Fourteen years ago, I interviewed Kazuo Ishiguro in his house in Golders Green. Here we are again. Not much has changed. I’ve aged, he hasn’t; there’s a home cinema in the house; and Naomi, his daughter, is thinking about Oxbridge rather than refining her toddling skills. Other than that, here’s Ish, still surrounded by street cherry blossom, still writing, still dwelling contentedly in the cosmopolitan suburbia of northwest London. “We have,” he says, “been very happy here.”

If you like your writers to be crushed by existential dread, mean-spirited, hard-drinking, man- or womanising, hanging out in low dives or haranguing the masses from high pulpits, then Ish is most definitely not your man. Ish does focused serenity and earnest calm. In manner he is exact, almost fussy, and in conversation analytically precise, almost pedantic. In his work, of course, he is a writer of cool brilliance. If I had to apply one word to Ish, it would be “sorted”, with all its vernacular overtones of invulnerability, autonomy and completion.

Yet he is unpredictable. Fourteen years ago, I was interviewing him about The Unconsoled, his astonishing, surreal fourth novel, which came as a shock after the solidish realism of A Pale View of Hills, An Artist of the Floating World and The Remains of the Day. This time it’s a collection of long short stories, Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall. Short stories may not be a shock, exactly, but they are, apparently, commercially unwise. “The publishers said that the market for a collection of short stories is less than a quarter of that for a novel. People don’t seem to like the effort of getting into a new world every few pages. I’m not worried about the sales, I’ve had more sales than I could ever have wished for. I just hope it gets to people who enjoy it.”

His last two novels, When We Were Orphans and Never Let Me Go, both sold 1m worldwide. Conscientiously, he promoted them through the commonplace but nonetheless bizarre mechanism of the book tour — a gruelling 18 months to two years of more or less identical interviews in an endless succession of countries. He’s not doing that this time — it is, he says, a “business decision”. If short stories don’t sell, he’s not losing so much of his writing time in hotels.

Importantly, though, his book tours have had a stylistic impact. “You spend your time,” he says, “being grilled by a lot of pretty insightful people who point things out about your style, your recurring themes, the ways you should and shouldn’t be writing. This — and the proliferation of writing schools — is having a huge impact on writing.” There is, in his imagination, something called “the Danish journalist effect”. Basically, tours make him supersensitive to the fact that he will often be read in translation, or by readers for whom English is a second or third language. “It means I mustn’t make assumptions based on the people I know in London, and I’ve always been aware that my prose must make sense in translation. It’s a good thing and a bad thing. It's a habit I’ve got into.”

So his prose works without the fireworks of contemporaries such as Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie, and his stories are set not in some exact locality, but rather in Ishland, which has some similarities to real places, but always feels somehow separate. One of his new stories, for example, is set in Venice, but the place itself is hardly described. “I kind of assumed a lot of people know what Venice looks like. We live in an age when visual images are everywhere, and there was no need for me to have half a paragraph on the sun shining on the roof of the Salute. People watch these TV programmes about Venice. These are no longer exotic places, they are almost local, part of where we all live.”

This is an aspect of his predicament — that of the contemporary British writer. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, he points out, British writers could be as provincial as they liked. Britain — London especially — was the centre of the world. The characters, textures and culture of the place had global significance. Writers could take it for granted that foreign readers would want to know how British people lived, loved and died. Now, though, only America can afford to be provincial. “They can write about, say, two boys growing up in a small town who go to New York and have a fierce rivalry. To some extent, you might say that’s inward-looking, but we feel it’s our business to know about America. They can afford to be provincial because it piggy-backs on American culture. I can’t just write a book about British culture and assume people should be interested. How British society functions is not a centrally profound theme just because of our place in the world now.”

Nocturnes has, in fact, an American inspiration. It emerged from plans Ish had for a novel about the milieu of Broadway music. “It wasn’t just about that kind of music, I wanted something about the atmosphere, the bittersweet, romantic atmosphere of jazz songs. Oddly enough, that’s when I came across the title Never Let Me Go. It was the working title for this other novel — though it became the title for something else entirely. I didn’t write it in the end. It ended up as this book.”

He’s always abandoning things. He only produces a book roughly once every five years, not because he’s a slow writer, but because he’s a compulsive abandoner. The further curious point is that Nocturnes does not consist of short stories for some strictly organic reason. Rather, it is an unresolved novel. “When you are writing a novel, you have three or four different facets, and you have to think of these things discretely, even if they involve the same batch of characters. I’m used to the idea of developing different stories and figuring out how they fit together.” Yet fitting them together is, in a way, an arbitrary act. “Perhaps it isn’t as necessary as novelists sometimes think it is.”

Life, after all, doesn’t fit together. Furthermore, Ish points out that many books sold as novels are, in fact, more like short-story collections. “There are quite a few books I’ve come across recently where the different elements are kept apart, though they are still called novels. David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas and Ghostwritten are marketed as novels, but are basically collections of short stories. Trainspotting is like that, and, further back, there was Naipaul’s In a Free State and Julian Barnes’s A History of the World in 10½ Chapters. Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 is basically five distinct novels. And Anna Karenina is two completely distinct novels.” So, lurking in the unity of novels is, in fact, the plurality of short stories. It’s a typically carefully thought out Ish insight.

That said, the unity of Nocturnes is plain. It is a unity of tone — regretful, memory-laden and full of an astonishing quality that is made to seem, somehow, routine. There is the woman who claims to be a great cellist, and who teaches and discusses the instrument with fabulous insight, but who . . . no, I won’t spoil it. And there is one story set in a Beverly Hills hotel specially designed for people who have just had plastic surgery. “I’ve stayed in one. It was very dark, you couldn’t read the menus.” The whole thing is tied together by a mood of life lived at an unresolved moment. “I wanted the stories all to fall in that time between the fall of the Berlin Wall and 9/11. Not that any of these things are particularly carried in the book, but I wanted them all to have that setting. There was a sixth story, but I left it out because it was set in the 1950s. I didn’t want them set in the contemporary world, but perhaps one that wasn’t conscious of things like the clash of civilisations.

“I look back to that time now and I almost get nostalgic about it. There was a real smugness, and you can see a lot of the seeds of things that didn’t go so well. But it was a time of great optimism — the end of history and so on. I’m not making a deep comment about that, but it did produce things like eastern Europeans who were still unfamiliar with a western lifestyle and slightly awkward.”

Explore Books

• Book Extracts

• Book Reviews

• Books Group

• Audio Books

Times Recommends

• The 100 Best Books of the Decade
• The Times picks the 50 best paperbacks of 2009
• The conversation: James Ellroy