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At the end of his three decades of service at Darlington Hall, Stevens embarks on a country drive, during which he looks back over his career to reassure himself that he has served humanity by serving ‘a great gentleman’. But lurking in his memory are doubts about the true nature of Lord Darlington’s ‘greatness’ – and graver doubts about his own faith in the man he has served.
Kazuo Ishiguro’s moving portrait of the perfect English butler, his loyalty and his fading, insular world in post-war England, won the Booker Prize in 1989.
(Summary provided by The Booker Prizes)
Kazuo Ishiguro’s works of fiction have earned him many honours around the world, including the Nobel Prize in Literature.
He was born in Nagasaki, Japan, and moved to the UK at the age of five. His work has been translated into over 50 languages. The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go have each sold more than two million copies and were both made into acclaimed films. Ishiguro was awarded a knighthood in 2018 for Services to Literature. He also holds the decorations of Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres from France and the Order of the Rising Sun, Gold and Silver Star from Japan.
Kazuo Ishiguro (born November 8, 1954, Nagasaki, Japan) is a Japanese-born British novelist known for his lyrical tales of regret fused with subtle optimism. In 2017 he won the Nobel Prize for Literature for his works that “uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world.”
In 1960 Ishiguro’s family immigrated to Great Britain, where he attended the universities of Kent (B.A., 1978) and East Anglia (M.A., 1980). Upon graduation he worked at a homeless charity and began to write in his spare time. He initially gained literary notice when he contributed three short stories to the anthology Introduction 7: Stories by New Writers (1981).
Ishiguro’s first novel, A Pale View of Hills (1982), details the postwar memories of Etsuko, a Japanese woman trying to deal with the suicide of her daughter Keiko. Set in an increasingly Westernized Japan following World War II, An Artist of the Floating World (1986) chronicles the life of elderly Masuji Ono, who reviews his past career as a political artist of imperialist propaganda. Ishiguro’s Booker Prize-winning The Remains of the Day (1989; film 1993) is a first-person narrative, the reminiscences of Stevens, an elderly English butler whose prim mask of formality has shut him off from understanding and intimacy. With the publication of The Remains of the Day, Ishiguro became one of the best-known European novelists at just 35 years of age. His next novel, The Unconsoled (1995)—a radical stylistic departure from his early, conventional works that received passionately mixed reviews—focuses on lack of communication and absence of emotion as a concert pianist arrives in a European city to give a performance.
When We Were Orphans (2000), an exercise in the crime-fiction genre set against the backdrop of the Sino-Japanese War in the 1930s, traces a British man’s search for his parents, who disappeared during his childhood. In 2005 Ishiguro published Never Let Me Go (filmed 2010), which through the story of three human clones warns of the ethical quandries raised by genetic engineering. The Buried Giant (2015) is an existential fantasy tale inflected by Arthurian legend. His next novel, Klara and the Sun (2021), is set in the near future and centres on a droid who serves as an “Artificial Friend” to a lonely child.
A short-story collection, Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall, was published in 2009. Ishiguro also wrote screenplays for British television as well as for the feature films The Saddest Music in the World (2003), The White Countess (2005), and Living (2022). The latter was based on Kurosawa Akira’s Ikiru (1952; “To Live”), and Ishiguro received an Academy Award nomination for best adapted screenplay. He was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 1995, and he was officially knighted in 2019.
(Biography provided by the Booker Prizes and Encyclopaedia Brittanica)
