Nobel Prize in literature 2017: Novelist Kazuo Ishiguro
Literature Desk :
Kazuo Ishiguro OBE FRSA FRSL Japanese (born 8 November 1954) is a British novelist, screenwriter and short story writer. He was born in Nagasaki, Japan.
Ishiguro is the son of Shizuo Ishiguro, a Physical Oceanographer, and his wife Shizuko. At the age of 5, Ishiguro and his family (including his two sisters) left Japan and moved to Guildford, Surrey, as his father was invited for research at the National Institute of Oceanography. He did not return to visit until 1989, nearly 30 years later, as a participant in the Japan Foundation Short-Term Visitors Program. In an interview with Kenzabur? ?e, Ishiguro stated 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.”
He attended Stoughton Primary School and then Woking County Grammar School in Surrey. After finishing school, he took a gap year and travelled through the United States and Canada, while writing a journal and sending demo tapes to record companies.
In 1974, he began studies at the University of Kent at Canterbury, graduating 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 studied with Malcolm Bradbury and Angela Carter, and gained a Master of Arts in Creative Writing in 1980. His thesis became his first novel, A Pale View of Hills, published in 1982. He became a British citizen in 1983.
Ishiguro is considered one of the most celebrated contemporary fiction authors in the English-speaking world, having received four Man Booker Prize nominations and winning the 1989 Award for his novel The Remains of the Day. His 2005 novel, Never Let Me Go, was named by Time as the best novel of 2005 and included in its list of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005. His seventh novel, The Buried Giant, was published in 2015. Growing up in a Japanese family in the UK was crucial to his writing, as he says, enabling him to see things from a different perspective to many of his British peers. In 2008, The Times ranked Ishiguro 32nd on their list of ‘The 50 Greatest British Writers Since 1945.’
Ishiguro set his first two novels in Japan; however, in several interviews he clarified that he has little familiarity with Japanese writing and that his works bear little resemblance to Japanese fiction. In an interview in 1989, when discussing his Japanese heritage and its influence on his upbringing, the author has stated, “I’m not entirely like English people because I’ve been brought up by Japanese parents in a Japanese-speaking home. My parents didn’t realize that we were going to stay in this country for so long, they felt responsible for keeping me in touch with Japanese values. I do have a distinct background. I think differently, my perspectives are slightly different.” When asked about his identity, the author says, People are not two-thirds one thing and the remainder something else. Temperament, personality, or outlook don’t divide quite like that. The bits don’t separate clearly. You end up a funny homogeneous mixture. This is something that will become more common in the latter part of the century-people with mixed cultural backgrounds, and mixed racial backgrounds. That’s the way the world is going.
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’ichir? Tanizaki is the one he most frequently cites-Ishiguro has said that Japanese films, especially those of Yasujir? Ozu and Mikio Naruse, have been a more significant influence.
A number of his novels are set in the past. 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 parallel 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.”
His novels (with the exception of The Buried Giant) 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 sympathise 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 towards 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 realisation 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 counts Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Marcel Proust amongst his influences.
Ishiguro has been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature 2017, because “in novels of great emotional force, [he] has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world.” In response to receiving the award, Ishiguro stated:
“It’s a magnificent honour, mainly because it means that I’m in the footsteps of the greatest authors that have lived, so that’s a terrific commendation. The world is in a very uncertain moment and I would hope all the Nobel Prizes would be a force for something positive in the world as it is at the moment. I’ll be deeply moved if I could in some way be part of some sort of climate this year in contributing to some sort of positive atmosphere at a very uncertain time.”
In an interview after the announcement of the Nobel Prize, he said “I’ve always said throughout my career that although I’ve grown up in this country and I’m educated in this country, that a large part of my way of looking at the world, my artistic approach, is Japanese, because I was brought up by Japanese parents, speaking in Japanese” and “I have always looked at the world through my parents’ eyes.”
Ishiguro has co-written several songs for the jazz singer Stacey Kent, with saxophonist Jim Tomlinson, Kent’s husband. Ishiguro has contributed lyrics to Kent’s 2007 Grammy-nominated album Breakfast on the Morning Tram, including its title track, her 2011 album, Dreamer in Concert, her 2013 album The Changing Lights, and her 2017 album, I Know I Dream. Ishiguro also wrote the liner notes to Kent’s 2003 album, In Love Again.
