Kazuo Ishiguro with
F.X.Fenney
ANDREA GROSSMAN: Thank you for coming
to
tonight's programming featuring Kazuo Ishiguro and F.X. Feeney. I am
Andrea
Grossman, the founder of Writers Bloc, a non-profit author lecture
series dedicated
to bringing to Los Angeles my favorite writers and their literature.
Before we turn to
Ishiguro
and to F. X. Feeney, I would like to thank Cheryl Rhodin and the Board
of
Directors of The Writer's Guild of America for making the theatre
available for
us tonight. And thanks as always, to Pam Henstell at Knopf. To my
volunteers,
to Debra Frankel, and to Kazuo Ishiguro for stopping here at Writers
Bloc while
in Los Angeles. We would have been otherwise "unconsoled" had he not.
And thanks to the very special F. X. Feeney as well.
Now for tonight. I
love
Kazuo Ishiguro's books, because they're so seductive in their settings,
their
eras, and their mysteries. He gives us characters who are not quite
comfortable
with their social order, or their fit into the tight stricture of their
class.
There's a palpable discomfort with the aristocracy. In the case of his
new
novel, When We Were Orphans, the dismay with the realm's main source of
wealth
opium turns to conflict and kidnapping. The ensuing mystery simmers
for
twenty years or so, and all the while, the reader feels like yanking
the main
character by his lapels yelling for him to do something to solve this
at
last. I remember yelling in a similar manner at the butler with his
quiet
complacency in The Remains of the Day warning him that something's
afoot
that something's not quite right.
It's not that
Ishiguro
tricks us by holding something back from us until late in the game.
That's
standard operating procedure for every mystery novelist in the
business. What
distinguishes Ishiguro's novels is that his characters, although
intelligent
and perceptive, sometimes choose not to see what's directly in front of
them,
and the reader is drawn into this denial, and makes the same choices as
the
characters. The reader can identify with the characters so strongly,
while
sensing this self-deception inherent in the characters. Perhaps it is
this
element that makes his books so perfect for movies.
Speaking of movies,
I've
known F. X. Feeney for about eighteen years, and have appreciated his
film
reviews for that long. They're grounded in a basis of solid literary
love and
appreciation. And this is one guy who knows his literature as well as
he knows
his movies. He's been a critic for the
Thank you, and it is
my
great pleasure to introduce Kazuo Ishiguro and F. X. Feeney. . .
F. X. FEENEY: I was
thinking
that perhaps we would start with a short reading from the book if that's
alright. . .
KAZUO ISHIGURO:
That's what we agreed on. . .
FEENEY: Yes. Get a
taste of
the book.
ISHIGURO:
I'm only going to read for I'll say three and a half minutes. This
is
literally to give you a taste of the book. This is right from page 56.
It is slightly
surprising to
me, looking back today, to think how as young boys we were allowed to
come and
go unsupervised to the extent that we were. But this was, of course,
all within
the relative safety of the International Settlement. I for one was
absolutely
forbidden to enter the Chinese areas of the city, and as far as I know,
Akira's
parents were no less strict on the matter. Out there, we were told, lay
all
manner of ghastly diseases, filth and evil men. The closest I had ever
come to
going out of the Settlement was once when a carriage carrying my mother
and me
took an unexpected route along that part of the Soochow creek bordering
the
Chapel district; I could see the huddled low rooftops across the canal,
and had
held my breath for as long as I could for fear the pestilence would come
airborne across the narrow strip of water. No wonder then that my
friend's
claim to have undertaken a number of secret forays into such areas made
an
impression on me.
I remember quizzing
Akira
repeatedly about these exploits. The truth concerning the Chinese
districts, he
told me, was far worse even than the rumors. There were no proper
buildings,
just shack upon shack built in great proximity to one another. It all
looked,
he claimed, much like the marketplace in Boone Road, except that whole
families
were to be found living in each "stall." There were, moreover, dead
bodies piled up everywhere, flies buzzing all over them, and no one
thought
anything of it. On one occasion, Akira had been strolling down a
crowded alley
and had seen a man some powerful warlord, he supposed being
transported on
a sedan chair, accompanied by a giant carrying a sword. The warlord was
pointing to whomever he pleased and the giant would then proceed to lop
his or
her head off. Naturally, people were trying to hide themselves the best
they
could. Akira, though, had simply stood there, staring defiantly back at
the
warlord. The latter had spent a moment considering whether to have Akira
beheaded, but then struck by my friend's courage, had finally laughed
and,
reaching down, patted him on the head. Then the warlord's party had
continued
on its way, leaving many more severed heads in its wake.
I cannot remember
ever
attempting to challenge Akira on any of these claims. Once I mentioned
casually
to my mother something about my friend's adventures beyond the
Settlement, and
I remember her smiling and saying something to cast doubt on the
matter. I was
furious with her, and thereafter I believe I carefully avoided
revealing to her
anything at all intimate concerning Akira.
Okay, that's it. I'm
just going
to leave it to that.
FEENEY: This book is
constructed along lines of layered tension. It really is very rich in
terms of
its structure. When we first meet Christopher Banks, the narrator of
the scene
you've just heard who is remembering Shanghai at that point, when we
first meet
Christopher, he is fresh out of Oxford in England. He is on the way to
becoming
a detective, and there are certain riddles about his past that are not
quite
clear even to himself. This emerges particularly as he's going around
London
trying to network and meet people to advance his career. He is an
orphan, but
there's a mysterious severing with his past that finds its counterpart
in the
woman Sarah Hemmings who he meets. And so we think, is this going to be
a
mystery story? Is it going to be a love story? Then, as the story moves
towards
Shanghai, one can feel many pages in advance that Christopher is being
thrust
to make a decision to choose between the spontaneous authentic love
that's
rising between him and Sarah and just simply trying to seek out what is
the
truth of his own life.
There are so many
surprises,
some, really quite outstanding surprises, as the story progresses, I
wondered,
in terms of your creative process, how willing were you to be surprised
at the
table when you were writing, or did you have to know more than your
hero, and
devise the game of hide and seek with the reader, or did you set out to
be
surprised yourself?
ISHIGURO:
Well that, to me, is a very crucial question about writing. To me, it's
getting
to be the question I worry about the most. How much should I know about
a story
before I start actually writing the words that go into the book? There
was a
time, earlier in my writing life, when I used to plan almost
neurotically. I
would spend a book like The Remains of the Day I believe I spent
two years
just planning it, and only a year writing actual prose. Since we're
here in Los
Angeles, I could say that it's a bit like location hunting getting
everything
ready and then going out there and filming it. It was almost like
that to me.
