Eileen Ying

The first forty pages of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun take place entirely within the narrow enclosure of a storefront. The Nobel Prize winner’s eighth novel shares a number of themes with his earlier Never Let Me Go and The Remains of the Day, and has enjoyed deservedly glowing praise from critics. In the storefront, Klara – an Artificial Friend, or ‘AF’ – waits to be courted by a human child. And courted she is, by a buoyant young girl named Josie, who insists to her mother that Klara is the one. The story could pass as a fable about the wonders of companionship if not for its troubling accessories: Klara’s intractable difference, Josie’s strange illness, the eugenic fads of their near-future dystopia, and the increasingly thin divide between care and service.

It’s tempting to read Klara as a limit test for technological advancement. In a review for The Guardian, Alex Preston calls it a meditation on ‘what it means to be not-quite-human’. But we don’t have to summon androids to think about the not-quite-human; the issue hits much closer to home. Beneath the book’s speculative veneer lies a familiar portrait of racialized labor. Ishiguro’s work here is subtle: besides Klara, the only other character who performs a service function in Josie’s household is ‘Melania Housekeeper’. Melania speaks in halting English and moves along the margins of Klara’s central drama. Her name literally derives from the Greek word for ‘black, dark’. Klara is, of course, a robot – a French-looking one, at that. Yet when we place her alongside Melania, the similarities become clear. Though Klara’s labour is more emotional than it is physical, she, too, bears a certain subjugation. On one occasion, the Mother asks Klara to imitate Josie – her walk, her speech, her mannerisms. What’s frightening is not Klara’s seamless execution, but the sense of ‘something cruel’ that appears around the Mother’s mouth, which makes the scene feel, suddenly, like a kind of minstrel show.

For the most part, however, the novel’s cruelty comes in gentler guises. In its closing pages, Klara chats with her old store manager in a junkyard. They concede that Klara’s been lucky, that she’s lived in ‘a successful home’. The effect is at once unsettling and deflating, but this is perhaps the point. Ishiguro asks us to dwell on the quiet ways in which power runs its course, to register an emergent politics of care in its most intimate, incremental forms.

Cite this: Ying, Eileen. “Family Matters: A Review of Klara and the Sun.” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2021, https://writersmakeworlds.com/essay-review-ishiguro-klara-and-the-sun. Accessed 12 February 2026.

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Chelsea Haith

Chelsea Haith, a DPhil candidate at the University of Oxford, was delighted to attend the awarding of the Bodley Medal to Sir Kazuo Ishiguro, and to hear the author in conversation with the Bodley Libraries Head Librarian Richard Ovenden during the 2019 FT Weekend Oxford Literary Festival on 3 April. Here she records and responds to some of the themes raised during this event.

Sir Kazuo Ishiguro knows how to command a room, even when that room is Oxford’s imposing Sheldonian Theatre brimming with an audience in attendance to celebrate his life and work. At the outset he politely interrupts his interviewer, the Bodley Libraries Head Librarian Richard Ovenden, and turns to engage the audience, his wry humour received with appreciative laughter. The audience straightaway relaxed into his confidence. In this moment it’s clear why, had things been different in the early 1970s, his aspirations to make a profession of music, performance and, hence, audience engagement, instead of writing, might well have materialised as he had planned.

Ishiguro is seemingly not intimated or impressed by pomp and ceremony, either, and not given to ceding to expectations. Calm, self-possessed, with the politeness that has become something of a trademark, he proceeded to direct the course of the conversation and indeed the evening. He wore a black suit and white shirt, the top button undone, as in many of his author photographs. Somehow it seems right that the author of The Remains of the Day should eschew convention without utterly upsetting the apple cart. Tie foregone, convention acknowledged and dispensed with, Ishiguro is free to be selectively irreverent, self-deprecating, and to pose difficult questions himself that reflect on the interplay between the past and future, and the role of the author in mediating and responding to the anxieties of our age. He explores the porous, destabilising nature of time in those parts of his work which depict circumstantial loss, and also the subject’s location in time as constitutive of their experience, as well as the unreliable nature of memory.

