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Ishiguro, who was born in Nagasaki, lived in England for almost 30 years before he made his first trip back to to Japan in 1989. He reportedly wasn’t aware of his home town’s significance as the target of a US atomic bomb in August 1945 until reading about it in a British textbook.

Despite this detachment from his country of birth, Japan features prominently in Ishiguro’s first novel, A Pale View of Hills, which is set in Nagasaki and England.

His second novel, An Artist of the Floating World, centres on Masuji Ono, a once respected artist who, in postwar Japan, must come to terms with his support for the country’s doomed militarist adventurism during the first half of the 20th century.

Britain’s selective memory regarding its imperial past also applies to Japan, Ishiguro said in a 2015 interview with the Asian American Writers’ Workshop.

“In Japan – and I’m very distant from Japan, so I’m looking at this from a great distance – but there has always been this conflict with China and Southeast Asia about the history of the second world war,” he said.

“The Japanese have decided to forget that they were aggressors and all the things that the Japanese imperial army did in China and south Asia in those years.”