Everything had been done. And planned, and I knew everything, I knew
about the
characters, their motivations, the plot, how the themes would work. I
wouldn't
dare start until I knew everything.
But I began to
think, after
a while, that there were limitations to this. And that there was quite
a lot
that I was perhaps denying to myself by not allowing what you just
described
this element of surprise. Whether a writer surprises himself. Not least
of all
because I think that some very uncomfortable things sometimes pop up.
And some
of the most interesting writing can be just that: stuff that is quite
uncomfortable for the writer. Stuff that you would perhaps, if you had
been in
control more, you would perhaps would prefer to avoid it. So these
days, I
slither a lot between these two poles. At the one end, there's this
appeal of
putting in a blank piece of paper into your machine whatever it is
and just
starting and seeing what kind of startling things come out. And being
slightly
horrified by it. But then using that as your raw materials and shaping
it, and
getting something out of that. At the other extreme, there's this
meticulous
planning, and producing something very controlled. I think there are
pros and
cons to both.
I think the neurotic
mapping
kind of approach, it does enable you to produce a very controlled book.
Where
you can manipulate the emotions of the reader very very finely. Where a
tiny
little element on page 34 reverberates or something on page 86. You've
weighted
everything just like that, and you can play on the reader's
expectations,
undermine their expectations, their emotions and so on their fears.
But it
can sometimes be a bit dead a bit cold. And you can sometimes get this
extraordinary stuff coming out if you allow yourself surprises, but
that can
be very messy. You can produce something brilliant but messy. So this
has
become the big question for me. It's not so much a question of, "should
it
be third person or first person," or anything like that. Always it's for
me, "should I start now, do I dare start now?"
FEENEY: You seem so
in
command of the reality of Shanghai at the turn of the century and also
in the
1930s. How much thinking had gone into it beforehand for the
composition of
this book? Was there another project that you had worked on and you
simply had
inhabited this place in your mind, and were able to then invent more
freely?
ISHIGURO: I
did actually do some hard research. I gathered together a collection of
guide
books and local history books, written in Shanghai at the time. I spent
what I
thought were very unreasonable amounts of money at Antiquarian
bookstores for
these shabby little volumes telling you where to get the best coffee
cake in
Shanghai, stuff like that. These were fascinating eventually. I prefer
to work
from sources like that, rather than scholarly books written many years
later
about the place. So I did do that kind of stuff. And my father was born
in
Shanghai in 1920, although he is entirely Japanese. His father, my
Grandfather,
was an industrialist there during that period. And so, there had always
been a
kind of family background, and I did have access to all these
photographs
albums of what looked almost like movie stills these gray and white
photos of
guys in white suits with ceiling fans. These always conjured up a
certain
atmosphere for me.
But I would say that
by and
large, for me, I don't really like that kind of hard research very
much. I try
to keep it in control. Because for a novelist you see, I don't feel
I'm a
historian, I don't feel I'm a social historian. I'm certainly not a
travel
writer. I'm not trying to inform people what a place is like, whether
it's
Japan or England of a certain time, or Shanghai. I'm trying to get my
imaginary
world alive. And it takes quite a lot of effort to build an imaginary
world
that kind of works within itself. And if you get too much of this stuff
from
the outside what the real Shanghai was like I think it stops your
real
world from developing and growing. Sometimes, this kind of research in
libraries, and old books and interviewing people, can be a bit of an
alibi for
a novelist or a creative person, a fiction writer. Because in the end,
a lot of
the research for a fiction writer is inside your own imagination.
You've got to
go in there and start delving around and you have to know what the
atmospheres
are in that world. You have to know if it is a realistic world, or if
it's
something that veers slightly away from realism. You have to know if it
is a
comic world. You have to know its terms and moods, and what kind of
people
inhabit it. And you can only do that by actually taking a plunge and
going
inside. I mean, it can become an alibi or crutch, all the researching.
FEENEY: The passage
you read
is particularly evocative I think, because it is from a child's point
of view.
I mean, you have the liberty of an adult voice recalling childhood
episodes and
tranquility, but they have the necessary exaggeration of childhood and
they
call upon universal things: "I was wondering is my best friend lying to
me
or not?" I felt that, although your biography states that you moved to
England from Japan at age five, I don't find that you're an
autobiographical
writer. I cannot locate that person in the text except through a certain
feeling of internal exile on the part of the characters. But that is
something
that any native of any place can feel even if they're staying where
they grew
up. I wondered about just how you locate those kinds of realities in
your imagination.
ISHIGURO:
I'm certainly glad to hear you say that you couldn't really locate me
autobiographically in the book. Increasingly these days I think,
there's a
tendency for people to want to locate some clearly autobiographical
figure in
people's novels. I didn't sense it so much, say ten or fifteen years
ago. It
might just be me, but there seems to be an increased interest in in
some
ways, people want to bypass the work of fiction. They want to know
about the
author. They're always saying, "Is this character based on you?" With
some authors this is the case. They work like that. But I've always had
an
oddly oblique relationship to my characters. I should say that there's
a kind
of emotional autobiography in there somewhere perhaps. About
displacement,
exile. But none of the things I describe happened directly to me. Of
course,
there's a character here who as a boy who moves from the East to the
West in
strange circumstances, and can't quite fit in in either place. But
that's not
really me.
FEENEY: It's not
even the
issue of the book.
ISHIGURO:
It's not the issue of the book, no. I've often tried to figure out what
my
relationship to my characters is. I think that I tend to work more from
searching inside myself for little impulses or tendencies that might
not even
be noticeable from the outside. But they might be ones that I feel are
significant, or perhaps that I fear, in myself. I create perhaps a
grotesque
character around a tendency like that. So if it's the fear of emotions,
or
whatever, it might not be something that pronounced in me. People who
know me
may not say that I'm any more emotionally repressed than the next guy,
but if
that's what I'm interested in, then my temptation is to build as in
the case
of Stevens the butler a monster of emotional repression, or at least
some
kind of peculiar self-denial in regards to his emotions. And I think
that I've
often tended to do that. I can't really point to any character who
relates to
me directly.
