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Interview
A Conversation with Kazuo Ishiguro about
Never
Let Me Go
What was your
starting
point for Never Let Me Go?
Over the last fifteen years I kept writing pieces of a story
about an odd
group of "students" in the English countryside. I was
never sure who these people were. I just knew they lived in
wrecked
farmhouses, and though they did a few typically student-like
things—argued over books, worked on the occasional essay, fell in
and out
of love—there was no college campus or teacher anywhere in sight.
I knew
too that some strange fate hung over these young people, but I
didn't
know what. In my study at home, I have a lot of these short
pieces, some
going back as far as the early '90s. I'd wanted to write a novel
about my
students, but I'd never got any further; I'd always ended up
writing some
other quite different novel. Then around four years ago I heard a
discussion on the radio about advances in biotechnology. I
usually tune
out when scientific discussions come on, but this time I
listened, and
the framework around these students of mine finally fell in
place. I
could see a way of writing a story that was simple, but very
fundamental,
about the sadness of the human condition.
This novel is set in a recognizable England of the late 20th
century.
Yet it contains a key dystopian, almost sci-fi dimension you'd
normally
expect to find in stories set in the future (such as Brave New
World).
Were you at any point tempted to set it in the future?
I was never tempted to set this story in the future. That's
partly a
personal thing. I'm not very turned on by futuristic landscapes.
Besides,
I don't have the energy to think about what cars or shops or cup-
holders
would look like in a future civilization. And I didn't want to
write
anything that could be mistaken for a "prophecy." I wanted
rather to write a story in which every reader might find an echo
of his
or her own life.
In any case, I'd always seen the novel taking place in the
England of the
'70s and '80s–the England of my youth, I suppose. It's an England
far
removed from the butlers-and-Rolls Royce England of, say, The
Remains
of the Day. I pictured England on an overcast day, flat bare
fields,
weak sunshine, drab streets, abandoned farms, empty roads. Apart
from
Kathy's childhood memories, around which there could be a little
sun and
vibrancy, I wanted to paint an England with the kind of stark,
chilly
beauty I associate with certain remote rural areas and half-
forgotten
seaside towns.
Yes, you could say there's a "dystopian" or "sci-fi"
dimension. But I think of it more as an "alternative history"
conceit. It's more in the line of "What if Hitler had won?" or
"What if Kennedy hadn't been assassinated?" The novel offers a
version of Britain that might have existed by the late twentieth
century
if just one or two things had gone differently on the scientific
front.
Kathy, the narrator of this book, isn't nearly as buttoned-up
as some
of your previous narrators (such as those of The Remains of the
Day or
When We Were Orphans) and seems more reliable to the reader. Was
this a
deliberate departure on your part?
One of the dangers you have to guard against as a novelist is
repeating
things you're deemed to have done well in the past, just for the
security
of repeating them. I've been praised in the past for my
unreliable,
self-deceiving, emotionally restrained narrators. You could
almost say at
one stage that was seen as my trademark. But I have to be careful
not to
confuse my narrators with my own identity as a writer. It's so
easy, in
all walks of life, to get trapped into a corner by things that
once
earned you praise and esteem.
That's not to say I won't one day reprieve my buttoned-up
unreliable
narrators if that's what my writing requires. You see, in the
past, my
narrators were unreliable, not because they were lunatics, but
because
they were ordinarily self-deceiving. When they looked back over
their
failed lives, they found it hard to see things in an entirely
straight
way. Self-deception of that sort is common to most of us, and I
really
wanted to explore this theme in my earlier books. But Never
Let Me Go
isn't concerned with that kind of self-deception. So I needed my
narrator
to be different. An unreliable narrator here would just have got
in the
way.
Was it a different experience writing from the female
perspective, and
also writing in a modern-day vernacular rather than the more
formal
language of past eras?
I didn't worry much about using a female narrator. My first
published
novel, A Pale View of Hills, was narrated by a woman too.
When I
was a young writer, I used narrators who were elderly, who lived
in
cultures very different from my own. There's so much imaginative
leaping
you have to do to inhabit a fictional character anyway, the sex
of the
character becomes just one of so many things you have to think
about–and
it's probably not even one of the more demanding challenges.
As for the more vernacular style, well, she's someone narrating in
contemporary England, so I had to have her talk appropriately.
These are
technical things, like actors doing accents. The challenge isn't
so much
achieving a voice that's more vernacular, or more formal, it's
getting
one that properly presents that narrator's character. It's
finding a
voice that allows a reader to respond to a character not just
through
what he or she does in the story, but also through how he/she
speaks and
thinks.
