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 LiteratureKazuo Ishiguro on writing Remains of the Day
‘So Lorna and I came up with a plan. I would, for a four-week period, ruthlessly clear my diary and go on what we somewhat mysteriously called a “Crash”. During the Crash, I would do nothing but write from 9am to 10.30pm, Monday through Saturday. I’d get one hour off for lunch and two for dinner. I’d not see, let alone answer, any mail, and would not go near the phone. No one would come to the house. Lorna, despite her own busy schedule, would for this period do my share of the cooking and housework. In this way, so we hoped, I’d not only complete more work quantitively, but reach a mental state in which my fictional world was more real to me than the actual one.’
Read the full interview here.
Kazuo Ishiguro.
© Reuters / AlamyWhat the critics said
Peter Beech, The Guardian
‘The Remains of the Day is a book about a thwarted life. It’s about how class conditioning can turn you into your own worst enemy, making you complicit in your own subservience. It’s probably quite an English book – I can’t imagine readers in more gregarious nations will have much patience with a protagonist who takes four decades to fail to declare his feelings. “Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way,” as Pink Floyd sang. It’s a book for anyone who feels they’ve ever held themselves back when something that truly mattered was within their grasp.’
Sheela Clary, The Berkshire Edge
‘I read recently that people on their deathbeds never regret not having bought that house, or having made that killing. They regret small things. Having hurt someone’s feelings. Having failed to forgive someone. Writers help to remind us of truths like this while we’re still living. A Japanese man inhabits the spirit of an Anglo butler, and in so doing, paints me a self-portrait. One has to confess, at this moment, to being overcome by a certain sense of awe.’
Lawrence Graver, The New York Times
‘Kazuo Ishiguro’s third novel, ”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.’
Paul Melki, Medium
‘After finishing this book, I directly added it to my “Classics” shelf. Even though this book is not (yet) a classic since it is a fairly new one, I feel completely comfortable adding it to the other classics. Indeed, I am quite confident that in due time this book will be considered by Humanity as one of its literary classics.’
‘This novel has won high praise in England, and one can certainly respect the convincing voice and the carefully bleached prose; yet there is something doomed about Ishiguro’s effort to enlist sympathy for such a self-censoring stuffed shirt, and in the end he can manage only a small measure of pathos for his disappointed servant.’
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 PhotoPerhaps 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 ImagesVideo highlights
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.
