"Dialogue with Kazuo Ishiguro"
Christopher Bigsby / 1987
Kazuo Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki, Japan in 1954, but grew up in England. He studied creative writing at the University of Kent and later at the University of East Anglia. Two of his earliest novels, The Shadow of the Distant Mountains (1982) and The Ukiyo Painter (1986), are set in a partially fictional Japan. This was followed by the success of The Long Day Will End (1989), set in pre-World War II Britain, narrated by an elderly butler whose belief in loyalty and personal dignity led him to abandon the more precious value of life. "Insoluble" was published in 1995, followed by "My Generation of Orphans" in 2000. The interview took place in 1987, when Kazuo Ishiguro was working on "The Long Day Will End."
01
"I don't have anything to compare"
Writer's Interview: You were born in Japan, but you left at the age of five and grew up in England. Do you have any memories of your early experiences living in Japan?
Kazuo Ishiguro: Strangely enough, I do remember. People think it's incredible, but I do have vivid memories, though they may not be accurate. I think it's possible that the memory is so vivid because of the dramatic changes that have taken place in my life. If life suddenly changes, you have to have something that can make your memories take root. All I can remember is something inconsequential. I'm sure there must have been something significant in the first five years of my life, but I now remember only the usual little things, like standing on the street with my grandfather looking at a movie poster or cutting my thumb with scissors. These trifles remain in memory for some reason. But I have a lot of memories of that.
Writer's Interview: Once in this country, to what extent do you find yourself playing the role of a younger generation of immigrants, between your parents and an exotic culture that is likely to be much stranger to them?
Kazuo Ishiguro: Soon, probably when I was six years old, that was a year after I came. I think my English is probably better than my parents. Of course I was more confident than they were, so I couldn't remember the time when I didn't speak English. I've definitely learned English since some point in time, but at such a young age, you won't be embarrassed that you can't fully master a language. So I learned to be no different from other children. I must have learned quickly. Almost as far as I can remember, there are many aspects of Life in england that I am more familiar with than my parents, although there must be something — and there are many — that my parents taught me.
Kazuo Ishiguro with his parents as a child
Writer's Interview: Did this change the power relationship between you and your father?
Kazuo Ishiguro: It's hard to say, because I don't have anything to compare. In addition, the power relations in the Japanese family are in fact far from the power relations I have observed in Western families. It doesn't work exactly the same way. In Japanese families, it is the mother who directly disciplines the child. To a large extent, much higher than the degree of western families. Of course, the father will also participate, but it is not his responsibility to educate the child, raise the child, and so on.
Writer's Interview: But even for your mother, you must have translated a lot, not just literally. You must have introduced it to her in an explanatory way, because these are what you know well. You grew up with these things.
Kazuo Ishiguro: Right, right. I believe that's the case. But, like I just said, I'm sure there's a lot she taught me.
Writer's Interview: I guess sometimes you're going to be annoyed by being seen as a Japanese writer. However, would you consider yourself a thoroughly British, or could you see that you are more emotionally Japanese??
Kazuo Ishiguro: I don't think I'm really British in the cultural sense because the parents who raised me were Japanese. My education outside the home was very British. I went to grammar school in the UK and then went to two UK universities. In that sense, I did get a very typical British education. But at home, at my parents' house, we still speak Japanese. I've always been very aware that the way they raised me as an adult was completely different from the parents of my friends.
Writer's Interview: In what ways are they different?
Kazuo Ishiguro: Everything. As I said earlier, family relationships are not the same. The ideas behind relationships are very different. I think actually, by Western standards, my parents seemed to be quite spoiled by me. Many Westerners who have observed Japanese families have the view that boys, in particular, are raised as little emperors. Japan is one such country — or at least in my memory — where adults get up and give up their seats to their children if there aren't enough seats on the tram. Little children are almost treated like treasures, and everything they do is for them. My parents raised me with this philosophy.
But behind this is not just what it seems on the surface. This is not to say that Japanese children are indulged in wild and do whatever they want. There is another side to this problem. In fact, Japanese children are taught from an early age to have moral responsibilities to their parents and to take on considerable moral pressure to do certain things, which occur much earlier than most Western children. For example, I don't go to finish my homework because my father or mother is standing behind me yelling, but because I feel guilty if I don't do my homework. Such a phase begins very early. I think that's why the way the Japanese family works is in a sense a bit mysterious to Western observers. Although it is rare to say, through this rather ancient way, the education of children has already quietly begun.
