I arrive at Kazuo Ishiguro’s central London flat on an iron-cold, blustery and grey day, and am immediately absorbed into a scene of quiet comfort and calm; the lights are low, the furnishings white, the coffee – made by Ishiguro’s wife, Lorna, before she absents herself to go to the cinema – hot and delicious. Ishiguro, now 70 and in receipt of a Nobel prize in literature and a knighthood, has fetched the elegant cakes himself, and is immediately solicitous. Am I chilly? Am I hungry? Am I worried whether my device will record our conversation?
It’s an attentiveness to minute, even mundane detail that is evident in all his work. From The Unconsoled to The Remains of the Day, Ishiguro is the creator of some of the most unsettling and memorable fiction of the last 40 years. But perhaps no book of his is more loved than his sixth novel, Never Let Me Go, which has outsold all his others and been adapted not only into a major film but now a stage production.
Still finding new readers 20 years after its publication, the novel is credited by the author with starting a train of thought and thematic inquiry that shaped its successors, The Buried Giant a decade ago, and 2021’s Klara and the Sun. All three, Ishiguro believes, are centred around the most basic and unavoidable fact: we are all going to die, and yet we must live as if we aren’t. Never Let Me Go is set in a society in which children are cloned in order to provide healthy organs to extend the lives of others; after two or three of these involuntary “donations”, they will “complete”, or die. But a rumour circulates among them that in some cases – if you can prove you are truly in love, for example – you may be granted an exemption from the process; you may be allowed to live.
It is this unfounded belief that there may be a means of escape that powers the novel’s emotional heart. “Somewhere, irrationally, we can’t quite accept our fate,” Ishiguro explains, “and we long for this special dispensation. I think that it’s not just because we want to carry on living on and on and on. I think it’s because we don’t want to face the pain and sorrow and loneliness that comes with death. We fear the loss of loved ones. We fear the parting.”
The novel’s title is a song that its narrator, Kathy H, plays on repeat during her time at the clones’ boarding school, Hailsham; it is both a physical possession, on a cassette tape that is later lost and which she searches to replace, and a talisman, an emblem of a time before she knew how her life, and those of her friends Tommy and Ruth, would develop. Ishiguro invented the song, which was later recorded by his friend and collaborator, the jazz musician Stacey Kent; subsequently, he taught himself to play it – he gestures towards a baby grand piano in the corner – “but that was very much after the fact, so that if anyone asked me about it, I’m not embarrassed by being totally ignorant”.
It is a romantic song, of course, but its plaintive, beseeching title can be addressed not only to a lover, but to life itself; a plea for continuation and connection. “I think that’s an instinct that is strong in all of us. And it seems to me there’s something sad about it, but there is something quite admirable as well. There’s some kind of courage there, and an affirming of the good things about being alive, in that instinct of saying: look, it hasn’t been easy to build love and family and friendship, but I’ve done it and surely we can, all of us, just have a little bit more.”
Never Let Me Go had a long gestation period, as Ishiguro explains in his introduction to a new edition; for many years, it existed merely as thoughts and notes about a group of students whose lifespan – perhaps as the result of a nuclear accident – was markedly different from their peers. The breakthrough came via a combination of external factors and timing: societal interest in the potential benefits and dangers of cloning, at its most headline-grabbing in the shape of Dolly the sheep; and a shift in writing and publishing that made a place in so-called literary novels for the techniques and practices of speculative fiction.
“I gave myself permission to use what traditionally might have been called genre tropes,” Ishiguro explains. “And that wasn’t because I was being terribly brave or anything. I think the climate around me changed; the next generation of writers, people about 15 years younger than me, didn’t see anything weird about it, at least the people I happened to become friends with, David Mitchell or Alex Garland. They were taking their cues from all kinds of places and I really liked their work.”
