Klara and the Sun Study Guide

Kazuo Ishiguro was born in Japan but moved to England as a child and did not return to his home country for 30 years. In spite of this, his first two novels (A Pale View of the Hills and An Artist of the Floating World) are set in Japan—Ishiguro drew on the experiences of his Japanese-speaking parents but has claimed to be more inspired by British and European authors such as Marcel Proust (In Search of Lost Time). In 1986, Ishiguro met his future wife, Lorna MacDougall, while working at a homelessness charity, and the two have lived together in London ever since. Though Ishiguro’s earliest novels were well reviewed, it’s arguable that his breakthrough was The Remains of The Day (1989), which follows a road trip by an English butler in the aftermath of World War II and was later adapted into a film. Ishiguro is known for writing in many different genres: perhaps his best-known novel today is the science fiction story Never Let Me Go (2005), but he has also written in the mystery genre (When We Were Orphans, 2000) and fantasy (The Buried Giant, 2015). In 2017, Kazuo Ishiguro received the Nobel Prize for literature. Klara and the Sun (2021) was Ishiguro’s first novel since winning the award.

Klara and the Sun was published in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, which disrupted life around the world, starting particularly in early 2020. The isolation of many of the characters in Klara and the Sun, especially the way that Josie gets her education almost exclusively from tutors in remote locations, reflects the quarantine conditions of the pandemic, even though the novel itself isn’t set during a pandemic. Klara and the Sun is also a satire of the contemporary college admissions process. It imagines a future where colleges will only accept students who have been “lifted” (meaning they have undergone a dangerous medical procedure that will, allegedly, make them smarter), which is meant to be a parody of all the tests, applications, and other requirements students must meet in order to be accepted for college in the 21st century.

Kazuo Ishiguro has claimed that his novels are often variations on the same themes. Klara and the Sun is perhaps most similar to Never Let Me Go (2005), Ishiguro’s other science fiction novel. Never Let Me Go is not about robots, but it involves humans who only live for the benefit of other more-privileged humans, and so their status is very similar to Klara’s. Ishiguro has also cited the influence of Fyodor Dostoevsky (Crime and Punishment) and Marcel Proust (In Search of Lost Time) on his own books. Some literary critics compared Klara and the Sun to the android love story Machines Like Me (2019), a novel by Ian McEwan, another famous British novelist of the 20th and 21st century.