Search Results

“... The British and the Japanese may not be particularly alike, but the two races are exceedingly comparable. The British must actually believe this, for why else would they be displaying such a curious desperation to deny it? No doubt, they sense that to look at Japanese culture too closely would threaten a long-cherished complacency about their own. Hence the energy expended on sustaining an image of Japan as a place of fanatical businessmen, of hara-kiri and sci-fi gadgetry ...”

“... In this brilliant new book Kazuo Ishiguro maintains his preference for first-person narrative. The voice of both the first and last of this suite of five stories is that of a guitarist who plays in a café orchestra in the Piazza San Marco in Venice. He knows a lot about guitars and enough about the class of music appropriate to the setting ...”

“... There’s a story that when Kazuo Ishiguro was studying creative writing at the University of East Anglia his tutor took him to one side. Ishiguro was at the time writing stories like the one contained in Firebird 2 – a punchy little McEwanesque conte in which the narrator’s mother dies from eating a poisoned fish ...”

“... It’s typical​ of Kazuo Ishiguro’s low-key, misdirecting approach to the business of fiction that, although the book contains such creatures as dragons and pixies, the buried giant of his new novel’s title should be an analogy explained only a few pages before the narrative ends. The revelation comes as a micro-shock or nano-coup, a slow burn converging on a fizzle ...”

“... It’s a version of the Kurosawa movie (ikiru means ‘to live’), with a screenplay by Kazuo Ishiguro, and it’s set in the 1950s, which is when the original film was made. But the location is England, where the remains of the day are tinged with a nostalgia that may or may not be ironic. Buses revolve around Piccadilly Circus, we glimpse the ...”

“... but it’s one that Christopher Banks, the young English detective who is the starchy narrator of Kazuo Ishiguro’s new novel, can’t see behind. He remembers leaving Shanghai as a boy with the discomfiting feeling that the city might never reveal the mystery of his mother and father’s strange disappearance: ‘my parents were still there, somewhere ...”

“... for a verbal error With all the instruments for causing pain. Stevens, the elderly butler in Kazuo Ishiguro’s third novel, The Remains of the Day, would never be so vulgar as to price anyone’s shoes, but much of his earlier life was discreetly spent in the presence of substantial men exchanging views, at a time of momentous events between the ...”

“... The shame of being on the wrong side of history: this is what Kazuo Ishiguro’s first three novels have been about. It is not a condition that has been written about a great deal in English, because the English language, ever since ‘literature’ was created and taught, has been on the winning side; and the once-colonised, who have been writing in English for about the past forty years, have always had the moral rightness of their exploitedness, and the riches of their indigenous cultures, to fall back on ...”

“... All of Kazuo Ishiguro’s six novels are first-person narratives. For the most part the voices of these narrators are quiet, civilised, rather formal. This is so whether the speaker is the obsessive butler of the most famous of the books, The Remains of the Day (1989); or one of the somewhat demented heroes of The Unconsoled (1995) or When We Were Orphans (2000); or the Japanese, guilty or exiled, of the first two books, A Pale View of Hills (1982) and An Artist of the Floating World (1986 ...”

“... and one that doesn’t look to be coming under restraint any time soon. In Klara and the Sun, Kazuo Ishiguro, looking to the (near) future, has a group of genetically enhanced boys set about ragging Klara, an Artificial Friend, to see if her internal circuitry is primed so that she’ll land on her feet if she’s tossed about upside down. Boys are ...”

“... wanted a friend.’Don Freeman’s children’s story, published in 1968, came to mind as I read Kazuo Ishiguro’s new novel (this isn’t supposed to sound disparaging: Corduroy is a masterpiece). Klara is a robot who lives in the ‘AF department’ of a medium-sized store. We aren’t told what AF stands for, but it seems, by analogy with AI, to be ...”

“... powerful recent or contemporary novelists. In its shadowed and unreliable depths Toni Morrison, Kazuo Ishiguro, Leonardo Sciascia, Alejo Carpentier have searched out their material, reflections of ourselves; and from A State of Independence his second novel (1986), to The Nature of Blood, Caryl Phillips, too, has been scrying for glimpses of troubled ...”

“... to forget the Imperial past and to dedicate the remainder of their lives to resurgent capitalism. Ishiguro’s narrator, Masuji Ono, has lost his wife and son but lives on with two daughters, one of whom is married. Were it not for his anxieties over his second daughter’s marriage negotiations, Ono could be left to subside into the indolence of old age. As ...”

“... recently published by the British Library.* I share the phrase with Timothy Mo, Salman Rushdie, Kazuo Ishiguro and Craig ‘Hurricane’ Raine; also with William Boyd, who, unlike the rest of us, adds of his manucripts that he ‘would be “very reluctant” to allow any access to them’. (This sounds pretty suspicious – what’s Boyd trying to ...”

“... everything. This is a man who has written just as convincingly on Don DeLillo as on John Donne, on Kazuo Ishiguro as on Joachim of Flora. But then this is one way of thinking of his special gifts as a critic. Nothing is a ‘field’ for him, there are no fences or trees in the way. The main army can camp anywhere; the avant-garde can camp anywhere ...”