The butler Stevens, who served Lord Darlington without fear or reproach, tells how his sense of duty developed and how he learned to put the right people in the right places—demonstrating true samurai-like restraint within the framework of his service code.
In 1989, for “The Remains of the Day,” Ishiguro received the Booker Prize unanimously (and it was perhaps the only decision by the Booker committee in the entire history of the award that caused no protests). The film adaptation of the same name by James Ivory, starring Anthony Hopkins, enjoyed great success. A. Boris Akunin wrote something like a remake of “The Remains of the Day” — the novel “Coronation.”