The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro – a subtle masterpiece about what is not said

Kazuo Ishiguro’s Booker-winning novel is a story of unspoken love for anyone who’s ever held their true feelings back

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Some of my friends and family might roll their eyes if they see this – they’ve heard my spiel about The Remains of the Day too many times. Some have already had a copy thrust upon them as a gift. Over the years since I read it, I’ve turned into a Remains of the Day evangelist. It’s not my fault. Kazuo Ishiguro’s subtle masterpiece about the private agonies of an ageing butler is hardly unknown – it won the 1989 Booker prize, after all – but sometimes you find a piece of writing so well executed, so moving and so perceptive about the lives many of us lead that you can’t help praising it to anyone not quick-witted enough to look busy.

A lack of restraint is perhaps the best response to Ishiguro’s novel, which is the tale of a man so burdened by propriety that he lets the love of his life slip through his fingers. Mr Stevens is chief of staff at an English stately home; as the novel opens, in the summer of 1956, he is set to undertake a motoring trip to visit Miss Kenton, a housekeeper who left 20 years earlier to get married. The butler says he wants to ask her if she’d consider returning to work: “Miss Kenton, with her great affection for this house, with her exemplary professionalism, was just the factor needed to enable me to complete a fully satisfactory staff plan for Darlington Hall.” But Stevens isn’t fooling anyone, especially when he lets slip that a letter (“her first in seven years, discounting Christmas cards”) contains hints her marriage is falling apart.

Related: Kazuo Ishiguro: how I wrote The Remains of the Day in four weeks

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