#sparkchamber 110821 — Kazuo Ishiguro
On this beautiful November 8 day in 2021, #sparkchamber sings a warm and rousing happy birthday song to British novelist, screenwriter, musician, and short-story writer, Sir Kazuo Ishiguro, born in Nagasaki, Japan on this day in 1954.
Ishiguro moved to Britain with his parents in 1960, and is now one of the most celebrated contemporary fiction authors writing in English. Known especially for his 1989 novel The Remains of the Day [adapted for film release in 1993], and Never Let Me Go, which Time magazine called the best novel of 2005 [adapted for film release in 2010]. Ishiguro was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2017, and was knighted by Queen Elizabeth a year later.
After relocating to the U.K as a five-year-old, Ishiguro did not visit Japan for nearly 30 years — something that became elemental to his writing process. As he explains in an interview with fellow-Japanese-born Nobel-Prizewinning author Kenzaburo Oe, though Ishiguro’s first two novels take place in Japan, the Japanese settings were imaginary: “The Japan that exists in that book is very much my own personal, imaginary Japan. This may have a lot to do with my personal history. When my family moved from Nagasaki to England, it was originally intended to be only a temporary stay, perhaps one year or maybe two years. And so as a small child I was taken away from people I knew, like my grandparents and my friends. And I was led to expect that I would return to Japan. But the family kept extending the stay. All the way through my childhood I couldn’t forget Japan, because I had to prepare myself for returning to it.
So I grew up with a very strong image in my head of this other country, a very important other country to which I had a strong emotional tie. My parents tried to continue some sort of education for me that would prepare me for returning to Japan. So I received various books and magazines, these sorts of things. Of course, I didn’t know Japan … but in England I was all the time building up this picture in my head of an imaginary Japan.
And I think when I reached the age of perhaps twenty--three or twenty-four I realized that this Japan, which was very precious to me, actually existed only in my own imagination, partly because the real Japan had changed greatly between 1960 and later on. I realized that it was a place of my own childhood, and I could never return to this particular Japan. And so I think one of the real reasons why I turned to writing novels was because I wished to re-create this Japan — put together all these memories and all these imaginary ideas I had about this landscape that I called Japan. I wanted to make it safe, preserve it in a book before it faded away from my memory altogether. So when I wrote, say, An Artist of the Floating World, I wasn’t terribly interested in researching history books. I very much wanted to put down on paper this particular idea of Japan that I had in my own mind, and in a way, I didn’t really care if my fictional world didn’t correspond to a historical reality. I very much feel that as a writer of fiction that is what I’m supposed to do: I’m supposed to invent my own world, rather than copying things from the surface of reality.”
The leap to other settings for his novels — a reminiscence on inter-war Oxford for Remains of the Day, a dystopic version of late 1990’s England in Never Let Me Go — follows that same creation-of-an-imagined-world framework. “My very lack of authority and lack of knowledge about Japan, I think, forced me into a position of using my imagination, and also of thinking of myself as a kind of homeless writer. I had no obvious social role, because I wasn’t a very English Englishman, and I wasn’t a very Japanese Japanese either. And so I had no clear role, no society or country to speak for or write about. Nobody’s history seemed to be my history. And I think this did push me necessarily into trying to write in an international way. What I started to do was to use history. I would search through history books for information in the way that a film director might search for locations for a script he has already written. I would look for moments in history that would best suit my purposes or what I wanted to write about. I was conscious that I wasn’t so interested in the history per se, that I was using British history or Japanese history to illustrate something that was preoccupying me. I think this made me a kind of writer who didn’t actually belong. I didn’t have a strong emotional tie with either Japanese history or British history, so I could just use them to serve my own personal purposes.”
In awarding the Nobel Prize to Kazuo Ishiguro in 2017, the Swedish Academy described him as a writer who, “in novels of great emotional force, has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world.” We are grateful to that work, and wish him a joyful, grounded, delightful birthday. And many more.
1.] Where do ideas come from?
I really have to think of the things fiction can do that film can’t, and play to the strengths of the novel. With a novel you can get right inside somebody’s head.
2.] What is the itch you are scratching?
As a writer, I’m more interested in what people tell themselves happened rather than what actually happened.
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I tend to be attracted to pre-war and postwar settings because I’m interested in this business of values and ideals being tested, and people having to face up to the notion that their ideals weren’t quite what they thought they were before the test came.
3.] Early bird or night owl? Tortoise or hare?
The evening’s the best part of the day. You’ve done your day’s work. Now you can put your feet up and enjoy it. — from The Remains of the Day
4.] How do you know when you are done?
We all complete. Maybe none of us really understand what we’ve lived through, or feel we’ve had enough time. — from Never Let Me Go