FEENEY: You mentioned
choosing a comic tone or a particular tone, and that these things are
more
important even than first or third-person. That brought to mind one
question
that grew while reading the book. Technically, I thought that you
pulled off a
very difficult trick, though it's not felt as a trick as one's reading
it. One
has a first-person narrator. One is trusting this narrator. He seems
very
together, he's very rational, he's always very observant. And yet there
are
moments when the impressions that people present to him as he was at
college,
"Oh, you were a loner" and he always thought he was a joiner! Little
things like that accrue, and then there is a long stretch where one has
to
question whether the narrator is in contact with reality at all, and
has grown
deluded. But he is presenting his delusion with such a poker face that
one is
unsure of what to do. I wonder if you could talk about how you kept
your own
balance as the storyteller, while working through that stretch.
ISHIGURO: I think
these days, I'm caring less and less what's really happening "out
there." You said there that at times you wondered whether the character
is
deluded perhaps he has lost touch with reality altogether. I think
that I
have become so interested in what the person thinks is happening, that
perhaps
I as an author have slightly lost touch with reality. I'm not that
concerned
about what really happened out there. What's important to me is what's
happening in a person's head how does it feel inside that person's
head. Just
as in my early novels, I wasn't so much interested in what had happened
to
certain characters in the past. I was interested in what they told
themselves
had happened. And how they kind of hid from certain versions and played
around
with their own history. That whole cat-and-mouse game one plays with
one's own
memories, one's own visions of oneself that interests me. In this book,
yes,
you could say in a way that this narrator, this first-person narrator
is an
unreliable one. Is that the catchphrase?
FEENEY: Yes, and
he's living
in an unstable cosmos.
ISHIGURO:
Yes. But I didn't want to write the sort of book where there is an
identifiably
crazy guy going through a normal world, where the reader can actually
measure
the distance between his craziness and the solid normal world out
there. So
that he goes thought this world with a lot of people doing double takes
every
time he comes out with how he thinks things should be. I didn't want to
write
that sort of book. I wanted to say that many of us even if we're a
perfectly
sensible normal human being some of the time, there is in many of us,
some sort
of small irrational core of motivation. We're often wanting to do
throughout
our lives something like mend something that got broken way back in
childhood. That if we were actually sensible and logical about it, we
would
know that it's far too late. You can't bring back a alcoholic dead
father by
marrying a drunken man and trying to cure him, for instance. But we all
know
what that means when we say somebody is trying to do that because we
understand that metaphor.
That's a rather
crude and
extreme example, but I think that we don't simply do things to make
money and
eat and sleep. Peculiar things govern the big decisions that we make in
our
lives. Often it's something rather irrational. I wanted to say in this
book,
"What would it look like if we actually paid some respect to this
slightly
crazy logic? Let's see what the world would look like from the point of
view of
that logic." Ostensibly, it's a detective story, but it gets a little
strange. Here we have a boy who looses his parents at an early age.
When he
grows up as an adult, there's a part of him that remains that small
child who
has lost his parents. He thinks that all the bad things in the world
would be
put right if only he could find his parents. Many many years later,
there's a
part of him that thinks, "It's still not too late. If only I could get
back to that place, Shanghai, on the other side of the world, I'll
still find
my parents, held up somewhere in some shack by the kidnappers. And then
all the
bad things in the world would go away." So I've tried to paint a picture
of the world that bends around to that crazy logic, that allows him to
have
that logic, rather than one that tells him he's mad.
FEENEY: Right. It
seems when
one is reading the book and reacting to the many things that are going
on,
especially during the Shanghai chapters, one gets the sense that if our
Hero is
deluded, other characters are AS deluded in different ways. Sarah is
hugely
ambitious in marrying Sir Cecil There are changes that this brings to
her life.
These new perspectives reveal things to her that she's tying to make
Christopher see at the same time. There are moments when I don't know
if Christopher
is entirely in touch with reality, but there is a reality in the book
that the
characters share even when they're in their fantasy.
ISHIGURO:
Yes. Tentatively these realities touch. But I am interested in the
reality that
exists in his head, not some philosophical idea of exterior reality.
FEENEY: To look to
another
writer for a moment for an analog. There's a moment we were discussing
a little
before we came onstage in Vladimir Nabokov's The Gift which is a
beautiful
novel. There are two moments which conjoin across a couple hundred
pages. The
first is when the Hero, who is a young poet, sees his father walk into a
rainbow on a mountaintop while he's hunting for butterflies. It's just a
staggering image that occurs near the top of the second chapter. It
gives you a
sense of the father. Who he is. He seems a bit magical, that he has this
experience of stepping into a rainbow. Then of course, the father has
disappeared under circumstances of the revolution.
Several hundred
pages later,
there is a moment where the Hero, Feodor, and Zeena, the woman who
seems to be
prepared for him by fate they are certainly attracted to each other
they
happen to walk into a vestibule where they're going to let somebody
into a
party. The person hasn't shown up yet, and because Europe has timers on
the
lights, suddenly the two are plunged into darkness and we wonder, "Are
they going to kiss? Is this the moment when they discover that they
really love
each other?"
Without saying where
the
scene goes, the prism in the window casts a rainbow over the shoulder
of Zeena
that the Feodor sees and the poet doesn't really think about it much,
but as a
reader, you're kind of exploding. You're thinking, "Oh, this is the
disappeared father. There's something fatal about this moment."
I thought about it
for a
couple reasons. It seemed to me that two people, who are not sure if
they are
in love or not, sharing a darkened vestibule, that's a place that the
protagonists of The Remains of the Day as well as When We Were Orphans
would be
perfectly at home. That moment strikes me being very much at home in the
context of your novels. But there's a corollary moment here in When We
Were
Orphans when, during a particularly important conversation between
Sarah and
Christopher, Christopher is shredding a plant he's not even thinking
what
he's doing. He's pulling the leaves off it. That reverberated for me
with a
moment much earlier just a strange moment in childhood when he's
talking with
Akira he's shredding a plant. I wondered: in Nabokov, it's a sign of
fate.
Here, it has a certain feeling of his childhood reality trying to break
through
at the very least, in When We Were Orphans. I was wondering, was that a
planned
effect, or was that a surprise that came to you in the writing? How do
you see
that moment and evaluate it?
ISHIGURO:
That particular thing that you described is just an accident. I didn't
plan it.
He's shredding something in his childhood scenes, and at another key
moment
he's shredding something. I wasn't aware of it until you said it.
FEENEY: Oh well. . .
