Klara and the Sun
Klara and the Sun
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Kazuo Ishiguro on Klara and the Sun
In him own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why he wrote it
A children’s story no child could readThe book’s origin was a rejection. Ishiguro had drafted what he thought was a picture book, encouraged by a Faber editor, and brought it to his daughter Naomi, then in her mid-twenties and working in a bookshop. She told him it was unpublishable for children. He kept the story anyway and rebuilt it as an adult novel, which means the emotional register of the whole book, that double-layered quality of bright surface and dark undertow, was present from the very first draft.
I find those books for children, the illustrations as much as the stories, quite poignant. You can see the wish on the part of the adults to shelter the children who’ll be reading these books from what’s coming up... but at the same time, you can see a kind of tension there because you can see that often the adults who’ve created that book don’t want to lie to the children, and they feel a kind of need to drop little hints about... sadness and death... without really rubbing it in their faces. [paraphrased from audio]
That tension between sheltering and truth-telling became the tonal model for Klara herself: she sees more than she says, and holds the darker knowledge at a careful distance from those she loves.
Alongside the picture book, Ishiguro had been attending conferences on artificial intelligence and genetic engineering for years, not as an expert but as a curious outsider. His New York literary agent sent him a clipping about Jennifer Doudna’s CRISPR gene-editing research, which opened a chain of meetings. The encounter he describes below was one of several that fed the novel’s background science.
I was lucky enough to meet Doudna, in 2017, at a conference in London, and I got very interested in the whole thing.
He also had repeated conversations with DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis about whether AI could eventually produce a novel capable of genuinely moving a reader. When the children’s story and this technology research finally merged, the science stayed in the background rather than driving the argument.
Once the two threads came together, Ishiguro was clear about what the resulting novel was not. The book’s near-future setting, with its genetic ‘lifting’ of children and its humanoid AF (Artificial Friend) companions, could easily read as a treatise on where technology is taking society. He resisted that framing.
The novel wasn’t essentially... supposed to be my thoughts about how AI, gene editing, all these things will impact on the world, but it’s just kind of there in the background. [paraphrased from audio]
There was also a specific emotional debt he wanted to repay. Never Let Me Go (2005), his earlier novel about cloned humans bred for organ donation, had unsettled even readers close to him. Harold Pinter sent him a postcard after finishing it, scrawled in black felt tip: ‘I found it bloody terrifying!’ Ishiguro’s response to his own book’s effect was that it was ‘supposed to be my cheerful book.’ Klara was the real attempt.
To some extent as a writer you’re always in dialogue with your earlier books, in terms of the emotions and atmospherics. Part of me wanted to reply to Never Let Me Go, which is a very sad book. It’s not pessimistic exactly, but it’s very sad. So I wanted to reply to that vision.
The goal he set himself was precise: ‘I wanted to focus on celebrating the things worth celebrating about human nature.’ Whether Klara actually arrives at celebration, or stops just short of it, is one of the questions the book leaves open.
How he wrote it
Keeping the narrator innocentChoosing a non-human narrator was not, for Ishiguro, primarily a science-fiction decision. It was a structural one. Klara is an AF, an Artificial Friend designed to observe and alleviate loneliness in adolescent children. That commercial function gave Ishiguro something a human narrator would have to work hard to justify: a built-in reason to read every human interaction through a single, unwavering lens.
If you have an outsider narrator like that, paradoxically, it does allow you to focus very sharply on specific aspects of the human world. [paraphrased from audio]
Because Klara is built to prevent loneliness, she studies every scene, including the street outside the AF store where she is displayed for sale, for evidence of who is isolated and how people work to avoid that condition. The premise and the narrative angle are the same thing.
The technical challenge that occupied him throughout the drafting was keeping Klara’s voice from darkening as the story darkened. His other major narrators, Stevens in The Remains of the Day and Kathy H. in Never Let Me Go, accumulate a kind of sad self-knowledge over the course of their books. Klara needed to stay open to the end, and that required constant vigilance against the tendency of a character who learns difficult things to sound like someone who has learned difficult things.
She’s like a tabula rasa at the beginning, and she’s quite childlike and very open... I wanted some of that childlike freshness and openness and naivety to survive all the way through the text in her. I wanted her to remain, like, a very optimistic character who has a childlike faith in the presence of something good and protective in the world, even as she learns all these other things, darker things about the human world that she occupies.
One of the novel’s stranger formal decisions is Klara’s relationship with the sun, which provides her solar power and which she comes to regard with something that resembles religious devotion. The premise might have produced allegory or satire. Instead Ishiguro used it to isolate a question he wanted to examine without the usual cultural noise surrounding it: what does the instinct toward faith look like when it has no tradition behind it?
I found it very interesting to remove the usual kind of — the social context away, you know, take it away and just have it in this rather pure, naive, artificial being — that she, too, could actually repeat these patterns of belief and faith and that there should be something rather touching about it.
