The Remains of the Day

Ishiguro's other great novel of suppressed memory and deferred grief — Kathy H. narrates her own tragedy with the same calm avoidance Stevens employs

Another first-person narrator who cannot fully see himself — but where Nick judges too much, Stevens judges too little

Another novel about a life lived in social performance and the cost of choices never made — but Woolf uses stream of consciousness where Ishiguro uses suffocating restraint

The unlived life as central subject — characters who have made their choices and can only reconstruct the paths not taken

Another Booker-era British novel about the long consequences of a single moral failure, told through layers of narrative self-justification

Ishiguro's preceding novel — another unreliable narrator reckoning with wartime complicity, this time a Japanese painter who supported imperial propaganda