Kazuo Ishiguro Reflects on Never Let Me Go, 20 Years Later

While I’d been busy writing my fourth and fifth novels, my study had mysteriously transformed itself around me into a kind of miniature indoor jungle. Everywhere were dusty mountains of scribbled-on pages and precarious towers of folders.

In the spring of 2001, however, I began work on my new novel with renewed energy, having just had the room entirely refurbished to my own exacting specifications. I now had well-ordered shelves up to the ceiling and—something I’d wanted for years—two writing surfaces that met in a right angle. My study felt, if anything, even smaller than before (I’ve always preferred to write in small rooms, my back to any view), but I was immensely pleased with it. I’d tell anyone interested how it was like being ensconced in the sleeper compartment of a period luxury train: all I had to do was revolve my chair and reach out a hand to get whatever it was I needed.

One such item now readily accessible was a box file on the shelf to my left marked “Students Novel.” It contained handwritten notes, spidery diagrams, and some typed pages deriving from two separate attempts I’d made—in 1990, then in 1995—to write the novel that was to become Never Let Me Go. On each occasion I’d abandoned the project and gone on to write a completely unrelated novel.

Not that I needed to bring down the file very often: I was quite familiar with its contents. My “students” had no university anywhere near them, nor resembled at all the sort of characters encountered in, say, The Secret History or the “campus novels” of Malcolm Bradbury and David Lodge. Most importantly, I knew they were to share a strange destiny, one that would drastically shorten their lives, yet make them feel special, even superior.

But what was this “strange destiny”—the dimension I hoped would give my novel its unique character?

The answer had continued to elude me throughout the previous decade. I’d toyed with scenarios involving a virus, or exposure to nuclear materials. I even dreamt up once a surreal sequence in which a young hitchhiker, late at night on a foggy motorway, thumbs down a convoy of vehicles and is given a lift in a lorry hauling nuclear missiles across the English countryside.

Despite such flourishes, I’d remained dissatisfied. Every conceit I came up with felt too “tragic,” too melodramatic, or simply ludicrous. Nothing I could conjure would come close to matching the needs of the novel I felt I could see dimly before me in the mists of my imagination.

But now in 2001, as I returned to the project, I could feel something important had changed—and it was not just my study.

*

As a reader and writer, I’d grown up under the influence of the university literature courses of the 1970s and the London fiction scene of the 1980s. It was an exciting era of high literary ambition, characterized by an openness to international and postcolonial currents. But it was also one hostile, at best condescending, to any works that gave the appearance of deriving from a “popular” genre. Science fiction in particular seemed to carry a mysterious stigma, and was conducted, in creative and publishing terms, within its own cultural silo. Accordingly, I, like many of my peers, had always steered clear of SF, believing it had nothing to offer that could be relevant to my artistic ambitions.

Then, in the late 1990s, I belatedly noticed I was no longer a “young writer”—that there was a distinct and exciting new generation emerging in Britain, typically fifteen or so years younger than me. Some of these authors I read and admired from a distance. Others became friends.

For instance: Alex Garland (who’d then recently published The Beach) and I began a pattern—still continuing today—of meeting for rambling, informal lunches in North London cafés, and I soon noticed how he, without self-consciousness or posturing, often cited writers like J.G. Ballard, Ursula K. Le Guin, and John Wyndham. It was Alex who drew up for me a list of the most important graphic novels I had to read, introducing me to the work of important figures like Alan Moore and Grant Morrison. Alex was at that time writing a screenplay that would become the classic 2002 zombie dystopia film 28 Days Later. He showed me an early draft and I listened in fascination to him discussing the pros and cons of various ways forward.

And in the autumn of 2000, during a coast-to-coast U.S. book tour, my itinerary intersected three times with that of a young English author promoting his first novel. The novel was Ghostwritten and his name was David Mitchell—both at that point unknown to me. We found ourselves sitting in late-night lounges of hotels in the American Midwest, chilling after our respective events, competing to identify tunes the cocktail pianist was playing for us.

Alongside chat about Dickens and Dostoyevsky, I noted how he mentioned Ursula K. Le Guin, Rosemary Sutcliff, the recent Matrix movie, H.P. Lovecraft, schlocky old ghost and horror stories, fantasy literature. On returning home I read Ghostwritten and realized I’d been communing with a monster talent (an assessment that became more or less universal when he published Cloud Atlas three years later).

