Kazuo Ishiguro

Editor's Note:
This is an edited transcript of the interview.

His first novel, "A Pale View of the Hills," won him the Winifred Holtby Prize of the Royal Society of Literature; his second, "An Artist of the Floating World," won the 1986 Whitbread Book of the Year award; and his third novel, "The Remains of the Day," was awarded the 1989 Booker Prize.

Kazuo Ishiguro, the talented and humble novelist, was born in Nagasaki, Japan, and moved to Britain in 1960. At that time, his parents thought that they would soon return to Japan and they prepared him to resume life in his native land. But the family ended up staying and Ishiguro grew up straddling two societies - the Japan of his parents and his adopted England.

In Conversation caught up with Kazuo Ishiguro in London.

Kazuo Ishiguro, welcome to In Conversation.

Well, it is very nice to be on it.

How does it feel to be 46 and such an acclaimed writer? Three out of five books having won prizes.

The first half of that sentence seems to be a powerful question to me. How does it feel to be 46. It's very odd being a writer because if you're a football player or something like that, you are deemed to be an old man by the time you are in your thirties, 31 and of course you retire naturally. With writers I think there is a rather insidious climate that you are encouraged to think of yourself as very young until you are about forty. And suddenly you find yourself a middle-aged writer. So it's a slightly alarming experience. I think sometimes writers do become rather complacent about the passage of time.

Have you?

I don't know sometimes I look back and think, yes I have, there should be little warnings issued to writers in their thirties that they are not as young as they think. But instead, I think young writers' prizes, first novelist prizes, the entry requirements for people is under the age of 35.

In Britain, every 20 years they run these campaigns around the best, the best of young British and I think it's for authors under 40. And so it's rather an alarming thing, you jump from being this kind of promising kind of baby to suddenly somebody who really has to be established because you are on your way to retirement. There seems to be no in-between. And so for me it's all gone by in a bit of a blur.

And in a way looking back, I'm very grateful about - I was very fortunate to have won these prizes early. Because I think the time just goes by like that.

Well I am really tempted to ask you right at this point when you say you've said twice that you looked back and you are actually grateful. The characters in your book do exactly the opposite. They keep looking back but they are not very grateful for what they did. Why is that?

Well, I don't know. I think when I, certainly when I was younger, you must remember a book like the "Remains of the Day," a typical looking back book, the main character is an old man, but I was around 30 when I wrote that book. In other words, I was a young man writing from the point of view of an old man and I think I used to write these books very much as warnings to myself. It is a way of saying, look here I am, I might feel rather pleased or satisfied about the way I am leading my life, I might feel very sure that I know what the correct values are.

And I might say I grew up in that sort of climate of the sixties and seventies when people were obliged to have quite solid certainties here in the west about political attitudes, opinions about nuclear disarmament. You always had to have an opinion and I supposed amongst my peers, we were quite righteous, we thought we had the right political views and we should campaign on behalf of all these things. But I think these books were a way of my trying to get the perspective to say, well look many years down the line, you might have a different view; history might put everything into a different perspective.

You got to always try and see things from a broader perspective, which is something that is perhaps natural, if you come from a Japanese background. My generation - I come just after the generation that went into the war. I think it's not unusual for Japanese people of my age, and also Germans too I think, to think if I was just slightly older what would I have done. Would I have gone along with all those things, or would I have had the courage or the insights to stand up and say, no this is all wrong. And I think all this, trying to imagine looking back was part of that when I was a younger person in danger of becoming complacent.

Well, the language that you use is English. You are Japanese, you feel your history, your culture coming into your writing. Has it been difficult to sort of be Japanese and Asian in the sense and writing in English?

Well, that hasn't been much of a difficulty as people might suppose because I arrived in England at the age of five which means almost my entire education was here in English schools and also I don't really have Japanese as a competing language. I still speak to my parents in the supporting Japanese which is almost 30, 40 percent English words. Often a whole sentence might be in English words between the Japanese words. But apart from my parents, I don't speak Japanese at all.

And so very rapidly, I grew up speaking English and writing English. I can't write Japanese at all. So I didn't have a linguistic conflict.

What about the cultural influence?

The cultural, I think the cultural thing perhaps was quite important, that I had a perspective that wasn't pure English. I grew up in a rather interesting way because my parents came to this country in 1960 when I was five years old. My father was a scientist. And the plan was to return to Japan in one year, perhaps two years. And this was the situation until I was about 15, we were always about to return the following year to Japan, which meant that we really never adopted the attitude of immigrants. It was always interesting for us to see the natives here, their customs are very interesting. But there was no need to adopt these customs ourselves, to consider ourselves people who will be living on any kind of long term basis in this kind of world.

And so of course, as a child I grew up with a very English education outside the home, but I think I always had this interesting perspective, a perspective of a foreigner, looking at all these cultural things, peculiarities of the English of that time, English of the 1960s and 1970s in particular. As everyone around the world knows, the English are obsessed with class.
But this is a strange thing that I think I do feel slightly apart from other people of, say, my generation who are just English. I've always felt on the outside of that class, as a kind of a cold civil war that went on in this country and still to some extent still goes on. Because my parents couldn't really read the class signals, they didn't understand this at all. It was all foreigners, white foreigners and their strange customs. It took a long time to distinguish between working class customs or the difference, the very subtle difference between the lower middle class way of doing things and the middle class.

