Interview with Kazuo Ishiguro, by Brian Schaeffer and Cynthia Huang, translator: Hu Yue, edition: Shanghai Translation Publishing House, January 2021
The original author | Cynthia Huang
Excerpt from | Zhang Jin
Kazuo Ishiguro's first two novels were set in Japan, the third was set in Britain, the fourth was set in an unknown european country, and the latest set in London and Shanghai. Critics delve into these contexts and corresponding historical contexts to unearth their symbolic or metaphorical meanings and to find the author's philosophical perspective. Kazuo Ishiguro himself prefers to see his work as an expression of the cosmopolitan or universal nature of the human experience, a goal he mentions when explaining his vision or purpose as a writer.
Kazuo Ishiguro was a Japanese-British novelist. In 1989, he won the "Booker Prize" and was called "three heroes of British literary immigrants" along with Naipaul and Rushdie. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2017.
"Readers should not read novels primarily to understand historical facts"
Cynthia Wong: In 1989, you told Kenzaburo Oe, "I don't really care if my fictional world fits into historical reality. I felt strongly that this was what I, a writer of fictional art, should do: I should create my own world, not copy what reality was.
How do you now view the relationship between historical reality and fiction writing, for example, in the case of Shanghai and Japan in fiction?
Kazuo Ishiguro: I don't mean that historians may have already settled on the facts of a certain period of history or the situation at that time, and that novelists are not responsible for it. What I want to emphasize is that those are not the primary concerns of novelists. I would say that readers should not read novels primarily to understand historical facts. I'm borrowing history; I mean, I don't want me to abuse history, but maybe I do it occasionally.
Huang: What are the main differences between the works of novelists and the works of historians?
Ishiguro: Historians have had to deal with historical materials in a rigorous way. They must present the facts, they must defend the history they understand with academic rigor. I have no obligation to do so. I can think of history as the place where the story takes place. I think I usually do that. I choose a certain period of time in history because I feel it helps to elicit certain themes.
Finally, I hope that people will read my work not because they can learn about the historical period in which these events took place, but because I may be able to share with them some more abstract ideas about life and the world.
Huang: What responsibility does a novelist have for such a life idea?
Ishiguro: My affirmation is that novelists must bear certain responsibilities. Every few years there is some sort of Holocaust memoir that arouses people's disgust, because they think that such lies are endlessly harmful. Well, there's been a very intriguing thing lately — the "Wilkomilski incident," which is a counterexample. His work was published in 1995 and won several awards. Almost overnight, it became — or seems to have been — a milestone in Holocaust writing about the holocaust written by children who grew up in Auschwitz — a book called Fragments: Memories of Wartime Childhood. But in fact, it was later revealed that the author had fabricated everything.
But interestingly, he was not Jewish, but Swiss. If he admits that it is a novel, then everything is safe. The reality seems to be this: what he wants to express is some kind of inner pain about his personal life. He had been an orphan, from the bottom of Swiss society at the time; he had been adopted by some people who, according to him, were not good to him. He believed that the experience of the Holocaust—growing up in Auschwitz—was some apt expression or metaphor for his outlook on life.
The incident provoked a heated debate about the differences between fiction and non-fiction. If he had made it clear from the outset that he was Swiss and had never been in Auschwitz, that he had written in the form of a novel, that his personal circumstances had nothing to do with the Holocaust, that he had only felt that he had some kind of resonance with the survivors of the Holocaust, then everything would have been understandable.
But when he was sure that he was indeed in Auschwitz at the time and that it was a historical record, he certainly touched the bottom line. The work is still exactly the same as it was when it was published in 1995, but today it has been abandoned. The book became infamous. Now it's a joke all over the world. This is an extreme example of blurring the boundaries between the two (historical and fictional literature).
I don't think the two are the same thing, and the so-called truth you get from the novel is far from the truth that the historian intends to present.
Huang: What is the "truth" you found in fiction writing?
