Kazuo Ishiguro is a redemption for the Nobel Prize

Thursday October 5th, the Nobel Committee in Stockholm, Sweden  announced British novelist Kazuo Ishiguro as the winner of its literature prize. After controversially awarding the prize to American Singer Bob Dylan last year, and the attendant fall out, this year, the committee went for an acceptable choice to help redeem its image.   Across Africa, […]

Thursday October 5th, the Nobel Committee in Stockholm, Sweden  announced British novelist Kazuo Ishiguro as the winner of its literature prize. After controversially awarding the prize to American Singer Bob Dylan last year, and the attendant fall out, this year, the committee went for an acceptable choice to help redeem its image.

 

Across Africa, there was a vigil online, with literature enthusiasts hoping that it would finally be the year of Ngugi Wa Thiongo. In Tokyo, as has become tradition every year, hundreds of Japanese gathered at a shrine awaiting the announcement of Japanese writer Haruki Murakami as the winner.

They applauded in the end, not because Japan’s darling Murakami (alongside Ngugi, perennial favourites for the Nobel Prize) won, but because Japanese-born British writer, Kazuo Ishiguro did.

It was a popular even if unexpected choice. Ishiguro was not one of the bookmaker’s favourites. By Thursday morning, Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood was, jumping ahead of  both Murakami and Ngugi.

Ishiguro may not have been the obvious candidate, but he sure was a popular one, especially in the wake of last year’s debacle when American singer Bob Dylan was awarded the prize “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.” It was a decision that shocked many across the world, even if some writers, including Ishiguro himself, were delighted by the choice. Others struggled to rationalise the choice.

The 2017 Nobel Prize for Ishiguro is a return to tradition. Ishiguro may not have been a popular choice but there is no argument that he is a deserving laureate and an even more popular writer, both more commercially and critically successful than previous recent winners like French writer Patrick Mudiano (2014).

Ishiguro, 62, was born in Nagasaki in 1954 and left Japan for the UK at the age of five. Even though his first two novels were set in Japan, he is very distant from Japan, something he himself admitted to. (Those Japanese at the shirne who applauded his win may not now care about that too much). His most famous novel, The Remains of the Day (1989), was written in four weeks, in what the author called, “The Crash”, a period of intense writing in which he penned his ideas none-stop. He was rewarded with a Booker Prize that year.

His other notable work is Never Let Me Go, a dystopian novel of longing and separation with a futuristic tone but set in the ‘90s. It was both a critical and commercial success and both books have been made into successful movies.

What is fascinating about Ishiguro’s sparse writing and his novels is his willingness to experiment with styles and genres. Never Let Me Go is dystopian with a futuristic tone, his latest novel, The Buried Giant is regarded as a fantasy novel set in Authurian Britain, with dragons and ogres thrown in. With  When We Were Orphans considered as a detective novel and The Unconsoled regarded as magical realism, Ishiguro has swapped genres with almost every book he had written.

His win is deserved, but beyond that it is a redemption, or at least a journey to one, for the Nobel Committee, that notoriously secretive committee of the Swedish Academy that awards the prize. Awarding the prize to Bob Dylan last year severely dented the integrity of the committee and Dylan did not help by stringing up the committee by refusing to acknowledge the prize for months after it was awarded to him. He must have been as baffled as the other one third of the world that didn’t comprehend the choice. He managed to anger the committee by refusing to take their calls and eventually didn’t turn up for the ceremony. When the prize was awarded to him in a private ceremony, his acceptance speech stirred controversy when it was alleged to have “borrowed” or more strongly “plagiarized” heavily from the online resource, Sparknotes, where students often go to find reviews of literature texts they are studying. Some of the lines from his speech were almost word for word versions of the ones on Sparknotes.

All in all, the Dylan affair was a really bad business for the Nobel Committee and awarding the prize this year to Ishiguro, though thoroughly deserved, was a tactical maneuver to regain lost honour. Smartly, they avoided the perennial favourites, perhaps in order not to be seen as a desperate attempt to regain lost pride and plunged for a widely acceptable laureate.

The move is paying off already. Ishiguro has already expressed his delight at his win and it is now taken for granted that he will accept the prize and deliver hopefully a truly original speech. It has also rekindled optimism about the prize worldwide.

Africans rooting for Ngugi found Ishiguro an acceptable candidate, but that has not stopped allegations that the committee is delibereately overlooking the continent. There hasn’t been a black Nobel Prize for Literature winner since Toni Morrison won in 1993. The last African to win it was South Africa’s JM Coetzee in 2003. He was preceded by his compatriot Nadine Gordimer in 1991, Egypt’s Naguib Mahfouz in 1988 and Wole Soyinka in 1986.

Achebe was the continents perennial candidate until his death in 2013. He has since been replaced by Kenya’s Ngugi and every time the doors of the academy open and a name that is not Ngugi’s is mentioned, there is always a sigh of discontent on the continent. 

But the workings of the committee are shrouded in secrecy, as are members of the committee. The Nobel Prize is not an exact science and there really is no knowing if Ngugi would ever win it or why he hasn’t won it up to this point. The same can be said of Murakami and Salman Rushdie for instance. What is certain for now is that the world is unanimous in the choice of Ishiguro. The Nobel Committee will need to sustain this run to recover totally from the mess that was Bob Dylan.