The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro

His other works include Klara and the Sun, The Buried Giant, A Pale View of the Hills, and An Artist of the Floating World. He is best known for his novels The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go. The paper concludes that Ishiguro’s ‘fictional’ metamorphosis serves to subvert imperial landscapes, and convert them into mythical metaphors to approach universal themes and worlds, while simultaneously finding his own voice and territory. Two of Ishiguro’s novels have been previously adapted: The Remains of the Day into a heartbreaking and Oscar-nominated 1993 film starring Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson, and Never Let Me Go. Kazuo Ishiguro is a British author who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2017. The main contribution of this study lies in extending arguments on the postcolonial engagement of Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, by focusing on his demythologization of both Eastern and Western Empires. It offers ways to question the ‘national greatness’ of both empires as represented through Japanese and British voices while narrating their personal histories and traumas. The novel follows the story of a butler named Stevens, who takes a road.

Drawing on the postcolonial theoretical framework, the study examines Ishiguro’s literary production grapples with universal themes. The Remains of the Day is a 1989 novel by Japanese-born British writer Kazuo Ishiguro. With a particular focus on Ishiguro’s third novel, The Remains of the Day (1989), the paper highlights the shift of the scene from Japan in his first two novels, A Pale View of Hills and An Artist of the Floating World to a purely English setting in The Remains of the Day. This paper aims to explore how Kazuo Ishiguro has found a position of enunciation away from the conflicting sentiments of otherness between the deeply rooted traditions of both Japan and England.

The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro