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Before Klara has a family, she has a window.
From her place at the front of the store she watches the street. Cars. People hurrying past. And a man she calls Beggar Man, who sits out there with his dog. One evening the two of them are lying so still that Klara is sure they have died.
The next morning the Sun comes up over the street, and they are moving again.
Klara draws the only conclusion her evidence allows. The Sun did that. Nearly everything that follows in Klara and the Sun, from the sickroom to the barn to the scrapyard, grows out of that one morning at the window.
Klara and the Sun meaning starts with how you learn a person
Klara and the Sun is Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2021 novel, his first since he won the Nobel Prize in Literature. Klara is an Artificial Friend, or AF: a solar-powered robot companion sold to families as a friend for a child. She is chosen by Josie, a fourteen-year-old girl who is seriously ill.
Most people who go looking for the Klara and the Sun meaning arrive with the obvious question. Can a machine love? The book is interested in that. But it is quietly asking something harder, and it takes most of the novel to reach it.
Klara’s great talent is watching. She learns the world the way she learned it in the store: by noticing, remembering and drawing conclusions. When she moves into Josie’s house, she turns that talent on one person. How Josie moves. What Josie says when she is scared. What Josie’s silences mean. Klara is not being nosy. She is getting good at loving someone the only way she knows how.
Then the reader finds out that somebody else wants her to get good at it, for a completely different reason.
The portrait that is not a painting
Josie had an older sister, Sal. Sal died of the same illness. Josie’s sickness is linked to “lifting,” a genetic procedure that gives children an advantage and carries a real risk.
So the Mother has a plan. On a trip to a waterfall that Josie is too sick to join, she asks Klara to imitate Josie. Just for a moment. Talk like her. Move like her. It is one of the eeriest scenes in the book, and Klara does it well.
Later, in the city, the plan comes into the open. Josie has been sitting for a “portrait” with a man named Mr Capaldi. It is not a painting. It is an AF body made to look like Josie. If Josie dies, Klara is meant to live inside it, and continue her.
Capaldi’s case is calm and very modern. People want to believe there is something unreachable inside each of us, he argues, but science has looked, and there is nothing inside Josie that cannot be learned and carried on. The Mother half wants to believe him, because the alternative is losing a second daughter.
The Father hates all of it. And he asks Klara the question the whole book turns on. Does she believe in the human heart? Not the organ, he says. The heart in the poetic sense. The thing that makes a person that person.
Klara does not say no. She says the heart would be the hardest part to learn.
The only character who can actually answer Capaldi
Here is the thing that is easy to miss on a first read.
Everybody in this argument is guessing except Klara. Capaldi has a theory. The Father has a dread. The Mother has grief. Klara is the only one who has done the work. She has studied Josie for months, closer than anyone, with a patience no human has. If Capaldi is right, Klara is the proof. She is the experiment and the only qualified judge of whether it could succeed.
And look at who holds which belief. The humans in this novel are the ones who think a person is information: copy enough of it, and you have the person. The machine is the one who believes in something nobody can calculate. Klara prays, in her own way, to the Sun.
Ishiguro has turned the usual robot story inside out. We expect the machine to be the cold one who reduces everything to data. Here the adults have already done that. It is the robot who keeps insisting there is more.
If you read Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, you will recognise the territory: people made for a purpose, and other people deciding what, if anything, is inside them. But Klara and the Sun is not a rerun. That book is about what the made ones believe about themselves. This one hands the question to the made one, and lets her answer it.
What Klara asks the Sun for
Klara’s faith has a location. From Josie’s window, the Sun seems to set behind Mr McBain’s barn, across the field. So that is where Klara goes.
The first time, she makes a bargain. She has blamed the Cootings Machine, a polluting construction machine she saw outside the store, for blocking the Sun’s nourishment. She promises the Sun she will find it and destroy it, if the Sun will help Josie.
In the city, with the Father’s help, she does it. She gives up some of her own P-E-G Nine solution, a fluid inside her, to disable the machine, knowing it may reduce what she can do. It is a real sacrifice. And it barely matters. There are other machines, and Josie gets worse.
So Klara goes back to the barn. And this time the grounds of her plea have changed.
Before she goes, she asks Rick, the boy next door, whether his love for Josie is real. He says it is. At the barn she offers more of her fluid, all of it if needed. But the heart of her case is not a trade anymore. She reminds the Sun of two people she once watched find each other again on the street outside the store, the ones she called Coffee Cup Lady and Raincoat Man, and of how good that moment was. Rick and Josie love each other like that, she says.
Notice what Klara does not argue. She does not say Josie is clever, or gifted, or lifted, or rare. She does not list what is inside Josie. Her whole case for saving this girl is that this girl is loved.
Soon after, on a dark and stormy morning, Klara suddenly says the Sun is coming out. She hurries everyone to Josie’s room and will not let Melania, the housekeeper, close the blinds. Light pours across the bed. Josie begins to recover.
Did the Sun do it? The novel never says. When Rick later asks Klara whether what she did at the barn had anything to do with it, she will not tell him. You can read the recovery as a miracle or as weather and good timing. Ishiguro builds both doors and walks through neither.
