Kazuo Ishiguro

It is a long way from Nagasaki to Number Ten Downing Street. Yet this is precisely the unpredictable path Kazuo Ishiguro has travelled, he was born in the former, and his portrait now hangs in the latter. The Remains of the Day won the Booker Prize in 1989, and confirmed Ishiguro’s status as one of Britain’s leading writers. Barry Lewis’ study offers a close-reading of this much-loved novel, and considers all of Ishiguro’s work from A Pale View of the Hills (1982) to When We Were Orphans (2000), including his short stories and television plays. How Japanese is Ishiguro? What role does memory and unreliability play in his narratives? Why was The Unconsoled (1995) perceived to be such a radical break from the earlier novels? In addressing these questions, Lewis explores the centrality of dignity and displacement in Ishiguro’s vision, and teases out the connotations of home and homelessness in his fictions.