There is a moment in Remains of the Day when Mr Stevens gazes at a particularly fetching bit of English scenery and comments: “I would say that it is the very lack of obvious drama or spectacle that sets the beauty of our land apart. What is pertinent is the calmness of that beauty, its sense of restraint.” Three decades after the book bagged the Booker for 1989, these lines ring true for two reasons. First, for its authenticity as the voice of an ageing gentle and genteel butler in post-War England, and second, as a succinct description of Kazuo Ishiguro’s spare, understated style.

Even within Japan, there was not universal joy at the announcement of the 63-year-old as the winner of the 2017 Literary Nobel. After all, he is more British than Japanese, writing in English. Their favourite writer, Haruki Murakami, 68, had once again been overlooked, and the fact that the winner was of Japanese origin gave Murakami fans scant consolation.

WHAT SETS ISHIGURO APART FROM MURAKAMI

The story was quite similar across the world, too, thanks to Murakami’s incredible popularity even in translation. Ishiguro was seen as the rank outsider who robbed the rightful winner of the silverware. However, on closer consideration, there is no denying Ishiguro’s incredible transition in the last three decades. It’s a story of first engaging with one’s roots and then plunging into one’s present reality. By feting this transition, the committee might be making a point about how one can be both proud of one’s past and still integrate into one’s present reality. The co-existence of identities that Ishiguro’s reality and his novels represent tell a powerful story that might be one of the reasons why he won this particular year.
It is interesting that Ishiguro’s debut novel was in many ways like Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies — the stuff diaspora writing is made up of. A Pale View of Hills was about Niki, a young Briton, and her Japanese mother. The latter is coming to terms with the death of her elder daughter, who was born in Japan and moved with her mother to England.
It was a quiet debut and followed the themes of alienation, integration and identity. Another novel (An Artist of the Floating World) about the British-Japanese experience followed.

What happened next is what made Ishiguro the writer we know. He wrote an ‘upstairs-downstairs’ novel that brought alive the house of an aristocrat as it must have been between the great wars. The novel is English with a vengeance with the world of butlers, fine manners and gleaming silverware, proving that Ishiguro could write a novel that did not have any trace of his Japanese roots. It was as English a novel as there was and equally importantly, it was one of the most elegantly mounted love stories of its time. Remains of the Day is narrated in the voice of Stevens, a middle-aged butler who is grappling with the changes in his life caused by upheavals in a post-War England. His reminiscences of his days as a butler who was privy to significant negotiations between the wars and his relationship with the housekeeper, Miss Kenton, don’t add up to much in terms of action and drama. However, its “sense of restraint” as well as the way he discusses the nature of dignity and a life well spent makes this a novel that chronicles England in the 1920s and 1930s in a way few English novels have.

Ishiguro did not look back at his Japanese roots ever since and his novels have been decidedly British or at best identity agnostic. Which is what makes him different from Murakami for most readers.

Two years before Ishiguro won the Booker Prize for his delicate and understated Remains of the Day, Japan had found its own literary superstar in Murakami. The latter’s Norwegian Wood was decidedly Japanese not just in language, but in its setting and themes around the restlessness of youth, the conflicting worlds of student unrest and the inner quest for peace. Deeply troubled characters, frequent suicides and an exasperatingly indecisive hero, Watanabe, makes it a riveting read.

WHAT MAKES A WRITER NOBEL-WORTHY

However, if Ishiguro’s writing career in the last three decades has been quite a consistent one with some peaks but very few unreadable troughs, Murakami has recently been a bit off-colour. The fire of Norwegian Wood and the complex if puzzling South of the Border and West of the Sun, the magic of Sputnik Sweetheart and Kafka On The Shore are missing from recent offerings like 1Q84. Murakami is unquestionably the superstar of his times, but has been somewhat off-colour in his recent offerings — even his staunch supporters would have to concede that. That does not mean that Murakami’s claims can be trifled with. He has produced a voice and style that has resonated with too many readers across too many continents and, eventually, he will make that speech in Stockholm. For the moment Murakami’s cult has to give way to the cultivated, crafted style of his contemporary.

In the millennium, Ishiguro has penned what he considers his best novel, Never Let Me Go. A story that makes dystopia a state of normalcy and yet imbues it with a tragic inevitability, it is a triumph in style and storytelling. The story is actually explained in the first two paragraphs but understood fully only after the last page is read. Significantly, both Remains... and Never Let Me Go were transformed into big-ticket Hollywood feature films, adding to their popularity.
What makes a writer Nobel-worthy is hard to tell as the last two writers have very little in common. However, Ishiguro’s win will give the wordsmiths, the disciplined writers and the consistently high-performing novelists hope vis-a-vis the stunning brilliance of those who dabble with magic realism, high drama and even a heightened sense of identity. Ishiguro is the chameleon who has merged so marvellously with his reality that Japan barely claimed him as their own in the aftermath of his triumph. He is clearly an English writer who is a Briton in their eyes.

Essentially, Japan felt what India did when Sir V.S. Naipaul won in 2001. Celebrating the win would have been forcing one’s claim on the Nobel laureate. The Japanese prefer to wait another year, for their very own Murakami. And many others across the world keep that vigil with them.