Although, he has certainly written far more obviously Japanese works (A Pale View Of Hills, An Artist Of The Floating World), it is the distillation of Japanese qualities in the days of World War II as being indistinguishable from those of his adoptive culture that makes his Booker-winning novel, Thae Remains Of The Day, a relevant study of his Japaneseness.
Source
A vast sense of solitude suffuses the book’s pages (all written, by the author’s admission, inspired by Tom Waits’ music, in four weeks), arguably Kazuo Ishiguro’s best work (and certainly his most British) that, like his other novels, uses a first-person narrative to induce a claustrophobic character study of the protagonist via their own perspective.
Works
Novels
A Pale View of Hills (1982)[37]
An Artist of the Floating World (1986)[37]
The Remains of the Day (1989)[37]
The Unconsoled (1995)[37]
When We Were Orphans (2000)[37]
Never Let Me Go (2005)[37]
The Buried Giant (2015)[37][38]
Klara and the Sun (2021)[39]
Short-story collections
Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall (2009)[37]
Screenplays
A Profile of Arthur J. Mason (television film for Channel 4)[26] (1984)
The Gourmet (television film for Channel 4) (1987)
The Saddest Music in the World (2003)[37]
The White Countess (2005)[37]
Short fiction
"A Strange and Sometimes Sadness", "Waiting for J" and "Getting Poisoned" (in Introduction 7: Stories by New Writers, 1981)[37]
"A Family Supper" (in Firebird 2: Writing Today, 1983)[37]
"Summer After the War" (in Granta 7, 1983)[40][37]
"October 1948" (in Granta 17, 1985)[41][37]
"A Village After Dark" (in The New Yorker, May 21, 2001)[42][37]
Lyrics
"The Ice Hotel"; "I Wish I Could Go Travelling Again"; "Breakfast on the Morning Tram", and "So Romantic"; Jim Tomlinson / Kazuo Ishiguro, on Stacey Kent's 2007 Grammy-nominated album, Breakfast on the Morning Tram.[21]
"Postcard Lovers"; Tomlinson / Ishiguro, on Kent's album Dreamer in Concert (2011).
"The Summer We Crossed Europe in the Rain"; "Waiter, Oh Waiter", and "The Changing Lights"; Tomlinson / Ishiguro, on Kent's album The Changing Lights (2013).[22]
"Bullet Train"; "The Changing Lights", and "The Ice Hotel"; Tomlinson / Ishiguro, on Kent's album I Know I Dream: The Orchestral Sessions (2017).
"The Ice Hotel"; Tomlinson / Ishiguro – Quatuor Ébène, featuring Stacey Kent, on the album Brazil (2013).
