ABSTRACT
Kazuo Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki, Japan in 1954 and came to Britain
in 1960. He was awarded the Booker Prize in 1989 for his third novel
The Remains of the Day, following A Pale View of Hills (1982) and the
Whitbread Prize-winning An Artist of the Floating World (1986). The
Remains of the Day – produced on film by Merchant-Ivory – tells the tale
of an English butler, Stevens, who, after squandering opportunities for life
and love through an excess of characteristic reserve, looks back on his
service at Darlington Hall in the 1930s. In contrast, Ishiguro’s novel The
Unconsoled (1995) is in part a study of creative drive. Its narrator, Ryder,
a fêted English Classical pianist, arrives in central Europe to give a con-
cert but stumbles across acquaintances from his Worcestershire youth, or
characters who mirror stages of his own life from boyhood to dotage.
