Mixing memory and desire, Kazuo Ishiguro's new
novel
returns to the scene of innocence lost
Five years
have
passed since Kazuo Ishiguro published The Unconsoled, an ambitious novel
experimental in
form and significantly different from the work that had brought him to
prominence -- books such as the commercially and critically successful
Booker
Prize-winner The Remains of the Day (1989), and the novels
An Artist of the Floating World (1986) and A Pale View of Hills (1982). Unlike his first
three
novels, precise and subtle stories with unreliable narrators attempting
to come
to terms with their war-time pasts, The Unconsoled features a
narrator
who is by turns omniscient and clueless as he wanders through the
surreal
landscape of an unrecognizable modern European city. Many critics and
readers
didn't seem to know what to make of it.
With his new novel, which has been short-listed for this year's Booker
Prize,
Ishiguro returns to territory familiar to readers of his earliest work
while
incorporating elements of his last novel. When We Were Orphans
is the
story of Christopher Banks, a London society detective in the 1930s who
returns
to his native Shanghai to solve the mystery of his missing parents,
whom he
believes were abducted from the city's International Settlement when he
was a
young boy. Like most Ishiguro narrators, Banks speaks with a careful,
overly
formal voice, and as the story progresses it becomes apparent that
Banks's
image of himself is at odds with the impression others have of him.
Stumbling
into the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese war in 1937, clinging to the
child-like
belief that he can contain the evil breaking out in the world by
finding his
parents, Banks moves through London and Shanghai driven by nostalgia
and a
primal desire to put things right even as the world grows more bizarre
and
menacing. Conflating the collapse of a child's world with the impending
cataclysm of World War II, When We Were Orphans is a classic
Ishiguro
novel, exploring the themes he's most moved by: the distortions of
memory, the
upheavals of history, and the effects of alienation.
Ishiguro, who was born in Japan in 1954, has resided in England since
1960. He
recently spoke with Atlantic Unbound's Jessica Chapel.
All of your novels -- with the exception of
The
Unconsoled -- are set during the World War II era. What is it that
draws
you to this historical period?
When I started to write my novels, around 1980-1981, I was quite
preoccupied
with Japan and the militaristic period it went through, and then the
war. In
some ways that's not surprising. If you are someone of Japanese or
German
origin, there is a stronger inclination to wonder how you would have
behaved
had you been born just one generation earlier. This is a question I was
asking
from a position of some comfort and safety -- I was living in England,
and
though it was the time of the Cold War, there was no real danger of
fascism
taking over. I suppose I feared that my generation was in danger of
becoming
slightly complacent about certain things. We took up political
positions very
easily. It was kind of an exercise on my part to imagine what I would
have done
had I been born just a few years earlier than I was. Would I really
have had
the strength of mind and clarity of vision to not go along with that
kind of
fervor or would I have been swept up as well? My first three books
arose out of
that kind of inquiry, looking at what happened before and after a big
cataclysm.
I think there is also some tendency on the part of writers my age and
younger
-- certainly in Europe and perhaps to some extent in America -- to have
a sense
of the present as boring or dull. Of course, we don't feel that it is
dull in
the everyday sense, but when we are looking for settings for big themes
it
sometimes seems that we're inclined to go back to a time when things
were
really up for grabs. I feel slightly weary of this tendency, and I
think perhaps
there is an element of imaginative laziness there on our part. But it's
certainly been a trend, and when I started to write there was a very
strong
climate that encouraged us to do this -- that we should go for big
themes, that
we should be writing about history and wars and the big clashes of
idealisms,
instead of just writing about our provincial lives.
Is it possible that those of us born since World War II and living in
Western democratic societies lead such comfortable lives that we can't
grapple
with these questions? Many contemporary authors just don't seem able to
write
about great passion or great evil.
Yes, absolutely. I think this is very much a question that preoccupies
a lot of
writers -- particularly writers who have become self-conscious about
the way
they write and why they write. Before the Iron Curtain collapsed, I
think there
was a sort of envy among Western European writers toward writers living
in
oppressed Communist countries, because for them the very act of writing
seemed
to be terribly serious. I think everyone realized that this was a very
decadent
kind of envy, but it was still there. Now I think the questions have
changed.
It's all very well to say that wars or revolutions are bigger, that a
love
story somehow becomes more profound if it's set against the backdrop of
the
Cuban revolution or the Russian revolution, but that's not always true.
There
is a difference between being big and being deep. To achieve depth in
art and
in fiction you have to look at small things, things that aren't always
obviously important in a history-book sense. I think that's often what
we go to
novels for -- that depth.