Prior to the ceremony, Ishiguro had spent the day with Ovenden, learning about the Bodley archives. Now, in front of a packed audience, he wants to know who gets to choose what we remember. For Ishiguro, archiving seems a deeply political project, one that is biased, and which must involve self-reflection at every turn. Ovenden agrees, noting the struggle that archivists have in curating not only the past, but also the present. They discuss the example of the difficulty that archivists face deciding which placards from the 2016 EU Referendum Leave and Remain campaigns should be collected for the records. “As many as possible, from both sides,” is the consensus, though as we know from media representation, certain messages that seem more evocative today are inevitably privileged over others.

On the topic of ethical archiving Ishiguro is relentless, questioning the role and purpose of these physical memory banks, noting access difficulties as well as the problems of potentially useful content becoming lost or overlooked in the sheer volume of material. “Libraries play a crucial role in shaping our memory of who we are, and the narratives that determine who we’ll become. In this sense, writers and libraries share a common – and solemn – responsibility,” he says.

Ovenden calls us back to the archival role of the Bodleian as a reference library, which receives a copy of every item published in Britain, and some texts published elsewhere as well. Newspapers, novels, pamphlets: everything ends up in the Bodleian. However, when the library first came into existence and the Copyright Law was instituted, Thomas Bodley, the library’s founder, did not value or assign much artistic or instructive merit to the novel form. As a result, for example, some first editions of Jane Austen’s works had to be bought later, at great expense. This early folly of the library’s otherwise diligent and forward-thinking founder serves as a reminder that we do not yet know what we may one day value.

Value is indeterminable, just as the future is. Ishiguro wonders whether, for example, his generation of authors have insufficiently addressed contemporary concerns of climate change. He’s equally concerned about the looming threat of AI, but has embraced the possibility of his job becoming obsolete. At home in London, he frequently meets for coffee with a developer from DeepMind. Together, they consider the possibility of AI authors. “Tolstoy III,” is closer than we think, Ishiguro contends. The audience laugh, though some are bemused by the author’s description of his future competitor.

For now, though, authors still have to do the work themselves. The next book is nearly ready, but things such as the Bodley Prize award ceremony keep getting in the way, he jokes. He’s also been writing plays, and collaborated on a successful album with American jazz musician Stacey Kent, for which he wrote the lyrics. However, he writes primarily for the “six or so people” closest to him. His ideal reader is a friend, and while he seems to have come to terms with his success and fame, he’s more interested in talking about ideas than about himself. The larger narratives of nationhood and how groups of people come to conceptualise themselves as such are at the heart of Ishiguro’s interest in collective memory.

Throughout, Ishiguro thinks carefully about the memorialisation of past conquest, and the role of archiving in recording the verity of events. Here is an author responding critically to temporal and technological uncertainty, but always with enthusiasm for the possibilities for creative and humanitarian intervention.

Cite this: Haith, Chelsea. “The Responsibilities of the Author and the Archive: On the Award of the Bodley Medal to Sir Kazuo Ishiguro” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2019, [scf-post-permalink]. Accessed 12 February 2026.

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Ed Dodson

In the post-war British context, the term ‘postcolonial’ has often been applied to Black and Asian writers. General surveys of post-war or contemporary British literature frequently use ‘postcolonial’ as a euphemism for ‘non-white’, and this becomes a way of lumping all such writers under one heading.

Andrzej Gasiorek, in Post-War British Fiction (1995), restricts his discussion of ‘colonialism’ to V. S. Naipaul and George Lamming, and of ‘post-colonialism’ to Salman Rushdie. Peter Childs, in Contemporary Novelists (2005), associates ‘Britain’s imperial past and post-colonial present’ with the familiar triad of ‘Rushdie, [Hanif] Kureishi, and [Zadie] Smith’. Nick Bentley, in Contemporary British Fiction (2008), connects ‘the multiethnic nature of contemporary Britain’ to these three, as well as Monica Ali, Courttia Newland, and Caryl Phillips. Brian Finney, in English Fiction Since 1984 (2006), places all of the non-white writers he discusses (Rushdie, Kureishi, and Kazuo Ishiguro) in a section entitled ‘National Cultures and Hybrid Narrative Modes’.

