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.”
After
studying English and philosophy at the University of Kent, in
Canterbury, he spent a year writing fiction, eventually gaining a Master
of Arts in creative writing, and studied with writers like Malcolm
Bradbury and Angela Carter.
Mr.
Ishiguro stood out early among the literary crowd. In 1983, he was
included in Granta magazine’s best of young British writers list,
joining luminaries such as Martin Amis, Ian McEwan and Salman Rushdie.
He published his first novel, “A Pale View of Hills,” about a middle-aged Japanese woman living in England, in 1982, and followed with “An Artist of the Floating World,” narrated by an elderly Japanese painter, set in post-World War II Japan.
His
deep understanding of the social conventions and affectations of his
adopted homeland shaped his third novel, “The Remains of the Day,” which
won the Booker Prize and featured a buttoned-up butler, who was later
immortalized in a film starring Anthony Hopkins. Mr. Ishiguro, who
writes his first drafts by hand, later said he had written the book in four weeks in a feverish rush.
When
he published “The Remains of the Day,” Mr. Ishiguro worried that he was
repeating himself by writing another first-person novel with an
unreliable narrator, but critics saw the book as an extreme departure.
“I
was afraid that people would say, ‘Oh, it’s the same book again, about
an old guy looking back over his life with regret when it’s too late to
change things,’” he told
The Times. “Instead, they were saying, ‘Your books are always set in
Japan; this is a giant leap for you.’ I get this with almost every
book.”
A
literary iconoclast, Mr. Ishiguro has played with genres like detective
fiction, westerns, science fiction and fantasy in his novels. Critics
viewed “The Unconsoled,” a surreal, dreamlike novel about a pianist in
an unnamed European city, as magical realism when it came out in 1995.
“When We Were Orphans” was viewed as a detective novel. His 2005 novel, “Never Let Me Go,” was regarded as yet another stylistic leap into futuristic science fiction, although it was set in the 1990s.
His most recent novel, “The Buried Giant,” defied expectations once again. A fantasy story set in Arthurian Britain,
the novel centers on an older couple, Axl and Beatrice, who leave their
village in search of their missing son, and encounter an old knight.
Though the story was a full-blown fantasy, with ogres and a dragon, it
was also a parable that explored many of the themes that have
preoccupied Mr. Ishiguro throughout his career, including the fragile
nature of individual and collective memory.
In
selecting Mr. Ishiguro, the Swedish Academy, which has been criticized
in the past for using the prize to make a political statement, seemed to
focus on pure literary merit.
The
Nobel Prize in Literature is given in recognition of a writer’s entire
body of work rather than a single title. Winners have included
international literary giants like Saul Bellow, Ernest Hemingway,
Gabriel García Márquez and Toni Morrison. In other years, the academy
has selected obscure European writers whose work was not widely read in
English, including the French novelist J. M. G. Le Clézio (2008), the
Romanian-German writer Herta Müller (2009), the Swedish poet and
translator Tomas Transtromer (2011) and the French novelist Patrick
Modiano (2014).
Of the 114 winners who have received the prize since it was first awarded in 1901, 14 have been women.
Recently,
the academy has often overlooked novelists and poets in favor of
writers working in unconventional forms. Last year, the prize went to
the singer-songwriter Bob Dylan, “for having created new poetic
expressions within the great American song tradition,” a choice that
infuriated some traditionalists. In 2015, the Nobel went to the
Belarusian journalist and prose writer Svetlana Alexievich, who is known for her expansive oral histories, and in 2013, the Canadian short story writer Alice Munro won.
Mr.
Ishiguro, the 29th English-language novelist to win the prize, stands
out from some previous choices for his accessible prose style. In a
rarity for writers, Mr. Ishiguro is beloved by critics and scholars and
is commercially successful; his work is widely known and read, and has
been adapted into feature films, and a television series in Japan. His
novels have collectively sold more than 2.5 million copies in the United
States.
“He’s
got such an extraordinary range, and he writes with such restraint and
control about some very big themes, about memory and the loss thereof,
about war and love” said Sonny Mehta, the chairman and editor in chief
of Alfred A. Knopf, who has worked with Mr. Ishiguro since his 1989
novel “The Remains of the Day.”
In
an telephone interview on Thursday, Mr. Ishiguro, sounding flustered
and stunned, said he was sitting at his kitchen table writing an email
in his London home, where he lives with his wife Lorna, when the phone
rang. It was his agent, who told him that the Nobel committee had
announced his name. Then the BBC called, and a gaggle of journalists and
photographers gathered in front of his door. “It was very
embarrassing,” he said. “My neighbors probably thought I was a serial
killer or something.”
Mr.
Ishiguro seems to be in a prolific phase: He said he’s working on a new
novel, and has several film adaptations of his books in the works, as
well as a couple of theater projects.
“I’ve
got a novel to finish, and it’s not an easy novel,” he said. “It’s
going to be just as difficult to get on with it when the dust settles as
it was before.”
