Kazuo Ishiguro’s moving portrait of the perfect English butler, his loyalty and his fading, insular world in post-war England.
At the end of his three decades of service at Darlington Hall, Stevens embarks on a country drive, during which he looks back over his career to reassure himself that he has served humanity by serving ‘a great gentleman.’ But lurking in his memory are doubts about the true nature of Lord Darlington’s ‘greatness’ - and graver doubts about his own faith in the man he has served.
Kazuo Ishiguro
About the Author
Kazuo Ishiguro’s works of fiction have earned him many honours around the world, including the Nobel Prize in Literature.The Remains of the Day is in fact a brilliant subversion of the fictional modes from which it seems at first to descend
Writing The Remains of the Day
Kazuo Ishiguro: ‘This is me in my study circa 1988, writing the book that went on to win the 1989 Booker Prize (The Remains of the Day). The places where I work today I prefer to keep private, but I can reveal they aren’t nearly as tidy as this room from back then. The kneeler chair was particularly inspiring.’
© Courtesy of Kazuo IshiguroThe Remains of the Day on screen
Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day was adapted into a film of the same name in 1993, directed by James Ivory and with a screenplay written by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala.
Anthony Hopkins took on the role of butler James Stevens, with Emma Thompson as Sarah ‘Sally’ Kenton. The film also starred Christopher Reeve and Hugh Grant.
The Hollywood Reporter’s review described Hopkins’ performance as ‘truly colossal’ and a ‘tour de force’, and said the film was ‘beautiful to look at and deeply moving in many scenes’.
Hopkins won the Best Actor award at the 1993 British Academy Film Awards for his role in The Remains of the Day.
Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson in The Remains of the Day.
© COLUMBIA PICTURES / Allstar Picture Library Ltd. / Alamy Stock PhotoVideo highlights
Perhaps I’m naive but I imagine a judge sitting down to read each book behind a veil of ignorance
Nobel Laureate Kazuo Ishiguro
In 2017, Kazuo Ishiguro was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.
His citation said he ‘in novels of great emotional force, has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world’.
In his Nobel Lecture, delivered on December 7 2017, Ishiguro spoke about the surprise he felt when he started writing a story about Japan, after not having ‘set foot in that country – not even for a holiday – since leaving it at the age of five’.
Speaking about his parents and upbringing, Ishiguro said he had ‘become thoroughly trained in the manners expected of English middle-class boys in those days’ but was ‘leading another life at home with my Japanese parents’.
The Remains of the Day, Ishiguro said in his speech, was ‘my first [novel] not to have a Japanese setting – my personal Japan having been made less fragile by the writing of my previous novels’.
‘In fact my new book, to be called The Remains of the Day, seemed English in the extreme – though not, I hoped, in the manner of many British authors of the older generation,’ he continued.
Kazuo Ishiguro delivering his Nobel Lecture.
© STINA STJERNKVIST / Contributor / AFP / GettyThe winning moment
Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day was named the winner of the Booker Prize in 1989 by judges David Lodge, Maggie Gee, Helen McNeil, David Profumo and Edmund White.
The judges for the 1989 Booker Prize had a series of ‘prolonged, intense and anxious’ meetings, said Lodge in his speech, on their way to crowning The Remains of the Day.
The book was chosen from 102 books that were submitted or called in that year.
In a short speech, Ishiguro urged the audience to think about Salman Rushdie, who in 1989 had a fatwa issued against him by the Ayatollah of Iran, following the release of The Satanic Verses.
Ishiguro said: ‘I think it will be improper of us not to at least remember him this evening and to think about, I suppose, the rather alarming significance of the plight he is in this evening.’
Kazuo Ishiguro 1989
1989 Booker Prize winner Kazuo Ishiguro with his winning book The Remains of the Day, at London’s Guildhall, 26th October, 1989
© PA Images / Alamy
1989 Booker Prize winner Kazuo Ishiguro at London’s Guildhall, 26th October, 1989
© Oxford Brookes Library
Kazuo Ishiguro, 1989.
© Rick Eglinton/Toronto Star via Getty Images
The Remains of the Day is a dream of a book: a beguiling comedy of manners that evolves almost magically into a profound and heart-rending study of personality, class and culture.
— Lawrence Graver at The New York Times, 1989
Other nominated books by Kazuo Ishiguro
Longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2021. Kazuo Ishiguro looks at our rapidly-changing world through the eyes of a unique narrator to explore a fundamental question: what does it mean to love?
Thought-provoking and unsettling by turns, Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel gradually unveils the true nature of three children’s apparently happy childhoods.
Kazuo Ishiguro’s adventurous combination of historical fiction and detective story, set largely in England and Shanghai of the 1930s.
Kazuo Ishiguro examines guilt, truth and ageing through the highly subjective reminiscences of a retired painter in post-war Japan.
