The theme of Ishiguro, born in Nagasaki in 1954, is always what to do with the past—how at once to respect it and to set it aside. His characteristic time is twilight, when what has recently been visible becomes as bleary as what is about to come. His first non-Japanese novel, bearing the very Japanese title of The Remains of the Day, centers on one postwar figure who, realizing, too late, that he failed to take responsibility in the public sphere and failed to take initiative in the private, is left in a shadowland of “If only”s.
