Kazuo Ishiguro

Wai-chew Sim

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780415415354
• eBook ISBN: 9781135198671
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Asian Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Having earned an international reputation with his booker-prize-winning novel, The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro is fast emerging as an important cultural figure of our times.

In this guide to Ishiguro's varied and often experimental work, Wai-chew Sim presents:

• a biographical survey of Ishiguro's literary career, and an introduction to his novels, plays and short stories
• an accessible overview of the contexts and many interpretations of his work, from publication to the present
• discussions of key topics in Ishiguro criticism such as narrative theory, multicultural Britain and postcolonial studies, psychoanalytic criticism, and Ishiguro as international writer
• cross-references between sections of the guide, in order to suggest links between texts, contexts and criticism
• suggestions for further reading.

Part of the Routledge Guides to Literature series, this volume is essential reading for all those beginning detailed study of Kazuo Ishiguro and seeking not only a guide to his works but also a way through the wealth of contextual and critical material that surrounds them.

1
Life and contexts

Kazuo Ishiguro is fast emerging as an important cultural figure of our times. He has produced six varied and interesting novels, all of which possess great emotional impact and intellectual verve. His work has been translated into over thirty languages. The existential issues addressed in his writing clearly strike a deep chord with readers. As the growing body of criticism on Ishiguro’s writing attests, he is seen as representing certain large socio-cultural trends and developments. Among them, his reception dovetails with the increased visibility of Anglophone writing from non-traditional sites. When Ishiguro first emerged on the literary scene over twenty-five years ago, his bicultural status was presented as an epitome of British multiculturalism. His reception was hailed as a sign of a more confident and inclusive society less riven by the conservative identity politics [52, 158] of the preceding era. Since then he has carved out a distinct position within British literature as well as a host of academic sub-fields that claim him as their own. These include Asian diasporic writing, minority writing, cosmopolitan literature, postcolonial writing, world literature and comparative literature. And furthermore it could be said that this development is not surprising, because among other things Ishiguro strives to breach geographical and cultural boundaries that many take for granted and are having to question in an era of increased globalization and cross-cultural exchange.

To help readers achieve a nuanced understanding of the recurrent and developing concerns in Ishiguro’s fiction, this section runs through some of the family and social background details pertinent to his choice of vocation and early development. A brief survey of Ishiguro’s oeuvre will be followed by an explanation of the trajectory of his writing, relating in the process his acknowledged creative and formative influences. This review of authorial development puts the emphasis on Ishiguro’s movement towards and occupation of a unique cosmopolitan terrain manifested among other ways in his self-ascription as an international writer. The narrative concerns underwriting Ishiguro’s early work are also recounted.

Life and works

Born in 1954 in Nagasaki, Ishiguro came to England in 1960 when his father, an oceanographer, joined a British government research project on the North Sea. His family settled in the town of Guildford, southern England, where he grew up attending British schools but speaking Japanese at home with his parents. Ishiguro states in several interviews that the expatriation was originally intended to be short-term. Well into his adolescence, his family expected that they would one day return to Japan. With the passage of time, however, the sojourn became permanent.

After leaving school in 1973, Ishiguro took up a variety of sundry jobs including working for a brief period as a grouse-beater for the Queen Mother at Balmoral Castle, Scotland. In April 1974, he travelled to the US and hitchhiked around the west coast for several months. As Ishiguro recounts it, this was a time of carefree, youthful idealism. In a recent interview, he states that in his encounters with fellow travellers, ‘the third question, after “What bands are you into?” and “Where are you from?” was “What do you think is the meaning of life?”’ (Hunnewell 2008:37). Later that year Ishiguro took up a course of study at the University of Kent in Canterbury. After a year he decided to take another year out and spent six months working as a volunteer community worker on a housing estate in Renfrew, Scotland. This was a time of declining manufacturing and widespread structural unemployment and Ishiguro recounts that the experience had a sobering effect on him: he ‘grew up a lot’ because he had been brought up in ‘a very middle-class environment in southern England’ (Hunnewell 2008:37). At the University of Kent, he attended classes in English and Philosophy, and after earning a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1978, Ishiguro went back to social work. For a while he was based in London and worked for the Cyrenians, an organization that seeks to meet the needs of the homeless [100]. His initial dreams about becoming a songwriter having come to naught, he enrolled in 1979 in a famous creative writing course run by Malcolm Bradbury at the University of East Anglia [87] in Norwich, where the writer Angela Carter was also another teacher and mentor. Ishiguro graduated from the course in 1980 having obtained an advance from Faber and Faber for a novel in progress.