Ishiguro: I don't think it's as clear as the historical facts that historians are looking for, and in fact it's not about presenting evidence in court, and people are trying to find out the truth when they come to the chase. The truth here is a bit vague. It's like a person saying, "This is some way of looking at human emotional experiences." Doesn't that coincide with your point of view? ”
It appeals to other people's understanding of the facts: "Don't you see it that way too?" Don't you think the same way? ”
And I think if you want to say something slightly different or slightly novel, then what you want to say is: "Maybe you've never looked at things that way, but since I understand it that way, don't you feel the same way?" In that sense, it is a search for the truth; it is not presenting evidence and saying, "There is all the evidence here, so the conclusion must change." "It's neither the kind of scientific truth, not even the social science truth." In my opinion, it is more like finding a voice in the experience of life.
Clara and the Sun, by Kazuo Ishiguro, translated by Song You, edition: Shanghai Translation Publishing House, March 2021
"Writing today is a process of communication"
Huang: When you write a novel, do you have the ideal reader in mind?
Ishiguro: No, I'm really confused about who I'm writing for. I think this must be increasingly affected by the actual situation. When the work was published, I actually flew all over the world to promote books or give interviews. So, without exaggeration, it's clear that some of the impressions I had about these people during the conversation somehow remained in the back of my mind as I wrote.
I don't mean to deliberately think of an audience in Seattle or someone who interviewed me in Norway. All of these experiences are a bit stacked up to form some sort of reader mix. This image is difficult to discern and sometimes daunting, especially since we call globalization trends.
When I first got involved in the creation of novels, this imaginary reader was about the same age as me and had a similar background, but as I went to more and more places, I became more and more aware that people in different countries had far-reaching ideas, and the vast local culture would also enter my work, and I felt that I became more and more aware of the reader who existed in my head.
If the imaginary reader were Norwegian, then much of what might have been written would be immediately wiped out. I can't use something that the natives of London are familiar with and the Norwegians don't know; I can't use too many puns, or just because the wording is clever and just right to use, and write a sentence that makes me feel complacent—I can't be proud of that, because by the time it is translated into Norwegian, it will be eclipsed.
So I have to really ask myself, "Is there anything in this sentence?" It's not just a show of cleverness, right? Is its value still there in the translation? ”
Huang: How do you see the role of this imaginary reader in other aspects of your creation?
ISHTKURO: Thematically, I might have made something that terrified the British right now a great theme for a novel, but again, this imaginary reader would have been thinking in my head—if [the reader] was Norwegian, of course, maybe Denver or something—well, for this person, the question might be of little importance.
In my opinion, the more places a person goes, the more he needs to prioritize his responses to readers in different cultures. The imaginary reader becomes more and more difficult and complex. Sometimes, it will make you shackled, unable to move, and blame you for being perfect.
Huang: You discussed the reaction of critics to your work, and you thought that the words "restraint", "subtlety", and "quietness" to describe the content of your novel surprised you. Knowing if these comments will hinder some of your attempts, or will they encourage and prompt you to test the waters on something else? Does the commenter's remarks have a direct correlation to your actions as a writer?
ISHIGURO: I don't know if there is necessarily a direct connection, but I can't get away from what the critics say. I mean, I usually read a lot of comments. I never care about any personal comments. But, in a sense, the advantage of being able to publish internationally is that you have all kinds of reviews immersed in different cultural backgrounds and different literary cultures. Well, when people seem to have a consensus, I can't pretend it's not important. No matter how I understand it, to a certain extent, this is a real indication of how people react to my work.
It's not just the bizarre misinterpretations that are unique to London's literary scene, but readers in Germany or the American Midwest or Japan speak to the public. This makes it fairly effective to determine how well my creations have responded in any time period, across a wide range of people.
But I can't separate that kind of comment from the feedback I might have received from the average reader I met at the book fair. This kind of public feedback sways me because I do think writing today is a process of communication. Partly because the profession is going to run around and confront the reader, I'm very sensitive to such a communication process. It's not just that I happened to write this stuff and then someone else happened to read it. In fact, what I try to measure is how people accept what I do, what they understand, what they don't understand, what they feel overwhelmed, what makes them stuttering, and what makes them indifferent.
I think these things are important because in a sense it's my way of getting to know other people, how much they're similar or different from me in terms of feedback on their work.
Huang: How important is this collision of ideas to you?
Ishiguro: As I said before—when you asked me what the truth the novelist was after—I thought of the question: "Don't you feel the same way about this?" That's my opinion. "That's exactly the kind of question I throw at others, so their answer is crucial.
