compelling is the way he weaves in the idea that our past, our memory, is simultaneously an illusion—an illusion often unconsciously edited and revised to suit our needs—and an unyielding force that determines our present and future. Characters in an Ishiguro story often appear to be in complete control at first, clearly recalling events and seeing their present with sober authority. Slowly, inevitably, their sense of self fractures as their past clarifies for the reader in subtle ways. More than one critic has noted a sense of the “Kafkaesque” in Ishiguro’s stories, a sense of slowly invading frustration and darkness that spoils a fictional world that seemed beautiful in the early going—The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go both begin on notes of pleasant recollection, then become sadder and darker in the telling. No one reads an Ishiguro novel without being moved, and it’s that power of emotion conveyed through words and images that makes the announcement of his Nobel Prize no surprise at all, but rather an inevitability finally come to pass.
To celebrate, why not re-read your favorite Ishiguro novel? And if you’ve never had the pleasure, this is as good a reason as any to finally discover one of the best writers we’ve ever had. If you’re skittish about committing to a novel, Ishiguro’s 2009 story collection Nocturnes contains beautiful, meticulously crafted (and subtly connected) stories that are an ideal bite-sized introduction to the singular genre the author has created for himself.