Kazuo Ishiguro in a Global Context

Cynthia F. Wong, Hülya Y?ld?z

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317109419
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Gothic, Romance, & Horror Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Bringing together an international group of scholars, this collection offers a fresh assessment of Kazuo Ishiguro's evolving significance as a contemporary world author. The contributors take on a range of the aesthetic and philosophical themes that characterize Ishiguro's work, including his exploration of the self, family, and community; his narrative constructions of time and space; and his assessments of the continuous and discontinuous forces of history, art, human psychology, and cultural formations. Significantly, the volume attends to Ishiguro's own self-identification as an international writer who has at times expressed his uneasiness with being grouped together with British novelists of his generation. Taken together, these rich considerations of Ishiguro's work attest to his stature as a writer who continues to fascinate cultural and textual critics from around the world.

Chapter 1
Kazuo Ishiguro and ‘Imagining Japan’

Romit Dasgupta, The University of Western Australia, Australia

I begin this essay with a personal anecdote. While flicking through the December 2011 issue of Skylife, the Turkish Airlines in-flight magazine, on the way to the conference on Kazuo Ishiguro at the Middle East Technical University in Ankara, I came across an article featuring various holiday destinations around the world, highlighting writers supposedly ‘representative’ of each of the locales. Japan was among the destinations featured. Not surprisingly, the entry reinforced many of the popular Orientalist and exoticised stereotypes of Japan – cherry blossoms, bonsai, haiku, Mount Fuji and other associations along the same lines. The ‘representative’ writers included the renowned seventeenth century haiku poet, Matsuo Bashō; icons of twentieth-century Japanese literature, Nobel Laureates Yasunari Kawabata and Kenzaburō Ōe; the globally popular contemporary writer Haruki Murakami; and Kazuo Ishiguro (Uslu 128).¹ This to me was intriguing – that a person who, other than the first five years of his life, had never lived in Japan, nor spent extensive periods of time there, nor spoke the language, could be framed as an embodiment of ‘Japanese’-ness. Moreover, given that I was on my way to a conference on British novelists, I could not help but wonder whether, had Britain also been among the destinations featured in the article, Ishiguro would have been mentioned as a ‘representative’ British writer.

This essay is a reflection not so much on Kazuo Ishiguro’s specific texts, but more on Ishiguro as a writer and as an individual situated between cultures. The focus that I adopt is from the position of someone who is situated within Japanese studies and cultural studies. Over the course of his career, Ishiguro has been variously regarded as a British writer, a postcolonial writer, as what Australian literary and linguistics scholar Mary Besemeres refers to as a ‘language migrant writer’ (10), and even, as the opening to this chapter illustrates, a Japanese writer. Yet, at the same time, Ishiguro does not fit neatly within any of these categories, something that no doubt has contributed to the public fascination with him, both as a writer and as an individual. Ishiguro’s relationship with Japan is particularly interesting, in that over the course of his career as a writer, he has gone from close, deliberate engagement in his texts to a seemingly complete disassociation and distancing in his later works from anything to do with Japan, or his own subjectivity as a person of Japanese heritage living in the West – something that has attracted criticisms of ‘whitefacing’ (Ma). And yet, Japan as a textual, or even sub-textual, reference continues to be an undercurrent in some of his later works too. Moreover, whereas in the West, Ishiguro’s Japanese connection is frequently underscored, his reception in Japan itself has been more ambivalent, with readers and critics not quite sure how exactly to pigeon-hole him. This was particularly the case in the early years of his career (Shibata and Sugano; Shōnaka). Clearly, Ishiguro was not a ‘Japanese’ writer. Yet, as someone who was born in Japan, and spent his early-childhood in that country, he could not be put in the same category as second- or third-generation diasporic nikkei writers like Japanese-North Americans Cynthia Kadohata, Joy Kogawa or John Okada. Thus, the springboard for the discussion in this chapter is Ishiguro’s relationship with notions of – an often imagined – ‘Japan’ and ‘Japanese-ness’, and his positioning as a writer who negotiates variously between ‘Japan’ and ‘The West’ (specifically, Britain).

