Where to Start with Kazuo Ishiguro

I don’t think Ishiguro really needs an introduction, as he’s one of the most celebrated and acclaimed writers in the world. He recently won the Nobel Prize and has had a few of his very good novels made into very good movies, which rarely happens to anyone.

He’s a writer who, in my opinion, has written two masterpieces and a handful of very good novels, with one novel that is obscenely bad. Now, most writers never even write one masterpiece, so hitting two puts him well past just about everyone else, and I’m willing to forgive the shortcomings of his very bad novel.

Several years ago, I read all of his novels. The success I had with this experiment has led me to do that with many other authors over the years, to sometimes very mixed results. But Ishiguro was a treat and remains a blessedly great experience.

Now, because I’m a novel reader, I’m only going to discuss his novels. So think of this as an introduction and guide to one of the most important living English writers.

Where to Start

Most people will tell you to begin with Remains of the Day, and for good reason(!) since this is one of the best English novels of the 20th Century.

But that’s a recommendation for babies who are only going to read one of his books. We’re collectors, baby. We’re diving into all of them!

And, really, the best place to begin is where Ishiguro’s career began: his fictionalized version of Japan.

A Pale View of the Hills

For a debut, this really is quite good. Like most Ishiguro novels, it is deeply obsessed with memory and the concealing of emotions. Here, we have a character continually returning to the past, before her life was shattered. Etsuko is trying to move past the tragedies of her life, but she falls always back and back and back, receding into memory.

There are big emotions here, but they remain, perhaps, too buried beneath the surface.

In some ways, this and his second novel are practice for his first masterpiece, Remains of the Day.

An Artist of the Floating World

Ono is a once revered artist now living a life primarily cast backwards in time.

Structurally, there is a lot of overlap between Ishiguro’s first three novels. They’re obsessed with memory, with the tiny moments where a life hangs in the balance. But these moments aren’t big or adventurous—they’re the moments when you didn’t take her hand when you could have, when he wanted to know you, to walk you home, but, instead, you turned away.

As a young person, I lived a life of moments. It was a strange life. It was often a sad life. So many moments that may have changed so many things about that sad life, and yet I let them slip through my fingers. All those times I let people walk away from me, or when I walked away from them, not realizing I was saying goodbye for the last time.

These first three novels essentialize this experience with so subtle a hand that you’re not even aware of how deeply Ishiguro is working on you.

Regret. Shame. Beauty. Awe. The love we share without knowing. The love we missed, but only saw too late.

Where A Pale View of the Hills buries its emotions a bit too deep, An Artist of the Floating World is clearer and more precise. It’s a natural development as an artist, but, again, in retrospect, it all feels like practice for his third novel.

If You’re Only Going to Read One

I will do the slightly unusual thing here and list three novels, depending on your mood and temperament.

The Remains of the Day

This is the one that Ishiguro will likely be remembered for. It will find its way into curricula around the world and may define post-War 20th Century British fiction for future generations.

This was the second Ishiguro novel I read, which is what made An Artist of the Floating World and A Pale View of the Hills not work so well for me. Upon reading those, I saw the DNA of this novel. I saw how these early novels—while good in their own right—were pale visions of what Ishiguro was attempting to do. Because those early two novels do really feel like prototypes for this.

And this novel—it is devastating. It is the kind of novel that absolutely shatters you.

This is also possibly the most British novel I’ve ever read. It is deliberately awkward and charming and lightly humorous, giving a nice shape to Stevens, who is maddeningly British.

What begins almost as a joke becomes tragic.

There’s so much to say about this book, but words continually fail me.

The construction itself is strange. A butler sets out on a vacation to meet an old friend and is keeping a diary, but rather than record the vacation itself, he is collapsing backwards through time, consumed by his memories of his friend and the man they served for decades. It’s a novel about the present moment of this man but which tunnels always backwards through the decades to relive a life that at first seems A Bit of Fry & Laurie but gradually reveals itself as something quite different.

The entire novel is buried beneath a British fog, but we begin to feel the stirrings of Stevens’ maelstrom of emotions, even as he narrates them in this detached, formal way.

It’s this juxtaposition, though, that leaves you sobbing.

And, for me, it happened in a single sentence most of the way through the novel, where a man is simply standing on the wrong side of a door.

Never Let Me Go

His second masterpiece is for those who want a bit more science fiction with their devastation.

This was the first Ishiguro novel I read and I picked it up immediately after I left the movie theatre where I watched the film adaptation. Even though I had literally just lived this story for two hours, I picked it up and began reading. Tearful hours later, I had finished it.

The power of Ishiguro, here, is that the same exact story broke my heart twice in the same day for the exact same reasons. Is the adaptation worse than the book? Maybe. I don’t know. I will never know. The two are so caught up inside me that separating them, even in memory, feels impossible.

