'It's rather a hard thing to explain in a few words, sir,' I said. While in some respects, it verges on Wodehousian: "What do you think dignity's all about?" The directness of the inquiry did, I admit, take me rather by surprise. It is a tour de force, as it perfectly evokes the most essential element of interbellum England - the country house of the landed gentry and its staff. The Booker-winning 'Remains.', about the dignified butler pondering over his past and wondering about his future after a life completely devoted to the service of another person, remains Ishiguro's best known - perhaps after its 1993 film adaptation.
Ishiguro did state that the Japanese settings of his first two novels were imaginary, based on his mental idea of the land of his birth. "Artist.", his second book, is set in an unnamed town in post-World War II Japan where the narrator is forced to come to terms with his part in the war as he gets blamed by the new generation for acquiescing in a jingoistic but ultimately ruinous nationalistic policy. The first of his two books with Japanese themes, it deals with a transplanted Japanese woman discussing the suicide of her eldest daughter with her younger child in England where she is living. Ishiguro's first work, 'A Pale View of the Hills' (1982), came out a year before he became a British citizen. While the family planned a return to Japan almost every or the next year, that never happened and they stayed on - in fact, he only went back to Japan in 1988. According to an ex-colleague, his works were a "mindf**k", while author Kiran Manral said that what marks him out is the focus on "the individual placed at the centre around which the universe and its chaos unfolds."īorn in Nagasaki in 1954, Ishiguro grew up in the UK where his family moved in 1959 when his father, a physical oceanographer, was invited for a project. However, some readers, though impressed, are overwhelmed. It is possibly this sentiment of a gradual alienation that the Swedish Academy cited as it lauded Ishiguro for having "uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world" in his "novels of great emotional force." Multiple layers - including some discomforting ones that are subsequently revealed as the story advances, and the lack of definitive endings, as protagonists gradually exhibit their failings but without acknowledging that they're even aware of them, and thus, end up resigned to fully comprehend or change their lot in life - are some other features of his work. This may explain why the narration in all but one of his seven books is in first person, and the earlier works usually deal with the past of the protagonists. In the end, as a writer, I'm more interested in what people tell themselves happened rather than what actually happened," Ishiguro had said in a 2000 interview. "More fundamentally, I'm interested in memory because it's a filter through which we see our lives, and because it's foggy and obscure, the opportunities for self-deception are there.
Memory - and its failings, deception (usually of self), and a sense of duty (as understood) are the main motifs of Ishiguro's small corpus - spanning reminiscences of the high life in the turbulent 1930s through the eyes of an English country house butler in 'The Remains of the Day' (1989), the question of personal guilt a painter-turned-propagandist confronts in post-war Japan in 'Artist of the Floating World' (1986), a "personal" detective story set in colonial-era and communist-era Shanghai in 'When We Were Orphans' (2000), and other works set in Europe, Arthurian Britain or in a dystopian future.
Listen to Nobel Prize winning author Abdulrazak Gurnah's 'The Last Gift' on Storytel
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