Chapter 1
Kazuo Ishiguro and âImagining Japanâ
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 ârepresentativeâ 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 â cherry blossoms, bonsai, haiku, Mount Fuji and other associations along the same lines. The ârepresentativeâ writers included the renowned seventeenth century haiku poet, Matsuo BashĆ; icons of twentieth-century Japanese literature, Nobel Laureates Yasunari Kawabata and KenzaburĆ Će; the globally popular contemporary writer Haruki Murakami; and Kazuo Ishiguro (Uslu 128).1 This to me was intriguing â 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 âJapaneseâ-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 ârepresentativeâ British writer.
This essay is a reflection not so much on Kazuo Ishiguroâs 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 âlanguage migrant writerâ (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. Ishiguroâs 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 â something that has attracted criticisms of âwhitefacingâ (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, Ishiguroâs 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; ShĆnaka). Clearly, Ishiguro was not a âJapaneseâ 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 Ishiguroâs relationship with notions of â an often imagined â âJapanâ and âJapanese-nessâ, and his positioning as a writer who negotiates variously between âJapanâ and âThe Westâ (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 Oneâs Self: Language and Selfhood in Cross-Cultural Autobiography, of âself translationâ by âlanguage migrantâ writers. These are writers who are born into a particular language, but, at varying points in their lives, âmigrateâ into another language, which becomes the primary language through which they express themselves in writing. Despite what Besemeres refers to as the ânatural languageâ 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 âselfâ (of the writer, of the individual). In opening her discussion, Besemeres draws upon Polish-Canadian journalist and writer Eva Hoffmanâs 1989 autobiography Lost in Translation, an account of her familyâs migration from Poland to Canada when she was a teenager. Besemeres observes that âthe title ⊠summons the potential loss of self, of key aspects of what a person has been, in the course of migrating between languagesâ (9). Further on she comments that this âexperience 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 languageâ (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 âlanguage migrantâ writers she discusses â Eva Hoffman, Vladimir Nabokov, Maxine Hong Kingston and Kazuo Ishiguro, among others â 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 YĆko 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 âlanguage migrantâ writer, it will be useful to briefly consider the relationship between Ishiguro, the writer and the individual, and Japan and âJapanese-ness.â Many writers â both academic and mainstream â have commented on Ishiguroâs complex, and indeed, complicated relationship with Japan (King 206â8; Wong 1â4). In particular, Ishiguroâs 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 âJapanese-nessâ were integral to the narratives. As Bruce King, in his essay on a selection of diasporic British writers, notes: âhis [Ishiguroâs] 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 issueâ (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 âexotic Orientalâ influences in Ishiguro (Cheng). For instance, Takayuki ShĆnaka, in his work on Ishiguro, talks about how these two early works fed into and, in turn, reinforced existing British stereotypes of an âexoticâ 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 (ShĆnaka 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 âEnglish-ness,â commentators continued to connect Ishiguroâs Japanese heritage with aspects of the work. For instance, in his discussion of Ishiguro and Japan, ShĆnaka refers to a review in Japanâs 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 (ShĆnaka 68, 69; also Rothfork; Wong 2, 3).
Ishiguro himself expressed irritation at this packaging of him as an exotic âotherâ through which readers could access some otherwise unfathomable âessenceâ of Japanese culture and sensibility. As Cynthia Wong observed, â[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 annoyingâ (Wong 8; also Ishiguro and Će 113). Significantly, the reception of Ishiguroâs 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 KenzaburĆ Će observed in a conversation with Ishiguro during the latterâs first visit back to Japan in thirty years, Ishiguro was depicted as âa very quiet and peaceful author, and, therefore, a very Japanese authorâ (Ishiguro and Će 115). This, as Će highlights, fed into collective national âself-orientalizingâ stereotypes that, while highlighting attributes like âtranquillityâ and âharmonyâ, 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 (ShĆnaka 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 ShĆnaka notes, Ishiguroâs entry into Japanese culture and literature was through English translations of iconic Japanese writers like Yasunari Kawabata or Yukio Mishima, who acted as âgatekeepersâ to knowledge about Japan in the West, but were hardly representative of contemporary socio-cultural reality (ShĆnaka 40, 41). Indeed, as ShĆnaka goes on to observe, Ishiguro claimed in an interview that he found Kawabataâs classic Snow Country (Yukiguni) to be âexcessively poetic and difficult to graspâ (41; my translation). As Ishiguro himself had admitted, the Japan he was writing about in those early texts was very much shaped by his âown imaginary Japanâ (Ishiguro and Će 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 Ishiguroâs Japanese-ness, early commentators and critics in Japan did the opposite, which was to zoom in on his lack of âinsiderâ knowledge as a flaw (ShĆnaka 68, 69). Many of the criticisms centred around Ishiguroâs imagined constructions of Japanese expressions and everyday socio-linguistic practices, and the difficulties involved in (so to speak) âback-translatingâ into a language Japanese readers would be able to recognize and feel comfortable with (see Shibata and Sugano; ShĆnaka 58â74). Indeed, as Shibata and Sugano point out, it was only after the success of Remains of the Day that Ishiguroâs reputation in Japan started to become established, to the point where his earlier Japan-connected works also started being reappraised (31; also ShĆnaka 189, 190).
Possibly in reaction to the over-reading of âJapanese-nessâ 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 Maâs 1999 essay represents this criticism of Ishiguroâs deliberate shift, a strategy Ma likens to a âwhitefacingâ desire for âpostethnicityâ. As Ma observes in relation to Ishiguroâs fourth novel, set in a seemingly un-identifiable anywhere/everywhere Central European city: âAn ethnic writerâs 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 â the majority. The very form ⊠suggests that postethnicity is a wish-fulfillment and that the deracinated dreamscape a reaction against Orientalist readings of his âJapaneseâ novelsââ (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 âwhite-facingâ 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, âto 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 isâ (80). He stresses that âpassing for minorities has historically meant a precarious passage into a semblance of powerâ (80). Consequently, he concludes that as a consequence of Ishiguroâs shift âfrom the intimation of minority [Anglo-Japanese] subjectivityâ apparent in A Pale View, the âlandscape has grown unrecognizable, depressingly darkâ (Ma 86).
However, I would suggest that such a reading of Ishiguroâs engagements with Japan, âJapanese-nessâ and for that matter, Anglo-Japanese-ness, is overly harsh and one dimensional. First, âJapanâ 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 âJapaneseâ 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 âseveral Japanese people ⊠greeting each other with much jollityâ (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 âCome Rain or Come Shineâ 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 âpost-ethnificationâ 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 Besemeresâs reflection in relation to Ono, the Japanese narrator of An Artist of the Floating World, through whose voice (the language-migrant) Ishiguro speaks: âOno 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 narratorâs voice is that of a bicultural being, even while the character himself is not defined as suchâ (Besemeres 248). In the case of the two instances referred to above, a mirror process may be at work, whereby a bicultural, âlanguage-migrantâ voice (Ishiguroâs) is speaking through, and alongside, monocultural narrators.
If anything, rather than a âwhite-facingâ device, Ishiguroâs engagements with differing voices and stand-points has given his writing an added dimension, one which allowed him to become the truly global â or âinternationalâ (Cheng) â writer he is generally recognized as today. Rebecca Walkowitz notes that...