 |
 |
|
|
INTERVIEWER
Did you do any writing at school?
ISHIGURO
Yes. I went to the local state primary school where they were experimenting with modern teaching methods. It was the mid-sixties, and my school rather complacently had no defined lessons. You could muck about with manual calculating machines, or you could make a cow out of clay, or you could write stories. This was a favorite activity because it was sociable. You wrote a bit, then you read each other’s things, and you read out loud.
I created a character called Mr. Senior, which was the name of my friend’s scoutmaster. I thought this was a really cool name for a spy. I got into Sherlock Holmes around then in a big way. I’d do a pastiche of a Victorian detective story that began with a client arriving and telling a long story. But a lot of the energy went into decorating our books to look exactly like the paperbacks we saw in the shops—drawing bullet holes on the front and putting quotations from newspapers on the back. “Brilliant, chilling tension.” —Daily Mirror.
INTERVIEWER
Do you think the experience affected you as a writer?
ISHIGURO
It was good fun, and it made me think of stories as effortless things. I think that stayed with me. I’ve never been intimidated by the idea of having to make up a story. It’s always been a relatively easy thing that people did in a relaxed environment.
INTERVIEWER
What was your next obsession, after detective stories?
ISHIGURO
Rock music. After Sherlock Holmes, I stopped reading until my early twenties. But I’d played the piano since I was five. I started playing the guitar when I was fifteen, and I started listening to pop records—pretty awful pop records—when I was about eleven. I thought they were wonderful. The first record that I really liked was Tom Jones singing “The Green, Green Grass of Home.” Tom Jones is a Welshman, but “The Green, Green Grass of Home” is a cowboy song. He was singing songs about the cowboy world I knew from TV.
I had a miniature Sony reel-to-reel that my father brought me from Japan, and I would tape directly from the speaker of the radio, an early form of downloading music. I would try to work out the words from this very bad recording with buzzes. Then when I was thirteen, I bought John Wesley Harding, which was my first Dylan album, right when it came out.
INTERVIEWER
What did you like about it?
ISHIGURO
The words. Bob Dylan was a great lyricist, I knew that straightaway. Two things that I was always confident about, even in those days, were what was a good lyric and what was a good cowboy film. With Dylan, I suppose it was my first contact with stream-of-consciousness or surreal lyrics. And I discovered Leonard Cohen, who had a literary approach to lyrics. He had published two novels and a few volumes of poetry. For a Jewish guy, his imagery was very Catholic. Lot of saints and Madonnas. He was like a French chanteur. I liked the idea that a musician could be utterly self-sufficient. You write the songs yourself, sing them yourself, orchestrate them yourself. I found this appealing, and I began to write songs.
INTERVIEWER
What was your first song?
ISHIGURO
It was like a Leonard Cohen song. I think the opening line was, “Will your eyes never reopen, on the shore where we once lived and played.”
INTERVIEWER
Was it a love song?
ISHIGURO
Part of the appeal of Dylan and Cohen was that you didn’t know what the songs were about. You’re struggling to express yourself, but you’re always being confronted with things you don’t fully understand and you have to pretend to understand them. That’s what life is like a lot of the time when you’re young, and you’re ashamed to admit it. Somehow, their lyrics seem to embody this state.
INTERVIEWER
When you finally got on a plane again, at age nineteen, where did you go?
ISHIGURO
I went to America. That was my ambition from quite early on. I was obsessed with American culture. I saved up money working at a baby products company. I packed baby food and checked 8 mm films with names like “Quads Are Born” and “Caesarean” for damages. In April of 1974, I got on a Canadian plane, which was the cheapest way to get over there. I landed in Vancouver and crossed the border by Greyhound in the middle of the night. I was in the United States for three months, traveling on a dollar a day. At that time, everyone had a romantic attitude toward these things. You had to figure out where you were going to sleep, or “crash,” each night. There was a whole network of young people hitchhiking along the West Coast.
INTERVIEWER
Were you a hippie?
ISHIGURO
I suppose I was, at least superficially. Long hair, mustache, guitar, rucksack. Ironically, we all thought we were very individual. I hitchhiked up the Pacific Coast Highway, through Los Angeles, San Francisco, and all over northern California.
INTERVIEWER
What did you think of the whole experience?
ISHIGURO
It more than fulfilled my expectations. Some of it was nerve-racking. I rode a freight train from Washington state across Idaho to Montana. I was with a guy from Minnesota, and we’d spent the night in a mission. It was a pretty sleazy place. You had to strip at the door and enter a shower with all these winos. You tiptoed your way through black puddles, and at the other end they gave you laundered nightclothes and you slept in bunks. The next morning, we went to the freight yard with these old-fashioned hobo types. They had nothing to do with the hitchhiking culture, which mostly consisted of middle-class student types and runaways. These guys traveled by freight, and they went from skid row to skid row in different cities. They lived by donating blood. They were alcoholics. They were poor and sick, and they looked awful. There was nothing romantic about them at all. But they gave us a lot of good advice. They told us, Don’t try to jump the train when it’s moving, because you’ll die. If anyone tries to get on your boxcar, just throw them off. It doesn’t matter if you think it might kill them. They’ll want to steal something and you’re stuck with them until the train stops. If you go to sleep, you’ll be flung out just because you’ve got fifty dollars.
INTERVIEWER
Did you ever write about this trip?
