11/07/2025
Kazuo Ishiguro, “who, in novels of great emotional force, has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world,” turns 71 tomorrow.
So let’s talk about the 2017 Nobel Prize in Literature winner, and the holes he’s revealed in the ways we connect with the world, with others, and even with ourselves.
Ishiguro’s prose is self-contained, restrained, calm. That might sound counterintuitive given that his plots often unfold against backdrops of war, dystopia, and social collapse—events his characters can only glimpse through the narrow lens of their interior lives. Yet that very tension captures something profoundly human: our emotions in the face of tragedy are inward, private, often detached from the vastness of what surrounds us. The connection between what we live and what happens is fragile, even lost.
His narrators, relying almost entirely on memory, expose this disconnection. Their recollections—fallible, ever-shifting—create stories full of omissions and distortions. The narrative becomes false by design, exposing its own holes in the reader’s mind. It’s the reader who must pull at those threads, draw the moral conclusions, and see the truths the characters are too flawed, too self-deceived to recognize.
Despite such depth, Ishiguro’s moral and philosophical preoccupations rest within accessible plots told in clear, unpretentious language. He is not flashy, he is deliberate.
Happy Birthday, Kazuo Ishiguro!
If you haven’t read him yet, we recommend starting with "Never Let Me Go," a quietly haunting dystopian novel with shades of science fiction that explores the textures of memory and the traps we set for ourselves from within.
“I half closed my eyes and imagined this was the spot where everything I'd ever lost since my childhood had washed up, and I was now standing here in front of it, and if I waited long enough, a tiny figure would appear on the horizon across the field and gradually get larger until I'd see it was Tommy, and he'd wave, and maybe even call.”
―Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go