But I wouldn't really respond to comments like that, saying maybe I should have written this way or that way; I wouldn't have done that.
You know, an overview of the work means as much to me as much as an evaluation. When they outlined it, what attracted me was how they would summarize the novel, what they would think was the core of the work, how they would interpret something, and whether it was what I expected to emphasize.
With regard to The Long Day, I would have said that I was resistant to many people discussing my work in terms of "Japaneseness", as if they only made sense to those who were obsessed with Japanese society. I'm talking about early works. The novels I write are set in Britain, which has nothing to do with Japan—a decision that may have been influenced by mainstream views, because they saw my work as an interpretation of the history or social ideas of Japanese society.
Huang: The accumulated feedback prompted you to examine your journey as a writer?
Ishiguro: The Long Day Is Set To End proves that I'm not responding to one or two critics who point fingers at how I should write. On the contrary, I am generally dissatisfied, because people are over-searching for information in my early Japanese novels, as if I could reveal intriguing information like an anthropologist or a documentary writer who documents Japanese culture.
I think that what I might want to express about the more commonalities of human beings and human beings is becoming more and more obscure. Instead of echoing, "Oh yeah, that's what I think," they say, "These Japanese ideas are really interesting."
Setting in Japan (in early novels) limits evaluation to some extent, and can somewhat mislead readers as to my original intentions. So, that example shows that the overall way the work is interpreted will influence my decision.
"The Long Day Will End", by Kazuo Ishiguro, Translator: Feng Tao, Edition: Shanghai Translation Publishing House, May 2018
"All had to get out of the soap bubbles of childhood protection"
Huang: In your fifth novel, My Generation of Orphans, readers shouldn't expect to find some kind of historical facts about old Shanghai in the 1930s that they didn't read in the history books, right?
ISHIGURO: I think so, they can't find it. All I did was study what I could find. There were one or two books that I had picked up from rare bookstores and were written in that era (the thirties), but as far as I know, there was nothing in the books that were not known. It mentions the Opium Wars—as everyone knows—and any book about old Shanghai would talk about those things.
People are talking about Shanghai. Perhaps I can recommend many good books in this regard, written by trained authors who pursue the study of the art of excellence and draw conclusions from historical sources.
I use Shanghai as a metaphorical scene of sorts. I am an unreliable man; if I want to know the details of history, I would not trust a writer like me. [Laughs]
Huang: Can you talk about the importance of the main idea or motif in "My Generation of Orphans"? Themes or themes such as "orphans" and "greatness" associated with "The Long Day Will End".
Ishiguro: On the question of orphans, it's not just about orphans literally. Of course, in this work, these characters are indeed orphans — their parents are either dead or missing. The orphan state here has a metaphorical meaning. What I hope to explore here is that everyone has to step out of the soap bubble of childhood protection, where we know nothing about the dangers of the outside world.
As we get older, we enter a wider world and understand the fate of the world. Sometimes the process is gentle and soothing; sometimes, for some, it's like a thunderbolt on a sunny day and a storm. The protagonist, Christopher Banks, lives in a relatively sheltered golden bell hood, in a protected childhood, he sees the world through the eyes of a child, he thinks he has big trouble, but it is really just a small problem that children don't want to run into trouble.
Suddenly, he was thrown into the adult world. The question becomes: When we enter a more sinister world, do we carry nostalgia, with memories of when we believed the world was a good place? Perhaps, we have been misled by the adults, or perhaps we are protected from these misfortunes.
Then we went into the world and found that there were filthy things and tricky problems here. Sometimes, maybe we still have the naïve thoughts of childhood, and we have the urge to reshape the world, to save the world, to restore the world to what it was when we were children.
Therefore, the latest work is mainly about a person who has lost the paradise of childhood by surprise. As he grew older, perhaps inadvertently, the grand goal of life he had always held was to fix the mistakes of the past, so that he could fall from where he could get up.
By "orphans," I mean leaving what I call the childhood world that protects us in the broadest sense.
"My Generation of Orphans", by Kazuo Ishiguro, translator: Lin Weizheng, edition: Shanghai Translation Publishing House, March 2018
Huang: How does nostalgia take root in Christopher's historical awareness of the past?
