The Remains of the Day
Kazuo Ishiguro (1989)
“A perfect butler looks back on a perfect life — and discovers, one careful sentence at a time, that he wasted it.”
About Kazuo Ishiguro
Kazuo Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki in 1954 and moved to England at age five. He grew up Japanese in English schools — an outsider performing belonging, navigating between identities and social codes. He studied English at the University of Kent and creative writing at the University of East Anglia. The Remains of the Day won the Booker Prize in 1989 and was adapted into the acclaimed 1993 film with Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson. Ishiguro won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2017. He writes, he has said, about 'what it means to be a stranger in a place you think of as home' — and Stevens, who is a stranger to his own inner life, is perhaps the deepest expression of that theme.
Life → Text Connections
How Kazuo Ishiguro's real experiences shaped specific elements of The Remains of the Day.
Ishiguro grew up between Japanese and English cultures, performing 'Englishness' while retaining a Japanese family sensibility
Stevens performs the identity of the perfect English butler — an identity so thoroughly adopted it has displaced his actual self
The outsider performing belonging is Ishiguro's autobiographical lens. Stevens is not English high culture — he is the idealized performance of it.
Ishiguro has spoken of the novel as an exploration of how people rationalize their complicity with systems they should have opposed
Stevens's rationalization of his service to Lord Darlington during the appeasement era — 'I was not in a position to judge' — is the novel's political argument
The novel is about more than repressed love. It is about how decent people participate in atrocity through professional deference.
Ishiguro grew up in post-war Britain, watching the decline of the old class system and the fading of imperial England
The novel is set in 1956, the year of Suez — the moment when Britain was forced to acknowledge the end of empire
Stevens's personal decline mirrors a national one. England and its butler are both trying to maintain dignity in reduced circumstances.
Historical Era
Mid-1950s England, with flashbacks to the 1920s-1940s
How the Era Shapes the Book
The 1956 setting is not neutral: it is the year Britain ceased to be a global power, forced by the United States to abandon the Suez operation. Stevens is driving through a country that has just been humbled in exactly the way his employer Lord Darlington was humbled. The American who owns Darlington Hall is the American who owns England now. Stevens's personal story — the failure to resist, the deference to authority, the late recognition of what was lost — is also England's story in the twentieth century.