Kazuo Ishiguro Explores Technology, Loneliness, and Love in His New Novel ‘Klara and the Sun’

On March 2nd, Kazuo Ishiguro released his long-awaited new book Klara and the Sun, which is his first novel since winning the Nobel Prize in literature in 2017. The story follows Klara, an Artificial Friend (AF) designed to provide companionship to a lonely child.  

Klara and the Sun is set in an unspecified place and time–– an alternate, futuristic reality where robots can be programmed to empathize and children can be genetically altered (“lifted”) to increase their intelligence. Ishiguro writes in characteristically restrained and calm language, which does not falter even in the most peculiar or disturbing moments in the plot. 

Readers experience the narrative from Klara’s perspective. Although her personality is algorithmic, she is strikingly perceptive and emotional. In the beginning, we watch her process the world from a store window. She analyzes human activity with a sense of tenderness, and displays an inexplicable emotional intuition, and a particular curiosity about human loneliness. 

Eventually, she meets Josie, a 14-year-old girl who has been “lifted” and consequently suffers from the physical complications of the procedure and the emotional ache of social isolation. They form a connection, and Josie takes Klara home as her personal AF. The story tracks their developing companionship and Klara’s effort to reverse Josie’s decline. Their relationship provokes difficult questions–– Is Klara a friend or a servant? Or just one of Josie’s possessions? Can our relationship with technology expand beyond utility to include emotion? And even love? Can these relationships genuinely combat loneliness? 

Ishiguro’s story takes its place in the timeworn debate about the emotional capacity of artificial intelligence machines. Klara and the Sun joins recent narratives like Spike Jonze’s film Her and Ian McEwan’s novel Machines Like Me, which all question the types of relationships we can have with technology in an age where AI is developing rapidly and “affective computing” (which programs human emotional analysis into robots and computers) is a growing field. 

Ishiguro’s novel focuses on the questions of love and loneliness. He examines how machines, like Klara, have the potential to love, and he even suggests that Klara’s love endures where human love might falter. The result is disorienting. At times, we seem to learn more about our own emotional barriers, than those of artificial machines. 

Klara and The Sun has arrived at a pivotal time in humanity’s relationship with technology. As we are separated by social distancing regulations, most of our friendships have become entirely virtual. Conversations are facilitated through screens or over the phone, our real human bodies kept separate. The change has affected children too, who have spent the year learning online, meeting their teachers over video-chat, and kept socially distant from friends who they cannot play with. 

Ishiguro’s tale seems distant and dystopian, but it grapples with an emotional condition that is critically relevant to the current moment: loneliness. Despite the bleak reality it presents, there is a thread of hope in the text–– a vision, embodied by Klara, of technology as a tool for connection and empathy, rather than separation. As much as the COVID-19 social restrictions have facilitated isolation, the situation has also nurtured this vision, and taught people of all ages how to connect, how to reach out, and how to support each other in unconventional and adaptive ways.