In considering Ishiguro, I draw upon a theoretical framework suggested by Polish-Australian linguist and literary/cultural theorist Mary Besemeres in her 2002 monograph, Translating One’s Self: Language and Selfhood in Cross-Cultural Autobiography, of ‘self translation’ by ‘language migrant’ writers. These are writers who are born into a particular language, but, at varying points in their lives, ‘migrate’ into another language, which becomes the primary language through which they express themselves in writing. Despite what Besemeres refers to as the ‘natural language’ being subsumed by the seemingly dominant language into which the writer has migrated, the former continues to have an influence on the shaping of the ‘self’ (of the writer, of the individual). In opening her discussion, Besemeres draws upon Polish-Canadian journalist and writer Eva Hoffman’s 1989 autobiography Lost in Translation, an account of her family’s migration from Poland to Canada when she was a teenager. Besemeres observes that ‘the title … summons the potential loss of self, of key aspects of what a person has been, in the course of migrating between languages’ (9). Further on she comments that this ‘experience of migrants into a new language attests doubly to the shaping effect of natural language on self: both in the sense of a loss of self undergone with the loss of the native language, and in the sense of an enforced gain of self in living with the new language’ (10). It is these often nuanced or even un-articulated movements between languages (and, in a sense, between selves) that Besemeres unpacks in her work. The ‘language migrant’ writers she discusses – Eva Hoffman, Vladimir Nabokov, Maxine Hong Kingston and Kazuo Ishiguro, among others – are all writers who migrated from non-English speaking backgrounds into English. However, I want to consider Ishiguro in relation to other language-migrant writers who engage with Japan, in particular the Japanese-German poet and writer Yōko Tawada, who writes in both languages. I argue that such language-migrant writers can work to disrupt comfortable assumptions about identities of self, nation, language and even race/ethnicity.

Ishiguro and Japan

Before unpacking the above-mentioned notion of Ishiguro as a ‘language migrant’ writer, it will be useful to briefly consider the relationship between Ishiguro, the writer and the individual, and Japan and ‘Japanese-ness.’ Many writers – both academic and mainstream – have commented on Ishiguro’s complex, and indeed, complicated relationship with Japan (King 206–8; Wong 1–4). In particular, Ishiguro’s connection to Japan was repeatedly highlighted in reviews and essays in the years following his early works, in particular A Pale View of the Hills and An Artist of the Floating World, two texts in which Japan and articulations of ‘Japanese-ness’ were integral to the narratives. As Bruce King, in his essay on a selection of diasporic British writers, notes: ‘his [Ishiguro’s] instincts are for the nuanced, the understated, elegant but significant gesture, similar to the deft brushwork of Japanese paintings … [and] his novels require us to understand by indiscretion, by analogy with the way Japanese conversations move politely around the matter at issue’ (207). There is something suggestive of a deliberately Orientalist undercurrent in this observation. Significantly, King was writing in the 1990s, before Ishiguro had moved away from Japanese themes in his works, and in this regard was not, at the time, exceptional in reading into these seemingly ‘exotic Oriental’ influences in Ishiguro (Cheng). For instance, Takayuki Shōnaka, in his work on Ishiguro, talks about how these two early works fed into and, in turn, reinforced existing British stereotypes of an ‘exotic’ Japan. This was manifested, for instance, in the cover of early editions of An Artist of the Floating World, with deliberately exoticised, but irrelevant (to the plot) images used (Shōnaka 70, 71; see also Cheng). Even with Remains of the Day, a text that has no obvious relationship to Japan and, if anything, encapsulates the essence of a particular imagining of ‘English-ness,’ commentators continued to connect Ishiguro’s Japanese heritage with aspects of the work. For instance, in his discussion of Ishiguro and Japan, Shōnaka refers to a review in Japan’s Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper, where the reviewer mentions being told by a British friend that the book was reminiscent of a Japanese novel translated into English (Shōnaka 68, 69; also Rothfork; Wong 2, 3).

