Kazuo Ishiguro

But is that something, is that something that comes out of your own life? This fear of a lost childhood, a paradise lost, things that you can't go back to. You were saying earlier that you liked looking back and when you look back, you were grateful, your characters look back, is it a way of you trying to relate to your past ? You wanted to tell yourself that when you grow up things might be different. How much of then this feeling of looking back, like in "The Unconsoled" is about the childhood that is lost? There is character in your "When You Were Orphans," Akida, who wants to go back to Japan. There's a sort of impression one gets as one reads it. Is there a bit of you in Akida. Is that, is that so?

I think it's very complicated. I've never written a clearly autobiographical character. I don't think, you know there is probably a bit of me in Akida a bit of me in the English boy as well as Christopher. There are long passages in the new book about these two boys - both display the Japanese boy and the English boy who were next door neighbours in Shanghai in the earlier part of the twentieth century - who just play. And they don't really, they assumed that you know, to live in this mixed cosmopolitan international community is normal, but they gradually start to realise that yes, people belong to certain races, and certain nations are starting to build up to have wars with each other and they fight for political power, military power. They are only just beginning to realise this. Yes there might be something -

Bits of you -

Yes, bits of me but I am not that sort of writer that has an alter- ego in a book. I mean in a sense the whole book, the sensibility the vision of the book relates to my emotional history in some kind of way but I have a natural inhibition about putting things as in directly in my life into my work.

I am very different; you see writers like these American writers like John Updike or Philip Roth, who at least, this would be my guess, if they tend to write whole chunks of their real life into their novels. I have to go through a much more complicated process when the story comes out. And all these question about the lost paradise and childhood, of course there must be something that I sensed about that but I feel it's a universal condition in a way. Because we may not all feel it acutely.

But I think when we are children, the adult world enters into a mass conspiracy, a very kindly mass conspiracy, to make us believe that the world is actually a much nicer place than it is. I noticed that, you know, when my daughter who is now eight, when she was say three or four, when you walk down the road with her, everybody instantly enters into this conspiracy, they all smile, they put on a silly voice when they talk to her when you go to a shop. It's automatic and of course when you censor out all signs of a darker world and at a certain stage, of course you know that this child will have to come out of this protective bubble and you hope you can do it and help her do it gradually.

And of course most of us must have lived in such a bubble, as long as we are fortunate, because there are terrible sad tragic cases when children don't have this bubble, they are born, and there's a war or something and this is one of the most hideous things. But those of us who are fortunate, we live in this bubble and I think we must have all made that slightly sad journey out of the bubble into the real world at some stage. And I think we all tend to have a slight sense of disappointment that the world isn't this beautiful harmonious place that our parents tried to have us believe when we were very young. I think we carry that with us to some extent. See this emotion of nostalgia, I am quite interested in as a human emotion. It has a bad press in this country. I don't know if it does where you are.

Well, in Asia in general, I think people like looking back. Nostalgia is something that they quite enjoy. If you are not feeling British you could actually feel nostalgic, I can understand. Which is perhaps why you are a bit in a bit of coming out of it. Do you sort of feel yourself a little distance from the culture of the country that you live in now?

I don't think so. I mean I feel perfectly comfortable here. I think there are peculiar historical reasons why the British don't like nostalgia. It is because it's associated with a kind of bad nostalgia about the great days of the British Empire and I think a lot of people perhaps quite rightly think this is not a good way to a nostalgia. These are things that one should be slightly ashamed of, more than slightly ashamed of.

But there is a kind of whole industry, a nostalgia industry here that tries to go back to the more glorious days when Britain ruled the world. And I think for this reason nostalgia is thought to be something of a dirty word here and perhaps to some extent a dirty emotion. But the pure human emotion of nostalgia, I think it is very important and a positive one. Because I think it's a kind of emotional equivalent to idealism. It's us remembering the times when perhaps things were better in our childhood when we had a vision of the world being better.

How do you decide on what's going to be your next book? Do you decide on the style first, the structure of the book, or the story?

I always start with the story in the sense that I start with a kind of a theme. I don't, I'm not really that interested in plots. That comes later. I have to start with an actual kind of key idea that I think would be the idea of the core of the book. And then I start to think how to orchestrate that.

Oddly enough where the book is set, the time and the place, that comes quite late for me. And people often think this is quite unusual. But sometimes I feel I'm almost like a film director, location hunting, and you have your script and you are looking for a location. I am often doing that through history books, trying to find a country and a place that would actually bring out this particular idea in the best sort of way. So for me it's this idea that comes first. And often you can boil these things down to very small things.

A book like "The Artist of the Floating World," my first book, it is a very simple idea. Someone gives himself to his work in a very idealistic and sincere way but he happens to live in a time when the cultural climate is fraught with militarism and fascism. And so later on he discovers he is contributing to these bad things and what does he do. Of course that story could take place in any number of settings, in the Soviet Union, in Nazi Germany. Of course at that point it was important for me to set it in Japan before and after the war. But I always start I could have written that book set somewhere else. In fact some people would say I did "The Remains of the Day" is very much that same story but set in an English context.

With the style that you have with a narrator and who narrates the story and looking back, this is pretty much now very much central to the way you have written so far. Did you deliberately choose this?

No, that just came about because of what I wanted to write about. I wasn't so much interested in what really happened to these characters. I was more interested in what these characters told themselves have happened. I was interested in the way people try to face themselves when they look back over their lives. I was interested in the self-deception they would have to go through.

But I think on the one hand yes they indulge in a lot of self deception when they look at the less dignified, less successful aspects of their past. But I think what is interesting is that people, they are often is this real need to see things clearly and try and face the truth as well. So these two sides are often battling. And most of my books are about these struggles.