This novel, like most of your others, is told through the
filter of
memory. Why is memory such a recurring theme in your work?
I've always liked the texture of memory. I like it that a scene
pulled
from the narrator's memory is blurred at the edges, layered with
all
sorts of emotions, and open to manipulation. You're not just
telling the
reader: "this-and-this happened." You're also raising questions
like: why has she remembered this event just at this point? How
does she
feel about it? And when she says she can't remember very
precisely what
happened, but she'll tell us anyway, well, how much do we trust
her? And
so on. I love all these subtle things you can do when you tell a
story
through someone's memories.
But I should say I think the role played by memory in Never
Let Me Go
is rather different to what you find in some of my earlier books.
In,
say, The Remains of the Day, memory was something to be
searched
through very warily for those crucial wrong turns, for those
sources of
regret and remorse. But in this book, Kathy's memories are more
benevolent. They're principally a source of consolation. As her
time runs
out, as her world empties one by one of the things she holds
dear, what
she clings to are her memories of them.
The setting for the first section of this book is a boarding
school
and you capture well the peer pressure and self-consciousness of
being a
kid at such a place. Did you draw on your own past for this? Did
you have
other direct sources, such as your daughter?
I never went to boarding school, and my daughter doesn't go to
one now!
But of course I drew on my own memories of what it felt like to
be a
child and an adolescent. And though I don't study my daughter and
her
friends, notebook in hand, I suppose it's inevitable the
experience of
being a parent would inform the way I portray children.
Having said that, I can't think of any one scene in that
"school" section that's based, even partly, on an actual event
that ever happened to me or anyone I know. When I write about
young
people, I do much the same as when I write about elderly people,
or any
other character who's very different from me in culture and
experience. I
try my best to think and feel as they would, then see where that
takes
me. I don't find that children present any special demands for me
as a
novelist. They're just characters, like everyone else.
The school setting, I must add, is appealing because in a way
it's a
clear physical manifestation of the way all children are
separated off
from the adult world, and are drip-fed little pieces of
information about
the world that awaits them, often with generous doses of
deception,
kindly meant or otherwise. In other words, it serves as a very
good
metaphor for childhood in general.
You've sometimes written screenplays, including the one for the
upcoming Merchant Ivory movie The White Countess. And you've had
the
experience of seeing your novel The Remains of the Day made into a
well-known movie. What for you is the relationship between cinema
and the
novel? Is it fruitful or dangerous for a writer to work in both?
I find writing for cinema and writing novels very different.
That's
partly because writing novels is my vocation, my full-time job,
while I'm
a kind of enthusiastic amateur when it comes to screenplays. A key
difference is that in cinema the story is told principally
through images
and music--the words are a kind of supplement. In a novel, words
are all
you have. But the two forms have many things in common, of
course, and I
think you can learn much about one from the other.
As you say, I wrote the screenplay to The White Countess,
and
collaborated on a movie released last year, The Saddest Music
In The
World. One important attraction of screenwriting for me is
that it's
part of a larger collaborative process. There's something
unhealthy about
continually writing novels all your life. A novelist doesn't
collaborate
the way musicians or theatre people do, and after a while the
lack of
fresh influences can be dangerous. For me, working on a film,
with a
director, with actors, maybe other writers, is a good way to keep
outside
influences coming in.
I'm often asked if I worry that writing screenplays will make my
novels
more like screenplays. But I've found the exact opposite. Looking
back,
my first novel, A Pale View of Hills, looks to me very
close to a
screenplay in technique. It moves forward scene by scene with
pared-down
dialogue, little set descriptions and stage directions. But just
after I
finished that novel, I wrote two screenplays for British TV's
Channel 4,
and that made me acutely conscious of the differences between film
writing and novel writing. I became dissatisfied with the idea
that I
might write a novel that could just as well have been a film. My
feeling
at the time was that novels wouldn't survive as a form--wouldn't
be able
to compete with TV and cinema--unless they focused on doing
things only
novels could do. Ever since then, I've tried to write books that
offer an
experience completely different from the sort you might get in
front of a
cinema or TV screen. You could say I want to write unfilmable
novels--though I've been keen enough to discuss movie adaptations
once I finish
a book! But while I'm writing, I want my novel to work uniquely
as a
novel, and my screenplay to work uniquely as a film.
A Conversation with Kazuo Ishiguro about
When
We Were Orphans
Is it true to say that When We Were Orphans is,
in part,
an homage to the 'Golden Age' of English detective fiction that
took
place in the '20s and '30s-- the work of writers like Agatha
Christie and
Dorothy L. Sayers?
