Light blue against grey, the words “It’s Kazuo Ishiguro!” flashed on my computer screen. Reading this message, I was ready to prostrate myself before the Almighty in sheer gratitude. “The Force be with them as they have chosen a real novelist this time,” I sighed with relief. “After Bob Dylan in the name of expanding the horizons of literature, they could have easily gone on to select a graphic writer this time,” I felt like consoling myself. My initial excitement was tinged with apprehension and a degree of sadness.

Keeping a close watch till about a few hours ago, I had just read the article in The Guardian measuring the odds against the different candidates the bookies were betting on. From all accounts, it seemed to be a close fight between Haruki Murakami and Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, him with the difficult to pronounce name and the highly readable novels. I was not ready to take sides, but would have been happy with either. A voracious reader of novels, poet Afzal Ahmed Syed had made his choice clear to me in the morning: “I am hoping and wishing for Ismail Kadare to win the prize.” Much as I am devoted to the Albanian novelist, there is something elusive about his reputation, which somehow diminishes his chances. We were not aware that leading fiction reviewer James Wood would begin his piece in The New Yorker this week by naming Kadare as his first choice. There were other equally serious contenders, with the top slot for Canada’s Margaret Atwood since her The Handmaid’s Tale has acquired an uncanny relevance in the era of Trump’s triumph. Vacillating between Murakami and Ngugi, I, for one, could have hardly imagined Ishiguro leaving others behind. Mind you, he is by no means the kind of dark horse that the Nobel Committee seems to enjoy throwing before the surprised world, almost like a rabbit out of the conjurer’s hat.

“What do you think of this one?” I rang up Masood Ashar who keeps abreast of developments in the novel. “Achcha hai!” [It is good.] He gleefully told me about the libraries where he had picked up Ishiguro’s novels and how he liked the latest one. “How is he?” was the question Kishwar Naheed shot at me, before expressing her own opinion. “A novelist, not a poet!” she commented before I could respond. When was the last time the Prize was awarded to a poet? She quizzes me. “Did they award it to [Wislawa] Szymborska? Also, I did not really care for Seamus Heaney,” she said firmly and we tried to recall major poets the world over who are getting ignored. We can begin with Adonis, the greatest living poet in the Arab world whose name comes up each year and then passed over. In any case, all anticipations are over and it is Ishiguro this time.

The 2017 Nobel Prize for literature goes to...

I shot a text message to London-based Aamer Hussein, a consummate craftsman among fiction writers. “I love most of his work, do you?” and when I confirmed, he went on to make his message more elaborate: “He may be my favourite of my own generation. An Artist of the Floating World is one of my top 10 favourites in English and The Buried Giant is the best book of the year in which it was published, nay, two years.” I agreed completely and I could not think of any other British writer whom I could imagine in this position. The Indian Express carried a “love letter” addressed to “Ish” — as his friends call him — while in Iran all of his books are available in Farsi. I wonder if he makes the world go around?

By sheer virtuosity and inventiveness, Ishiguro is a cut above others. It was in 1983 that I first encountered the name Ishiguro in the Granta issue Best of Young British Novelists. One of the many exciting discoveries in this marvellous piece, this name stuck in my memory (the Japanese connection was certainly a help) and I kept a lookout for his work.

I learned that Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki, Japan, and came to England at the age of five, acquiring a unique perspective characteristic of his work. He completed his Masters from the University of East Anglia, which has led some people to describe him as a product of the writing programmes. My admiration knew no bounds when I managed to pick up here in Karachi a copy of An Artist of the Floating World, as in those days new literary titles were easier to come by in local bookstores. Shortly afterwards I came across A Pale View of Hills, both books truly transnational in scope than anything I had seen then.

I liked both books, but never for a minute did I suspect that this would be material for the Nobel Prize. The book which impressed me no end, when I first read it, was The Remains of the Day, for many Ishiguro’s best-known book. Wood regards it as “an almost perfect book.” Many commentators have remarked on “the pitch-perfect voice” of the very English butler with impeccable manners, but I was no less fascinated by the guilty secret of the dangerous flirtation with the Nazis buried in the past and all but covered by the façade of the Jeeves-like perfect butler. In his interview for the ‘Art of Fiction’ series of The Paris Review (Spring 2008) Ishiguro spoke of “creating the texture of memory.” He commented that he had already written “about how individuals come to terms with uncomfortable memories” and wanted to write a novel about “how societies remember and forget.” This was based on the perception that “the way an individual remembers and forgets is quite different to the way a society does.” Many more people have known of the book because of the film based on it, but the book is nuanced in a way the film never could be.

Perfect acts are hardly repeated, and I found The Unconsoled, Ishiguro’s next book, to be almost impenetrable. Similarly, I could not warm up to When We Were Orphans as it seemed a detective novel gone wrong. Hardly the author who repeats failures or even success, he covered new ground with the “beautiful and terrifying” Never Let Me Go, termed by Wood as “one of the central novels of our age” for its perfect mix of realism and dystopian fantasy. It has the perfect setting of the British boarding school, but plunges the reader into unimaginable depths of sadness and disillusion. My enthusiasm for Ishiguro returned with The Buried Giant. This is ancient England peopled by dragons, ogres, knights and giants, but above all, covered in a strange mist that turns out to be the breath of a dragon, and which has the uncanny power to erase all remembrance. The dragon-infested land is the country of Amnesia, and yet the country of the past suffers from today’s ills.

He seems to create his own rules and then take them apart, busting neat categorisations. I have some more of Ishiguro to catch up on and will keep on doing so till the same time next year when I will start recounting my favourites and their chances. It’s going to be one or the other: Murakami. Ngugi. Atwood. From Iceland, Jon Kalman Stefansson, the author of Fish Have No Feet. But there is no other Ishiguro to surprise us again. “The Swedish Academy should be proud of themselves,” declares critic Robert McCrum in The Guardian. I don’t fully agree as the Academy has done much to be less than proud in the past, but Ishiguro has redeemed them. It is thumbs up for Ishiguro.

The writer teaches liberal arts and Urdu and is the editor of the literary journal Duniyazaad

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, October 15th, 2017