ISHIGURO: Nostalgia in the deepest sense – I'm not talking about the nostalgia that the global tourism industry sometimes peddles, nor the harmless pre-industrial era of some kind of beautiful, laid-back past. I'm talking about a purer personal nostalgia for childhood.
Sometimes, I think that nostalgia can be a very positive force, or it can be powerfully destructive, because just as idealism is to intelligence, that nostalgia has the same effect on emotion. You remember fondly an era when you thought the world was a beautiful place.
Of course, sometimes this emotion can lead you to a move of destruction, but it can also make you want to make everything better.
Huang: The theme of imperialism seems to be crucial in your novel. Humanity's denial of historical events, the guilt of committing crimes, or the responsibilities of taking on responsibilities will always appear in some form in your novels. What about this novel?
Ishiguro: Imperialism has said all that it can say, and I don't have any high opinions. There are all these topics covered in the book, but there are few surprising findings about imperialism.
The imperialism involved in this book is slightly different, because it is not really imperialism. We are not talking about, for example, the situation in India (at roughly the same period), where Britain is in power and India is its colony. We are talking about unofficial imperialism, where Shanghai is still fundamentally a Chinese city, and foreigners have simply won so-called "extraterritoriality," meaning that they are not subject to Chinese law.
All these foreign industrialists flocked to the scene and laid down rules that they were not subject to Chinese law, which was a great shame for Chinese. But that was the military situation at the time.
So in fact, the context here is different: the hostile forces — the British, the Japanese, the Americans — are all eyeing each other, trying to dominate economically and industrially and exploit China, but without the imperialist concept of what colonialism calls the responsibility of colonizing other countries.
Even though the British rulers may have been self-deceitful (in the case of India), they did have grand ideas to inculcate the British way of life and the British system in the natives. The process is complex and not simply exploitative. I don't think those people in Shanghai feel like that. In many ways, you could say that they enjoyed many of the benefits of colonization without taking on any responsibilities. But there was no power in Shanghai at that time. It is not rigorous to call it an imperial state because this is not the case.
Huang: What do you think of Christopher's exposed understanding of the disappearance of his parents? Should we read it as a parable about the struggle?
ISHIGURO: I don't know —I mean, to some extent, the novel is an imitation of the form; the mysteries are set up, and to some extent, I think to fit this narrative style, you have to give the answer, so the mystery is solved in that sense. Sometimes, mysteries are resolved at a deeper level. I don't know if such revelations are meant to convey grandiose content; to some extent they are meant to move the plot forward.
Perhaps Christopher's discovery, who thought he was fighting evil, ended up finding himself benefiting from evil has implications.
This is not some kind of evil that a villain or a thief will show in him— I mean, you can't trace the origin of evil. It is everywhere, and those who have good intentions sometimes end up contributing to abuse. At that time, he was an innocent child who unknowingly benefited from evil.
At the beginning of the novel, his idea is very simple, how to fight evil as a detective: you expose the real culprit and put the evil elf back in the bottle. In the end, he discovers that evil is inherently intertwined and complex, and it's hard to get out of the mud without staining or being left alone.
"Distant Mountains and Light Shadows", by Kazuo Ishiguro, Translator: Zhang Xiaoyi, Edition: Shanghai Translation Publishing House, May 2011
"I don't really care what characters are male and what roles are female"
Huang: One of the criticisms of your work at one of the times I was at a conference was that you had a very limited representation of women. However, it has been pointed out that your debut novel was written in the first person in a female tone. What about the female characters in this new work? Jennifer, Sarah, and her mother all play an important role in Christopher's quest.
ISHTURO: Well, I don't know. When I wrote the novel, I didn't really care what characters were male and what characters were women. Of course, to some extent, I'm aware of it, but you don't necessarily assign traits to different groups, different races, different genders when you write. The interaction of the characters you create is what it will eventually look like.
It's a little difficult for me to compare Sachiko from Distant Mountain shadows to Jennifer in this new book. Of course, they are all women, but the roles they play are far apart, they are very different. I don't know except that they are all women...
Originally published in Clio Magazine, Vol. 30, No. 3 (2001). This article was published with the permission of the publishing house, with abridgements, and the full text can be found in the book "Interview with Kazuo Ishiguro".
Editor | Zhang Jin
Introduction Proofreading | Wang Xin