And in any case, the emotional value of these things didn't really register with us so I think I always was outside of that to some extent. But I did not suffer entirely because I went to an English school of some sort and I have absorbed some of those ways of looking at people in the world but that's just one key example in which I feel I was slightly removed from the society which I grew up in.

Well writing there what, which book or what sort of writing did you really enjoy?

In all the books that I was reading you mean or when I was -

No. When you were writing your books what books did you really enjoy writing? "Remains of the Day" made it very big but is there any other book apart from "Remains of the Day" that you actually enjoyed writing more than -

I'm not sure if I, if I can honestly say I enjoy writing that.

Do you dote on your writing?

No, I mean I, it's very difficult; of course I feel a kind of a certain satisfaction when I finish a book. But I can't honestly say I sit at the desk thinking I'm having a great time. It often feels like a terrible struggle and a book takes a long time you don't have that immediate satisfaction of just writing an essay or perhaps you are making a television programme where you see it after a day or two and sometimes you are working on the same thing for day after day. For three, four years it just feels like you'll never get to the end and it's, you know you're longing for that time when that, this book could be finished. A lot of it is quite hard work and on a daily basis it's quite difficult to see the progress.

So which book gave you the most satisfaction by writing?

It's - authors often compare this question with questions about which is your favourite child you know out of your children. It is very difficult for me to say there are special things about all my books. I think I have a certain affection for my first book because it was my very first book. I was learning everything there.

Particularly because I didn't really have a background in writing, I came to writing quite late and I wrote my first novel almost straight away so I was having to learn on the job and also my first book was set in Japan and it was an attempt to try and I was suppose to get in touch with that Japanese side of myself that I think I have to some extent forgotten about in my early twenties. It was an opportunity to try and recreate some sort of Japan that I had always had in my mind. The way I -

Nagasaki, you were born there. The book is also about -

Yes, it is. The book is about Nagasaki just after the war, in other words, it is a Japan that existed just before I was born. And, so I think I always had this very powerful image of what that society was like, what that time was like. But I somehow, in the growing up period in the West I put it away somewhere.

And so my turning to writing was synonymous at that point with my re-discovering that Japanese side of myself and trying to get that into perspective so that that I see that as a fairly important moment in my life even though I don't really think its perhaps the focus of the same standard as my later books but for me it's an important point.

Each of those books for me there are things that I feel I did for the first time. "The Remains of the Day" although it's my most famous book, I would say it was, in some ways it was the least challenging to write. It probably was the easiest book to write, for me. There was nothing new that I hadn't already done and it was perhaps my most precise book. I knew in advance what the book was going to be like.

Afterwards, when I had finished the book, you know, I remember looking at notes I had made long before starting the book and I was surprised at how close the finished thing was to the plan and in a way that's okay. That shows a matter of control on a technical power so it's not sometimes not as exciting an experience when you're doing that. Perhaps because of that, you know, I was able to write a book that would be very successful, that people understand all around the world. I was writing well within my capabilities and I could control every new - I could predict line by line how readers would receive it. But for that reason it was it was for me not quite a challenging and cathartic experience.

Well, did you feel more challenged than trying something different in you in "The Unconsoled." Because "The Unconsoled," that didn't do as well as your previous success with the "Remains of the Day."

I feel very happy about "The Unconsoled." If at this moment people were to ask me which book I am most interested in, I would say "The Unconsoled." Once again I am not saying it's my best book although a lot of people think so.

And it's only at the moment that you feel that you very much like the book.

Yes, I suppose so. Well these things change all the time. But I feel that I entered into a certain world, a certain territory, a certain way of writing and challenging myself. I think perhaps what I felt was, you know, it was appropriate for the time of life I was living through and possibly and this might sound very presumptuous but possibly for the times that the world was going through.

But then you abandoned that style and came back to the style that you have been used to with "An Artist of the Floating World" and "Remains of the Day" and the latest book, "When We Were Orphans."

I think that's only superficially the case. Well, first I think, "The Unconsoled" is a very one-off book. It operates according to a certain set of rules that exist just for that book. It takes place in this very strange dream-like world. It wouldn't be my intention to always accept things in that kind of dreamscape anymore than I would want to say I always set a book in Japan or England or Europe or wherever. You shift location but geographically and in terms of the mood and atmosphere.

But I would say in terms of theme my latest book has a lot in common with "The Unconsoled." It's just that in an exceptional way that the book is presented, it's - yes you are right it's written perhaps a something closer to my earlier books. It's probably more readable and accessible to audiences. Because of that it's set within the context of a kind of detective story and it's a fast narrative and so on.

But some of the themes about what the essential key to the book I think is much similar to that of "The Unconsoled" which is that it is about trying to go back to mend something that went wrong years ago in your childhood. When of course it is much too late. There is an irrational side of you that says it's not too late you can somehow, when you put the clock back and put things right, and then the world would be a much better place. The paradise you lost as a child would come back. That's the heart of both books although as you say in presentation they appear to be very different sorts of books.

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