Such literary categorisations are often tied to authors’ biographies. This is true for gender and sexuality as much as for race. Most of the writers above, who are sometimes called ‘Black British’ writers, have their roots in British colonies, past and present. As a result, they are perceived to have a particular investment in ‘postcolonial’ questions of race and empire. This is a perception that is often, but by no means always, true.

Numerous contemporary writers and critics have complained about the ghettoisation of Black and Asian literature within Britain. In Bernardine Evaristo’s words, ‘If you are a black writer you are deemed to be writing about black subjects and that is generally perceived to be for a black audience’. According to Aminatta Forna:

I have never met a writer who wishes to be described as a female writer, gay writer, black writer, Asian writer or African writer. We hyphenated writers complain about the privilege accorded to the white male writer, he who dominates the western canon and is the only one called simply ‘writer’.

There are a number of ways to tackle this question of naming. One is to expand the definition of ‘postcolonial’ beyond the confines of race: to read white writers as postcolonial, too. Several critics have argued that white writers from Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland (Irvine Welsh or Bernard MacLaverty, for instance) might also be considered postcolonial, or at least brought into postcolonial conversations. A parallel is suggested here between the ‘peripheries’ of the empire and the ‘peripheries’ of the UK, especially in the era of devolution.

An alternative and complementary solution would be, as Timothy Ogene argues, ‘to momentarily de-postcolonize’ the work of writers like Evaristo and Forna by discussing their writing outside of the frames of race and empire.

Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds brings together Black and Asian writers in and around the UK but without foregrounding their racial identities or imposing postcolonial themes on their work. At the same time, as the project title suggests, the term ‘postcolonial’ is not being discarded entirely.

The question we are left with is: what is the role of ‘postcolonial’ as a label today? It is, after all, fifty or so years after the major processes of decolonisation. Is postcolonialism still an effective tool for addressing contemporary writing in Britain produced by a range of writers from many different cultural backgrounds?

Cite this: Dodson, Ed. “The Postcolonial ‘Ghetto’?” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2017, [scf-post-permalink]. Accessed 12 February 2026.

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Biography

Writing

On awarding him the Nobel Prize for Literature in October 2017, the Swedish Academy said that Ishiguro ‘in novels of great emotional force, has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world’. Never Let Me Go (2005) is one such novel, a dystopian examination of the relationship between the personal and the institutional that has been called one of the ‘central novels of our age’.

All of Ishiguro’s novels feature thematic concerns such as anxiety about the future, fear of desertion, the fallibility of human connection, and the intersections of memory and regret. He develops these themes through the deft use of narrative voice, achieving ‘a type of impersonation, a kind of camouflaging of the writer’s authority and hence his responsibility’. Ishiguro has worked with various forms and settings, moving from the post-World War II Japanese locations of his first two novels to capturing early-twentieth-century English restraint and class-based ‘subsumption of life by work’ in Remains of the Day (1989). His work frequently deals with individuals’ relations to power and are often set in a pre- or post-war period, which he argues is the ideal context in which to explore the ‘business of values and ideals being tested.’

The Guardian and the BBC labelled Ishiguro a British author upon the announcement of the news of his Nobel Prize. In a 1989 interview, however, Ishiguro said, ‘I think differently, my perspectives are slightly different [to the English].’ He went on to note that his relationship with England is complicated by his Japanese heritage: ‘There is a big difference between someone in my position and someone who has come from one of the countries that belonged to the British Empire’.

—Chelsea Haith

Cite this: Haith, Chelsea. “[scf-post-title].” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2017, [scf-post-permalink]. Accessed 12 February 2026.

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