My growing familiarity with these younger colleagues excited and liberated me. They opened windows for me I’d not thought to open before. They not only educated me into a wider, vibrant culture, they brought to my own imagination new horizons.

There might have been other factors around at that time: Dolly the Sheep, history’s first cloned mammal, adorning the fronts of newspapers in 1997; the writing of my two previous novels (The Unconsoled, When We Were Orphans) making me feel more sure-footed about taking deviations from everyday “reality.” In any case, my third attempt at “the Students Novel” went differently to before.

I even had a kind of “eureka” moment—though I was in the shower, not a bath. I suddenly felt I could see before me the entire story. Images, compressed scenes, ran through my mind. Oddly I didn’t feel triumphant or even especially excited. What I recall today is a sense of relief that a missing piece had finally fallen into place, and along with it a kind of melancholy, mixed with something almost like queasiness.

I went about auditioning three different voices for my narrator, having each one narrate the same event over a couple of pages. When I showed the three samples to Lorna, my wife, she picked one without hesitation—a choice that concurred with my own.

After that I worked, by my standards, pretty rapidly in my refurbished study, completing a first draft (albeit in horribly chaotic prose) within nine months. I then worked on the novel for a further two years, throwing away around eighty pages from near the end, and going over and over certain passages.

*

In the twenty years since its publication in 2005, Never Let Me Go has become my most-read book. (In hard sales terms, it overtook quite quickly The Remains of the Day despite the latter’s sixteen years head start, Booker Prize win, and the acclaimed James Ivory film.) The novel has been widely studied in schools and universities, and translated into over fifty languages. It has been adapted into a movie (with Carey Mulligan, Keira Knightley, and Andrew Garfield as Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy—and a superb screenplay, appropriately, by Alex Garland); a Japanese stage play directed by the great Yukio Ninagawa; a ten-part Japanese TV series starring Haruka Ayase; and most recently a British stage play written by Suzanne Heathcote.

This has meant that over the years I’ve been asked many questions about the novel, not just from a range of readers, but from writers, directors, and actors wrestling with the task of transferring this story into a new medium. Reflecting on these questions today, it occurs to me that the great majority of them can be gathered into two broad categories.

The first might be summarized by this question: “Given the awful fate that hangs over these young people, why don’t they run away, or at least show more signs of rebellion?”

The second group of FAQs is slightly harder to characterize, but essentially comes down to: “Is this a sad, bleak book or is it an uplifting, positive one?”

I’m not going to attempt here to answer either of the above, partly because I don’t wish to give spoilers in an introduction, but also because I feel quite content, even proud, that this novel should provoke such questions in readers’ minds. I will however make the following observation—which may possibly make greater sense after you’ve finished the book.

It seems to me that these most-asked questions about Never Let Me Go arise because of tensions concerning its metaphorical identity. Is this story a metaphor about evil man-made systems that already exist today—or are in imminent danger of existing—ushered in by uncontrolled innovations in science and technology? Or, alternatively, is the novel offering a metaphor for the fundamental human condition—the necessary limits of our natural lifespans; the inescapability of aging, sickness, and death; the various strategies we adopt to give our lives meaning and happiness in the time we have allotted to us.

It may be both a strength and a weakness of this novel that it often wishes to be both of the above at one and the same time, thereby setting certain elements of the story in conflict with one another.

*

Lastly: let me make a remark about the book’s title. “Never Let Me Go” is the name of a song made popular in the 1950s by Nat King Cole (written by Ray Evans and Jay Livingston). I wasn’t familiar with it when writing the novel. I happened to see the title written on the sleeve of a jazz album—pianist Bill Evans’s Alone—and was immediately drawn to it.

Aside from its simple elegance, what struck me about this title was the sheer impossibility of what was being requested. “Please hold me for a long time” would be reasonable. But if someone pleads “Never let me go,” they’re not only asking for the impossible; they must know, even as they make the request, that they’re asking for something beyond anyone’s gift. This was why I found these words so moving—why I wished to embed their poignance at the heart of my novel. Because there are times when we human beings wish, from the depths of our souls, for something we know to be beyond anyone’s reach.

Over the years, I’ve come to realize that it’s on this territory—this no-man’s-land between what we desperately yearn for and what we know to be the limits of the possible—that I most like to work as a writer.

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From Never Let Me Go: Twentieth Anniversary Edition by Kazuo Ishiguro. Copyright © 2025. Available from Vintage Books, an imprint of Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.