ISHIGURO
I was keeping a diary, in this kind of pastiche Kerouac prose. Every day I would write what happened: Day 36. Met so-and-so. We did this. When I got home, I took these thick diaries and sat down and wrote out two of the episodes, in depth, using a first-person narrator. One was about the time my guitar was stolen in San Francisco. That’s the first time I started thinking of a structure. But I’d adopted this strange transatlantic twang in my prose, and because I’m not American, it sounded phony.
* * *
INTERVIEWER
Looking back at your first published novel, A Pale View of Hills, what do you think of it now?
ISHIGURO
I’m very fond of it, but I do think it’s too baffling. The ending is almost like a puzzle. I see nothing artistically to be gained by puzzling people to that extent. That was just inexperience—misjudging what is too obvious and what is subtle. Even at the time the ending felt unsatisfactory.
INTERVIEWER
What were you trying to accomplish?
ISHIGURO
Let’s say somebody is talking about a mutual friend, and he’s getting angry about this friend’s indecisiveness about a relationship he’s in. He’s getting absolutely furious. Then you realize that he’s appropriating the friend’s situation to talk about himself. I thought this was an interesting way to narrate a novel: to have somebody who finds it too painful or awkward to talk about his own life appropriate someone else’s story to tell his own. I’d spent a lot of time working with homeless people, listening to people’s stories about how they’d got to this place, and I’d gotten very sensitive to the fact that they weren’t telling those stories in a straightforward way.
In A Pale View of Hills, the narrator is a late-middle-aged woman, and her grown-up daughter has committed suicide. This is announced at the beginning of the book. But instead of explaining what led up to that, she starts to remember a friendship she had back in Nagasaki, just after the end of the Second World War. I thought the reader would think, Why the hell are we hearing about this other thing? What does she feel about her daughter’s suicide? Why did the daughter commit suicide? I hoped readers would start to realize that her story is being told through the story of her friend. But because I didn’t know how to create the texture of memory, I had to resort to something quite gimmicky at the end, where a scene back in Japan blurs into a scene that obviously took place much more recently. Even now, when I do an event to talk about my latest book, somebody asks, Were those two women the same woman? What happens at the end on the bridge when “you” switches to “we”?
INTERVIEWER
Would you say the writing program helped make you a writer?
ISHIGURO
The way I see it, I tried to be a songwriter, but the door never opened. I went to East Anglia, everyone encouraged me, and within months I’d published stories in magazines and gotten a publishing contract for my first novel. And it helped me technically as a writer. I’ve never felt that I have a particular facility at writing interesting prose. I write quite mundane prose. I think where I’m good is between the drafts. I can look at one draft, and I have lots of good ideas for what to do with the next one.
* * *
INTERVIEWER
How did the English setting come about for The Remains of the Day?
ISHIGURO
It started with a joke that my wife made. There was a journalist coming to interview me for my first novel. And my wife said, Wouldn’t it be funny if this person came in to ask you these serious, solemn questions about your novel and you pretended that you were my butler? We thought this was a very amusing idea. From then on I became obsessed with the butler as a metaphor.
INTERVIEWER
As a metaphor for what?
ISHIGURO
Two things. One is a certain kind of emotional frostiness. The English butler has to be terribly reserved and not have any personal reaction to anything that happens around him. It seemed to be a good way of getting into not just Englishness but the universal part of us that is afraid of getting involved emotionally. The other is the butler as an emblem of someone who leaves the big political decisions to somebody else. He says, I’m just going to do my best to serve this person, and by proxy I’ll be contributing to society, but I myself will not make the big decisions. Many of us are in that position, whether we live in democracies or not. Most of us aren’t where the big decisions are made. We do our jobs, and we take pride in them, and we hope that our little contribution is going to be used well.
INTERVIEWER
Were you a fan of Jeeves?
ISHIGURO
Jeeves was a big influence. Not just Jeeves, but all butler figures that walked on in the backgrounds of films. They were amusing in a subtle way. It wasn’t slapstick humor. There was some pathos in the way they would come out with a dry line for something that would normally require a more frantic expression. And Jeeves is the pinnacle of that.
By then I was very consciously trying to write for an international audience. It was a reaction, I think, against a perceived parochialism in British fiction of the generation that preceded mine. Looking back now I don’t know if that was a just charge or not. But there was a conscious feeling among my peers that we had to address an international audience and not just a British one. One of the ways I thought I could do this was to take a myth of England that was known internationally—in this case, the English butler.
INTERVIEWER
Did you do a lot of research?
ISHIGURO
Yes, but I was surprised to find how little there was about servants written by servants, given that a sizable proportion of people in this country were employed in service right up until the Second World War. It was amazing that so few of them had thought their lives worth writing about. So most of the stuff in The Remains of the Day about the rituals of being a servant was made up. When Stevens talks of the “staff plan,” that’s made up.
INTERVIEWER
In that book, and in so many of your novels, the main character seems tragically to miss his or her chance at love by seconds.
ISHIGURO
I don’t know if they miss it by seconds. In a way they’ve missed it by miles. They might look back and think, There was this moment when it could have all been different. It’s tempting for them to think, Oh, it was just a little twist of fate. But in fact, there are colossal things that make them miss not just love but something essential in life.
To read the rest of the interview with Kazuo Ishiguro, click the link below:
|
Purchase this issue |
|
|
|
|
|
