Kazuo Ishiguro is a contemporary novelist very worthy of the Nobel Prize in Literature that he was awarded in 2017. Born in Japan and raised in Great Britain, Ishiguro differs from the Modernist and late Twentieth Century novelists who preceded him. Each of the Modernists developed a distinctive style that they applied to whatever subject matter they were dealing with. So a reader can recognize Hemingway for his short and aphoristic sentences, Faulkner for his long and complex sentences, Joyce for the allusive style of his masterpiece, “Ulysses”, and Mann for his richly descriptive style. That is different from Updike and Roth, both of whom wrote straightforwardly even if their subject matter was gauche. For his part, Ishiguro crafts a different style for each of his novels. He makes it seem that arriving at the style in which a novel will be written is part of the chore of writing because the style sets up the kind of world which he is creating. So “Never Let Me Go” sounded like a research report; “The Buried Giant” sounded like a legend; and “An Artist of the Floating World” sounded like a series of apologies, everyone deferential in what is supposed to be the Japanese manner. The subject matter of those three novels, however, was the same. They were about the impact on people’s lives of the loss of or never having had a memory of pivotal events. The clones in “Never Let Me Go” did not know their ancestry and never found out, however much the reader can catch on fairly early that they were descended from dogs. The people in “The Buried Giant” seem to forget things after a few days, and the Japanese in “An Artist of the Floating World” suppress their memories of what they did during the Second World War. Moreover, all three novels explore how and why it is that people are so deferential to those around them. They are very annoying even if some of the characters, such as the dog-clones, are quite endearing.