He hesitates on the word creature, it seems to me I felt the same way. “She’s been created specifically to help teenagers not get lonely. “I suppose she’s a creature that’s been created to help with human emotions,” Ishiguro says. She stands in the window of a toy store, yearning for the sun - she is solar-powered, after all, and the sun provides her “nourishment.” Her function is to be a friend to a young person, whichever young person happens to come in, choose her and buy her. In fact, you must not go anywhere near a young child with that story,’” he says. “She knew quite a lot about children’s literature … And she said, ‘No, no, that is not a suitable story for young children. “All of this crazy logic is allowed very naturally, so the moon could be a person that talks, or you can open the window and put up a ladder and walk to the moon.”īut Ishiguro’s daughter, Naomi, who is also a novelist, put a stop to that idea very early.

“I kind of like the world that is allowed to exist in these young children’s books,” he says. The attraction of that kind of children’s literature is that it allows for what he calls “foreshortened logic.”

We laugh as talks about how he stumbled over the word in a previous interview, this time getting it right. It started off as a children’s book, with Klara as a “dog or a doll” - where the character is anthropomorphized.

Ishiguro klara