Maybe that's putting it too strongly, to call the novel an homage,
because it's not really a conventional detective story. But yes,
there's
a relationship. These mystery authors--Christie, Sayers, a whole
host of
others--became enormously popular in England just after the Great
War.
Today, they're still read and enjoyed, but their work is, by and
large,
derided as being two-dimensional, class-ridden, and most
importantly--and
in contrast to the American crime tradition--much too genteel.
I'm sure
you know the type of thing. The stories often take place in some
idealized English village of the time, where everyone knows his
or her
place, and life would be idyllic but for one thing: there's a
murderer on
the loose. So everything, just for the moment, has fallen into
disarray.
But the vision of evil isn't very scary. The murders all take
place in
some crossword puzzle-like dimension. And all it takes is for one
remarkable figure, the Great Detective, to arrive on the scene,
go click,
unmask the murderer, and the order and tranquility is restored.
At the
close of these books, there's no sense of post-murder trauma,
even when
someone's gone through four or five victims in a tiny country
village.
Once the killer's unmasked, then everything in the garden's rosy
again.
The Great Detective is thanked and goes on his way. Of course,
looked at
one way, this is escapism of the shoddiest kind.
So what is it that fascinated you about this tradition?
Well, when you look at it in its proper historical context, you
can see
it's a genre filled with poignant longings. Because what you have
to
remember is that this genre flourished right after the utter
trauma of
the Great War. Europe had just experienced modern warfare for the
first
time. A whole generation of young men had died in hitherto
undreamed-of
conditions, and social values had been turned upside down. The
point is,
those detective stories were devoured by a generation who know
only too
well the real nature of suffering and mayhem in the modern world.
They
knew full well that evil wasn't about vicars poisoning widows for
their
inheritance. They'd seen the face of modern evil--rampant
nationalisms,
blood-lust, racism, dehumanized technological mass killing, chaos
no-one
could control. The 'Golden Age' detective novels, if you look at
them a
certain way, are filled with a pining for a world of order and
justice
that people had once believed in, but which they now know full
well is
unattainable. There's a forlorn wish that even now, all it needs
is this
superhuman figure, this detective, to come and put the world
right again.
It's escapism, but escapism of a particularly poignant kind.
Christopher Banks, your detective hero, has to some extent
stepped out
of this genre, but the world of When We Were Orphan is quite a
long way
from that of these genteel mysteries, isn't it?
I hope so. What I began with was the notion of taking one of
these
Golden Age detectives and setting him down, completely out of his
depth,
in the turmoil of the twentieth century, as the world hurtles
form one
horror to the next. I had this rather comic idea of a detective
going
about high society London with his Sherlock Holmes magnifying
glass, who
by the end of the story is examining dismembered corpses in a war-
zone,
with the same magnifying glass, desperately wondering 'who-
dunnit.'
The novel starts in high society London in the 30s, but a lot
of it also
takes place in China, in Shanghai during the first half of the
twentieth
century. What drew you to the place?
I'd had it in the back of my mind for some years to set a story
in what's
referred to as 'Old Shanghai.' My father, who is Japanese, was
born there
in 1920, and lived there with his parents until the outbreak of
W.W. II.
His father--my grandfather--had been charged with setting up
Toyota in
China, and that's why they were there. Toyota in those days
wasn't a car
company, but a textiles firm. In our family albums, there are
photos of
the original Mr. Toyota visiting the house. Shanghai in those
days was a
glitzy, glamorous, wild place. Gambling, opium, luxuriously
decadent
night-clubs. The center of it, what was called the International
Settlement,
where my novel takes place, was where British, American, European
and
Japanese industrialists were vying for dominance as they built
skyscrapers and made vast fortunes.
Meanwhile, the Chinese themselves were locked in a bitter
underground war
between the Nationalists and the Communists. There were also
Russian
aristocrats who'd fled the Revolution living in ghettos, and
later, in
the thirties, Jews escaping Europe settled there. It was pretty
lawless,
but the elite lived in some splendor, while others, including
most of the
native Chinese, live in awful poverty. You could say it was a
kind of
prototype for many modern cosmopolitan cities we have today. I
used to
look at these family albums, with photos of my grandfather in a
white
suit, in offices with ceiling fans, or posing in front of cars
with big
running boards, and it all looked to me like an old movie or
something.
And yet this was the same grandfather I lived with in quiet
provincial
Japan in my childhood. And it was odd to think that my father,
who's
lived the last forty years in the leafy Home Counties of England,
actually grew up there. I think I'd been wanting to set a novel
in that
Shanghai for some time. Of course, it all vanished with the war,
and then
the Communist Revolution.
