Kazuo Ishiguro Biography
Kazuo Ishiguro, born in 1954, British writer best known for his third novel, The Remains of the Day (1989), which won Britain's highest literary award, the Booker Prize, in 1989. Ishiguro's writing examines the human capacity for “handling”, exploring the choice to face some regrets and to repress or ignore others.
Born in Nagasaki, Japan, Ishiguro moved to England with his parents at the age of six. He was educated at the University of Kent and received a master's degree in creative writing at the University of East Anglia, a course established and taught by the British writer Malcolm Bradbury. After publishing a number of short stories and articles in magazines in 1980, Ishiguro's first novel, A Pale View of Hills, was published in 1982, winning the Winifred Holtby Prize. His next novel, An Artist of the Floating World (1986), won not only the Whitbread Fiction Prize but also the Whitbread Book of the Year award. It was with The Remains of the Day that Ishiguro achieved widespread recognition. The novel is the first-person narrative of an English butler looking back on his career; beneath the dutiful, restrained, pompous tone of his delivery, it becomes clear how much his life of service has cost him. The conclusion, by its very reservation, is frightening in its evocation of sorrow and loss. Rich in carefully researched historical detail, the book was adapted to film by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala in 1993 and starred Anthony Hopkins.
With its large and virtually plotless account, The Unconsoled (1995) could not be more different than its predecessor. In its nightmarish and surrealistic tone, it resembles the grotesque and disturbing literature of the Austrian (Czech) author Franz Kafka. Set in an unnamed Eastern European country, it concerns a visiting pianist scheduled to perform in a concert he seems doomed not to reach, while fragments of the lives and conversations of the townspeople swirl around him. In When We Were Orphans (2000), the central character, a detective in London, is troubled by flashbacks to his childhood in China. He eventually returns to Shanghai to find out what happened to his parents who disappeared under mysterious circumstances during his youth.
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