Kazuo Ishiguro was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2017 for his ‘novels of great emotional force, [which have] uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world’ (in the words of the Nobel Committee).
As ever, the enigmatic Swedish judges failed to elaborate in any meaningful way on this statement. How exactly does Ishiguro achieve ‘great emotional force’ in such cool, dry, almost formal prose? What or where is this ‘abyss’?
One answer might lie in the way Ishiguro typically foregrounds the influence of the more ‘minor’ emotions on our lives. Literature has always explored the big emotions: love, hate, anger, jealousy, shame, sadness, pride. But what about our more ‘petty’, everyday feelings: the small embarrassments, boredoms, inconsequential anxieties, irrational resentments, uneasinesses and mood swings that, if we are honest, fill more of our inner lives than those grand, noble, more ‘consequential’ forces?
It is these that Ishiguro shows guiding the trajectories of his quietly suffering characters, whose lives follow paths unseen to them but gradually unveiled to us as readers. Think of the butler Stevens in The Remains of the Day, shutting Miss Kenton out of their evening chats in a fit of pique over a misunderstanding, permanently losing the momentum of their growing intimacy and denying both of them a chance of happiness. Haven’t we all over-reacted and then found it impossible to reverse the consequences?
And in his more experimental novels, Ishiguro allows such feelings to direct the narrative beyond realism and into what at first seem like dreams or surreal landscapes, but which could also be interpreted as the waking inner life of his characters. Consider the long sequence towards the end of When We Were Orphans, which sees the detective Christopher Banks working his way through an increasingly surreal war-torn city landscape, apparently accompanied by his long-lost childhood friend Akira. Has this incredible coincidence really occurred? Or is the endlessly multiplying series of barriers Ishiguro’s way of representing the labyrinths of Banks’ mind, where a childhood trauma has never been resolved – to the extent that the past is more real to him than the present? Banks thinks continually of his parents (as does Ryder in The Unconsoled) in a way that is more childlike than adult: an irrational refusal to accept the possibility of their ageing and death. Does this perhaps persist in all of our minds, however much we think we’ve left the illusions of childhood behind?
The novel in which Ishiguro has most fully explored the potential of emotions to direct the narrative is The Unconsoled (which you can read with the LitSalon from this February). What we may uncover in our reading of this ‘difficult’ novel is that its impossible movements of time, place and relationship are directed not by the ‘plot’ but by the passing thoughts and feelings of its irritable, sleep-deprived, somewhat pompous musician-narrator. Yet these seemingly trivial, even tiresome interludes are gradually revealed to show something terribly sad, even tragic about this man’s fate (and indeed that of all the other men and women in the novel) in life: they are doomed (like all of us?) by their patterns of thought and emotion to remain forever unconsoled.
Lewis Ward will lead an eight-week study of The Unconsoled from 2 February – 23 March 2026.
