Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Never Let Me Go has several different directions: It looks backward, forward, and sideways. The setting is Hailsham, an academy strongly flavored by the British and postcolonial tradition of boarding school literature (“We loved our sports pavilion”). The novel flits past the canon of “school stories” like Tom Brown’s Schooldays, circles the Victorian classics of schooling (Jane Eyre, David Copperfield), and eventually settles on the wistful pastoralism undercut by dread that defines certain novels of patrician childhood: The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, The Go-Between.

The plot, however, is dystopian. The residents of Hailsham are being bred for their organs. Such dystopias always gesture toward the future, because they imagine an alternate version of an actual past (for his part, Ishiguro mentions things like cassette tapes). Things that have not happened yet could always happen at some other time. Experimenting with the laws of the world, and looking toward how those laws might change one day, is a sci-fi gesture. The organ-farming of Never Let Me Go is a very similar intervention to the breeding program written by Margaret Atwood into the familiar world of The Handmaid’s Tale.

But by referring to a deep tradition of British childhood writing, Ishiguro blends his futurism with a whole other canon. He combines two full literary genres to create a third, which we can call Kazuo Ishiguro and nothing else. This is what enables him to look sideways in his fiction: He can describe things about our world that nobody else can. In Never Let Me Go, that thing, I think, is the crushing weight of circumstance on our lives. The place in space, history, and social hierarchy that we occupy is an accident of birth and a cage, Ishiguro shows—one that our humanity resists.

Ishiguro has won the 2017 Nobel Prize for Literature. And with a prize like that comes some serious biographical thinking. There will be articles in the coming days and weeks that will weigh him up like meat on a deli scale, assessing who he is and what he means for the literary culture of our time.

Like the characters of Never Let Me Go, Ishiguro’s public identity has been crushed inside circumstance. The facts of his life, to many of his critics, are markedly racial. Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki in 1954. His family moved to England for his father’s job when he was five. In his early career, Ishiguro wrote what he has called “Japanese books, or at least books set in Japan with Japanese characters.” These include An Artist of the Floating World (1986), which follows a painter in post-war Japan recollecting his life, and A Pale View of the Hills (1982), also a novel of memory, in which a mother in England remembers a dead daughter to her living daughter, telling stories from the country she used to live in.