Search results
This volume is an extensive edited collection devoted to the work of the 2017 Nobel Literature Laureate, Sir Kazuo Ishiguro, featuring contributions from the most established Ishiguro scholars. It contains major new chapters on each of his novels, including the first published essay on Klara and the Sun as well as his short-story collection Nocturnes and his screenplays. Situating Ishiguro’s work within current debates regarding modernism, postmodernism and postcolonialism, the chapters examine his engagement with the defining concerns of the contemporary novel, including national identity, Britishness, cosmopolitanism, memory, biotechnology, terrorism, Brexit, immigration and populist politics. Discussing Ishiguro as both a British and a global author, the collection contributes to debates regarding the politics of publishing of ethnic writers, examining how Ishiguro has managed to shape a career in resistance to narrow labelling where many other writers have struggled to achieve long-term recognition. The collection opens with an extensive introduction by the co-editors which examines Ishiguro’s body of work as a whole and Ishiguro’s evolving literary reputation in light of his recent personal and commercial success. The book then offers individual chapters on each of Ishiguro’s novels, his short-story collection and his television and film work, as well as his recent journalistic interventions. Each chapter aims to extend and update existing criticism on Ishiguro via engagement with the most up-to-date critical frameworks, while at the same time staying true to each text’s most prominent thematic concerns. Given the prominence of its contributors and its comprehensive coverage, Kazuo Ishiguro: Twenty-First-Century Perspectives will be the definitive volume of Ishiguro scholarship for years to come.
From 1978 to 2005 Kazuo Ishiguro proposed fourteen screenplays, with four being successfully produced. Being a full-time novelist, Ishiguro still writes screenplays as a self-proclaimed ‘enthusiastic amateur’. However, at the beginning of his career, Ishiguro tested the waters with writing screenplays along with short stories. In 1978 Ishiguro wrote his first radio play, ‘Potatoes and Lovers’, which got him accepted into the MA creative writing programme at the University of East Anglia. With piano music set instructions bracketed as the
Making sense of worlds of ambiguous, ambivalent, treacherous and often contradictory signs as well as of silences and pauses emerges as a central concern for both narrator-protagonists and readers of Kazuo Ishiguro's novels. These slippery signs and the deceptive surface transparency of the author's prose, in addition to his Japanese background, have compelled many readers to attribute to the narratives’ blanks and ambiguities the kinds of meanings on the levels of character, culture, aesthetics and ethics that Ishiguro's texts so intriguingly
In organ transfer, tissue moves through a web of language. Metaphors reclassify the tissue to enable its redeployment, framing the process for practitioners and public. The process of marking off tissue as transferrable in legal and cultural terms parallels many of the processes that typically accompany commodification in late capitalism. This language of economic transformation echoes the language of Gothic ceremony, of purification and demarcation. As in literary Gothic s representations of ceremony, this economic work is anxious and the boundaries it creates unstable. This article identifies dominant metaphors shaping that ceremony of tissue reclassification, and examines how three twenty-first century novels deploy these metaphors to represent the harvest (procurement) process (the metaphor of harvest; is itself highly problematic, as I will discuss). Kazuo Ishiguros Never Let Me Go (2005), Neal Shusterman Unwind (2007), and Ninni Holmqvists Swedish novel Enhet (The Unit) (2006, translated into English in 2010) each depict vulnerable protagonists within societies where extreme tissue procurement protocols have state sanction. The texts invite us to reflect on the kinds of symbolic substitutions that help legitimate tissue transfer and the way that procurement protocols may become influenced by social imperatives. In each text, the Gothic trope of dismemberment becomes charged with new urgency.
Arguably the leading voice in contemporary British literature, during a four-decade career Sir Kazuo Ishiguro has also established himself as an artist of international reputation. Indeed, he enjoys a rather remarkable position as a critically acclaimed author of formally innovative literary fiction who also tops bestseller charts across the world and whose new releases are anticipated with the relish usually reserved for more ‘popular’ writers. Beyond the text: Merchant Ivory's 1993 film adaptation of The Remains of the Day was nominated
‘How can you like being lonely?’ ‘I do, I just do’. ( U : 171) In the final scene of Klara and the Sun (Ishiguro, 2021 ) Klara has a conversation with Manager, now retired from the store where Klara was displayed and sold. The meeting happens in a junkyard. Klara, no longer able to move, has been in the yard since her teenage purchaser went off to college and her career as an AF
Ishiguro remarked in 2000 that nostalgia, in its purest form as ‘a profound emotion’, is ‘to the emotions what idealism is to the intellect’ – a way of ‘longing for a better world’ (Ishiguro, 2000a ). Ishiguro's preoccupation with nostalgia, the aching sense of desire and longing for home or the past, in many ways matches his concerns with memory. Christopher Banks's return to Shanghai in When We Were Orphans ( 2000 ) was not so much about rooting out evil as it was to retrieve lost objects, people and moments from his past. Banks
Ishiguro has proved himself to be a remarkably prescient author. Although he is not considered a particularly political figure – avoiding the polemical stance of fellow authors such as Jonathan Coe or Ian McEwan – his body of work does contain a sustained interrogation of major cultural events to comment on the politics of national identity, memory and trauma. Further, Ishiguro has recently been uncharacteristically outspoken on the disastrous approach taken by British politicians in post-Brexit negotiations. Following the EU referendum result
Are the narrators of Kazuo Ishiguro's first two novels set in Japan innocents recovering from a tormented life or murderous villains covertly shielding their deceits? Etsuko from A Pale View of Hills and Ono from An Artist of the Floating World have sparked both empathy and antipathy in unequal measure when reflected in psychological, cinematic or feminist readings of their characterisation. Interpretations vary on charges of unreliable narration stemming from emotional instability, on Ishiguro's reworking of Japanese cultural stereotypes
Neither the presentation nor the plotting of When We Were Orphans ( 2000 ) properly stacks up. In interviews Ishiguro has commented on what he calls the ‘peculiar elision’ of the governing geopolitical premise and promise of its plot (Hunnewell and Ishiguro, 2008 : n.p.) – that in finding his parents, who have supposedly been kidnapped and held for more than two decades in the Chinese sections of Shanghai, the celebrated detective Christopher Banks will be able to resolve an international crisis and prevent in turn: regional war; invasion