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November 8, 1954,

 

The extraordinary talent of the author of The Remains of the Day (1989), Kazuo Ishiguro,
was rewarded with the Man Booker prize for this story. The questions Ishiguro asks in his novels reflect a focus on human puzzlement.

[It has]... always fascinated me that we can't be like cats or dogs or cows.  These other creatures are quite happy to just eat and sleep and reproduce and then die. Its a perfectly good life for them. We are very different, we keep stopping and saying, "Is this good enough?" and so on, and we behave in a very strange way...because we want to fulfill some idea of having done good, although nobody knows what that is.  I'm sure cats and cows don't worry about these things, but we do...

Ishiguro, born on November 8, 1954, in Japan, and educated in England, phrased this major theme in his work thusly during interviews published in Conversations with Kazuo Ishiguro (2008) conducted by Brian W. Shaffe and Cynthia F. Wong.

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