Alongside the feel of dystopic science fiction that attends Never Let Me Go, Ishiguro also detects a relationship with another emerging genre. Its readership has far exceeded that of his other novels, including The Remains of the Day, and is responsible, he says, for the noticeable numbers of younger people who come to events and readings: “I think one of the reasons is that it’s like a YA book before YA was a label. It’s not meant necessarily for young people, but it’s got a lot of what have now become the tropes of a YA novel: children at school together, jealousies and little power battles. I think that’s part of the reason it keeps finding a readership; it’s a YA novel that then expands into something else.”
He is amusing and illuminating about the insulated feel to literary fiction prior to the 1990s: the novelists that featured alongside him on the celebrated inaugural list of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists in 1983 – Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie, Julian Barnes and Pat Barker among them – may have been a new generation, but they were still associated with those who had come immediately before. “I think, literally, the Sunday Times magazine that had our photograph actually said: Will these be the future William Goldings and Graham Greenes?” Ishiguro remembers.
“It was a fairly compartmentalised bit of the publishing world, and we weren’t supposed to be part of this other stuff. Although we made less money and didn’t sell any books, we were rather proud of the fact that we were proper literature people and understood literary values, and we understood the value of each other’s work. It was that kind of coterie, and so the idea of science fiction was quite frowned on.” I ask him about a counter-example, fellow Nobel laureate Doris Lessing, who moved between genres with apparent freedom. He smiles in perhaps slightly wistful agreement: “Well, I suppose she didn’t give a shit. She went with her imagination, Margaret Atwood as well, more recently. I mean, these people, they didn’t care about such things.”
But when the literary landscape started to change, Ishiguro was well placed, in terms of influence and temperament, to take advantage of the loosening of the stays. He had both read and created comics – he is ambivalent about the term “graphic novel” – since he was a child, and a lifelong passion for music and film gave him a different perspective on the idea of mixing styles and genres. His heroes were Bob Dylan, swapping folk protest music for rock’n’roll for country and western, or Miles Davis or even Picasso; and in film, he had the constantly shifting figure of Stanley Kubrick, with A Clockwork Orange, 2001: A Space Odyssey and Barry Lyndon all in his imaginative wheelhouse, to inspire him.
Aren’t you a bit like that, too, I ask him: you moved from the Japanese setting of your early novels, to the country-house environment of The Remains of the Day, to the wild, dreamlike indeterminacy of The Unconsoled, after all. “Yes,” he replies, laughing, “I do it consciously because I’m emulating Bob Dylan and Stanley Kubrick.”
Having recently seen Timothée Chalamet as Dylan in A Complete Unknown, he says he wonders how aware the singer was of the consternation he would cause when he chose to use a Stratocaster rather than an acoustic guitar; whether, even, there was a certain naivety at work. “I have no idea. I can’t get inside Dylan’s mind.” Certainly in terms of the differences between his own books, he says, “I was following something more internal. I wasn’t angling for someone to shout ‘Judas’.”
It’s hard to imagine angry crowds challenging Ishiguro, who is unfailingly polite and self-effacing, and who has written so piercingly about the human tendency to become entangled in self-deception and contradiction. And his ability to see beneath surface motivations is also applied inward. Despite enthusiastically embracing the flow of genres and styles, Ishiguro is strikingly insistent on his own limitations. As we’re talking about his preference for first-person narratives, and his commitment to creating distinctive voices who will establish the tone and content of his novels, he makes a frank declaration. “You have to understand, I have to also play to my strengths and not to my weaknesses,” he says, and then, “I’ve never been a great writer of prose.”
It’s quite difficult not to point out – and indeed, I do – that he won the Nobel prize and so, definitionally, he must be pretty great. “There are all kinds of good ways to write. One of them definitely is to write wonderful, virtuosic prose. There’s no doubt about it. Sometimes I read things and I marvel at the beauty of the actual prose.” And you don’t think that’s you? “Well, I can’t do it. It’s not out of choice.”
