Nobel literature winner Kazuo Ishiguro: An artist of the disconnected world

A living example that literary art has no national landscapes or limitations, Japanese-born British writer Kazuo Ishiguro, the 2017 Nobel Literature laureate, is possibly its first recipient whose range of evocative works is not in his mother tongue and deals with situations and settings from far beyond his old and new homelands and times.

Spanning reminiscences of high life in the turbulent 1930s through the eyes of an English country house butler in the acclaimed Booker-winning "The Remains of the Day" (1989), the question of personal guilt a painter-turned-propagandist confronts in post-war Japan in "Artist of the Floating World" (1986), or other works set in Europe, colonised China, Arthurian Britain or in a dystopian future, Ishiguro's small corpus is distinguished by its variety as well as some customary motifs and style.

The narration in all but one of his seven books is in first person, and the works usually deal with the past of the protagonists. As he noted in an interview, he was more "interested in memory because it's a filter through which we see our lives, and because it's foggy and obscure, the opportunities for self-deception are there. In the end, as a writer, I'm more interested in what people tell themselves happened rather than what actually happened".
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