The novel builds itself slowly, presenting, at first, a story seemingly caught out of time. A rural boarding school and the lives of the children bound there feels like the start to any number of stories.

Like all school kids, they learn about art and life, but they are kept at a remove from the rest of the world. This rarely feels sinister during the novel like one might expect from what could be described as a 1984-esque vision of the future.

Rather, it all feels so common and matter of fact. And so it is that when the reason for this isolation begins to emerge that we understand the towering human shame at the center of this novel, at the center of our post-industrial lives.

Never Let Me Go is so heartbreakingly beautiful that the title alone has never fully left my mouth, my ears. I find myself whispering it at times, returning back to the boy I was just weeks before I moved to Korea, two years before I met my wife.

The sad boy who was running away from his life, who had felt the maelstrom of buried emotions reflected so clearly on screen, bound in paper, that I felt as if I could die. That I would die.

That I’d die unless you told me that you’d never let me go.

The Buried Giant

For those who want a more fantastical spin on Kazuo Ishiguro’s particular kind of tragedy.

Some would call this his third masterpiece, or would consider it his second with Never Let Me Go falling into the very good category. But, for me, it misses the masterpiece level.

It is very good, though.

Like all Ishiguro novels, it is obsessed with memory. With time. With the little moments between people. With the rising totalitarian systems filling in as backdrop to the lives of his characters, whether he’s writing about 1930s Japan, 1930s England, the near future, or even the distant British past.

I found this one a bit too self-consciously Arthurian, honestly. It’s a novel that I felt wanted to wink at me and this is truly one of the things I despise about any novel.

Don’t wink at me.

But, even so, the book has much going for it. It’s a very subtle book, but possibly his least subtle. I also think Ishiguro is doing something particularly strange, which is that he’s literally writing about the distant past. He’s not using it as a mirror or a metaphor for how our lives are now. He’s just writing about people from long ago while also subverting quest fantasy and bringing all his subtlety to work upon his characters.

It is often a beautiful novel full of awe.

Those You Can Skip

Klara and the Sun

There’s nothing wrong with this novel, really, but I do think it’s one of his weakest. In some ways, it’s a bad version of Never Let Me Go. Worse, it’s a less enjoyable or interesting version of Spike Jonze’s movie Her.

There’s a darkness lying beneath and behind this narrative. We’re given glimpses of this unsettling terror, which casts a sinister edge to much of what happens in the novel, but I fear it never manages to connect properly with the narrative.

This terror looming in the background is a constant in Ishiguro’s work. Whether it’s Imperial Japan in An Artist of the Floating World or the Nazi sympathizing upper class of Britain in The Remains of the Day or the quietly totalitarian society of Never Let Me Go or even, to me, the terrifying totalitarian vision that settles as resolution over The Buried Giant, there is always this shadow in Ishiguro’s novels.

The best of his novels find a way to marry these with the buried emotions at the center of the characters’ lives.

Klara and the Sun just never manages to really hit, I think. It’s a very good novel, but if you’ve read his two or three masterpieces, this will feel like a sad glimmer of what he’s capable of.

I mean, if Never Let Me Go or The Remains of the Day had never existed, I might think of this novel more positively. But, I mean, that’s not the world we live in.

The Unconsoled

Perhaps Ishiguro’s strangest and least characteristic novel. It’s postmodern and somewhat surreal. Dizzying digressions that fascinate, in a way, but possibly never completely cohering into something worth really dealing with.

Some consider this his finest work. I have nothing to say to these people.

I have, as it turns out, very little to say about this book at all.

The Bad One

When We Were Orphans

I literally do not know what happened here. I mean, I understand the plot and all that. What I don’t understand is how Ishiguro wrote something that misses so far and so wide at every turn.

Sort of modeled as a hardboiled mystery, even employing the most unreliable of unreliable narrators. The first half feels very familiarly Ishiguro, where a narrator is tumbling back through time. It lacks the intense emotional restraint of his better novels, but it works very well.

The problems begin when Ishiguro begins subverting his own template.

The novel quickly quagmires and becomes increasingly bizarre leading to a major sequence of surrealism that fascinates but feels almost as if it belongs to a different book.

And then, the reveals to the mysteries feels almost senseless. The answers to every question are just told to use in the end by what amounts to a man standing in front of the camera to drop information in your lap that was never available to you, that you never could have put together.

It is all so strange and so very bad.

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Hopefully this gives you some indication of how to tackle this titan of contemporary literature. I plan on doing some more of these with different authors.

Expect Mary Doria Russell, Louis Erdrich, and maybe a few more over the course of the year.