Kazuo Ishiguro

Life and works

Kazuo Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki, Japan, in 1954, and at the age of six, came to England, where he received his education. He attended the University of Kent and the University of East Anglia. He now lives and works in London.

His first novel, A Pale View of Hills, appeared in 1982 and it consists of the memories of Etsuko, a Japanese widow who often recalls Nagasaki during the American occupation after the war, when the older generation of nationalists refused to accept the rejection of unthinking obedience and patriotism by the young.

An Artist of the Floating World was published in 1986 and won the Whitbread Prize. The title of the novel refers to a Japanese master painter, of whom the narrator was a disciple, who captured in his work the fleeting changing pleasures of life. It is classically Japanese in its use of indirection and analogy. Since the narrator’s indirect ways of telling can be variously interpreted, the effect is an example of the contradiction produced by the unreliable narrators of many modern novels.

In 1989 Ishiguro was awarded the Booker Prize for his third novel, The Remains of the Day, which was made into a successful film by director James Ivory in 1993. He published The Unconsoled in 1995, When We Were Orphans in 2000, Never Let me Go in 2005, The Buried Giant in 2015. As a whole, Ishiguro’s works reflect his talent for elegant understatement, economy and selection of detail, just as the choice of the subjects shows his concern with social and historical change and the need to survive. In 2017, Kazuo Ishiguro was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Never Let Me Go

Never Let Me Go is the story of Kathy, a young woman of 31, and her best friends, Tommy and Ruth. Kathy remembers her childhood and adolescence at Hailsham School, an exclusive and indefinably creepy but otherwise ordinary English boarding school.

Kathy never mentions her parents because she and her classmates are clones that have been raised in schools and institutions across Great Britain for the purpose of giving body parts, ‘donations’, to sick normal human beings.

The novel is divided into three parts, dealing with the way the children gain awareness of themselves and of the world.

Part 1 is set at Hailsham, where the children are brought up and educated. They are encouraged by their teachers to produce various works of art and to keep extremely healthy, for example smoking is regarded as a crime for the damage it causes to the body. Kathy takes care of the others, while Tommy finds it difficult to relate to others and Ruth is extrovert and strong-minded.

In Part 2, the characters are grown-ups and move to the ‘Cottages’, where they come in contact with the external world. Ruth and Tommy fall in love.

Part 3 describes Tommy and Ruth becoming ‘donors’ whereas Kathy is a ‘carer’, who helps donors to adapt to the limits of their condition until death. When Ruth dies, Kathy takes care of Tommy and together they decide to find out the reason of their existence. They learn that Hailsham represents an experiment to improve the conditions for clones and perhaps change the attitudes of society, which tends to view them merely as non-human sources of organs. The novel ends, after the death of Tommy, and the emphasis on Kathy’s resignation and acceptance of her fate as a donor and her eventual death.

The novel in detail

The novel is narrated by Kathy in first person and has a mood of melancholy. The characters tend to be flat because they are clones: when they come to a consciousness of their identity, they do not rage against their condition as the Monster does in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (4.10 in your textbook), but question it gently. The climax of the novel is when Kathy and Tommy find the courage to confront their guardians (Direction 7) and submit proof that even as clones they too have souls.

Never Let Me Go is no more Ishiguro’s attempt to write an anti-cloning polemic, than Frankenstein was. In fact, like Frankenstein, the book uses the fantasy of artificially constructed beings to explore big metaphysical mysteries: life, death, and the measured benevolence of an all-powerful creator.

In 2010 this novel was turned into a film starring Keira Knightley as Ruth, Carey Mulligan as Kathy and Andrew Garfield as Tommy.