America perhaps has a peculiar problem at the moment. American culture
is
dominant throughout the world, and there is less incentive for American
writers
to look beyond their own society and what is on their doorstep. I think
the
British went through this until the end of the British Empire. There
was the
assumption that you could write a novel of global importance just by
writing about
British or English problems. And if somebody in China or somebody in
Buenos
Aires wasn't interested, well, they damn well should be, because
Britain was
the dominant power in the world and so British culture by definition was
important. I think America may be in that position now. A writer
describing
what it's like to grow up in a particular neighborhood of New York
automatically gains a kind of global significance simply by virtue of
American
culture's current dominance in the world.
The trouble is that you can get a certain inward-looking society. You
can start
to feel that you don't have to look further. I am not accusing American
writers
of doing this, but that kind of climate has affected British writers
for a
number of generations, and I think it could be affecting American
writers too.
I think if you understand that, then you start from a position of
looking
outward.
Let's talk a bit about The Unconsoled. It was a very
different novel
in terms of tone and structure from some of your earlier work. What
gave you
the idea for this book, and did you find it difficult to maintain the
tone and
structure of the novel?
To take the first part of that, I think I was prompted by the sense
that the
assumptions from which I had written my earlier novels didn't
necessarily fit
with what I was experiencing. My first three books were a young man's
novels in
that they assumed that life was about having principles and political
values,
and the success of your life could be measured by how well you'd worked
out those
initial principles and how well you stuck by them. My early novels,
including The
Remains of the Day, have this assumption built right into them -- a
man or
woman looking back and struggling with the sense that they had failed
to live
up to their ideals.
But as I got older it occured to me that there was something
unsatisfactory
about this whole way of looking at life -- my own life seemed to be far
less in
control than I once assumed it would be. You can have a lot of
principles and
values and things that you declare you will and won't do at the outset,
but
once you are actually out there, how you end up living seems to me much
more
about what fate allows you to do, what other people's obligations allow
you to
do. We take a rather zig-zaggy path through things. We are just kind of
blown
around by chance, by opportunities that open up and opportunities that
close. The
Unconsoled was an attempt for me to try and put into a novel what I
felt
was the actual structure of life.
Were you surprised by the reviewers' responses to it? Many seemed to
find it
befuddling.
Quite aside from what I just said, from a novelistic point of view,
it's a very
strange book. I mean, it breaks a lot of rules. I really didn't know
how people
would receive it. It also followed The Remains of the Day, which
was a
very different kind of book. And perhaps more significantly, it came
out only
about a year or two after the movie of The Remains of the Day.
So I
think a lot of readers expected The Unconsoled to be something
like The
Remains of the Day or the movie, and they weren't fully primed for
what was
there. It's a difficult book, but it has had an interesting career here
in
England. Probably a lot like in America, it opened to pretty unfavorable
reviews, though there were some strongly favorable ones as well.
Predominantly
people seemed baffled or angry or something. But over the years that
book seems
to have acquired a reputation here in England. It cropped up on lots of
those
end-of-the-century lists when people were rounding up things.
When my new book was published here in April, a lot of the reviews
spent about
a third of the space discussing The Unconsoled and kind of
reassessing
it. And you would think from those reviews that it had gone down as a
big
success at the time. But you know, I don't pretend for one moment that
it's an
easy book. I think The Remains of the Day or those shorter books
are
much easier. But sometimes you don't have a choice when you are trying
to do
something -- you end up doing something odd and rather complicated and
it might
not be to everybody's taste. My hope is that as the years go on, people
will
feel it does say something you don't find in many other books.
Suzie Mackenzie, in her profile of you in The Guardian, suggested
that When
We Were Orphans is a rewrite of The Unconsoled.
It's not a rewrite in the very obvious sense that it's a completely
different kind
of book, which will be clear to anyone who opens it for just a few
minutes. Its
technical unfolding is entirely different. Now, in terms of the themes -
- the
themes at the heart of When We Were Orphans are very much
related to
those in The Unconsoled. Both books are about people who want to
think
that they can fix something that's broken in childhood, years ago. Both
books
have that, and in the case of Ryder, the pianist in The
Unconsoled, he
believes that if only he had been a better pianist as a boy his parents'
marriage wouldn't have been the rather hellish thing that it was. Years
later
he becomes a very fine pianist, but of course it's too late. In that
way it's a
similar story to When We Were Orphans, though it's an entirely
different
kind of novel. Christopher Banks's parents disappear when he is a
child, and he
grows up believing that he can find them and turn back the clock -- that
they'll carry on where they left off, and he'll pick up a kind of happy
childhood again.
[an error occurred while processing this directive] Why make
Christopher
Banks a detective?
My starting point was what is often referred to as the Golden Age of
detective
novels. English detective novels, writers like Agatha Christie and
Dorothy L.
