"When I write a novel perhaps some part of me wants to offer in a book an experience that you can't get easily sitting in front of a cinema screen or a television screen," novelist Kazuo Ishiguro told Linda Richards in an interview for January magazine online. "For that reason, one of the strengths of novels, I think, over camera-based storytelling is that you are able to get right inside people's heads. You're able to explore people's inner worlds much more thoroughly and with much more subtlety." In his five novels, Japanese-born Ishiguro has explored this inner world of characters from his native Japan to his adopted homeland of England, and on to Europe and mainland China. In the process, Ishiguro has emerged as one of the foremost British writers of his generation, his novels commonly dealing with issues of memory, self-deception, and codes of etiquette, leading his characters to a reevaluation or realization about the relative success or failure of their lives.
