Biography of Kazuo Ishiguro (1954-)

Kazuo Ishiguro

Kazuo Ishiguro, born in Japan, now a British citizen, won the Man Booker Prize in 1989 for his acclaimed novel The Remains of the Day. Ishiguro was bron on November 8, 1954 and currently resides in London with his wife and daughter.

Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki, Japan, before he moved to England in 1960 when his father took a position at the National Institute of Oceanography. At the age of six, then, Ishiguro enrolled in the grammar school for boys in Surrey. Later, he obtained his B.A. from the University of Kent in 1978 and subsequently his Master's degree in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia. Among the odd jobs that Ishiguro held between his years of education, he was employed as a community worker in Glasgow, worked as a social worker in London, and even as a grouse-beater for the Queen Mother at Blamoral, where he likely learned many of the facets of aristocratic life he'd bring to his 1989 masterpiece. As a result of his writing prowess, however, Ishiguro came under the mentorship of famed writer Angela Carter, and then began writing full-time in 1982.

In 1981, Ishiguro published a collection of short stories, followed by his first novel, A Pale View of Hills, in 1982 about a Japanese widow in England who reflects on the destruction of Nagasaki in WW II. Ishiguro's second novel, An Artist of the Floating World, also explored Japanese reactions to World War II through a first-person narrator, in this case a Japanese artist.

What Ishiguro's novels share in common are first-person narrators who exhibit frailties or flaws that are exposed in their reminiscing or account of events. His novels are at once character studies and moral inventories that also serve to illuminate the context of given political events. In the course of a story, then, we not only see a character struggling with their own feelings in reaction to interpersonal situations, but also a political environment.

Remains of the Day, his third novel, was published in 1989 and won not only the Booker Prize, but also became an acclaimed film as well as radio broadcast on the BBC. Ishiguro followed up The Remains of the Day with The Unconsoled in 1995 about a concert pianist and then When We Were Orphans in 2000 about a private detective in Shanghai investigating his parents' disappearance. In 2005, he published Never Let me Go, and even dabbled in screenplays, writing the full-length film The Saddest Music in the World, directed by Guy Maddin and starring Isabella Rossellini.