That novel, A Pale View of Hills, was published in 1982. A precocious first book, it tells the story of a middle-aged Japanese woman who has settled in England and whose grown-up daughter from her first marriage has committed suicide. Her manner of coming to terms with the tragedy is to recount the story of a friend she had back in Nagasaki just after the war. The friend wants to leave Japan and move to the United States; she also has a young troubled daughter whose behaviour echoes the protagonist’s own experiences with her daughter. This narrative arrangement gives the novel an uncanny doppelganger dimension and helped Ishiguro win the prestigious Winifred Holtby Prize awarded by the Royal Society of Literature. The impact of the first novel can also be gleaned from Ishiguro’s inclusion in 1983 in Granta magazine’s list of the twenty best young British novelists [99] as names to watch out for in the future, although the accolade was slightly premature. Ishiguro only took up citizenship later that year, something that had been on the cards because, as he puts it, he ‘felt British’ and thought that his ‘future was in Britain’ (Wroe 2005).

A subplot in A Pale View of Hills features a retired teacher who has to rethink his values in the aftermath of the war. This scenario was transformed and expanded in Ishiguro’s second novel, An Artist of the Floating World, which appeared in 1986. Set entirely in post-war Japan, the book recounts the experiences of a painter who had supported militarism in the 1930s with propaganda artwork. In a radically altered post-war environment, he is forced to question the certainties of the antebellum period. Among other things, the novel deals with the themes of collaboration, self-deception and self-betrayal. Its garrulous, back-and-forth narration marks an ambitious attempt to capture the texture of memory. The novel was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the Whitbread Book of the Year award. It subsequently appeared on bestseller lists around the world.

Ishiguro earned an international reputation in 1989 when his third novel, The Remains of the Day, won the prestigious Booker Prize. The book recounts the experiences of an emotionally stilted butler who discovers late in life the costs of his misplaced adherence to hierarchical notions of duty, service and vocational excellence. The novel is Ishiguro’s best-known work and has arguably become a classic of the contemporary literature canon. Explaining the award, the chair of the selection panel, David Lodge [106], called it ‘a cunningly structured and beautifully paced performance’, one that ‘renders with humour and pathos a memorable character and explores the large, vexed themes of class, tradition and duty’ (Lewis 2000:137). In a review of the book, Salman Rushdie praised it for daring to pose ‘Big Questions’ like what is ‘greatness’, what is ‘dignity’, and what is ‘Englishness’ – all of it done with ‘a delicacy and humour that do not obscure the tough-mindedness beneath’. For Rushdie, the twist that it gives to the country-house novel genre [54, 79, 117, 126] makes it ‘a brilliant subversion of the fictional modes from which it at first seems to descend’ (Rushdie 1991:244–5). The novel was subsequently made into a movie by the famous Merchant Ivory production team. Released in 1993, it starred Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson; it garnered eight Academy Award nominations and won three awards.

Ishiguro’s most openly experimental novel, The Unconsoled, was published in 1995 to decidedly mixed reviews. Its lengthy dream-like sequences and opaque construction left many critics nonplussed. At the same time, it also drew the support of some prominent commentators [113]. Lengthwise, the novel is almost as extensive as Ishiguro’s three previous novels combined. It allowed him to push into a new post-realist phase and also to surprise readers with his reach and coverage. In the same year, Ishiguro received an OBE for his services to literature. He was also named Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government in 1998.

Ishiguro’s fifth novel, When We Were Orphans, was published in 2000. While not a conventional realist text, the novel makes a sizeable retreat from the out-and-out fabulism that characterizes the previous work. Set in London and Shanghai, it relates the experiences of a detective who tries to unravel the mystery of his parents’ disappearance in the early years of the previous century. On one level a rewrite of Dickens’s Great Expectations, it directs attention on the protagonist’s psychological manoeuvres rather than on the spadework that one might expect from a conventional detection novel. In this sense it also gives a twist to the crime fiction genre.

