Largely, though, I continue to wonder what all the fuss is about. I feel I should be expressing more solidarity with those who are perturbed by Ishiguro’s seeming attempts to distance himself from genre. I read widely in genre, I write in genre, I attend genre conventions, I mingle with genre people. There are other genres, of course, but SF and F seems to have claimed it) there are some hackles raised.įirst off, let me nail my colours firmly to the mast.

So it’s understandable that, when an author appropriates the conventions of genre (the science fiction and fantasy community regularly refers to itself as “genre”. I mention, only because there might be one or two people out there who aren’t aware of it, Margaret Atwood’s now legendary distinction between what she wrote (around the time The Blind Assassin won the Arthur C Clarke award) and what she thought of as science fiction, which she dismissed as “talking squids in outer space”. It is an argument that resurfaces every time an author with “literary” chops dips a toe into the waters of SFF. She adds: “Familiar folktale and legendary ‘surface elements’ in Mr Ishiguro’s novel are too obvious to blink away, but since he is a very famous novelist, I am sure reviewers who share his prejudice will never suggest that he has polluted his authorial gravitas with the childish whims of fantasy.” Why not? It appears that the author takes the word for an insult.” Though some critics have questioned the book’s structural integrity, there’s no denying the power of watching Ishiguro’s grand themes flow with messy profundity into the lives of these archetypal characters.The fantasy author Ursula K Le Guin quickly picked up on Ishiguro’s words in a piece written for the Book View Cafe: “Well, yes, they probably will. And as their journey unfolds, it becomes apparent that the Nagasaki-born, Japanese-British author Ishiguro is wrestling with the imperialist legacies of his native and adopted nations, as well as with the ambiguous ethics of preserving traumatic historical memories. On a path littered with dragons, monks, a certain Sir Gawain and an inscrutable Saxon warrior, the couple find their commitment tested.

Its heroes, elderly Britons Axl and his beloved wife Beatrice, suddenly recall that they once had a son, and embark on a quest to find him. Ishiguro’s 2015 foray into fantasy, The Buried Giant, takes place in a mythical post-Arthurian England afflicted by a mysterious mist that clouds inhabitants’ long-term memories.

This approach isn’t a gimmick so much as a way of accessing the perfect metaphor to communicate a big, unruly idea without sacrificing emotional weight. Nobel laureate Kazuo Ishiguro writes philosophical novels clothed in the conventions of popular genres, from historical fiction in The Remains of the Day to dystopian sci-fi in Never Let Me Go.

The buried giant kazuo