Whether to let Klara keep that faith intact by the novel’s end, or to destroy it, was a live question throughout drafting. The choice he made shapes the book’s emotional conclusion more than any other single decision.
The actual composition followed a pattern Ishiguro had used before and described elsewhere through a samurai analogy: years of internal preparation, then a concentrated burst of writing. He deliberately did not read Ian McEwan’s Machines Like Me or Jeanette Winterson’s Frankissstein, both of which arrived while he was working and both of which dealt with artificial intelligence. The goal was to protect his own fictional world from another writer’s version of adjacent territory while the book was live.
To some extent as a writer you’re always in dialogue with your earlier books, in terms of the emotions and atmospherics.
The personal thread
A father’s machine, a mother’s survivalIshiguro’s father, Shizuo, spent his entire working life building a single machine: a storm surge predictor that eventually left the family garden shed for a permanent display in the Science Museum in London. Ishiguro has said he drew on his father’s particular combination of scientific precision and near-total ignorance about everything outside his specialty when constructing Klara’s character. Klara, an AF whose perceptions are acute within her designed domain and bewildered outside it, carries that portrait.
I wanted to focus on celebrating the things worth celebrating about human nature.
The dedication of the novel runs in a different direction. Klara and the Sun is dedicated to Ishiguro’s mother, Shizuko, who survived the Nagasaki bombing, told war stories throughout his childhood, and died in 2019 at ninety-two. The book’s central drama, what a mother will do rather than lose a child, was written in the years immediately following her death.
Klara is not modeled on any version of a threatening machine. Ishiguro was explicit about what he wanted her to embody, and the terms he reached for were not technological but ethical. His comments at Nashville PBS connect Klara directly to a quality he associates with the best of human character, not with AI.
I didn’t want her to be like an anti-AI figure at all. She’s not menacing. I wanted her to reflect something very pure and generous about human beings. [paraphrased from audio]
On what the book is wrestling with
The soul question, without the pomposityThe plot’s most unsettling element is a proposition made by Josie’s mother: that Klara, having studied Josie closely enough, could step into Josie’s place if Josie died, becoming a functional continuation of her daughter. The question this raises is not whether AI is dangerous. It is whether any person is truly irreplaceable, or whether personhood is a pattern that could, in principle, be reconstructed from sufficient data. Ishiguro framed this for The Guardian as a question he had not resolved.
What happens to things like love in an age when we are changing our views about the human individual and the individual’s uniqueness? There was this question — it always sounds very pompous — about the human soul: do we actually have one or not?
In WIRED, he came at the same problem from a different angle, dropping the philosophical framing entirely and restating it as the kind of question a novelist, rather than a philosopher, would actually pursue. The difference in register is worth noting: one version sounds like ethics, the other sounds like grief.
What the hell is a human being, what’s inside their mind and how irreplaceable is any one human? Those are the questions that, as a novelist, I’m interested in.
The novel’s treatment of religion sits alongside this question rather than answering it. Klara has a concrete, practical reason to revere the sun, since sunlight charges her, and that practical dependence develops into something that looks like faith. Ishiguro used that arc to examine what the religious instinct actually is, divorced from every institution that normally surrounds it.
It’s a kind of a religious thing. But I wanted to write about that instinct without any of the kind of the baggage of organized religion, without power, politics, and tribalism and wars that have occurred around organized religion. [paraphrased from audio]
Klara’s faith, stripped of all those accretions, reads as something innocent and perhaps doomed. The book does not decide whether that innocence is wisdom or delusion.
What he wants us to sit with
What remains when the data runs outJosie’s mother puts the novel’s sharpest question into action by commissioning a Klara-shaped replacement for her daughter. She is not presented as a villain. The novel asks readers to follow her reasoning far enough to feel its pull, and then to decide, without Ishiguro settling it, whether she is wrong. His comments to Nashville PBS locate what the book ultimately reaches toward: not a verdict on technology but a claim about what human beings cannot stop doing.
We’re not content just to feed ourselves and reproduce and then die. We’ve got to keep asking ourselves, have I made a contribution? [paraphrased from audio]
Klara, whose entire existence is organized around observing and serving a single person, ends the book in a yard, gradually running down. The image could be read as a comment on obsolescence, on exploitation, or on the nature of love. Ishiguro has been consistent that he wants no single reading to close the novel off. His description of what Klara is supposed to embody, offered at Nashville PBS and echoed elsewhere, treats her not as a cautionary figure but as a moral one.
I didn’t want her to be like an anti-AI figure at all. She’s not menacing. I wanted her to reflect something very pure and generous about human beings. [paraphrased from audio]
What that purity costs her, and whether the humans around her deserve it, is the question the book declines to answer on the reader’s behalf.