Klara and the Sun ending explained: the wrong place
Josie grows up. She gets well, prepares for college, and drifts away from Rick, who goes his own way. When she leaves home, she says goodbye to Klara for good.
We find Klara at the end in the Yard, where old AFs are left for their “slow fade.” She can no longer move, and she is content to sort through her memories. The Manager from the store comes across her there and stops to talk.
That is when Klara gives her verdict on Capaldi. She thinks now that she would not have succeeded in continuing Josie. Not because she failed to learn Josie well enough. Because Capaldi searched for the special thing and was looking in the wrong place. In her words: “There was something very special, but it wasn’t inside Josie. It was inside those who loved her.”
Now put that sentence next to the barn. It is the same argument. Klara pleaded for Josie’s life on the grounds that Josie was loved, and she ends the book concluding that being loved was where Josie’s specialness lived all along. She knew the answer before she could say it. The barn scene is the ending, spoken early and in the language of prayer.
It is a gorgeous answer, and Ishiguro does not let it be a comfortable one. Because look at what happens to the people who loved Josie. Rick and Josie part. Josie leaves Klara behind. If what made Josie irreplaceable was held in the people who loved her, then it is held in hands that grow up, get busy and let go.
Saint-Exupéry’s fox made a cousin of this argument about a rose, in The Little Prince: she is unique because of the time you gave her. Ishiguro follows the same idea further, into the part where the giving stops.
A hundred sheep, minus one
There is a very old story that makes Klara’s argument in about four sentences.
Jesus told it. A shepherd has a hundred sheep and loses one. Do the maths and he is fine. He still has ninety-nine percent of the flock. Any sensible manager would write the loss off. The shepherd leaves the ninety-nine and goes looking for the one, and when he finds it he carries it home on his shoulders, glad.
Look at what the story never says about that sheep. Not that it was the best. Not that it was rare. Not that it had better wool. There is nothing inside that sheep that one of the other ninety-nine could not replace. On the sheep, Capaldi would have been right.
The worth of the one is not in the sheep. It is in the shepherd, which is exactly where Klara found Josie’s. And the story adds the one thing Klara’s world cannot supply: a love that does not drift off to college. The shepherd is the one who goes looking.
Back to the Yard
It is worth ending where Ishiguro does.
Klara is in a yard of old, discarded machines. Her abilities are fading. Josie is not coming back. And what she chooses to do with the time she has left is go through her memories of a girl who has long since moved on.
By Klara’s own logic, that means the special thing that was Josie has not disappeared. It is still somewhere. It is in a worn-out machine sitting in the Yard, turning her memories over, in the sun.
Questions people ask about Klara and the Sun
What is Klara and the Sun about?
Klara and the Sun is a 2021 novel by Kazuo Ishiguro, his first after winning the Nobel Prize in Literature. It is narrated by Klara, an Artificial Friend, a solar-powered robot companion, who is bought to keep company with Josie, a seriously ill teenage girl. Klara comes to believe the Sun has healing power and tries to win its help for Josie. Underneath, the novel asks whether a person could ever be copied, and what actually makes someone irreplaceable.
What does the ending of Klara and the Sun mean?
At the end of Klara and the Sun, Josie has recovered and left home, and Klara is in the Yard, where old AFs are left to fade. She tells her former store Manager that she could not have continued Josie, because Mr Capaldi looked for what was special about Josie in the wrong place. The special thing was not inside Josie but inside the people who loved her. The ending suggests a person’s irreplaceability is found in relationship, not in anything that could be measured or copied.
Did the Sun really heal Josie in Klara and the Sun?
Klara and the Sun never confirms it. Josie begins to recover after sunlight floods her room on a stormy morning, just after Klara has pleaded with the Sun at Mr McBain’s barn. When Rick later asks Klara whether her visits to the barn made a difference, she refuses to say. Kazuo Ishiguro leaves the recovery open, so it can be read as a miracle or as coincidence.
What is the portrait in Klara and the Sun?
In Klara and the Sun, the “portrait” Mr Capaldi is making is not a painting. It is an artificial body built to look like Josie. The Mother’s plan is that if Josie dies, as her older sister Sal did, Klara will live inside the portrait and continue Josie, using everything she has learned by studying her. Josie’s father is strongly against the plan.
What does “lifted” mean in Klara and the Sun?
In Klara and the Sun, being “lifted” means a child has had a genetic procedure to enhance their abilities. Lifted children get access to better education and opportunities, but the procedure carries a risk of serious illness. Josie is lifted and falls ill; her sister Sal died. Rick, Josie’s neighbour, was not lifted, which limits his future.
Your turn
Do you think the Sun healed Josie, or did Klara just happen to be right about the weather? And here is the harder one: if Josie had died, could Klara have continued her? Tell me where you land in the comments.
If you want to share this
In Klara and the Sun, the humans think a person is just data you can copy. The robot is the only one who believes there is something more. Ishiguro flipped the whole robot story.
Klara’s plea at the barn and her conclusion in the Yard are the same argument. She never says Josie deserves to live because she is special. She says Josie is loved. By the last page, she thinks that was the special thing all along.
Capaldi was looking for what made Josie irreplaceable inside Josie. Klara says he was looking in the wrong place. It was in the people who loved her.