Sayers. I was fascinated by the very cardboard nature of the genre --
the fact
that they didn't even aspire to be realistic. It struck me that the
whole
appeal was that they weren't realistic. Of course, it's a truism that
most
escapism is entertainment. That's why we like it: we escape from the
real
world. But the English detective genre seemed to be peculiarly wanting
to avoid
anything that resembled the real world. The characters are drawn almost
deliberately in a two-dimensional way at times, particularly in the
whodunits.
That's slightly unfair to some of Dorothy L. Sayers's novels, which do
sometimes have deeper characterization. But there are a lot of these
whodunits
that are almost like board games that have been written up -- they're
like
crosswords. But it was this very attitude that fascinated me, because
these
books were very popular after the Great War. It was a vision of the
world that
people found comfort in at the time they were getting over this horrific
trauma. This was a generation that had experienced modern warfare for
the first
time, and it was interesting to me that they should create this
particular form
of escapism.
Often these detective novels would portray a beautiful village, a
tranquil
English village, and just one thing had gone wrong -- somebody was
murdering somebody.
But all it took was one detective to come from the outside and unmask
the
murderer and society would be beautiful again. Once the murderer is
unmasked,
once you discover that it is the vicar's wife that's been poisoning
everyone in
the village, there's very little sense of post-murder trauma, even
though five
or six people in this small English village have been murdered in the
space of
two weeks. At the end, when the detective's leaving, everything is fine
and
everybody's terribly happy, and most of the subplots that in hindsight
you
realize had nothing to do with the murder mystery, they've all been
resolved as
well. The quarreling couple have made up, and the old soldier who's
drinking
too much has stopped drinking. Everything has been healed.
In its historical context I think this kind of escapism is quite
poignant, this
hope that there's a detective who can just put the evil back in the
bottle.
This wasn't really a hope -- you can see from the way these books are
written
that no one is pretending this is for real. It's just a kind of longing
for a
more innocent period of life that's gone forever, after the Great War. I
thought it would be interesting to have a detective who seems to come
out of
this cardboard world, perhaps carrying a lot of those assumptions about
how you
can control evil, and throw him into the turmoil of the twentieth
century as it
runs toward the Second World War and see what happens to him.
Banks seems to be driven by nostalgia. There is the passage, for
instance,
where he thinks he is with his childhood friend Akira, and he says that
when
they were boys "they lived in a good world." Is he trying to recreate
that world by going back?
Well, I suppose that my suggestion is that for many of us nostalgia is
a very
important emotion. I talked about this in that piece by Suzie Mackenzie
as
well. I am not referring to the sort of tourist-industry nostalgia
invoking
past eras. But the pure human emotion of nostalgia harks back to
childhood,
perhaps before we discovered the world for what it was and what it is.
Even if
most of us are fortunate not to have gone through a trauma as
Christopher Banks
did in childhood, we must all come out from our sheltered world as
children
into the adult world. And my guess is that many of us harbor a kind of
disappointment that the world isn't quite the place that adults led us
to
believe it was when we were young.
In some ways I think that nostalgia can be quite a positive emotion. It
does
allow us to picture a better world. It's kind of an emotional sister of
idealism. I think to some extent that this is what When We Were
Orphans
is about. It's about the fact that we all made a journey out of some
sheltered
bubble. And there's a part of us that knows that we can't ever go back
into
that protective bubble. But there's an irrational part of us that hopes
we can
somehow fix things and we can make the world a much more enchanted
place.
Mackenzie suggests in her article that you feel that way about Japan,
particularly since you've only gone back to Japan once since your
parents moved
to England. She speculates that this is because you always thought of
it as a
temporary move or imagined Japan remained as it was before you left
it.
In profiles of that sort there is always a tendency to find echoes and
parallels
between the author's life and work. I am not utterly convinced that
this is
where all of my stories arrived from -- that I feel some sort of
nostalgia for
the Japan of my childhood, therefore I write about these things. It's a
little
too neat. But I've read it more than once and it's not objectionable,
and in a
way you need a neat thing. It's not entirely untrue either. I think
part of the
reason that I am drawn to memory and nostalgia is because in my own
experience
these things have been crystallized very sharply. My early childhood is
very
clearly marked off geographically, and in terms of the people around
me, in a
way that perhaps it isn't for someone who has grown up in the same
place.
You know, for me there is this ready-made emotional shorthand of Japan,
standing for my early childhood -- a more innocent, protected life --
and then
there's Britain, when I was older and had to face the world. But
perhaps this
is a more universal thing. Of course, many people don't make a
geographical
move or cultural move of that sort, but what I'm suggesting is that
most of us
have had to make that very big move out of that protective world of
childhood.
We've made a journey out of that world into the world that we have to
live in.
And that I think is a universal thing.
“A
fugitive Past“,THE Atlantic Online,October 5,2000<http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/interviews/ba2000-10-
05.htm>
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