Contd on Page 9
Kazuo Ishiguro OBE FRSA FRSL Japanese (born 8 November 1954) is a British novelist, screenwriter and short story writer. He was born in Nagasaki, Japan.
Ishiguro is the son of Shizuo Ishiguro, a Physical Oceanographer, and his wife Shizuko. At the age of 5, Ishiguro and his family (including his two sisters) left Japan and moved to Guildford, Surrey, as his father was invited for research at the National Institute of Oceanography. He did not return to visit until 1989, nearly 30 years later, as a participant in the Japan Foundation Short-Term Visitors Program. In an interview with Kenzabur? ?e, Ishiguro stated 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.”
He attended Stoughton Primary School and then Woking County Grammar School in Surrey. After finishing school, he took a gap year and travelled through the United States and Canada, while writing a journal and sending demo tapes to record companies.
In 1974, he began studies at the University of Kent at Canterbury, graduating 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 studied with Malcolm Bradbury and Angela Carter, and gained a Master of Arts in Creative Writing in 1980. His thesis became his first novel, A Pale View of Hills, published in 1982. He became a British citizen in 1983.
Ishiguro is considered one of the most celebrated contemporary fiction authors in the English-speaking world, having received four Man Booker Prize nominations and winning the 1989 Award for his novel The Remains of the Day. His 2005 novel, Never Let Me Go, was named by Time as the best novel of 2005 and included in its list of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005. His seventh novel, The Buried Giant, was published in 2015. Growing up in a Japanese family in the UK was crucial to his writing, as he says, enabling him to see things from a different perspective to many of his British peers. In 2008, The Times ranked Ishiguro 32nd on their list of ‘The 50 Greatest British Writers Since 1945.’
Ishiguro set his first two novels in Japan; however, in several interviews he clarified that he has little familiarity with Japanese writing and that his works bear little resemblance to Japanese fiction. In an interview in 1989, when discussing his Japanese heritage and its influence on his upbringing, the author has stated, “I’m not entirely like English people because I’ve been brought up by Japanese parents in a Japanese-speaking home. My parents didn’t realize that we were going to stay in this country for so long, they felt responsible for keeping me in touch with Japanese values. I do have a distinct background. I think differently, my perspectives are slightly different.” When asked about his identity, the author says, People are not two-thirds one thing and the remainder something else. Temperament, personality, or outlook don’t divide quite like that. The bits don’t separate clearly. You end up a funny homogeneous mixture. This is something that will become more common in the latter part of the century-people with mixed cultural backgrounds, and mixed racial backgrounds. That’s the way the world is going.
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’ichir? Tanizaki is the one he most frequently cites-Ishiguro has said that Japanese films, especially those of Yasujir? Ozu and Mikio Naruse, have been a more significant influence.
A number of his novels are set in the past. 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 parallel 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.”
His novels (with the exception of The Buried Giant) 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 sympathise 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 towards 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 realisation 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 counts Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Marcel Proust amongst his influences.
Ishiguro has been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature 2017, because “in novels of great emotional force, [he] has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world.” In response to receiving the award, Ishiguro stated:
“It’s a magnificent honour, mainly because it means that I’m in the footsteps of the greatest authors that have lived, so that’s a terrific commendation. The world is in a very uncertain moment and I would hope all the Nobel Prizes would be a force for something positive in the world as it is at the moment. I’ll be deeply moved if I could in some way be part of some sort of climate this year in contributing to some sort of positive atmosphere at a very uncertain time.”
In an interview after the announcement of the Nobel Prize, he said “I’ve always said throughout my career that although I’ve grown up in this country and I’m educated in this country, that a large part of my way of looking at the world, my artistic approach, is Japanese, because I was brought up by Japanese parents, speaking in Japanese” and “I have always looked at the world through my parents’ eyes.”
Ishiguro has co-written several songs for the jazz singer Stacey Kent, with saxophonist Jim Tomlinson, Kent’s husband. Ishiguro has contributed lyrics to Kent’s 2007 Grammy-nominated album Breakfast on the Morning Tram, including its title track, her 2011 album, Dreamer in Concert, her 2013 album The Changing Lights, and her 2017 album, I Know I Dream. Ishiguro also wrote the liner notes to Kent’s 2003 album, In Love Again.
Contd on Page 9