Brit takes Nobel Prize in literature
Ishiguro best known for his novel The Remains of the Day
NEW YORK — Kazuo Ishiguro, the Japanese-born British novelist who in The Remains of the Day, Never Let
Me Go and other novels captured memory’s lasting pain and dangerous illusions in precise and elegant prose, won the Nobel Prize in literature on Thursday.
The selection of Ishiguro, 62, marked a return to citing fiction writers after two years of unconventional choices by the Swedish Academy for the $1.1 million prize. It also continues a recent trend of giving the award to British authors born elsewhere — V.S. Naipaul, the 2001 winner, is from Trinidad and Tobago; the 2007 honoree, Doris Lessing, was a native of Iran who grew up in Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe.
“Some of the themes that I have tried to tackle in my work — about history, about not just personal memory but the way countries and nations and communities remember their past, and how often they bury the uncomfortable memories from the past — I hope that these kinds of themes will actually be in some small way helpful to the climate we have at the moment,” Ishiguro said Thursday, speaking in his backyard in north London.
Ishiguro already was one of Britain’s most celebrated writers, winning the Booker Prize for The Remains of the Day, receiving an Order of the British Empire medal and appearing frequently on lists of the country’s greatest authors. The academy called Ishiguro’s eight books, which also include An Artist of the Floating World and The Buried Giant, works of emotional force that uncover “the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world.”
Many know him best for The Remains of the Day, a million-seller published in 1989 and, thanks to the Nobel, in the top 10 Thursday on Amazon.com. Ishiguro’s novel reads like a darker take on P.G. Wodehouse’s comic Jeeves stories, with a butler at a grand house looking back on a life in service to the aristocracy. The gentle rhythms and Downton
Abbey-style setting gradually deepen into a haunting depiction of the repressed emotional and social landscape of 20th-century England and the deadly rise of fascism so many failed to perceive or prevent.
Ishiguro would explain that he saw the butler as a metaphor for both emotional and political detachment. An Associated Press review from the time noted that “Ishiguro neatly reverses the cliche of ‘what the butler saw’ by building a novel around what the butler didn’t see.”
The 1993 film adaptation by the Merchant-Ivory production team starred Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson and was nominated for eight Academy Awards. Like The Remains of the Day, his 2005 novel Never Let
Me Go is a story of deception and uncertainty. What appears to be a narrative of three young friends at a boarding school gradually reveals itself as a dystopian tale with elements of science fiction that asks unsettling ethical questions. The movie adapta- tion starred Carey Mulligan, Andrew Garfield and Keira Knightley.
The Swedish Academy stunned the literary world last year by giving the prize to Bob Dylan, while in 2015 it offered a rare spotlight for nonfiction writers by honoring Belarusian journalist Svetlana Alexievich.
Ishiguro’s preferred art form is fiction, but he works in other media. He has written several screenplays, including for the Merchant-Ivory release The White Countess, and has collaborated on songs performed by jazz singer Stacey Kent. He also contributed liner notes for Kent’s album In Love Again.
“Songwriting was an old passion of mine. Earlier in my life I’d been a singer-songwriter until I turned to fiction,” Ishiguro, who has called Dylan one of his early heroes, told the Independent in 2013.
Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki but moved to England as a boy after his father, an oceanographer, was invited by the head of the British National Institute of Oceanography. An admirer of Jane Eyre from early on, he also is a longtime fan of comics and said Thursday that he was “in discussions” about working on a graphic novel.
“This is a new thing for me and reconnects me to my childhood, my Japanese childhood of reading manga,” he explained.
He studied English and philosophy at the University of Kent and found an early mentor in Malcolm Bradbury, who taught creative writing at the University of East Anglia. After a few false starts, Ishiguro completed his first novel,
A Pale View of Hills, narrated by a Japanese woman whose daughter has committed suicide. Both his debut work and the Booker-nominated An Artist of the Floating World centered on Japanese characters.
Information for this article was contributed by Jim Heintz and David Keyton of The Associated Press.