His first two novels - A Pale View of Hills (1981) and An Artist of the Floating World (1985) - are set in the author's native Japan, and deal with questions of blame, shame and recrimination in the wake of the dropping of the nuclear bomb and the subsequent Japanese surrender.
Whilst these novels established Ishiguro as an exciting and innovative new voice on the literary scene, it was the publication of the Booker-winning The Remains of the Day (1989) which catapulted him to widespread popular recognition. Ishiguro employs his trademark unreliable narrator to explore many of the same themes of identity and historical agency tackled in his earlier novels, but relocates these concerns to Britain, mapping the transition experienced in that country between the 1930s and 1950s through the eyes of that most staple of characters, the English butler.
Never one to rest on his laurels, Ishiguro's next novel, The Unconsoled (1995), eschews the surface realism which characterises his first three novels in favour of a surreal, dreamlike style. Despite the surrealism, The Unconsoled shares many of the same concerns as the novels which precede it. Narrated by Ryder, a famous musician adrift in an unnamed city and preparing for a performance he cannot recall agreeing to give, The Unconsoled tackles questions of memory, nostalgia and recrimination from the perspective of yet another highly unreliable narrator.
Ishiguro's experimentation with surrealism was not universally appreciated, and it was with some relief that When We Were Orphans (2000) was greeted (not entirely accurately) as a return to more familiar territory. Narrated by the celebrated detective Christopher Banks, Orphans follows the narrator's journey back to his childhood home of Shanghai in search of his parents, who went missing some twenty years earlier. Combining the surface realism of his earlier novels with the surrealism of The Unconsoled, Orphans sees Ishiguro turn yet again to the same questions of identity memory, nostalgia and historical agency which characterise his earlier work.
Ishiguro's transition from unknown Japanese author to one of the most important and innovative of contemporary British writers was confirmed by the publication of his most recent novel, Never Let Me Go (2005), which sees him turn his experimental eye to the science-fiction genre. Despite the dystopian setting, the novel's concerns are familiar ones - memory, agency, and identity, all explored against the background of that most contemporary of issues, scientific cloning. Although told from the perspective of the 1990s, much of the novel takes place in a seemingly typical English boarding school in the 1970s. It is, indeed, a long way from Nagasaki. Long may the journey continue.
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