August 2025: Kazuo Ishiguro

This month we are exploring the works of Kazuo Ishiguro.

Born in Nagasaki, Japan on November 8, 1954, he moved to England with his family in 1960.

He won the Booker prize with The Remains of the Day in 1989 and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2017 and had been nominated for almost any award for fiction (and had won a few more awards).

What do you plan to read this month?

I loved The Remains of the Day. I plan to read Never Let Me Go.

Thanks, Annie. I have several books on my shelves, haven’t decided yet which one to read.

I have a few of his and have read Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go, but I think I will read An Artist of the Floating World.

{The Remains of the Day was also a film released in 1993 starring Emma Thompson and Anthony Hopkins. It

was directed by the well known James Ivory and it was enjoyable to watch.

Loved Never Let Me Go. Going to correct some oversights and pickup A Pale View of Hills and Remains of the Day and probably his short story collection Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall.

I just read Never Let Me Go, finished last week. But this month I’m focused on the new Booker longlist

I have finished Artist of the Floating World. This is one of Ishiguro's early novels, published in the 1980s, and set entirely in his native Japan, between 1948-50. The narrator is Masuji Ono, an artist recounting his life during those years with frequent digressions as he recalls earlier incidents in his life from before and after the war (but not during it). Ono was clearly involved in some right wing nationalist politics in the run up to the war and, by implication, during it, though he clearly regrets it after the war as he becomes more involved in family life and the marriages of his daughters Setsuko and Noriko and the life of his engaging grandson Ichiro. However, the divergences between his views and those of others are not really expressed politically, but rather obliquely and hesitantly through the medium of different styles of and approaches to art, in particular attitudes towards the "floating world" of the dreamy approach to Japanese culture and entertainment of previous centuries. I was sort of waiting for some grand revelation about Ono's past at the end, but the novel ended more quietly and optimistically as Ono sits on a bench watching young office workers of the democratic post war generation going about their business.

I have finished The buried giant, and to be honest, I didn’t enjoy this very much. Everything is frustratingly vague and elusive at the beginning: are we in England? In the Dark Ages, with Arthur long dead, the Romans gone? Everyone living has bad or no memory of the past, and yet our elderly couple decide to go and see their son living in a neighbouring village. Do they have a son? An agonisingly long time goes by before the author slowly reveals what has (may have?) happened, and I was bored to tears when we finally got there.
I think The remains of the day is going to remain my favourite, it is the most accessible of all his books I have read.

As a group member who only posts occasionally(my bad- I don't get around to reading many of the selected books) I am curious about Ishiguru. I thought that some members might have tried Klara and the Sun
I have read it twice with book groups and found it very thought provoking given the current interest in all things AI. Klara, a 'personal friend' chosen by an ailing teenage girl is perceptive and very observant, albeit from her limited viewpoint. The society that has created her and her kind are now losing their traditional skills in favour of ever more technology. It is as one might expect a very well written and thoughtful book and I reccommend it to members.

Finally read The Remains of the Day, and it took a while to grow on me but I'm glad I stuck it out. The full weight of the tragedy of a life not lived by Stevens, while still living a life according to a strict code full of integrity, is something that gathers force as it goes. It has a way of echoing hours after I've finished.

Sorry I couldm't join you all, I've read The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go twice and found they both resonated afterwards, where I would read both again.

Recently, I added The Unconsoled and Artist of the Floating World to my library.