Ishiguro himself expressed irritation at this packaging of him as an exotic ‘other’ through which readers could access some otherwise unfathomable ‘essence’ of Japanese culture and sensibility. As Cynthia Wong observed, ‘[I]f early reviewers admire Japanese attributes … they also peg Ishiguro as a foreign writer who just happens to write in the English language. Having lived in Britain since the age of five … such perceptions are obviously annoying’ (Wong 8; also Ishiguro and Ōe 113). Significantly, the reception of Ishiguro’s early works in Japan itself was much more complex and, indeed, ambivalent, than was the case in the Anglophone world. On the one hand, as the noted Japanese writer and Nobel Laureate Kenzaburō Ōe observed in a conversation with Ishiguro during the latter’s first visit back to Japan in thirty years, Ishiguro was depicted as ‘a very quiet and peaceful author, and, therefore, a very Japanese author’ (Ishiguro and Ōe 115). This, as Ōe highlights, fed into collective national ‘self-orientalizing’ stereotypes that, while highlighting attributes like ‘tranquillity’ and ‘harmony’, conveniently side-stepped other less palatable aspects of Japanese culture and history such as its militaristic past (114, 115).

On the other hand, despite the media interest surrounding the debut of a writer with a Japanese surname receiving acclaim in the West, there was also a degree of uncertainty, and even suspicion, about Ishiguro. Indeed, at the beginning, despite his growing reputation in the West, Ishiguro remained relatively unknown in Japan (Shōnaka 178).² As someone born in Japan, he was clearly not a second- or third-generation diasporic writer, along the lines of Japanese-North Americans Cynthia Kadohata or John Okada. He was someone who, after the age of five, had never lived in Japan nor had proficiency in the language. As Shōnaka notes, Ishiguro’s entry into Japanese culture and literature was through English translations of iconic Japanese writers like Yasunari Kawabata or Yukio Mishima, who acted as ‘gatekeepers’ to knowledge about Japan in the West, but were hardly representative of contemporary socio-cultural reality (Shōnaka 40, 41). Indeed, as Shōnaka goes on to observe, Ishiguro claimed in an interview that he found Kawabata’s classic Snow Country (Yukiguni) to be ‘excessively poetic and difficult to grasp’ (41; my translation). As Ishiguro himself had admitted, the Japan he was writing about in those early texts was very much shaped by his ‘own imaginary Japan’ (Ishiguro and Ōe 110), one that, in many regards, remained frozen in his childhood memories of the place. The English translations he read, as well as the films of the legendary director Yasujiro Ozu that Ishiguro watched, added another layer to this imagined Japan (Matthews and Groes 5; Shibata and Sugano 25). Thus, while early commentators in the West may have been over-accentuating Ishiguro’s Japanese-ness, early commentators and critics in Japan did the opposite, which was to zoom in on his lack of ‘insider’ knowledge as a flaw (Shōnaka 68, 69). Many of the criticisms centred around Ishiguro’s imagined constructions of Japanese expressions and everyday socio-linguistic practices, and the difficulties involved in (so to speak) ‘back-translating’ into a language Japanese readers would be able to recognize and feel comfortable with (see Shibata and Sugano; Shōnaka 58–74). Indeed, as Shibata and Sugano point out, it was only after the success of Remains of the Day that Ishiguro’s reputation in Japan started to become established, to the point where his earlier Japan-connected works also started being reappraised (31; also Shōnaka 189, 190).

