I knew then that whatever the answer to Rosa's question, we were about to get all the nourishment we would need for some time to come.

We only needed to stretch our feet a little to place them within its warmth.

But once we'd seated ourselves on the Striped Sofa, I saw there was a narrow gap running along the bottom of the grid – Manager must have raised it a little when checking everything was ready for us – and the Sun's light was making a bright rectangle that came up onto the platform and finished in a straight line just in front of us. The store, of course, had yet to open, and I thought the grid would be fully down. Then our turn finally came, and Rosa and I stepped into the window one morning, making sure not to knock over any of the display the way the pair before us had done the previous week. I never thought it was going to actually be an intrinsic problem in terms of how my readers would feel because my main character was artificial.The latest novel by Nobel laureate Kazuo Ishiguro ('The Remains of the Day,' 'Never Let Me Go'), 'Klara and the Sun' (Knopf) is a science-fiction story of artificial intelligence, manufactured companions, and the meaning of love. At some level, we're responding metaphorically because we think that it impinges, in some metaphorical relationship to our real lives, I suppose. We've put ourselves into some kind of space where we're relating to created beings. When we read books and you get weepy over the fate of some character, we're not weeping over a real person. Because after all, characters in books are artificial. It shouldn't be that surprising, really, though, that an artificial creature could actually solicit our sympathies as much as a human one. On sympathizing with Klara, despite her being an A.I. I wanted her to remain a very optimistic character who has a childlike faith in the presence of something good and protective in the world - even as she learns all these other things, darker things about the human world that she occupies. I wanted some of that childlike freshness and openness and naivety to survive all the way through the text in her. She's like a tabula rasa at the beginning, and she's quite childlike and very open. Klara was especially interesting for me because she doesn't bring any baggage with her.

On why he wanted his narrator to be an artificial person

Klara and the sun kazuo ishiguro