Ishiguro Issue

Kazuo Ishiguro moved to England (from Nagasaki) when he was five, but ever since the publication of A Pale View of the Hills in 1982, this thirty-five-year-old writer has tended to be categorized—if not dismissed— as a phenomenon more Japanese than British. It's partly understandable: both Pale View and Ishiguro's second novel, An Artist of the Floating World, are set in Japan; both share a beguiling, presumably Oriental bent for the elliptical. But now, with The Remains of the Day—received enthusiastically in Britain (where it is a strong contender for the Booker Prize) and published here by Knopf this month—Ishiguro has done his best to clear up the confusion. The book is set entirely in England, and its narrator is that most English of creatures, a butler. If Ishiguro's prose still seems markedly muted compared with that of his near peers (careening Martin Amis, chuckling Julian Barnes), why, just think of it as oldfashioned reserve. And there's nothing more English than that.

J.R.