They are not really just plots saying this is what happened, that's all it was, I could tell the story in a few pages. We are following the journey of a particular narrator and he very gradually and painfully comes to accept that his life wasn't successful as he thought. And so it is that really it's that mental process that I am interested in.

Did you always want to be a writer or did you just stumble upon this career?

I stumbled across the career. For many years I wanted to be a songwriter actually. And I wrote over a hundred songs. And until -
Putting them together and getting them out -

Oh no, no, no. I am terribly embarrassed to do that. I think a lot of things that writers - I see young writers, not necessary young, but first time writers going through early in their careers - I think I went through in writing these songs. I went through my autobiographical phase and yes my sort of adolescent….

Were you wooing anyone that you call your -

No I don't think so, yes well almost everything happened in my songs really probably. I went through a kind of purple phase, I went through everything. And I did this whole thing of taking demo tapes to recording companies and I tried to, I had a serious go at making a career as a singer and songwriter. And it's only when I realise this is going nowhere, I started to write short stories.

And after many years of no success in the music world, as soon as I started to write short stories. Within the first year I had published a number of short stories in magazines and the people who are still my publishers, Faber and Faber in London, gave me the beginning of my first novel and a contract in advance to finish it. It's like a lot of things that suddenly allows you to do one thing.

But then how did you switch out of song writing and decide to do a short story after all?

To me it felt very natural at that point in my life, I am talking about when I was 24, it seem very natural, I felt that the way I was growing as a person, I had to some extent outgrown at least my song writing talents. I am not suggesting that song writing is a smaller form but for me it was. I was trying to say things that could no longer really be contained in songs.

For me there is a perfectly understandable stepping-stone between my last songs and my first novel, these little short stories seem to me to be a very natural continuation. Because it might seem odd to somebody on the outside but to me there are many things in common. You are trying to, there are many things you have to learn to do, like you have to figure out the difference between simply learning a technique, learning on the job that one might say and actually expressing yourself artistically. Yes, what is the difference between showing off in other words and genuine communication. A lot of my principles that I had developed by the time I began to write fiction, I think I gradually arrived at when writing songs.

You also did television scripts, and profiled parts of -

Yes, that was between my first novel and second novel.

What prompted you to do that?

I have always been a big fan of movies. Yes, I still am, I watch a lot of films.

What films do you want to watch - Hollywood productions?

Oh, everything, classic Hollywood, modern day Hollywood. I like Japanese cinema very much; I like European cinema. Actually, there are many modern Chinese directors like Zhang Yimou, I think he is one of the great directors of this moment. But yes, I mean I suppose because of my Japanese background, I was very drawn to both Akiro Kurusawa and also I don't know if people these days are so familiar with the work of Ozu, he is perhaps for me the greatest of Japanese directors. He worked mainly in the between the thirties and the fifties.

Well, it's not surprising then that you were such a movie buff. Your books have been commented upon by people to be that of a movie director actually writing out a story looking for a location and stunt. It does seem to be a natural thing there. You probably think of your stories then like a movie in your mind once you decide what the key is.

No, I don't think so, in effect it's the reverse. My experience of writing these two television scripts between the first and second novel early in my career was it brought home to me the difference between writing for camera and writing on the page. I felt after that, that if I wrote a book, it has to offer an experience to readers that they cannot have sitting in front of a cinema screen or television. Because it seems to me, television and cinema are such powerful mediums today.

And often I read a novel that I think is perfectly okay, but I've been reading it for six to seven hours and I finish and I think I've got that sort of experience I could just as easily have had just by watching an episode of a quality soap opera. And perhaps once that would have been good enough but today I think it isn't. I feel if a novel is to claim its place in the gallery of different kinds of works that we have, it has to offer something unique that can't be offered by the screen. And so this, I was made aware of this so rapidly when I started to write scripts. I suddenly thought, my first novel is actually like a script and when I came to write my second novel, I wanted it to be not like a script, something that couldn't be done on the screen. So it's a perverse relationship I have. I am always trying to write books that can't possibly be filmed.

But "Remains of the Day" was.

Yes, it was, yes - successfully. Yes, this is of course, there are very talented people who can get to the core of everything and make it a good film. But I think for this reason, I think the experiences that you get reading the book and watching the movie, I think they are different experiences. And I think that's right, I think there are some things that the cinemas offers very powerfully, and then there are other things that books offer very powerfully. I am not advocating a complete split but as I said, I think if a novel is to remain an important art form, it has to find ways of doing things that can only be done in that form.

But do you think that form is going to be a book that one can pick up and read or what do you think of publishing on the Internet these days? That's a new line that people want to do. You don't really need a book anymore. You have your book on the Internet, have you any ideas on this?

Well, at the moment, I don't think the technology to be honest is vast enough for that to be a serious option. I mean I don't know about you, but I find I can't read things from the Internet for more than five or ten minutes. Even with a light laptop, it's very difficult to take it to the beach. I don't know about your laptop, my laptop runs out of battery in fifteen minutes. And so after a while struggling with laptops and leads and things you have to plug in, a paperback book seems to be the pinnacle of technology.

So I think at the moment even if the technology becomes good enough so that people can read with some palm held device and it doesn't strain your eyes after half an hour. I think the actual artistic experience will not be that different yet.

Of course eventually people invent a new media which is somewhere between a visual, oral and reading art form, but it will be something different again just as cinema grew up once, moving cameras appear. For the time being, I think it doesn't matter whether you can access the novel on the Internet or you buy at the bookshop. The artistic principles I think remain unchanged.

The power of the book I think is that of novels or fiction is that it can get right inside your head. You are often writing about the inside of people's heads, inner worlds, inner emotions. And this is where the cinema with all its powers is quite weak, it's a third person form, you have to always film an actor from the outside.

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