Kazuo Ishiguro
Writer's Interview: You can speak Japanese, so can you write in Japanese?
Kazuo Ishiguro: I can't. I think it's very difficult to master this language unless you grew up in a Japanese language environment. I should explain it to you this way: Japanese has two sets of kana, which is probably what most Westerners think of as written Japanese. Japanese characters include Chinese characters from thousands of years ago. There are about two thousand Chinese characters, and you have to master at least a thousand to be able to read and write. Each Chinese character is quite complex and not easy to write. You have to be a calligrapher to write decent Kanji. Every Chinese character does not represent only a word, or a concept. The same Chinese character will express completely different meanings depending on how it is combined. It is difficult to learn to write Japanese. Of course, when I left Japan at the age of five, my learning of Japanese writing came to an end. Although my parents tried to keep me going, I thought that if you were in a foreign country, it would be of little success.
02
"There's one piece of my heart that I really like music"
Writer's Interview: Have you always seen writing as your career?
Kazuo Ishiguro: Oh no, not at all. I have no idea when I wanted to be a writer. I used to want to be a musician and it's always been my dream. I think that dream disappeared after my first novel came out. And I thought, well, I'd better try writing.
Writer's Interview: Have you ever made music?
Kazuo Ishiguro: The word creation is too grand. I've written songs, played guitar, played piano, and I'm not quite sure if I want to be a musician or a rock star. For people growing up in the late sixties and seventies, it's natural to expect to be rock stars as teenagers. But there is one piece of my heart that I really like music, and now I only have this love for music. And the other piece of the heart is the strong desire to be some kind of person. I think I can see this in people who aspire to be writers or do become writers. We can distinguish between the urge to just want to write something and the urge to be a writer. What you aspire to be is a writer who is worshipped as a god. In my opinion, these two ideas are in fact often contradictory to each other. At the very least, these two impulses may not support each other.
Kazuo Ishiguro is with musicians Stacey and Jim
Writer Interview: But when you're pursuing a master's degree in creative writing at the University of East Anglia, you seem to have chosen to become a writer. But can writing be taught?
Kazuo Ishiguro: I doubt very much that the idea of a writer can be made simply through lessons and exercises. You can certainly develop people who are more skilled in writing, but I doubt that they can produce anything of artistic value. I think what a creative writing class can do is create an environment in which people who are serious about writing find out if they really want to write, whether they have the talent to write, and figure out what they want to write. This provides people with the necessary space and the right environment so that a certain talent they have can stand out.
I think the university of East Anglia's curriculum is excellent because it's not rushing forward, at least when I was there. You have plenty of time to be unintrusive and done independently. There is no pressure to write in a specific style or on a specific theme. The course emphasizes the diversity of excellent works, rather than telling you that these are examples and asking you to pick a gourd to draw a scoop. The reality is that students have to try and find something that really fits them.
Writer Interview: Has master's degree changed the way you write?
Kazuo Ishiguro: That's when I really started writing. So change is fundamental. Before I went to the University of East Anglia, I actually wrote very little, which today doesn't seem to be real writing at all. At that time, I didn't draft or revise and polish what I wrote, and the way I thought was different from what I call writing today. What I wrote before I went to the University of East Anglia to study I called it a record rather than a writing. I took a lot of notes when I traveled in the United States.
Writer's Interview: Something like martin amis writing?
Kazuo Ishiguro: More like Jack Kerouac, I think. It's autobiographical writing in disguise, a friend named John in your life, and you change your name to Pete and claim that you're writing a novel. You're just writing down anything that happens to you in your life. That's what I wrote at the time. I came into contact with the University of East Anglia's Creative Writing course by accident. At the time I actually wanted to study for a master's degree in English. I worked as a social worker in London for a year. The year was hectic and stressful, so the idea of suddenly going back to school was like a godsend for me. I read a lot of admissions brochures, and that's when I discovered that this master's program in creative writing seems more engaging than English, and perhaps much less task. Of course, I was a little panicked when I was admitted, because I thought my level was going to be exposed, there would be a lot of great writers there, and the work I was going to show would be laughed at by others. So, in the summer I went to the University of East Anglia, I started creating, and I think it was the first time I started writing seriously. I started writing short stories, and that was the first time I really started thinking about structure, well, even plot, characters, the traditional ideas.
