Kazuo Ishiguro Is Awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature
By ALEXANDRA ALTER and DAN BILEFSKYOCT. 5, 2017 The New York Times
As a young man, Kazuo Ishiguro wanted to be a singer and songwriter. He played at folk clubs and went through several stylistic evolutions ― including a purple, poetic phase ― before settling into spare, confessional lyrics.
He never succeeded in the music business, but writing songs helped shape the idiosyncratic, elliptical prose style that made him one of the most acclaimed and influential British writers of his generation. “That was all very good preparation for the kind of fiction I went on to write,” Mr. Ishiguro said in a 2015 interview with The New York Times. “You have to leave a lot of meaning underneath the surface.”
Mr. Ishiguro went on to publish seven acclaimed novels, and on Thursday, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, the literary world’s highest honor.
Mr. Ishiguro, 62, is best known for his novels “The Remains of the Day,” about a butler serving an English lord in the years leading up to World War II, and “Never Let Me Go,” a melancholy dystopian love story set in a British boarding school. He has obsessively returned to the same themes in his work, including the fallibility of memory, mortality and the porous nature of time. His body of work stands out for his inventive subversion of literary genres, his acute sense of place and his masterly parsing of the British class system.
“If you mix Jane Austen and Franz Kafka then you have Kazuo Ishiguro in a nutshell, but you have to add a little bit of Marcel Proust into the mix,” said Sara Danius, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy.
Ms. Danius described Mr. Ishiguro as “a writer of great integrity.”
“He doesn’t look to the side,” she said. “He has developed an aesthetic universe all his own.”
At a news conference at his London publisher’s office on Thursday, Mr. Ishiguro was characteristically self-effacing, saying that the award was a genuine shock. “If I had even a suspicion, I would have washed my hair this morning,” he said.
He added that when he thinks of “all the great writers living at this time who haven’t won this prize, I feel slightly like an impostor.”
In a career that spans some 35 years, Mr. Ishiguro has gained wide recognition for his stark, emotionally restrained prose. His novels are often written in the first person, with unreliable narrators who are in denial about truths that are gradually revealed to the reader. The resonance in his plots often comes from the rich subtext ― the things left unsaid, and gaps between the narrator’s perception and reality.
The Canadian novelist Michael Ondaatje, the author of “The English Patient,” said he was “thrilled” by the academy’s choice. “He is such a rare and mysterious writer, always surprising to me, with every book,” he wrote in an email.
Born in 1954 in Nagasaki, Japan, the son of an oceanographer, Mr. Ishiguro moved to Surrey, England, when he was 5 years old, and attended Woking County Grammar School, a school that he told The Guardian was “probably the last chance to get a flavor of a bygone English society that was already rapidly fading.”
Mr. Ishiguro discovered literature as a young boy when he came upon Sherlock Holmes stories in the local library. “I was around 9 or 10, and I not only read obsessively about Holmes and Watson, I started to behave like them. I’d go to school and say things like: ‘Pray, be seated’ or ‘That is most singular,’ he said in an interview with The Times Book Review. “People at the time just put this down to my being Japanese.”
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