Klara and the Sun, a book launched in March 2021, is the first book Kazuo Ishiguro published after he got the 2017 Nobel Prize in Literature. It’s a book confirming that the Japanese-born British author is indeed the writer who – as the Swedish Academy nomination reads – in novels of great emotional force, has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world.

Ishiguro started his creative career as a songwriter. I can’t help thinking about this while reading Klara and the Sun. The stint into human behaviour is like a beautiful weaving between lines that is also so gently poeticised. One cannot ignore the subtext that lyricists master providing they cannot afford too much wording given their short artistic form. Ishiguro himself once confessed that one of the key things he learnt writing lyrics for songs was that the meaning had to be oblique and sometimes had to be read between lines. He said that songwriting had an enormous influence on his fiction because with an intimate, confiding, first-person song, the meaning must not be self-sufficient on the page.

Indeed, I read Klara and the Sun and I hear a song. It’s a beautiful book, as beautiful as only music can be. The author recently revealed he draws on his songwriting past when writing books about future. ”Many of the things I do, still to this day as a writer, as a novelist, I think it has its foundations in what I discovered and the kind of place that I arrived at as a writer of songs.” Ishiguro said.

After reading the Remains of the Day, I had a bitter aftertaste of sadness. I questioned the obedience of the butler, the pride he took in his loyalty ignoring his own emotional decay. His decision to place work first and above love and family really disgusted me. I even started having an unconscious bias towards Ishiguro’s fellow citizens suspecting they could all do the same with a parent deemed unfit for work as in the case of the butler’s father. Although I know one shouldn’t make a general statement by inferring from specific cases, the way the English butler treated his father still ignites my indignation.

Then, I read Ishiguro’s Buried Giant and his Never Let Me Go. That’s when I got a different feeling. A feeling of curiosity about an author who could be mastering the premonition gift and could suggest an answer to questions about our future. Klara and the Sun, topping up the trilogy formed with the two books above is indeed suggesting answers as to whether AI can replace human beings. As a matter of fact, Ishiguro once confessed he is writing the same book over and over again. Klara and the Sun, a dystopian science fiction story that takes place in the near future is indeed a continuation of the first two mentioned above. But it’s a tender and touching revelation that although the machines are to replace us to some extent, they might not be as dangerous and unfriendly as we suspect. The book is in a way a positive view over Artificial Intelligence.

Klara, who narrates Kazuo Ishiguro’s remarkable novel, is an Artificial Friend, a robot designed to be a companion to a young girl, Josie. Klara is an unusual narrator for most writers, but, at the same time, she is a typical Ishiguro’s narrator who helped the author look at the modern world through the eyes of an android exploring love and loyalty. Josie was sick and Klara was expected to learn to be Josie and replace her in case she died.

I thought of the Little Prince’s rose and about beauty that is always in the eyes of the beholder when reading the last pages of the book. Klara was able to learn to become Josie but understood there is something special about her human friend, and that wasn’t inside that friend, that she couldn’t replicate. That special something was the affection that the human being was surrounded with – love coming from family and friends – that couldn’t be cloned. That was what a machine couldn’t learn. That was the answer the author found for all of us wondering.

Written before the pandemic, the book surprisingly and as a magic coincidence reflects the times we transcend now. The narrative of Klara and the Sun presents two different types of love: one that is selfish, fearful, excessive and one that is generous and kind. Both The Buried Giant and Never Let Me Go were dark allegories that explored the technological development threats. Klara and the Sun brings a positive feeling of reassurance that we shall all be fine – as the main character is learning about human nature we realise it cannot make an exact copy of it. Although it takes us to some dark places on the introspection journey and we see the divided society paradigm persisting in the near future, with AI contributing to widening the gap between people, the book is a precious masterpiece presenting humanity as a beautiful and fragile construction, that cannot be cloned and replicated, due to its complexity and beauty.

“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.” said Kazuo Ishiguro in a recent interview. It looks like the dialogue worked out well and we all got some long overdue answers.