Possibly in reaction to the over-reading of ‘Japanese-ness’ into his earlier works in the West, Ishiguro, in his subsequent works (with the possible exception of When We Were Orphans), seemed to move away from anything to do with Japan, or even his own subject-position as a person of Japanese/East Asian heritage living in Britain. This opened him up to the criticism of a deliberate, apolitical evasion of the everyday realities of being a non-white immigrant person in contemporary Britain. Sheng-mei Ma’s 1999 essay represents this criticism of Ishiguro’s deliberate shift, a strategy Ma likens to a ‘whitefacing’ desire for ‘postethnicity’. As Ma observes in relation to Ishiguro’s fourth novel, set in a seemingly un-identifiable anywhere/everywhere Central European city: ‘An ethnic writer’s persistent desire for postethnicity is eventually realized in Unconsoled, cast, ironically, as a dream, one which emanates minority anxiety because it pretends to be the opposite – the majority. The very form … suggests that postethnicity is a wish-fulfillment and that the deracinated dreamscape a reaction against Orientalist readings of his “Japanese’ novels”’ (Ma 73).³ Ma chastises Ishiguro for not recognizing his position as Anglo-Japanese, but instead vacillating between Japanese and English characters in his works (71). Indeed, his ‘white-facing’ could at one level be seen as both potentially subversive of hegemonic white power structures, reversing the longstanding stereotypical depictions of East Asian characters (often played by white actors) like Fu Manchu or Madame Butterfly in Anglo-American popular culture, and as a reaction to the earlier Orientalist constructions of himself and his works by critics (Ma 79, 80). However, as Ma points out, ‘to defy Orientalist characteristics imposed on him, Ishiguro passes as white. … But the multi-directional passing does not betoken an egalitarian society; rather it reflects how slanted the socio-economic relationship is’ (80). He stresses that ‘passing for minorities has historically meant a precarious passage into a semblance of power’ (80). Consequently, he concludes that as a consequence of Ishiguro’s shift ‘from the intimation of minority [Anglo-Japanese] subjectivity’ apparent in A Pale View, the ‘landscape has grown unrecognizable, depressingly dark’ (Ma 86).

However, I would suggest that such a reading of Ishiguro’s engagements with Japan, ‘Japanese-ness’ and for that matter, Anglo-Japanese-ness, is overly harsh and one dimensional. First, ‘Japan’ as a narrative current does not necessarily get erased from his post-Artist of the Floating World works. I am not just referring to the supposed ‘Japanese’ sensibilities noticed by commentators in works like Remains of the Day that I referred to above. Rather, what I have in mind is the fleeting, seemingly accidental, but nevertheless very deliberate, insertion of references to Japan in some of his later works. For instance, when Ryder, the narrator of The Unconsoled, comes down to the lobby of his hotel in the anonymous European city where the book is set, he comes across ‘several Japanese people … greeting each other with much jollity’ (Ishiguro, Unconsoled 19). There seems to be no obvious reason why the presence of these Japanese (presumably) tourists in the lobby deserve mention; there is no relationship whatsoever to the narrative, nor to some of the other things Ryder notices when entering the lobby in that scene. Furthermore, one cannot help but speculate why Ishiguro chose Japanese, rather than (say) British, American, German, Chinese or any other nationality that may have stood out in that particular setting. Similarly, in the short story ‘Come Rain or Come Shine’ in the 2009 anthology Nocturnes, the narrator, a mid-forties ESL (English As a Second Language) teacher based in Spain, mentions making plans to move to Japan in the late-1980s because Japan then was the place to go to earn a good income (Ishiguro, Nocturnes 40). At one level, such apparently random references to Japan may be seen as part of the ‘post-ethnification’ process that Ma discusses. After all, in both instances, it is white men whose voices Ishiguro references Japan through. However, at another level, we could regard this as an expression (no matter how trivial) of the process of journeying between two cultures that language migrant writers, like Ishiguro, engage with. The two instances mentioned here resonate with Mary Besemeres’s reflection in relation to Ono, the Japanese narrator of An Artist of the Floating World, through whose voice (the language-migrant) Ishiguro speaks: ‘Ono appears … to share the floor with a meta-narrator who is aware of other (non-Japanese) cultural expectations where Ono ostensibly is not. In accommodating these two perspectives, the narrator’s voice is that of a bicultural being, even while the character himself is not defined as such’ (Besemeres 248). In the case of the two instances referred to above, a mirror process may be at work, whereby a bicultural, ‘language-migrant’ voice (Ishiguro’s) is speaking through, and alongside, monocultural narrators.

If anything, rather than a ‘white-facing’ device, Ishiguro’s engagements with differing voices and stand-points has given his writing an added dimension, one which allowed him to become the truly global – or ‘international’ (Cheng) – writer he is generally recognized as today. Rebecca Walkowitz notes that...