REBECCA RUKEYSER interviews KAZUO ISHIGURO
Author Kazuo Ishiguro PHOTO/Jeff Cottenden
The Booker Prize-winning author on samurai sword fights, the trouble with literary allusion, and the fabled world of post-Arthurian England.
But while he has grappled with the theme throughout his lauded career, Ishiguro has taken a radically different route in each of his works to arrive there. A Pale View of Hills (1982) is an intentionally obfuscated account of a daughter’s suicide. An Artist of the Floating World (1986) charts the life of an artist in postwar Japan. The Remains of the Day (1989), which won the Booker Prize, follows a butler on his drive across England. When We Were Orphans (2000) is a detective story. The Unconsoled (1995), written according to “dream logic,” considers a pianist in Central Europe. Never Let Me Go (2005) is about a boarding school full of clones. Now, in The Buried Giant, his first novel in a decade, Ishiguro has written a post-Arthurian legend.
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Guernica: You’ve written a number of books that deal with historical specificity as well as interpersonal complications. Did your decision to move into a metaphoric realm with The Buried Giant have anything to do with the way those books were perceived?
Kazuo Ishiguro: When I wrote my early novels set in Japan, I was publishing in the West—my first audience was British and European and American. Maybe because Japanese culture seemed quite far away and exotic, particularly back then in the ’80s, people tended to say, “Oh, this is an interesting study of Japanese psychology, this is what the Japanese went through.”
It did seem to confine, I felt, the relevance of the book to those people who were Japanophiles or who had a peculiar interest in what the Japanese had gone through after the war. While that’s not by any means a wrong reading, I thought it was limiting. And that’s when I started to think maybe I needed something a bit more metaphorical. Otherwise people are going to think, “We’re just talking about this historical situation.”
When I wrote The Remains of the Day I thought it would be more universal, and to an extent it was. People did read it both specifically as something that took place in that time in history, but also, maybe because it was Western and didn’t have that shock of the exotic, people were more ready to say, “This is a human story from which we can take various and more universal messages.”
But nevertheless I was still uncomfortable about the fact that people seemed to think I was a great expert on English social history. Often people said, “You must have done a lot of research about how servants ran houses” or “You must know a hell of a lot about European foreign policy.”
And of course I had to do a ton of research about that, but I felt that was slightly beside the point. I wanted to say, “Well, if that was what I was trying to do, I would have written a nonfiction book, properly annotated and with my sources named so that you could argue with me and say, ‘You’ve got that wrong, I’ve got it right.’”
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