Ishiguro’s most recent novel, Never Let Me Go, captured the runner-up spot in the 2005 Booker Prize awards and raises the topical issue of cloning and bioethics. It tells the story of a trio of clones who in some speculative society are bred to furnish body parts for ‘original’ humans. The title of the novel is also the title of the chief protagonist’s favourite song, which she interprets as a mother’s love song to her infant. In formal terms, it braids together science fiction and dystopian fiction [118, 156]. Critics and reviewers have commented on its striking ability to stoke existential angst and deliberation [118]. Already the novel is starting to attract innovative readings addressing a number of pressing issues and challenges. Among other things, it taps into and explores deeply held yearnings for radical change in society. With the passage of time, it could conceivably become Ishiguro’s most culturally and intellectually important book.

Compared to the novels, Ishiguro’s other creative works have not received much critical attention. He has published a number of short stories, some of which acted as trial runs for the books. An early batch of three appeared in 1981 in Introduction 7: Stories by New Writers. The most recent story, ‘A village after dark’, appeared in 2001 in the New Yorker magazine. Ishiguro also wrote two original screenplays for Britain’s Channel 4 television: A Profile of Arthur J. Mason (broadcast in 1984) and The Gourmet (broadcast in 1986). Both plays were directed by Michael Whyte. Told in a semi-documentary style, the former relates the experiences of a butler who late in life suddenly becomes famous when a book he wrote decades ago is rediscovered and published to great acclaim. The latter is a black comedy about a sophisticated, wealthy gourmand who travels the world searching for ‘extreme’ culinary experiences and who faces a crisis when he runs out of things to satisfy his bored palate. Part of the play recounts his travails in a church that provides shelter for the homeless. This portion of the play appears to draw on the social work that Ishiguro did before he became a full-time writer.

In addition, Ishiguro also wrote a screenplay that was substantially reworked for a movie directed by the avant-garde film-maker Guy Maddin, as well as the screenplay for another movie directed by James Ivory. Maddin’s film, The Saddest Music in the World, was released in 2003 and revolves around an international music competition held in Depression-era Winnipeg, Canada. Its objective is to determine which folk music tradition has the most tragic melody. Ivory’s film is titled The White Countess, and was released in 2005. It tells the story of a group of White émigrés who, displaced by the Russian civil war, fetch up in Shanghai in the mid-1930s. One of them – the female lead played by Natasha Richardson – falls in love with a blind former diplomat played by Ralph Fiennes, who sets up a nightclub for her.

After his first three novels, Ishiguro was branded a supplier of Japanese and English authenticity [60] despite his efforts to probe cultural claims and assumptions made about these nations. In some circles, he was read in a manner diametrically opposed to the universalist and cross-cultural thrust of his fiction. Since then he has sought to write in a mix of realist and non-realist styles so that his works would be read as ‘parables’ and he wouldn’t be saddled with literalist readings that tied them severely to a national, cultural or historical setting. Ishiguro explains in a 1990 interview that, ‘if there is something I really struggle with as a writer … it is this whole question about how to make a particular setting actually take off into the realm of metaphor [60] so that people don’t think it is just about Japan or Britain’ (Vorda and Herzinger 1993:16).

Three books later, in a recent extended interview in the Paris Review, Ishiguro gives some tantalizing glimpses into his forthcoming novel. His remarks show him still apprehensive about this driving issue, still trying to come up with innovative solutions so that his settings can take off into a figurative realm. He states that he considered France after World War Two and post-invasion Britain (c. 450 AD) as potential settings for his new novel. The latter covers the period after ‘the Romans left and the Anglo-Saxons took over, which led to the annihilation of the Celts’. He figured that ‘the further you go back in time, the more likely the story would be read metaphorically … as a modern parable’ (Hunnewell 2008:43) [109].

Elsewhere in the Paris Review interview, Ishiguro talks about how The Remains of the Day got its name [135]. He states that a piece of juvenilia he wouldn’t mind publishing relates the experiences of two young people working in a fish-and-chip restaurant who fall in love. In response to the interviewer’s comments that in his writing he doesn’t do ‘what is so common now’, namely to fictionalize his life, to write about how it was like ‘growing up in a Japanese home in England’, Ishiguro replies that he did do it, but only ‘half-hearted[ly]’, because at that point in his life his main priority was writing songs that ‘went over the same territory’ (Hunnewell 2008:38) [19, 74]. Ishiguro currently lives in London’s Golders Green district with Lorna Anne MacDougal, h...

Table of contents

• Routledge Guides To Literature
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations and referencing
• Introduction
• 1 Life and contexts
• 2 Works
• 3 Criticism
• Chronology
• Bibliography
• Index