The Remains of the Day

Then there's like the Hunger Games stuff is kind of sci-fi-ish.

Yeah, and Ishiguro is really interesting, right, because we obviously did The Remains of the Day, which was not at all science fiction, but for someone to – have written science fiction and then also have written all kinds of other things.

It's kind of unusual because Clara and the Sun, his other book that's about to be made into a big film, that's science fiction, right? Oh, yeah, that's right.

Yeah,

Today, we have a very special treat for you.

I'm sitting down with Kazuo Ishiguro, the Nobel Prize-winning author of The Remains of the Day, Never Let Me Go, and one of my personal favorites, Klara and the Sun, which we are talking about today.

Klara and the Sun is a coming-of-age story with a difference.

Klara is an AF, an artificial friend, who is bought as a companion for 14-year-old Josie.

You know, we get this very narrow perspective, and it starts with what she can see on the shop floor and then gradually expanding to what she can see from, like, the store window, and then eventually to what she observes at Josie's house and, and beyond that.

And I feel like this, this may be quite familiar framing for those that maybe have read your other books.

You know, it might even be your trademark, where we get this very narrow first-person perspective, like, for example, Stevens, the butler in The Remains of the Day, or Kathy H. in Never Let Me Go, or to put it another way, I guess you have the servant, the clone, and now the robot.

And all of them are underdogs, of course.

It's my real, it's my favorite type.

And I love, I love novels that end on a kind of like a sad, ambivalent note where you kind of sit back and you like sigh, you know, like I love, I'm thinking about The Remains of the Day, for example, Keizo Ishiguro, like, you know, the butler and, you know, he has to go get a different job.

I won't, I won't get into the weeds about the plot, but it's the type of book that It ends and you're kind of heartbroken for like a lot of reasons.

So I love stories like that.

And it makes total sense.

And the perfect example of this is his novel, The Remains of the Day.

Oh, man.

The first time you read it, you are following Mr. Stevens, this incredibly dedicated aging English butler, as he takes a motoring trip across the countryside to see a former colleague, Miss Kenton.

Right.

His dedication was supposed to be a virtue.

The tragedy of The Remains of the Day isn't that Stevens was evil.

The tragedy is the devastating loss of a life he could have lived.

[laughs]

... is that a couple books that I think people should look at if they're interested in sort of the philosophy of this, um, Kazuo Ishiguro, who wrote The Remains of the Day, also wrote a book called What I Talk About When I Talk About Running.

It's very short, but it's a short kind of life-changing read about how his writing and running are completely in tune with each other, the same way that I think, you know, my athletic journey is with my writing.

Um, and then Built to Move by the legendary Kelly and Juliet Starrett, who trained Obama and Biden, who I'm lucky enough to, um, have as kind of friends and mentors and have taught me so much about what it means to be human.

But the thematic tissue connecting these two stories is just undeniable.

So looking at the source facts, The Remains of the Day is the 1993 film based on Ishiguro's 1989 novel.

Yes.

And if you haven't seen it, the article notes it is currently available on Tubi, The Roku Channel, and Hulu.

Whether we are an outdated, obsolete artificial friend wanting nothing more than to bring unexpected light to a home in Klara and the Sun-

Right

... or a British butler hiding his deeply unfulfilled heart behind extreme suffocating professionalism in The Remains of the Day.

Yeah.

So again, this one's pretty interchangeable for a number of books exclusively.

It could be The Remains of the Day.

It could be Never Let Me Go.

I've gone with Never Let Me Go because I've seen the movie.