The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro

In a 2009 interview, Kazuo Ishiguro explained: ‘I started writing The Remains of the Day because of my suspicion that to some extent we are all butlers’.

• What does it mean to realise, at the end of your life, that all your most dedicated efforts were inadvertently in the service of evil?
• Can we ever see outside our own times, or are we doomed to limited perspectives based on unquestioned (unquestionable?) beliefs and cultural norms?
• How do our daily habits of thought, our seemingly petty emotions and feelings, influence the most important moments of our lives and loves?

These are among the profound questions posed by Kazuo Ishiguro’s masterful third novel, which won the Booker Prize in 1990. Having hitherto set all his fiction in Japan, Ishiguro placed this new narrative in England before and after World War II, and made his hero that most traditional of English figures, the butler.  But by Ishiguro’s own account, time and place were not central to the book’s genesis; rather, the theme of misplaced loyalty was uppermost in his plans. Indeed, the novel repeats much of the theme and structure of his previous novel, An Artist of the Floating World, which was set in the same time period but in Japan.

In The Remains of the Day, Ishiguro also perfected a nuanced version of the ‘unreliable narrator’. He created what he calls an ‘ironic gap’ between himself and Stevens, which in turn creates an implied reader – us – who gradually begins to see everything that Stevens himself cannot. As critic Adam Parkes writes, ‘The narrative is like a mirror that shows us Stevens as he sees himself, or as he wants us to see him, but that also enables us to picture him quite differently.’

But how exactly does Ishiguro achieve this? And how does this link to the novel’s themes of appeasement, idealism and loyalty?

On this six-week study we will begin to unravel Ishiguro’s deceptively simple narrative, which has perhaps been falsely ‘clarified’ by the hugely successful film version starring Anthony Hopkins. We will discover what this novel does that the film – perhaps any film? – cannot, and why it remains one of the most highly-regarded and best-loved novels of the twentieth century.

JOINING DETAILS:

• Six-meeting study, live on Zoom, led by Lewis Ward
• Wednesday 7 October – 11 November 2026, 7.00-9.00 pm (UK time)
• Recommended edition: The Remains of the Day, Faber & Faber, ISBN-13 : ‎ 978-0571258246
• £210 for six meetings

REDUCED COSTS: we are committed to making our studies as affordable as possible. We have a fund in place to support anyone who would like to register for a study but finds the cost difficult to afford. We can’t promise to help, but please email us at litsalon@gmail.com in confidence if you would like to request a reduction in the cost of a study.