ISHIGURO:
But it doesn't mean that it's extraneous for you to point that out. You
do want
your characters to have certain mannerisms that go on and on. Perhaps
without
thinking about it, I have things that I have my characters do over a
period of
time when certain things happen to them. And I think this is one of
Christopher's things. He shreds things. It's kind of a way of stitching
together a book. Although in this case if indeed, this is a motif, it's
an entirely
flukey one. I did try and put in little things like that, except
intentionally
sometimes, to tie aspects of a book. To get a reader to remember
another small
moment, and compare those scenes. It's a very simple way of doing that.
The
magnifying glass I used in that way. I very much wanted to start the
book with
a high society detective who thinks he can conquer all the bad things
in the
world by solving crimes. And so he's looking at things through a
magnifying
glass. And he studies bodies, murdered bodies, through a magnifying
glass in a
way that detectives do I guess.
I wanted him to be
looking
much later in a war zone, in the middle of a war, at charred bodies in
a bombed
out ruin. At the dead members of a little girl's family. The little
girl's
still alive, and he's saying "Don't worry, don't worry I'll find out
who
did it." Of course, the whole place is full of charred bodies it's a
war
zone. And he's looking through the same magnifying glass. That was a
deliberate
use of this kind of idea. A little habit he has, taken from one context
to
another, to highlight a kind of poignant inadequacy of a certain way of
approaching the tragedies or the darkness of the world.
FEENEY: How about
writers
that you looked up to. Is there anybody that you feel most strongly
influenced
by, or that inspired you to become a writer in the first place?
ISHIGURO:
I'm probably not a typical writer in many ways unless everyone else
is lying.
When I talk to my friends, they seem to have grown up reading a lot,
often
writing from an early age, and indeed, having big mentor-type writers.
I don't
mean interpersonally. It might be Tolstoy or whomever that they've
grown up
with. I kind of missed out on all that. I actually read very little as a
teenager in fact, generally. I wanted to be a singer-songwriter until
I was
about 24. Like many things in life you bang on a door and it doesn't
open,
and another one happens to open, so you go through it. That's what
happened to
me with writing. I suddenly discovered writing fiction at around age
24. And I
started to do it. I was allowed to do it, so I very rapidly started to
get
published after years of getting nowhere as a singer-songwriter.
To answer your
question,
it's a bit odd. There are writers that I really like. Of the classical
authors,
I like for instance, Dostoevski a lot, and Chekhov. But I don't know to
what
extent they've influenced me. The odd thing I notice is that writer's I
don't
particularly like, often influence me quite a lot. Even people I
haven't read
very much have a kind of peculiar influence on me. It's just there's
one aspect
and, I think, "Oh, I'll adopt that."
For instance,
Proust's novel
this dirty great long thing. I always think I ought to read it, but I
haven't
gotten past the first volume. I've only gotten about 80 pages into this
four-thousand page book. I can't get beyond that because it gets
incredibly
boring around that point. And yet, the first 60 pages or so, the thing
that's
called the Overture, I think has probably taught me more about writing
than
almost any other bit of writing. I read that between my first and
second novels
and it was a complete revelation to me: that you didn't really have to
write
your novels in a kind of screenplay way, with a scene, and a scene and
another
scene. I don't know if you are familiar with that Overture thing or
not, I
don't know if you are. . .
FEENEY: That's about
as far
as I got too. . .
ISHIGURO:
But the possibility that you can just follow a mind. The memory, just
drifting
from a fragment of one scene set in one point in time, and then
suddenly be
reminded of another thing that happened many, many years apart. That
you can
move from one scene to another like this playing around very fluidly
with the
associations of one scene to the next reverberating against each
another. You
don't even have to have full scenes. You can just teasingly glance off
one, and
come back to it later. This kind of great fluidity, that at the same
time,
mimics quite skillfully how someone might remember or just daydream.
This was a
tremendous liberation to me. And that's all I ever read of Proust. But
I feel
it's been kind of a foundation, technically, to the way I approach
things.
Often in terms of my prose, I think I have been influenced very much by
David
Magashak, who you've probably never heard of.
FEENEY: Wasn't he the
translator of Chekhov, among others?
ISHIGURO: He
was the translator of quite a lot of Russian stuff. I read a lot of
Russian
literature translated, and I think something to do with his translated
prose
really rubbed off on me. I don't know whether the original Russian was
anything
like that, but the way it came out in English, rather appealed to me.
Once
again, at an impressionable age. Writing age anyway. And I think that
to some
extent, I still write in this kind of translation-ise. Because I rather
like
that. I realize that I'm quite freaky in this. That the people who
influenced
me a lot, aren't my literary heroes necessarily, but they do influence
me.
FEENEY: I wonder if
there
isn't a generational thing here. Because what you say has been alluded
to in
other ways by such writers as Martin Amis and Richard Price. Two
writers who
grew up in the 50s and 60s and were, as they would freely admit,
probably more
influenced by comic books, television and movies in terms of their
approach
to the novel. They came late to reading. I wonder if one byproduct
would be
that one might be interested in recreating the past. Doing a novel set
in the
1920s, or 30s. Trying to building a bridge into the past, if one comes
to
novels as an adult.
ISHIGURO: It
might well be true. I was born in 1954. I am very much that generation
that
grew up on television and movies. In a way, that's not such a bad
thing. As
novelist, when you muck around with images, when you try to make your
reader
picture things and imagine things, I think it's more or less fair
enough to
assume that the reader has a lot of these "stock images" that come from
movies and television already in their heads. A writer writing in
Victorian
times would have to describe quite thoroughly say, what a hotel in
Africa
looked like. We have been bombarded and saturated with so many images
from
advertising, movies, television programs, documentaries, travel,
whatever, that
as a writer of fiction, all you have to do is just refer, or at least
provoke
or evoke, certain stock images. Of course, you can do quite clever
things with
that. You can undermine it, you can manipulate that. Whether you like
it or
not, that's what you're dealing with. In order to make these pictures
come
alive in the reader's minds, you've got to be aware of what the
stereotypes are
that are circulating around. To some extent, I feel I have some
authority in
that area, because I am a typical kind of person who has been saturated
by
these movie images and so on.
This latest book of
mine,
set in Shanghai. Immediately, you don't just think about about an
historical
Shanghai. You think about the mythical Shanghai that's evoked by the
various
Chinatowns along the West Coast here, or by Josef von Sternberg's
movies or
whatever. It's as much a place of myth as it is of history. And you can
do a
lot playing around with people's expectations, undermining them or
fulfilling them,
and so on. Whether it's a good thing or a bad thing that's the world
we live
in, that's the world in which we are communicating in as writer's and
reader's.