Writer's Interview: Do you remember how you started writing your first novel, The Shadow of the Distant Mountains?
Kazuo Ishiguro: It's hard to figure it out. I started writing from 1979 to 1980, when I was at the University of East Anglia. In fact, I spent most of my time at the University of East Anglia working on that book. I wrote short stories for coursework presentations, but all those short stories were done in one go at the beginning of the school year. I remember writing all the short stories in November because I had a deadline. It was my birthday at that time, so I wanted to finish these short stories before that. Everything really went as planned. There was plenty of time left in that class, so I started working on that novel. However, when the novel began to be written, the novel was set in Cornwall in the seventies, and the characters were relatively young. In other words, it's more like an autobiographical novel, because it seems to be directly about my generation, people like me. Writing and writing, I found that if I changed the background and put the whole story further away, maybe I would write better and more forcefully. In a sense, I think that's what I did after that.
I do feel that I am essentially the kind of writer who writes a lot about his peers and his own circle of life, the West of the seventies and eighties, rather than the kind of people who will try to reshape the historical period. Although on the surface, my first two works seem to be set in Japan in the late 1940s, for me, the driving force behind these novels was not the background but elsewhere.
"Distant Mountains and Light Shadows", by Kazuo Ishiguro, translated by Zhang Xiaoyi, Shanghai Translation Publishing House, 2011
Writer's Interview: Can you elaborate, because not only are the two novels set in the forties, but the storytellers are by no means contemporaries of you?
Kazuo Ishiguro: Yes, they are not the same era as me. I think the value of the novel's background is not just in the external scenes it provides, but in the characters and political environments that I can discuss. The historical phase that interests me is a time when there are more abrupt changes in social values, because then a lot of what I find interesting will jump out of this environment. I'm concerned with how people who want to do good in their lives and make a difference suddenly find themselves wrongly paying for their youth. They may not only waste their talents and energy, but may also have been unconsciously aiding and abetting abuse, but mistakenly thinking that they have done a good thing. What is painful is that people are swayed by the society around them, and they can only follow the trend of society on how to use their talents and good intentions.
Right now, I'm interested in — and that's what I've always focused on — is how people evaluate their lives when they look back and feel like they haven't lived their lives as much as they expected. When realizing that they may have wasted their lives, how they managed to retain a little dignity, that's what attracted me. Considering that these—dramatically—are areas of interest to me, I have always been fascinated by the times in history when morality confused the individual. This was the case in post-war Japan, where the achievement of being told to be supreme glory began overnight as the beginning of a nightmare. I think post-war Germany is a bit like this. However, not all scenes are so obvious or dramatic.
Writer's Interview: In what way does this have to do with the times you live in? You said that this is a deliberate transposition, because what you actually want to explore is your own era. In what sense do you think such an effect has been achieved?
Kazuo Ishiguro: I think I write out of fear of what might happen rather than what has already happened. I feel that I belong to a very fortunate generation, for us, life is no longer just a simple money to make money, so that we and our family can live a decent life. I grew up in an era of material abundance, when it seemed like it wasn't enough to just support my family. You have to make a difference in your life, and you have to contribute to humanity in some way: for example, to improve the world, to make the world a better and more peaceful place. I think I grew up in that idealistic environment of the sixties. When I finished high school and college, my peers and I competed not to win jobs and afford a more luxurious car than others, but to see if we could be a more useful person. Have we made a useful contribution to humanity? Do we have a high enough level of thought and morality?
In my opinion, the generation I belong to is very focused on making a difference in life and behaving decently. I think I'm writing now out of a fear, a fear of my own life, of going to a certain age, and looking back at my own life, and maybe the past of the people around me, I'm going to ask all of us who have tried to make a difference in our lives.
Writer's Interview: So there's a fear here. On the one hand, you fear that the result of what you do may be insignificant or even counterproductive, while on the other hand, you are afraid that you may have participated in the conspiracy to agree.
