After learning that Japan was using robots to comfort legions of lonely, older people, novelist Kazuo Ishiguro was alternately "horrified and fascinated," he says.
The news inspired him to write his newest novel, "Klara and the Sun" (Knopf, $28).
"In Japan, comfort robots are quite popular for elderly people. They are starting to be advertised in England, too. I don't know if it will go with the British character," Ishiguro said in an interview from his home in London.
The author, who was born in Nagasaki, Japan, was 5 when his family moved to England. Best known for "The Remains of the Day," Ishiguro received the Nobel Prize for literature in 2017.
His latest book is an intense meditation on the meaning of humanity and technology's limits. He began writing "Klara and the Sun" in 2014, he said, so any parallels readers find to the COVID-19 pandemic are purely coincidental.
Klara is an artificial friend that Josie's mother purchases to prevent her teen-age daughter from being lonely. Klara narrates the story, and her keen observational skills offer a master class in understanding human nature.
One of the novel's key questions, Ishiguro said, is, "What are we prepared to accept as human beings?"
As an example of how technology changes our lives, he noted that online dating is widely accepted now. But when he was growing up, "that was looked upon as creepy."