So I feel quite good about the film thing, on the whole.
But what you said
about
going back to the 30s, I think that's something separate. I think a lot
of
writer's, certainly British writer's (I don't know if it's the plight
here in
America, for quite interesting reasons), but British writer's of my age
and
younger, you'll find to a peculiar degree, they write about either the
Second
World War, the period between the wars, or the First World War.
Certainly
speaking for myself, I think it was a kind of an occupational
inferiority
complex I had when I first started to write fiction. I felt that I
lived in
this very safe, quiet, affluent, corner of the world. And I felt, as a
person,
very privileged. But it wasn't the front line of where things were
happening.
"He wanted to write the big novels of the day." It was difficult to
write that kind of "big novel" by just describing the life that I
knew immediately around me. The life in London in the 1980s as it was
then.
Because this was safe, quiet, whatever. Surely for the big themes, you
had to
go to places like Eastern Europe, Africa. To some extent, we, in a very
decedent way, felt envious towards writers who lived in oppressive
regimes
because they could just describe their everyday life, and it was
immediately
big and significant.
I think the solution
that a
lot people came to, and to some extent in Europe a lot of writer's
still resort
to, is that you can either travel geographically in fiction and set
your novels
in Africa or Eastern Europe. But of course, feel that you're at a
disadvantage
because you don't know that locale well. You can get to know it, but
you feel
slightly intimidated by that. Or you can go back in time. And you can
keep
talking about Britain, England, Europe, whatever. Go back in time. And
you
don't have to go back very far to a point when all these values that we
take
for granted today: democracy, freedom, affluence, all these things were
really
threatened. You go back a generation, and Europe is in absolute
turmoil. I
think that's partly the appeal for going back to the 30s for me. It's
not that
kind of fascination with the surface style of the period. This is
location
hunting. You need a place. You need to find a place in history where
you can
bring your themes out in a big way. These days I'm beginning to think
there's
something wrong with that way of thinking, actually. Although I still
do it
setting books in war zones, times of great political upheaval. That's
well and
good, but it can sometimes be a kind of an alibi for not exploring
deeply
enough the quiet surfaces of the life that you know. Perhaps there is a
big difference
between just writing "big" novels and writing "deep" ones.
Perhaps the real challenge is to look at the everyday sadness and
tragedies and
triumphs that lie beneath a still quiet surface if that's where you
happen to
be. But as I say, there was a time when a lot of slightly matured male
writers
wanted to write these big themed books. And it was kind of a habit that
stuck.
FEENEY: Gore Vidal,
when
speaking about American literature, once spoke of the Civil War as our
"Trojan Wars." A lot of American fiction is often drawn from there
and why is that? There were very few people who wrote about the Civil
War when
it was happening. But sometimes there is an unconscious thing that
really does
move upon a generation. Where you feel the need to do it and perhaps,
like the
Ancient Greeks spinning tales of Troy which had happened hundreds of
years
before, we say to ourselves "that's where all the good drama is, let's
go
there and mine that." I wonder if you feel sometimes that your choice of
subject is somehow "outer world" or is it coming to you as it is
coming to other members of your generation?
ISHIGURO: I
think it's just the locations. It's my themes that are coming from
someplace
else. I don't really take my themes from the period. It's the other way
around.
I go into the 30s because it's a good stage for the things I want to
talk
about. I've always been interested in what happens to peoples' values
when they
have invested all their energies and their lives in the prevalent set
of social
values, only to see them change. So it's always interested me to take a
period
of big change and to see what happens to people when, at the end of
their
lives, they find the the world has changed its mind about what is good
and what
is bad. But for this particular individual, it's too late. They had the
best
intentions, but history has proved them to be either foolish or perhaps
even
someone who contributed to evil. It is very much that way around for
me. I use
it as location hunting. But as I say, I'm beginning to think maybe that
it's a
bad habit to keep going to war zones times of huge
change.
FEENEY: Let's have
some
questions from the audience.
QUESTION: Do you
think that
everyone is a potential writer?
ISHIGURO: I think
perhaps it's a matter of writing about something that people will find
unique,
or find valuable. I don't know if it's the case that we can all just
tell each
other stories and are content. I think there are stories that we put a
higher
value on than others. And sometimes I think that it's pure luck. I
certainly
feel, that as somebody who tries to write fiction, that I can only
really write
in a way that I find satisfactory. At least something that I know. At
least
from my own emotional level for myself. Often, I feel that there's a
large
element of luck as to whether my particular preoccupations when they're
written
up, are things that people at large find interesting. That vibrate at
some
deeper level with people. I can easily see that I would just be writing
for me,
and that it would be something that only matters to me. . .
QUESTION: Yes, but
did
something set you free?
ISHIGURO:
You mean to write? I can tell you that sometimes, there is a particular
trick.
This is leaving aside your question of "Is everybody potentially a
writer." I don't know. Probably not by definition, No. I have to say it.
Because what we're talking about are the people whose stories seem to
be of
more value than anybody else's. But leaving that aside, what are the
things that
trigger people on to write books or write movies or to paint pictures or
whatever. I my case, it had very much to do with Japan. My relationship
with
Japan. Although I didn't actually think so at the time. Having gotten
older and
looking back, I see that my relationship with Japan was crucial in
turning me
from a singer-songwriter, an unsuccessful singer-songwriter, into a
writer of
fiction.
I went from Japan to
England
as a child, at the age of five. I moved with my family. I was always
under the
impression that we were going to return to Japan. My parents had
planned to
return to Japan after a year, perhaps two years. Between the age of
five and
fifteen, I was fully under the impression that my life would be in
Japan. So I
had built up a very important place in my head called Japan, when I was
growing
up in England. A place where I would ultimately belong. A place built
up of my
childhood memories, and I had quite a lot of them. My Grandparents, the
house I
lived in, the Kindergarten, all these things. And my speculation about
what it
would be like when I went back, all the educational material that kept
getting
sent to me. . . So I had a very thorough world in my head that I called
Japan.
And only later, when I realized that I wasn't going to go back to that
Japan,
when I realized that in any case, this Japan of mine probably didn't
exist
anywhere except in my head. If I went on a plane to this place called
Japan, it
wouldn't be anything like it. Also when I realized that with every year
that
went by, this rather precious world was fading in my head. I think
there was a
real motive, a real impulse to write it down. To actually put this
whole world
that I had in my head, everything I felt about it, everything I knew
about it
its colors, its moods, its shortcomings I wanted to have it all safe
in a
work of fiction so that it would be preserved. And I could go on and
forget it
and I could still say, "it's there." I didn't realize it at the time.
