Kazuo Ishiguro: some of my book titles have come from cookery books

‘This probably isn’t acceptable,’ explains Kazuo Ishiguro to journalist Samira Ahmed during his appearance at the Southbank Centre in March 2024.

‘But for 30 or 40 years, my wife and I have collected titles. I’m sorry to admit this, but we have this thing where we open a book at random, it could be a cookery book, you stick your finger in without looking, and then look to see what phrase you’re pointing at. You do this about 30 times and you come up with about five titles’.

The surprising admission prompted Ahmed to quip, ‘was The Remains of the Day, originally the soup of the day?’. Ishiguro was talking to Ahmed as part of a special event in our Queen Elizabeth Hall to mark the publication of The Summer We Crossed Europe in the Rain: Lyrics for Stacey Kent, which also saw a performance by the jazz-singer, Kent.

You can watch Ishiguro’s remarkable admission in this clip from the evening, which also includes the writer explaining how his approach has left him with ‘a list of great titles that don’t have works to go with them,’ and confessing to occasionally tweaking scenes within his books so that they were more fitting to a potential title he really wanted to use.

The author also expands on the title Never Let Me Go reflecting his fascination of ‘working within that little area of understanding of why humans really, desperately want a particular thing, but at the same time they understand it’s impossible’.

‘Good titles have to have a double function. One is a shop window function, and the other is that when a person is reading the book, the title helps something – a theme, an atmosphere or an emotion – focus and fall into place’.

Kazuo Ishiguro