Remains of an Author

While his prose is elegant and telling, Remains of the Day author Kazuo Ishiguro is much more mysterious. “I've never met anyone who lends himself less to characterization,” The Guardian’s Decca Aitkenhead writes of her interview with Ishiguro. But there’s one defining characteristic of Ishiguro: a concern for aging. Or, a concern about productivity. Ishiguro's most recent collection of short stories, Nocturnes, is being published a year earlier than he had anticipated, because he realized how slowly he was publishing. “There comes a point when you can more or less count the number of books you're going to write before you die," Ishiguro says. "And you think, hmm, God, there's only four left, and so you start. Well— it's a bit alarming. So I thought I'd better adopt a less leisurely attitude."