I thought I was writing a book about this theme or that theme.
Looking back, I
think that
this was the very strong drive that led me to write these novels.
Because after
all, it's an odd thing to do: to sit around writing novels, when you
don't even
know if you are going to build a career in it. It's very time
consuming, it's
anti-social. You have to have quite a strong motivation to write a
novel. You
said did something "free" me. I don't know if "free" is the
right word. It's almost the opposite. But that's what tied me to
writing. I
think it's something like that first of all. A big motive like that,
pushes you
into being a creative person of some sort.
FEENEY: Do you take
a more
direct interest in the Japanese translations of your works, or do you
leave it
alone?
ISHIGURO:
No. I can't read or write Japanese. I have no authority over the
translation
anyway, and short of getting some Japanese person to read it out loud
to me,
and even then my command of the language isn't sufficiently good. These
days, I
can say honestly, I don't care particularly care that much more for
Japanese
culture than any other culture. Well, that's an exaggeration but as
far as
the translation goes, there's nothing special about it.
QUESTION: May I ask
you
about the title of your new book? I've thought a lot about it. When We
Were Orphans.
I couldn't believe that it could just pertain to the protagonist and
the woman
he meets. Is there was something more symbolic about the title? Or am I
reading
too much into it?
ISHIGURO:
Well yes, I did intend for there to be a wider application. Of course,
there
are a lot of people in this book who are literally orphans. Actually,
there are
four or five. I wanted to suggest this always sounds very grandiose
and silly
when you say it like this I wanted to suggest that we're all orphans
of course,
in some kind of way. But let me explain so that it doesn't sound too
sweeping
and bland. It's partly why I read that passage from the book just now.
I was
interested in examining this. . . Well, let me start over and put it
like this:
You walk about the streets with a four-year-old, which I used to do a
couple of
years ago with my daughter. It's amazing how rapidly total strangers
will enter
into a conspiracy with you to make the child believe that the world is
a much
nicer place than it actually is. How they will immediately put on a
smiley
face. You go into a store where the person there is always very grumpy.
They
suddenly perk up because you have a child, and they say something sweet
and
they hand over a lollipop. And this is quite right. There's this
instinct in
all of us that makes us want to keep little children in a bubble, where
they
believe the world is much sweeter than it actually
is.
But of course sadly,
we all
know that each child at some point will have to come out of that
sheltered
bubble and come out into the less nice, more disappointing world. If
we're
lucky, we make that journey smoothly. If not as in the case of the
protagonist in my book, where they are suddenly thrown into the night,
into the
harsh world (Christopher becomes an orphan). What I'm suggesting is that
perhaps even if we are not literally orphans, many of us, perhaps
somewhere way
back in our emotional memory at least, we have a sense of
disappointment or
regret at discovering that the world is not quite the beautiful sunny
place
that adults led us to believe when we were very young. That's what I'm
trying
to explore in this book. How, when we move out of the bubble, sometimes
we do
keep hold of some remnant of that memory. There's a part of us which,
perhaps
almost irrationally, wants to go back to that nicer, sweeter world.
Even though
we know that it's hopelessly naive, that it can't be done. That's what
the
orphan theme is supposed to be. In that sense, we all share some
element of
being orphans.
QUESTION: I was
fascinated
to hear that you were influenced by Proust, even though you found him
boring. I
was also surprised that you put things in the book and aren't aware that
they're there, until somebody might call your attention to the power of
it.
When I read The Unconsoled, I thought I was reading Proust except I
was never
bored. I thought I should put it down, but I never could until I
finished it.
Even though I wasn't sure exactly what I was reading. The images that
kept
coming up in my mind, they propelled me to find out where this was
going. I
then discussed it with my wife, who spoke of the image of the white
tile, which
kept coming back in the book. This suggested to her that this might
actually
have been an institution, and much of what took place clearly took
place in the
mind of somebody who had been locked up. I read a review in The New
York Times,
and thought that that person clearly missed it completely, just didn't
understand what the book was about. I would love to get some input from
you
about what it might have been about.
ISHIGURO:
I'm glad that you didn't find The Unconsoled boring. I do appreciate
your
fulsome response to the book. It's hard to summarize briefly what my
intentions
were in writing the book but, maybe I should just say this: I was
thinking
around the time I wrote that book that often, writer's use one of two
ways to
tell the story of someone's life. There's this straight kind of David
Copperfield biography method. You have their early life which you follow
chronologically. They get older and maybe they die at the end. The
other common
way is through flashbacks. At a certain point in their life, perhaps
quite
later on, have them recall key moments of their life. After a while,
you have
filled out what's happened to that person. His or her life. I used that
method
myself in my early books.
But I thought maybe
there's
a third way, that maybe nobody's tried yet, and it might be interesting
to try.
Not that dissimilar to these other methods, but a little different. Why
not have
someone just turn up, in a town, let's say. And they'll run into all
the people
in that town, strangers. These people would exist to a certain extent,
but this
person will start just as one does while dreaming that this person
will
start to appropriate figures he's met, to stand in for people who are
much more
important in the character's life. I'm referring to when, like tonight,
I might
see (turning to F. X. Feeney) you in my dream. I have your face very
vividly
etched in my imagination. And it might be standing in for you. F. X.
Feeney in
my dream. But sometimes, it might not be. It might be just your face
that I
have appropriated to stand in for some other emotion or figure or
incident that
happened way back, that I am trying to resolve in my mind. I think that
we do
that all the time. I thought it would be interesting, instead of using
the
flashback or the biographical method, to have this person wander around
a town,
getting involved with the business of that town, but beneath it all,
there would
be this other layer. Because every time he ran into people, there would
be
echoes of his parent's marriage or, he'll see a young man there, and
he'll
begin to project his own past onto that young man. And before you know
it, he's
not telling you about this young man. He's telling you about himself,
and so
on. He would even appropriate characters to project his fears of who he
might
become. In this way, you would actually get a picture, if not the
literal
history of a person's life, then at least the big emotional history.
All the
things that he fears and that he regrets and he remembers.
This was the method
that I
wanted to use in The Unconsoled. It was for that reason that I made
that book
obviously rather dreamy, by using a lot of the techniques that the
dreaming
mind uses to tell stories. Because I wanted to remind people of that
thing that
we always do at night. I thought that to some people at least, that this
process would ring a bell. That they would understand what was going
on.
