Description ■ The human girl Josie and Klara, the artificial intelligence robot who becomes her companion — a heartbreaking story of sorrow, love, and selfless devotion woven by two beings The novel is set in a near-future America. AI manufacturing technology and genetic engineering have advanced, and society has restructured its class system around these scientific developments. Children's intelligence is genetically "enhanced," and they receive remote education at home instead of attending school. Artificial intelligence robots called AFs (Artificial Friends) are manufactured and sold as companions for these children. Of course, not all members of society enjoy these benefits — those without sufficient wealth or status, or those who refuse to belong to the system and instead live in separate communities, are excluded from the benefits of this technology. The protagonist of the story is Klara, a girl-model AF. Today, as always, Klara waits in the shop window of an AF store for the child who will take her home. Klara is not the newest model just released, but she has something very special about her: an unusually keen interest in observing humans and learning their emotions and ways of communicating. Sitting in the store window, Klara reads the emotions of passersby, imagining herself in their place. But the other AFs show little interest in such things. One day, as Klara waits for her fated meeting with the child who will take her home, a girl approaches. Her name is Josie, and her uneven gait and thin frame make it clear at a glance that something is wrong with her health. Klara and Josie talk for a while, and the two are drawn to each other. Josie firmly promises to come back for Klara, and Klara, in turn, refuses the interest of other children, waiting only for the day Josie will take her home. ■ Kazuo Ishiguro's finest work, bridging Never Let Me Go and The Remains of the Day In a message to Korean readers, Kazuo Ishiguro revealed that this book would serve as a bridge between his two most acclaimed works, The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go. This is likely because Never Let Me Go deals with the science of human genetic cloning, while The Remains of the Day captures the absurdity and sorrow of the world and human relationships through Ishiguro's signature imperfect first-person narration. Ishiguro is not a writer who tackles a new theme with every book; rather, he writes and rewrites the themes that concern him most, going deeper each time. In this sense, Klara and the Sun sits squarely within the trajectory of his career, distilling its essence in the simplest yet deepest form. After its publication, major Western media outlets grouped this novel together with Never Let Me Go and The Buried Giant as a kind of trilogy, given that all three feature an "other" — a non-human protagonist — at their center. Having moved to England at the age of five and lived there ever since, Ishiguro has long been preoccupied with what it means to be an "outsider" or an "other," and his body of work to date contains quiet questions that shake the foundations of a world taken for granted, all seen through the ambivalent and precarious gaze of the outsider. This exploration of otherness and its perspective was already a shared sensibility among the new writers who emerged in British literature in the 1980s. The renowned British literary magazine Granta selects, once every decade, twenty young writers who will shape the future of British literature. The 1983 list included Kazuo Ishiguro, Salman Rushdie, Julian Barnes, Ian McEwan, Martin Amis, and William Boyd, among others — writers who would go on to become the golden generation of contemporary British literature over the following forty years. Many from this generation went on to win the Booker Prize, and even the Nobel Prize in Literature. Among them, the writer who has achieved perhaps the greatest literary accomplishment is none other than Kazuo Ishiguro, winner of the 2017 Nobel Prize. ■ If this is not love, then what is? Questions of humanity and its uniqueness, posed through an allegorical science fiction tale This book was born from Ishiguro's wish to try his hand at writing a children's story. He conceived of a tale about a moving, talking toy waiting for the little girl who would take it home, and shared the outline with his daughter, Naomi Ishiguro (herself now a novelist). But his daughter, who has long served as an editor of sorts for her father's novels, gave a firm and objective response: telling this story to children could be traumatic. And so Ishiguro began writing it not as a children's book but as a novel for adults, finishing it just as the pandemic began to sweep the world. The completed novel, Klara and the Sun, is an allegorical science fiction tale that retains the shape of its original motif. The story is spare, and as always, there are deep spaces between the quiet prose and dialogue; reading between those lines brings forth a sorrow and lingering resonance that reaches deep into the heart. From the moment two fragile beings who desperately need each other happen to meet, sorrow is already foretold, and readers are drawn irresistibly through the process by which that sad premonition comes to pass, unable to look away until the very last page. This is the power of the fable, wielded by a master who understands that power better than anyone. Kazuo Ishiguro is also known as a writer who moves fluidly across genres. Through works such as the dystopian science fiction of Never Let Me Go, the historical novel The Remains of the Day, the Arthurian fantasy The Buried Giant, and the mystery When We Were Orphans, he has proven himself a master at freely summoning whatever form best suits the theme he wishes to explore. Klara and the Sun, an allegorical work of science fiction, may or may not read as dystopian, depending on the reader. Rather than explaining in detail the near-future setting encompassing big data, genetic engineering, artificial intelligence, and the inequality that results from their realization, Ishiguro constructs the novel through the first-person perspective of Klara, whose imperfect cognitive framework gradually develops over the course of the story — and along with it, the reader's own understanding of the background deepens in a sophisticated, gradual way. Through the process of Klara's unwavering devotion to humans — despite not being human herself — we come to reflect on what it truly means to be human, and what makes each individual person unique. How does the way a non-human being loves a human differ from the way humans love one another? If such utter devotion is not love, then what is? This is the theme of Klara and the Sun, the first new work published by the author since winning the Nobel Prize in Literature. At a time when the whole world suffers from disease, discrimination, and conflict, it is time to confront this question.