Kazuo Ishiguro: Yes, these are the worries. I know very well – and even more so in my more idealistic days – that it is difficult to be free from the prevailing social or political atmosphere. It seems that few people have the unique perspective to see their surroundings so that they can make decisions without the noise of the people around them. So, making a difference in your own life is not an easy task. It's not enough to be led by the noses of the people around you and obedient to them. It seems to me that history seems to have proven time and time again that people do that, and then there are disastrous consequences.
03
"I don't have to work with someone I hate"
Interview with a Writer: In "Shadow of the Distant Mountains" and "Ukiyo Painter", you have set yourself a narrative puzzle. The first novel is told in a feminine tone with a feminine sensibility, and the second is told through a fairly older man. Is that challenge what draws you in?
Kazuo Ishiguro: No, I don't think any of them are challenges. I'm not being modest, and if I write from the perspective of a character who is similar to me in every way, I mean superficially similar, and I wouldn't be able to start. For example, I live in the UK today, my age. I just find it difficult to start with that kind of protagonist. In a sense, if the narrator or protagonist I choose is, at least superficially, very different from mine, then as a writer, I can be clear about which is more important than mine. Of course I picked those narrators — and I think I do a lot of people who picked narrators — purely because they were the easiest for me at the time, given what I was trying to achieve. I did try other types of narrators as well.
Almost every character in Ukiyo-e Painter can be the narrator's choice at some point. I asked my little grandson to try it once, and one of Ono's daughters, Setsuko, also recounted a passage. A character who no longer appears in the book also becomes the narrator. I made all sorts of attempts. As far as "Distant Mountain Shadow" is concerned, when I was studying at the University of East Anglia in my early years, I once wrote a short story, which was written from a female perspective, much like the narrator in "Distant Mountain Shadow". I feel that creating from a perspective that is obviously different from mine can liberate me tremendously. I think there are writers who are best at writing through narrators who are similar to themselves. But if I could hide behind a narrator who was very different from me, I felt less constrained and more able to speak out.
Writer's Interview: But in another sense, you distance yourself from the work. One way to do this is through gender and age. But your work is emotionally idyllic and distant, and it is deliberately unheated, isn't it?
Kazuo Ishiguro: I suppose you can say that, but in fact, I didn't deliberately stare at the work and say, "This sentence is too emotional, let's change it to a more dull or cold word!" "That's part of my style. Of course, the narrator you choose will greatly affect your narrative style. I had to write this because the narrator and theme I chose was so.
In both novels, especially the second, I'm interested in the fact that the narrator has been trying to escape some sort of truth about himself and his past. In other words, they use language of self-deception. That's why the language I use must always avoid confronting reality. I think that creates tension. I don't think I'm the kind of person who always feels the same no matter what I write, but since I've set myself the task of depicting the minds of characters who try to examine and constantly escape, my writing style has to be the same.
Interview with a Writer: The test is that you can write a novel that takes place in different scenarios. Aren't you working on a novel set in Britain? (This refers to "The Long Day Will End")
Kazuo Ishiguro: That's right.
Writer Interview: Did this change your writing style and way?
Kazuo Ishiguro: No. I write the same way I used to. I've always thought that the scenes with a Japanese style are only a fairly superficial part of my work. Seriously, I introduced this style for technical reasons. Although this is an environment in which I have an obvious emotional attachment, I introduced it with the intention of weaving something else that interests me more. For me, the proof is that the last two years I have created works that are entirely british in the background and there is not a single Japanese person to be seen. I didn't deliberately make any major changes in my writing methods. It's still the same thing in essence, just in a different context.
Writer's Interview: Of course, setting the story in Japan, especially Nagasaki, will make the work resonate with history effortlessly. This is probably what is lacking in the UK, right?
Kazuo Ishiguro: I only set the first novel in Nagasaki. I think it was a bit naïve to do that. In fact, I think my debut novel is childish in several ways, and that's just one of them. I chose Nagasaki only because the Japan I remember and the Japan that I am familiar with in any case is Nagasaki. It was the only city I ever lived in, and it was also the home of my parents. So, it seemed natural that I set the novel in Nagasaki. What I don't quite understand is that for most Westerners Nagasaki is synonymous with the atomic bomb. My parents and I don't see it that way, and Nagasaki means a lot of other things. Even today, many things come to my mind before the image of mushroom clouds.