QUESTION: You set
your first
two books in Japan. Did your parents seek to immerse you in Japanese
culture
while you were growing up in England?
ISHIGURO: My
parent's didn't particularly immerse me in Japanese culture. But they
did try
to keep up a Japanese side to my education. This was just a practical
thing,
because they thought I was going to have to grow up in Japan. I was
slightly
resistant to that until a certain young adult age. I wasn't interested
in
Japanese culture, I didn't want to read Japanese books in translation
or seek
out Japanese art movies until I was in my 20s. It was always this stuff
that my
parents wanted me to do. But I was actually much more interested in the
things
that young people that age are always interested in: rock music and so
on. There
weren't any Japanese rock 'n' roll superstars, so I wasn't particularly
interested in Japan. Today it might be different, what with Pokeman or
whatever.
Nevertheless, I
think there
was a Japanese influence insofar as I was brought up by Japanese
parents. And I
was very conscious all the time while growing up in the home counties of
England, that they were very different to my friend's parents. The
values they
held, they way they looked at British society. I probably looked at
British
society through their eyes. They did, and actually, they still do. They
still
live in the home counties of England. They still regard the English as
"the natives" that they are living amongst. I often hear them
discussing the people "over here" they call them. One of them might
notice a certain quirky thing about English customs. They will discuss
it, and
they'll say, "Hmm they do that here." I think I must have grown up
very much looking at the world around me at this slight distance. The
Japanese
influence perhaps came in like that, rather than overtly in being
immersed in
Japanese culture.
QUESTION: When you
research
your locales, do they actually exist? For instance, in The Remains of
the Day,
as Stevens leaves Darlington Hall, he drives to the top of a knoll and
sees a
wonderful view. Does the view actually exist? Or is it only in your
head?
ISHIGURO:
Well, I've seen many views like that in England. . . But I don't know
if there
is a specific. . . I didn't actually stand on the top of a hill and
write it
down. I live in England. It's not too hard to evoke these things. It
kind of
goes back to what I was saying to F. X. earlier, about research and
locale. I
find too much hard research is actually a bit of an inhibition on the
imaginary
world I am trying to create. The Remains of the Day, I don't know how
accurate
that book is about the life of butlers. I did a little bit of research,
but it
was the other way around. I had certain things I wanted to say
metaphorically.
If butler's didn't do certain things but I needed them to, I just had
them do
that. Because I wasn't trying to write a book to tell people how
butler's
lived. I was writing something else, and I thought a butler was a good
way to
look at English life. A way of talking about these things. I am quite a
bad hard
researcher. I don't tend to go places and sketch.
QUESTION: Your
novels are
wonderfully interior, exploring the nuances of a character and a
worldview and
the delusions that come with that. And as the other person was saying,
they all
have a lot of suspense to them. And it seems that your plot is carried
through
character. I was wondering if you could talk about how it is you
conceive that,
how you see plot developing in your stories.
ISHIGURO: I
never think that consciously about plot. This latest novel is the first
time I
was thinking consciously about plot, because I was trying to pastiche a
detective fiction: some sort of plot, mysteries that are resolved. Even
there,
I didn't think consciously about what is usually called plot. I usually
let that
take care of itself. If you are focusing on the themes and the
characters,
probably there is a momentum. My books are not necessarily fast. Some
of them
are quite slow going books. If there is a momentum, it's because you're
curious
about what the narrator is going to reveal about himself. There's not
much
suspense in the sense of, "is the hero going to get shot?" or that
kind of stuff. But it's more of, "Is this person going to own up to
something? He seems to be coming close to sort of owning up to
something, so
let's hang around a bit longer and see it he does." It's more that kind
of
suspense, I guess.
When I structure
books, I do
tend to structure them in terms of how a narrator moves in his own
head, from
one position to another. Those of you who have read my books will
notice that I
have this kind of pseudo-diary form. The narrator has written a chunk
on this
date, another chunk at a later date, and so on. This can go on for some
time in
some of my books. And this is due partly because I structure my books
according
to the mental states of the narrator. They have this way of thinking,
and then
they kind of moved slightly, they've owned up to a few more things, but
not
everything. So the next chunk they write is from a slightly different
position,
and the third chunk is again, written from a different position. I
think that
this perhaps gives a book a certain amount of momentum. The sense of the
narrator shifting his position underneath all the writing. But I don't
think
too much in terms of plot or suspense in the way that a mystery writer
or
suspense writer would have to. (Turning to Andrea) Should we go to
another
question?
ANDREA: Kazuo, how
many more
questions to you want to take?
ISHIGURO:
I'm okay, but maybe people have a life to go back to. . . I am very
happy to be
here. I'm not offended at all if you have babysitters that are going
mad. . .
Please don't stay because you think it looks rude. . . I'm quite happy
to carry
on. . .
QUESTION: I wanted
to ask
what it's like for you to see one of your novels becoming a film
adaptation.
Something which is basically being created in your mind. I'm thinking
of The
Remains of the Day. What's is it like to see it on screen, and for that
matter,
were you satisfied with what they did with that?
ISHIGURO:
The simple answer is yes. I thought the film The Remains of the Day was
terrific. I'm not just saying that as a P.R. thing you know. I did
think that
it was a very fine movie. In a way, well, F. X. is probably much more
authoritative than me, but I think that a movie like The Remains of the
Day,
for me, it kind of harks back to an earlier kind of Hollywood film from
the
golden age. It's slightly unusual now, in the middle of all the action
pictures. But you go back to the Preston Sturges, Frank Capra era, then
that
kind of film doesn't seem so odd. I thought it was a good, serious,
uncompromising movie, beautifully acted, beautifully
shot.
I must confess the
first
time I saw some rushes, I had some irrational responses to it. And they
were completely
unfair. I wanted to say, "Look, why have you shot it this way? You've
got
this door on the wrong side." Because obviously, I had a very clear
picture in my head as to how a particular thing looked. "How could you
make such a silly mistake, having that. . ." But then very rapidly, I
started to accept that the authority of the film kind of took over.
That it had
its own solidity.
In any case, I kept
opening
magazines and newspapers and reading this phrase, "James Ivory's The
Remains of the Day," and the first few times I saw this, I thought
something had gone wrong. But then I thought, yes, that's right. There
is
something called "James Ivory's The Remains of the Day," which is
sort of related to my Remains of the Day. That's perfectly alright. It
has to
be a work that works in it's own terms, and I think it
does.
