ABSTRACT
Born in Japan but brought up and educated in England, Kazuo Ishiguro has made of his fiction a mirror to reflect obliquely the characteristics of his two nationalities. His first two books, A Pale View of Hills and An Artist of the Floating World, were enigmatic, poetic studies of individual Japanese trying to come to terms with the realities of the nation's recent past. In his first novel, Ishiguro's prose already shows all the characteristics that have marked it in his later career. "The Remains of the Day", Ishiguro's Booker Prize-winning third novel, continues to be his best-known work and its fame was only enhanced by the 1993 Merchant-Ivory film version starring Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson. The reader often has the feeling that it is not only Christopher Banks's language but Ishiguro's that is inadequate to the task of describing the events of the novel.