Christopher Banks sets out to solve the great mystery of his
past: the
event that shaped his childhood in Shanghai. Childhood and, more
specifically, memory are crucial themes here. Are they important
to you
as a writer?
I've never written anything that didn't, in some important way,
concern
childhood and memory. This book contains an extended section
containing
the narrator's memories of an innocent, happy childhood in
Shanghai
before events suddenly took it all away from him. I've always been
interested in memory, because it's the filter through which we
read our
past. It's always tinted--with self-deception, guilt, pride,
nostalgia,
whatever. I find memory endlessly fascinating, not so much from a
neurological or philosophical viewpoint, but as this tool by
which people
tell themselves things about the lives they've led and about who
they've
become.
Nostalgia, incidentally, is an emotion I'm very interested in
these days.
This book's a lot about nostalgia. I think nostalgia is a much-
maligned
emotion, and I'd like to speak up on its behalf. Of course, it
can be a
vehicle for a lot of shoddy, reactionary baggage. But in its
purest
forms, I think nostalgia is to the emotions what idealism is to
the
intellect. It's a way we have of longing for a better world. We
remember
a time--often from our distant childhood--when we believed the
world to
be much kinder place than it proved to be when we grew up. I think
nostalgia is a profound emotion that's all too often dismissed
unfairly.
Like the butler, Stevens, in The Remains of the Day,
Christopher Banks
is a man unable to see the larger world picture in his pursuit of
order
in the rather insular universe he knows. Are you drawn to that
part of us
that's somewhat deluded by our own unique experience?
Well, actually, I think most of us live in our small worlds.
It's
natural. We do our jobs, we bring up our children, we try and get
by the
best we can. It's very hard to get proper perspective in our
lives. It's
very difficult to rise above the immediate urgencies that weigh
each of
us down and take a look at how things are up there, above the
roof line.
Yes, my characters are deluded, or they can't see where their
small world
fits into the large world, but that's because I feel that for
most of us
that's our fate. The small world of our unique experience is
where most
of us live.
Early in your adult life you were planning to be (and were) a
singer-songwriter. Was the switch to writing an easy one for you
and do
you find the work at all similar?
As you say, from the age of sixteen and perhaps till as late as
twenty-four, my ambition was to be a songwriter. It was the '70s,
so yes,
the natural thing seemed to be a singer-songwriter. This was a
drawback,
since my singing is, well, let's say it's not a strong point! But
I play
guitar and piano, and I wrote over a hundred songs, made demo
tapes and
did the whole thing of going to see A&R men at the various
recording
companies. My heroes were people like Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Joni
Mitchell, Kris Kristofferson. I also liked songwriters from an
earlier
era like Gershwin, Cole Porter, Carlos Jobim. I've always loved
the early
songs of Jimmy Webb. 'By The Time I Get To Phoenix' was a kind of
ideal
for me: economy of narrative, the bitter-sweet blend, the
evocation of
landscape, it's all there. Anyway, I had a few years of
unblemished
failure in terms of getting a career going. But looking back, I
did learn
a lot from my songwriting, and when I started to write fiction,
when I
was twenty-four, I think I was able to start at a more advanced
point
than I would have otherwise. When I sometimes read the work of
writing
students, or writers who are just starting out, I often recognize
things
they're going through in fiction that I went through in my music.
For
example, I think I got through my intense adolescent
autobiographical
phase in my songwriting. (You wouldn't want to hear those songs.)
Similarly, that phase writers often go through, a kind of purple
prose
phase, when you're exhilarated at gaining for the first time
anything
like technical prowess: I went through that in my songs too. I
had a lot
of songs with strange stream-of-consciousness lyrics going over
augmented
and diminished chords thrashing around to some Latin beat. By the
time I
came to write short stories, I'd managed to pare things right
down. I'd
begun to distinguish between what was showing off and what was
authentic
artistic expression. Though mind you, that's still a distinction
I find
hard to draw.
What are you working on now?
As it happens, I'm thinking about a novel about a writer of
American
popular songs, between the end of W.W. II and the start of rock-
and-roll.
Someone of European ancestry, trained in classical European music
in his
childhood in Vienna or Strasbourg or someplace like that, who
comes to
America as a penniless refugee, learns this jazz and show music,
becomes
American. But I've got two other possible novels, and I haven't
decided
which to get to work on next. After the turn of the year, I'm
going to
stop traveling and promoting my last book and really get down to
working
on my next one.
Unless otherwise stated, this interview is
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