It’s the birthday of Sir Kazuo Ishiguro (b. 1954), who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2017 (back when they were still awarding those) and who is best known for the novel The Remains of the Day (1989), narrated by the quintessential English butler, Stevens, as he looks back on his life and his service under a master who had been a Nazi sympathizer.

Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki, but when he was five, his father, a world-class oceanographer , moved the family to England in order to do secret research for the National Institute for Oceanography. When Ishiguro was about 10, he discovered Sherlock Holmes and began to emulate the stories, saying odd things like, “Pray, be seated,” which everyone figured was because he was Japanese. He grew up with strong memories of his home in Nagasaki and always expected to return there, but didn’t return for 30 years. Ishiguro got his B.A. in English and philosophy at the University of Kent in 1978 and his M.A. in creative writing at the University of East Anglia in 1980, and then worked as a social worker at a homeless charity.

Ishiguro broke onto the literary scene with three stories that appeared in Introduction 7: Stories by New Writers (1981). His first novel, A Pale View of the Hills (1982), is about a Japanese widow living in England dealing with her memories of postwar Nagasaki and the recent suicide of her daughter. His next novel, An Artist of the Floating World (1986), also features a Japanese protagonist remembering WWII, this one struggling with his involvement in the imperialist war effort. (In 1986, Ishiguro also married Lorna MacDougall; they have a daughter.) Then came The Remains of the Day, which won the Booker Prize and made Ishiguro’s reputation internationally.

After this, Ishiguro began writing less conventional novels, including his highly controversial novel The Unconsoled (1995), about a concert pianist struggling to meet his obligations before a performance in a European city. (By “controversial” I mean that some people thought the novel was just awful. The critic James Wood said that it “invented its own category of badness.”) When We Were Orphans (2000) was Ishiguro’s experiment in crime/detective fiction; it’s about an English detective trying to solve the case of his own parents’ disappearance years ago and also garnered some iffy reviews. Never Let Me Go (2005) is a chilling dystopian novel about clones created solely to be organ donors, and The Buried Giant (2015) is an “existential fantasy” inspired by Arthurian legend.

Ishiguro was completely shocked when he learned he’d won the Nobel Prize and said at a press conference, “If I had even a suspicion, I would have washed my hair this morning.”

Wash your hair, or not, this fine chilly Thursday and stay scrupulously honest to the data.