Comprehensive information and links about Kazuo Ishiguro

Kazuo Ishiguro , born November 8, 1954Kazuo Ishiguro is a British author of Japanese origin. He was born in Nagasaki, Japan, and his family moved to England in 1960, when he was aged five. Ishiguro obtained his Bachelor's degree from University of Kent in 1978 and his Masters from the University of East Anglia in 1980. He now lives in London.

He won the Whitbread Prize in 1986 for his second novel See rationale on the talk page, or replace this tag with a more specific message. Editing help is available.

The literary characteristics of Ishiguro's work are unique in the accepted canon of English literature and technique. This is due to the mixed chronology of the plot, to the extreme subjectivity of the narration, and to the delicate and historically accurate deions that accompany the narration.

Most of Kazuo Ishiguro's novels are semi-historical works. There are, however, two exceptions: his latest novel, takes place within a large country home of an aristocratic lord, during the period immediately after the First World War and to the final period before the outbreak of the Second. The quality of the research is superlative; there is not only an accurate context, but the psychological atmosphere is represented with skill rarely approached in historical fiction.

is set in the author's home town Nagasaki, Japan, during the post-war period of reconstruction following the detonation of the atomic bomb. The narrator is Ono, who is forced to come to terms with his own part in the Second World War. He finds himself partially blamed by the new generation for the misguided Japanese foreign policy, and is forced to confront the modernisation represented by his grandson, Ichiro.

The novels are written in the first person and the narrator often exhibits human failings. Ishiguro's technique is to reveal such character flaws implicitly by behaviour, or typically in a character's lack of action. In , the butler Stevens is emotionally limited and thus struggles to reconcile himself between the dignity of duty and his personal feelings. In the process of writing, Ishiguro makes full use of historical context, usually semi-fictionally.

His novels end with a paradox. The issues his characters confront are buried in the past, and the problems those issues have caused cannot be resolved. Thus Ishiguro ends many of his novels with an atmosphere of depressing resignation, whereby the characters accept what has happened, and who they have become, and find in that realisation a relief from mental anguish.