He is, I say, quite brilliant at creating atmosphere, and a curiously mesmerising sense of the uncanny: in an Ishiguro novel, we are always somewhere we both do and don’t recognise, witnessing events that feel utterly crucial but also hard to decode, in the company of characters who are similarly compelled and confused. It is unsurprising to discover that he is currently at work on a novel set in the compartment of a train; you can almost already imagine how claustrophobic it will be, how obscurely significant its journey, how bewildered its passengers.
And yet, he explains, it’s more lighthearted than that; something he wrote as an antidote to the pressures of travelling when he was promoting the 2022 film Living, for which he adapted Kurosawa’s film Ikiru, transplanting the action to 1950s London. Its protagonist, a bureaucrat who is terminally ill, was played by Bill Nighy, whom Ishiguro propositioned in the back of a taxi. “What happened was that Bill’s cab hadn’t turned up, so we gave him a lift to his cab, which was in the wrong place. So it was only a few minutes, but during that time, I said: ‘Bill, I know a part that will get you the best actor Oscar.’ And Lorna said: ‘Stop bothering Bill, he’s got lots of work.’”
Nighy’s interest, however, was piqued, and he did indeed get nominated for an Oscar, losing out to Brendan Fraser’s performance in The Whale. As the byzantine voting campaigns played out, Ishiguro began to get a sense that it wasn’t going to go to his man, and “I started to feel that I went and promised Bill this Oscar, and maybe he’s not going to get it. This is terrible!”
Ishiguro is joking, but also not: he’s a man of noticeable intellectual fastidiousness, and one of the things he has been thinking about recently is his responsibilities as a writer. “I’ve become quite wary of the power to provoke emotions in readers – and that is the gift, if you like, that I’ve been praised for; the Nobel citation actually says something like ‘emotionally powerful’. And most of my writing life, that’s how I justified my job. I would say that you won’t learn much about history from me; go to a historian. However, a novelist can provide the emotional dimension; we offer some sort of emotional truth that is not there in nonfiction, however scrupulously well researched and documented.”
But over the last few years, he’s become increasingly worried that stirring up strong emotional responses has a far darker dimension, as we see in the way that political movements are able to harness citizens by appealing to their instincts rather than to evidence. “In the post-truth Trump era, there’s this relentless attack on accredited news media. It’s not just Trump: it’s a general atmosphere that whatever the evidence, if you don’t like it, you can just claim some alternative emotional truth for yourself. The whole status of what might be true has got very blurred lately. And so I feel that this power to actually cause emotions in people and create apparent emotional truths, is quite an odd thing.”
That can only be intensified, he believes, by the increasing power of AI. “AI will become very good at manipulating emotions. I think we’re on the verge of that. At the moment we’re just thinking of AI crunching data or something. But very soon, AI will be able to figure out how you create certain kinds of emotions in people – anger, sadness, laughter.” AI is likely to have a significant effect on the creative arts, too, and Ishiguro has recently called for the British government to protect writers’ and artists’ work from the predations of tech corporations, describing the current era as a “fork-in-the-road moment”.
So in a post-truth society aided by AI and algorithms, is it enough for fiction to pack an emotional punch? “If I was deploying that kind of gift for the service of a politician or for a large corporation that wanted to sell pharmaceuticals, you wouldn’t necessarily think it was commendable, you’d be highly suspicious of it. But if I’m doing it in the service of telling a story, that is considered to be something really valuable,” he says. “It’s something that increasingly makes me feel uneasy, because I haven’t been praised for my incredible style, or because in my fiction I exposed great injustices in the world. I’ve usually been praised for producing stuff that makes people cry.” He laughs. “They gave me a Nobel prize for it.”
They did, and despite his concerns, the stories he tells will continue to be a source of great pleasure and importance to his readers. I ask him what his novels are to him. Are they now part of his psychology, his internal landscape? “In some ways, I feel they’re quite distant from me. The classic analogy is children: they were very close to you, and then they go their own way, but you feel bonded to them.” He considers. “They are my work, but I feel who I am is somewhere else.”
• Never Let Me Go: 20th Anniversary Edition by Kazuo Ishiguro is published by Faber on 13 March. To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
