Kazuo Ishiguro in conversation, 7 November 2012

What an extraordinary event – Birkbeck’s Russell Celyn Jones, Professor of Creative Writing, was in conversation with Kazuo Ishiguro in a large theatre at Friends’ House (Euston Road NW1 2BJ).

The Booker Foundation and Man Group are collaborating with Birkbeck, University of London to celebrate recent winners of the Man Booker Prize through a series of conversations with them (http://www.bbk.ac.uk/news/prize-winning-author-kazuo-ishiguro-visits-birkbeck).

Kazuo Ishiguro was born in Japan and came over to leafy Surrey from Nagasaki when he was five years old. His parents, expecting to stay in England for no more that a year or so, would observe their neighbours’ behaviour from afar and comment on how interesting all this was. Ishiguro has admitted that this probably had the effect of allowing a young Kazuo to see Britain from an anthropological point of view.

Last time I heard Kazuo Ishiguro at the Purcell Room, Southbank Centre in 2002, he went to great lengths it seemed to dissociate himself from Japan. He emphasised to the audience that he could not read or write Japanese. He also mentioned how in the 1990s he used to be asked to take part in television discussions, for instance, to comment on the trade wars with Japan and to give his take on other Japan-related issues. Realising that he was not a spokesman for Japan, he began declining these invitations.

On the same occasion, a woman asked Ishiguro how, as a Japanese man, he had been able to write about an English butler, to which Ishiguro, normally unflappable, visibly flinched and reminded her that he had lived in England since the age of five.

Ishiguro’s books, which started off with Japanese themes, also began to veer away. He went on to portray an English butler, a European musician, a detective trying to solve the mystery of his parents’ disappearance in Hong Kong and, more recently, a group of friends who meet at a secluded English school called Hailsham.

At the Birkbeck Man Book event on 7 November, in conversation with Professor Russell Celyn Jones, Ishiguro seemed to have become reconciled to his Japanese heritage. It was a privilege to hear him at this free and packed event.

Kazuo Ishiguro, or Ish, as called by Professor Jones, won the Booker Prize in 1989 for his book, ‘Remains of the Day’. Three of his other novels made it to the shortlist, ‘When We Were Orphans’, “An Artist of the Floating World’ and ‘Never Let Me Go’.

Jones touched on Ishiguro’s Japanese family and voice. Ishiguro, it transpired, can understand Japanese women from the 1950s, thanks to having heard his mother talking Japanese when he was growing up. Consequently, he is able to understand 1950s women in Japanese films, while being completely thrown by the language used in samurai films.

The voice in his first novel was of an ageing Japanese woman, undemonstrative and elliptical. This voice has stayed with him through force of habit, he said, and is not artistically justified.

Jones brought up the theme often used by Ishiguro of unreliable memory against the backdrop of politics, be it World War Two or Japanese fascism and wanted to further explore this. Ishiguro explained that well-meaning people may not have the perspective of the time they are living in. Ultimately, things they were most proud of may turn in to the very thing that makes them most embarrassed in later life. Ishiguro wondered how his generation would react if found in that situation.

It is this idea of self-deception which fascinates Ishiguro, as well as the battle that we face between wanting to remember yet at the same time not wanting to remember. Nations go through this as well, which Ishiguro also finds compelling. Most countries have dark periods that they want or need to confront, but find this difficult.

Jones returned to the notion of Japan in his work and wondered how Ishiguro’s career would progress, reminding us that his first three books had been about Japan and that Ishiguro has something that has always intrigued writers, a confluence between East and West.

As a teenager, Ishiguro said he wanted to be a singer/songwriter in the mould of Bob Dylan or Leonard Cohen. He would go to open mics and folk clubs. His songwriting was his apprenticeship in writing fiction.

When he was 21,22 he went through a Japanese phase. Up until then he felt that Japan was secure in his head but at 21 he realised that Japan was not there for him any longer and that it had changed. His Japan was the world of childhood. His memories of Japan were nourished by parcels he was sent, full of comics and toys. It was a rather precious place as he was growing up – it contained his beloved toys and his grandparents, and was not a world that he could revisit on a plane.

In his early twenties he felt he had to preserve this world which no longer had a physical presence and came to write about it. Up until that age he had never been an avid reader and had no ambition to be a writer.

To help with his Japan project, Ishiguro consumed lots of Japanese films from the late 1950s and early 1960s to remind him of Japan as it was at the time he’d left.

He then came to feel he had fulfilled his Japan project, which coincided with his realisation that he was not an expert on Japan and could no longer justifiably accept invitations to act as a spokesman for Japan.

In reply to a question about his living across cultures, Ishiguro admitted to not being able to compare his childhood and background to anything else and is aware of other authors who can cross cultures equally well without having had his kind of background. He saw his parents observe British culture though the eyes of Japanese people with a deep interest in England but without the feeling of investment towards a life in Surrey. It made Ishiguro aware of rules and regulations in and differences between both cultures.

Once the period for questions concluded, this most thoughtful, magnanimous and humane of individuals got ready to sign books for a long queue of fans.