I think it's a
mistake to
look at movies as though they were translations of a book in the way
you might
do a French translation of a book. . . It's a bit of an exaggeration to
say
that all you should hope for is a really good movie with the same
title. I
think first of all that it has to be a good movie, and very much a poor
second
whether or not it's loyal to the original. That's what I feel. And I
can feel
very lucky in the case of The Remains of the Day, because it was very
faithful
to the book in many ways. The atmospheres, the moods, might be very
different,
but I think it was a serious, brave movie, particularly for a mass-
market
movie. I thought it was terrific.
FEENEY: There's word
that
you have written a screenplay for Merchant-Ivory. Is that true?
ISHIGURO: I
don't know if it's going to go into production of not, but what
happened was
while doing research for this novel set in Shanghai, I came across
certain
things that I couldn't fit into my novel. They had no place in my
novel. In
particular, I found that there were these White Russians living in
Shanghai
between the wars, who had fled from the Russian Revolution. They were
these
aristocrats, Countesses and Princes, who were working as bouncers. A
lot of the
Countesses were working as Taxi-dancers and prostitutes, and living in
great
poverty. I found that world very fascinating. Of course, there was no
place for
this to exist in this particular novel.
I did write this
screenplay
with Jim Ivory, very much discussing the thing with James Ivory. About
a family
like this living in Shanghai, and their relationship with an American
diplomat.
Apart from the fact that it takes place in Shanghai, there is no
resemblance at
all to this book. Far more naturalistic. It's kind of like a Merchant-
Ivory
thing. I wrote it for James Ivory. . . There were lots of opportunities
for
costumes and stuff.
I must say that
there is a
part of me that actually wants my books to not be filmable. I'm very
schizoid
about this. I feel that when I write a novel and offer it to people, I
am
offering them an experience they can only get by reading a book. It
takes a lot
longer to read a book than to sit in front of a movie screen or switch
on the
television. I know that as a reader, I sometimes read books that I
think are
perfectly unique. They have to offer something that you can't get from
these
other, more powerful media. I don't want to compete with these things,
I want
it to be different.
In a sense, part of
my
writing more and more interior monologues and more subjective
monologues, I
think is perhaps an instinct that tells me that this is where novel
writing is
strong. You can go inside people's heads. You can paint interior
pictures of a
world, very well in a novel. In television and film, these are
necessarily
third-person media I think. It's hard to get inside a person's head. Of
course,
great actors and great directors manage to do this, but it's much
harder.
Anyway, that's certainly the way I want to push it. Perhaps slightly
move away
from straight naturalism as well, because I do want to offer a reading
experience that isn't the same. Having said that, and sounding very
schizoid
about it, once I finish a book, I really want the phone to ring and to
hear
that we've done the film deal. . .
QUESTION: I was very
interested in the way you paint the picture of the way you built
yourself as a
novelist concerned primarily with interior worlds, and we've all been
talking
about this. You said that it's more important to you what goes on
inside the
minds of the characters that you create than any "real world" that
might be out there. In connection with that, you talked about your
tendency to
put your novels in some sort of "real world" economic or political
catastrophe.
There is an interesting tension there. What is the role of the
political in
your novels?
ISHIGURO: I
haven't ever tried to write political novels in the sense of trying to
directly
bring about some sort of change in the law or a political system or
something
like that. But I am usually interested in people's small personal world
and the
big political world. Whether one likes it or not, the bigger political
world
does touch on the small personal world. Perhaps my books are political
because they
do mention wars and so on, but they're not overtly political in that
sense. You
wouldn't come away with a slightly different view of the morality of the
positions of the various sides of the war reading my books. I am very
much
concerned with the relationship between the personal and the political.
But I appreciate
your point
about the tension that exists between writing novels that are very much
interior landscapes, while using at the same time, real historical
settings. I
think there is a point where your poetic license kind of runs out when
you're
describing big things that actually happened in history. You can't just
keep
making things up for the sake of what you want to say. You have to treat
history with respect. Otherwise, it's an abuse of history, rather than
just a
simple use of history. That's a tension I've always felt as a writer. I
know
that I am prone to abuse history, because I want to twist it around for
my
purposes.
QUESTION: I wondered
if you
could comment on what strikes me as themes of imperialism, the class
system and
racism in your books.
ISHIGURO:
Those things are there. I don't know how central they are. It almost
comes with
the territory. I don't know that I have a profound interest in
imperialism as
such, any more than my having a profound interest in the war the last
war. I
guess what I'm doing is talking about things that concern me as a
person living
in the world today. It's sometimes quite useful for me to look at these
things,
these issues, if I talk about a character in another period or era going
through these same things.
The imperialism to
some
extent, is part of this use of history that I talked about, which
sometimes
veers into an abuse of history. In things like The Remains of the Day,
or this
latest book, I need the dark side of imperialism to orchestrate my
story.
People who invest their small efforts they try to do their best but
because
they live in a particular kind of society, despite their best
intentions, these
darker things touch them and contaminate their lives. Stevens, to some
extent,
is touched by imperialism. Both of the British Empire and the would-be
imperialism of Nazi Germany. Whether he likes it or not, no matter how
much he
tries to keep out that world. The main character in this book, although
he
doesn't realize it, his life has been deeply touched by what you could
loosely
call the economic imperialism of British companies in China; the
selling of
opium to the Chinese.
FEENEY: There is a
moment toward
the climax of the book, where the hero is being driven through the
ruins of
Shanghai by a Japanese Colonel, and the Japanese Colonel says, "If you
think this is something, wait until you see what's coming." Basically
telling him in a clairvoyant way, "World War II." It struck me in
that moment, at that connection, the intersection of history with
intimate
stories, that you see history as a chorus of stories and voices, as
well as the
interior lives of the characters.
ISHIGURO: As
I say, it's about how the big world inevitably touches our small world.
In the
case of wars, it touches it in the most tragic and horrific way.
Perhaps at the
best of times, our small worlds are always colored by the big political
world.
Perhaps much more than we would care to believe. Sometimes, my books
have been
about that.
FEENEY: One of the
things I
want to thank you for, for being with us tonight, is that you do seem
to create
worlds in which the world we know impinge very beautifully on the
worlds that
we are discovering through your characters. We really enjoyed it.
ISHIGURO:
Thank you very much for having me here.
Wahlner,Kurt.Kazuo Ishiguro with F.X.Feeny,Writers Bloc,October 11,2000,Los Angeles<http://www.writersblocpresents.com/archives/ishiguro/ishiguro.htm>< o:p>
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