In Defence of Nobel Laureate Ishiguro With the dust settling, senior writer Michael Mullooly gives his take on Kazuo Ishiguro’s Nobel Prize win.

Last year, five members of the Swedish Academy named Bob Dylan the winner of the 2016 Nobel Prize for Literature, a decision so surprising that even he didn’t show up for his own prize reception. Slightly overshadowed by Brexit and the election of Donald Trump, it was nonetheless yet another jarring upset in a year determined to be as weird and incongruous as possible. Coming off the back of such a year, it was going to be difficult for the Swedish Academy to cause a repeat uproar, and yet while just about everybody will agree that Kazuo Ishiguro is a far better choice for Laureate than Dylan, the selection of the bestselling British author has not been without its own controversies and detractors.

Born in post-nuclear Nagasaki in 1954 to parents who had survived the atomic bomb, Ishiguro’s family relocated to Surrey when he was a young child, a move which his parents held was merely temporary for over a decade before it became apparent that they were there to stay. There, he went to school — the only non-white pupil in his class — before going on to study English and Philosophy at the University of Kent. Ishiguro completed his education with a Masters in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia. His thesis there eventually became his first published novel, A Pale View of the Hills, which fixated on memory, the passing of time, regret, and beauty — motifs that would be repeated time and again in his work. A year after its publication, Ishiguro formally became a British citizen, and rapidly established himself as a literary giant. For many, works such as The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go stand among the greatest English novels of all time. They are powerful books that capture a surface world and the time-matured depth below it with an elegance and precise level of ambiguity as haunting and painful as any form of human expression.

A couple of days after the announcement, John Boyne, another graduate of the UEA’s Masters course, wrote an article for the Irish Times about Ishiguro winning the Nobel Prize, entitled “Kazuo Ishiguro deserves Nobel prize but others deserve it more.” In it, Boyne writes that while he believes Ishiguro to be a supremely talented writer, there are others “with a far broader oeuvre, many of whom have embraced more diverse themes and offered us a more substantial library over their careers.” He cites Margaret Atwood and John Banville as worthier Laureate choices, writing of Atwood, “It’s hard to think of someone who has combined the political with the poetic over so many decades quite so well.” Of Banville, Boyne very graciously puts “national loyalty” aside before declaring him the best contemporary writer active today, and directly compares Banville and Ishiguro’s handling of similar themes to the denigration of the latter. Banville’s portrayal of memory and regret in protagonists has, according to Boyne, “more depth and is infinitely more complex than Ishiguro’s.”

After a quick and weirdly out-of-place bashing of Murakami, who, after all, “is really too populist a writer to earn Nobel status,” Boyne concludes the article with the interesting sentiment that “the winner of the Nobel Prize should not be slighted in comparison to those who might have won it,” a sentence contradicting his entire article, including its title.

Boyne is not alone in feeling that there were others worthier of the Nobel prize than Ishiguro this year; however, this sentiment often speaks more to a sense of literary elitism surrounding the Nobel prize than it does any concrete reasoning. This is why many have explained Murakami’s failure to secure the prize by pointing to his popularity and accessibility, despite the Swedish Academy never giving reasons why writers are not picked. Furthermore, the comparison between Ishiguro, Atwood and Banville is unhelpful. Would Atwood or Banville have been worthy Nobel winners? Yes, I believe so. Does that fact have anything to do with Ishiguro winning? Not that I can see.

At their best, his novels assume a parabolic nature, with Ishiguro’s prodigal children weaving through their distorted pasts in an attempt to decipher the unfailingly complicated present.

Ishiguro writes with a unique perspective that he credits to his upbringing in a Japanese household in Surrey by parents convinced they were always going to go back home. Those close to him speak of his deeply held and closely guarded set of morals and values. His novels are often situated in pre- and post-war settings, his characters often displaced and isolated figures. He’s fascinated with testing his characters and their beliefs, with examining the effect time and circumstance has on them. At their best, his novels assume a parabolic nature, with Ishiguro’s prodigal children weaving through their distorted pasts in an attempt to decipher the unfailingly complicated present, trying always desperately to hold onto the values that make them who they are. Ishiguro writes truly human characters, never shying away from the nebulous complexity such a feat requires. Therefore, it is truly fitting that he has been awarded a prize intended to honour those who “confer the greatest benefit on mankind,” which is about as populist as a group of people can get.

The Swedish Academy declared Ishiguro a writer “who, in novels of great emotional force, has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world.” Upon hearing the news that he had won the Nobel Prize, Ishiguro had thought there had perhaps been a mistake. A writer of immense power and delicacy, Ishiguro is as humble and as worthy a winner as one could imagine.

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