Kazuo Ishiguro, the Nobel laureate of buried memories who is back in cinemas and turning to spy comedy

Kazuo Ishiguro

Photo: Martin Kraft / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	November 8, 1954 Nagasaki, Japan
Occupation	Novelist
Awards	Nobel Prize in Literature · Booker Prize · Whitbread Book of the Year · Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize · Bodley Medal

Kazuo Ishiguro spent the London Film Festival premiere of Klara and the Sun talking about a different film. On the red carpet, with Taika Waititi’s adaptation of his most recent novel about to screen, he told Deadline that he had written an original script for Tim Burton, an idea the two men hatched “privately, without any producers” while he was visiting Burton’s “beautifully crazy house”.

It also capped a crowded autumn for a writer who publishes a novel roughly once every half-decade. Waititi’s film, with Jenna Ortega as the solar-powered Artificial Friend and Amy Adams as the mother who brings her home, reaches American and British cinemas this week after a long spell on the shelf, and the first reviews out of London have been cool. Faber and Knopf, meanwhile, are preparing Miss Lambert Steps Aboard Danger, his first new novel since Klara and the Sun and, by early accounts, the most unexpected thing he has written.

Born in Nagasaki on 8 November 1954, Ishiguro was five when his family moved to Guildford, Surrey, where his father, the oceanographer Shizuo Ishiguro, had a post at the National Institute of Oceanography. He did not set foot in Japan again until 1989, and by then the country of his first two books had been assembled almost entirely from his parents’ stories and his own imagination. “I grew up with a very strong image in my head of this other country,” he once told Kenzaburō Ōe, describing what he called “an imaginary Japan”.

He studied English and philosophy at the University of Kent, worked with homeless people in west London, where he met his wife, the social worker Lorna MacDougall, and in 1980 completed the creative writing MA at the University of East Anglia under Malcolm Bradbury and Angela Carter. His thesis became A Pale View of Hills (1982), in which a Japanese widow in England, shaken by her elder daughter’s suicide, keeps returning to a post-war Nagasaki summer she cannot narrate honestly. An Artist of the Floating World (1986) followed: an ageing painter in occupied Japan, circling his own part in the propaganda of the war years. It won the Whitbread Book of the Year.

Then he left Japan behind on the page. The Remains of the Day (1989) handed its voice to Stevens, an English butler motoring west in 1956 and reconstructing, with immaculate evasions, his years of service to a lord who sympathised with the Nazis and his failure to answer the feelings of the housekeeper, Miss Kenton. It won the Booker Prize and in 1993 became the James Ivory film with Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson. Salman Rushdie later wrote that with it Ishiguro showed his sensibility “was not rooted in any one place, but capable of travel and metamorphosis”.

That book fixed the method he has refined ever since. His novels are told in the first person by narrators who arrange their memories so carefully that the worst thing always sits just out of frame, and the reader learns to listen for what is left unsaid. When the Swedish Academy awarded him the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2017, it praised novels “of great emotional force” that have “uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world”. A knighthood followed in 2018, and Companion of Honour in 2024.

His biggest risks came mid-career. The Unconsoled (1995), a dreamlike, sprawling account of a famous pianist adrift in an unnamed Central European city, divided critics more sharply than anything else he has published. When We Were Orphans (2000) bent the detective novel through 1930s Shanghai. Never Let Me Go (2005), narrated by Kathy H., a former pupil of an English boarding school, lets readers slowly work out what the students were raised for, and then refuses them the rebellion they want. Time named it the best novel of its year, and Mark Romanek filmed it in 2010 with Carey Mulligan, Andrew Garfield and Keira Knightley.

Nocturnes (2009), five stories of music and nightfall, grew out of a second career. Ishiguro writes lyrics for the jazz singer Stacey Kent with her husband, the saxophonist Jim Tomlinson, including the title song of her Grammy-nominated album Breakfast on the Morning Tram. The Buried Giant (2015), his one novel not told in the first person, sends an elderly couple across post-Arthurian Britain through a mist that wipes out memory, and asks whether peoples, like marriages, last only by forgetting.

Klara and the Sun (2021), longlisted for the Booker, turned that method on the near future: a robot companion bought for a sick girl, watching the street from a shop window and then a family from inside its home, misreading almost everything with complete sincerity. A year later he adapted Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru into Living for Bill Nighy, which earned him an Academy Award nomination for the screenplay. Kei Ishikawa’s film of A Pale View of Hills, starring Suzu Hirose, premiered in Un Certain Regard at Cannes in 2025.

The new book is the real surprise. Set in London in 1938, Miss Lambert Steps Aboard Danger follows Richard Hadley, a music-hall enthusiast who meets the title character after a matinee, bonds with her over singing, and trails her to a secretive conference on a Devon estate and onto a Scotland-bound train. Knopf’s Jordan Pavlin calls it part spy fiction and part Wodehousean comedy of manners. The year sits close to Stevens and his pre-war Darlington Hall; the tone, by all accounts, does not. It is due in March 2027.

Ishiguro lives in Golders Green, north London, with MacDougall; their daughter, Naomi Ishiguro, is also a writer. He counts Dostoyevsky, Proust and Charlotte Brontë among the writers who formed him. Weeks short of his seventy-second birthday, with one adaptation in cinemas, an original screenplay in Burton’s hands and a comic spy novel on the way, he is busier than at any time since the Nobel, and still writing about people who notice too late what they gave away.

Tags: Tim Burton, novelists, writers, Taika Waititi, Klara and the Sun, Kazuo Ishiguro