I feel very fortunate to have access to the Harry Ransom Center as a student in Austin. When I took a Shakespeare course a few years ago, one of my favorite classes was visiting the Harry Ransom Center and viewing surviving copies of the texts (which included an original First Folio!). Later taking a Victorian Literature class, I discovered I could also make requests to view archived materials in the reading room, where I had a ton of fun digging through H.G. Wells’ old notes, letters, and drafts to try to find answers for a research paper.

To my immense delight, I found out that the Harry Ransom Center holds the archives of my favorite author, Kazuo Ishiguro. Since I will be moving to another city soon, I realized I won’t get another opportunity to really dive into the archives. Also, I desperately needed a side project to distract myself from the anxiety of waiting for graduate school application results. Hence, this project: I decided to read/reread Ishiguro’s books and gain additional context about them by looking through the materials available at the Harry Ransom Center, afterward writing up my general thoughts. I probably won’t have time to look through all of the books, so I’ll start with my favorite books and work my way down the list until I move away from Austin.

Given that Ishiguro is a Nobel Prize laureate, there are countless other, more qualified people out there who have already explained why his writing is so brilliant. But to articulate it myself, Ishiguro leverages the unreliable narrator in a way unlike any other. He examines the core ideas of what it means to be human with a subtlety that eventually crescendos into some devastating emotional impact. In doing so, he forces us to glimpse the human condition through another’s eyes in a way that is brutally honest and painful.

At the center of (almost) every book, there is a hidden truth that slowly unravels and reveals itself. This truth is at first obfuscated, for if the narrator were to truly recognize it, they would have to reconcile with some aspect of their lives that is too unbearable. Of course, by the end of the book, the narrator must at least briefly grapple with this painful truth, and it is at that moment of reckoning that Ishiguro dissects the core essence of being human.

In other, less impersonal terms: Ishiguro’s books can dredge up emotions and make me think about my life in ways that few others do. In particular, The Remains of the Day is my single favorite book of all time, with Never Let Me Go falling among my other favorites. Hearing Ishiguro talk about how he conceptualized these books in his Nobel Prize speech was what made me really excited to learn more about his writing process.

Before I finish this introduction with the links to the posts for each book, I want to put as a disclaimer that I am not a literary critic, and there is no particular research question or theme I had in mind when I started looking through the archives. So these posts are not truly essays and are more of ramblings on what I found interesting. Finally, I firmly believe it is best to go into all of Ishiguro’s books without knowing anything about them at all. So do not read these posts if you have not already read the books :)

Ordered by how much I liked the book:

• The Remains of the Day
• Never Let Me Go
• A Pale View of Hills
• The Buried Giant
• An Artist of the Floating World
• The Unconsoled
• Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall
• Klara and the Sun
• When We Were Orphans