Following the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941, Japan’s territorial possession expanded to encompass Hong Kong, the Phillipines, and other parts of Asia. In 1931, Japan invaded Manchuria in a quest for greater resources. Nationalist sentiment began to rise, with many in Japan advocating for a Japanese empire in Asia that would rival the empires of Europe. In the 1920s, the economy saw a crash, and poverty became a thorny problem, especially among peasants and industrial workers. In the first two decades of the century, the economy boomed as a result of modernization, industrialization, and the 1868 opening of the country’s economy to international trade. The committee justified the decision to award the prize to Ishiguro by saying: “in novels of great emotional force, has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world.” Ishiguro is married and has one daughter.Īlthough the destruction and defeat of Japan during World War II give the novel its immediate context, the novel is more broadly concerned with transformations in Japanese society occurring throughout the first fifty years of the twentieth century. In 2017, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. He has been nominated for Great Britain’s most prestigious literary prize, the Booker, four times, and won it in 1989 for The Remains of the Day. Ishigura enjoyed critical acclaim starting early in his career, and won the Whitbread award for his second novel, An Artist of the Floating World. Ishiguro received a masters at the University of East Anglia, where Angela Carter became an early mentor and he studied with Malcolm Bradbury. As a teen, he hoped to become a rock musician. Ishiguro was educated at a boys school in Surrey, and attended the University of Kent. Ishiguro did not visit Japan again until he was in his thirties.

He moved with his parents to Guildford in Southern England in 1960 when his father was recruited to work as a marine biologist for the British National Institute of Oceanography. Kazuo Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki, Japan in 1954.

An artist of the floating