I think by the time I wrote my second novel, I realized more clearly that if Nagasaki was mentioned, then I really couldn't avoid the whole thing —the atomic bomb, the nuclear weapons debate — at least to some extent. If I hadn't been prepared to treat it as an important part of the book, I shouldn't have taken the liberty of mentioning place names like Nagasaki, even though I was born there and had the right to do so. But I felt that I should not continue in this direction, so in the second work, I successfully bypassed Nagasaki and avoided introducing that aspect. As you said, I think it's going to be heartwarming because of place names like Nagasaki, Hiroshima, Auschwitz, etc. Serious writers—I want to count myself—can't help but deal with that serious subject in a fictional, skeptical way, because it sells books. In the field of serious literature, in order to make the works more gimmicky, writers face a huge temptation to grab some serious content from history. I think it's better to be cautious about that.
Kazuo Ishiguro
Writer's Interview: When I read your work, in addition to the short and pithy statements, I was also deeply impressed by the large passages of dialogue. You've created a TV script, haven't you?
Kazuo Ishiguro: Yes, I have completed the creation of two TV series. When I look back at these two novels, I think the first one was written more like a play script or a movie script. On each page is a large paragraph of dialogue, connected to the middle of the dialogue with a little text. However, after the creation of two novels, I began to write TV scripts, and I became more and more dissatisfied with the fact that I was doing TV scripts in the name of novels at that time. For this reason, I began to write in a way that seemed to me to apply only to fiction. I think strictly speaking, the two novels are written in different ways. "Ukiyo Painter" does not follow the same A-B model, it is not interspersed with dialogue interspersed with stage explanations, and this is, in my opinion, the basis of "Distant Mountain Shadow". In a sense, I think fiction should be something that cannot be reproduced in another form.
Writer's Interview: Although both of your novels have historical backgrounds, the characters in them live in a closed space, a tightly closed space. Can you imagine yourself writing a novel with a broad historical brushstroke, just like Mao Xiangqing wrote "A Lonely Island"?
Kazuo Ishiguro: I'd love to write a novel like this. I hope that one day I can write a grand novel that is all-encompassing. Obviously, it's not just about how many characters are in the book. Your novel doesn't automatically become all-encompassing just because you have three main characters, one based in Japan, one in Russia, or the United States, or somewhere else. This is only superficial, because you inevitably talk about three countries. But I have a strong urge to write a global novel, to explore at the broadest level a topic that is not narrow. But right now, when I try to do that, the only way I can think of is to pick a microscopic world and hopefully it will become important because of the universality of what I'm talking about.
But yes, I do have the ambition to create a novel that is a bit like A Lonely Island. I'm working towards an epic global novel, and I think a lot of people have been working toward that kind of fiction.
Writer's Interview: What is the greatest pleasure you get from your profession as a writer?
Kazuo Ishiguro: I don't have to get up at some point in the morning and take a ride to an office, and I'm grateful for that. I don't have to work with someone I hate. I also have considerable freedom as to how I spend my time and what kind of content I should create. I enjoy more freedom than a freelance journalist. I can almost decide what I want to write, and I can spend as much time as I want to complete, as long as my money hasn't been used up. I didn't have a deadline to turn on, and I didn't have an editor pointing fingers at me and saying you were going to write about this topic because that's the style of our magazine. So I have tremendous freedom, i have the freedom to think. I think a writer is still privileged, and that privilege is that you have time to think. You can pull out and think about problems that most people can't.
In a sense, I feel responsible for using my time to think. I'm grateful that if I want to read, say, books about colonial history, then I have time to go to the library, borrow some books, and spend two weeks reading these books about colonial history. It's a great feeling. In fact, I don't particularly like the writing activity itself. I don't remember writing The Ukiyo Painter when I had a moment where I stopped at the end of the day and thought, well, it's been a fun day. Obviously there are times when some kind of satisfaction comes to you, but I really don't remember feeling physically and mentally happy at any point in the creative process. That process is always a bit laborious.
* Originally published in Interviews with Writers, vol. 1, pp. 193-204.
Publisher: People's Literature Publishing House
Producer: 99 readers
Translator: Yang Xiangrong et al