Kazuo Ishiguro: A Foreigner Who Visited Keio University

2018/01/01

In 2015, various programs were held to commemorate the 125th anniversary of the founding of the Keio University Faculty of Letters, the first of which was an open interview with the Japanese-born British author Kazuo Ishiguro.

On June 5 of that year, the Mita Campus West School Building Hall was filled with the enthusiasm of Keio University affiliates, broadcasting and publishing representatives, literary critics, researchers, and those who had applied in advance. The interview was scheduled for 90 minutes and was to be conducted in English between him and me without an interpreter. We had discussed the general direction via email beforehand and had a briefing on the day, but neither Ishiguro nor I knew exactly which direction the conversation would take. This was because we both agreed that discussing things in too much detail would spoil the "pleasure of the moment." The content of the interview, which left a strong impression on many people, was published in Japanese translation in Mita Bungaku No. 123 (Autumn 2015 issue), so I encourage you to read it.

During our briefing, something very impressionable happened. Ishiguro had also visited the Juku in 2001 and presented his "personal history" at the North Building Hall. He provided us with a time of sincerity and warmth, speaking about "current issues and things I want to write about" and carefully answering questions from the audience. He remembered this time from 14 years ago surprisingly well. He may have retraced his previous experience as part of his preparation before visiting the Juku again. However, his memory was on a level that exceeded such preparation. It was like this: back then, I was also in charge of the preliminary preparations and the briefing on the day, but I had asked someone else to moderate the actual event. Ishiguro asked, "By the way, where were you in the hall 14 years ago? We were together for the briefing before and the reception afterward." I couldn't recall immediately, but after a while, I vaguely remembered the events of that day.

I was amazed by Ishiguro, who remembered that half-day at the Mita Campus 14 years ago in such detail. All of his works depict various forms of memory, and he truly was a man of memory. An icon of memory floated in my mind, like a painting with an extremely complex composition of many meticulously assembled puzzle pieces. My location in the North Building Hall in 2001 might have been a single puzzle piece whose absence would have marred the perfection of that memory puzzle. The open interview that followed then unfolded with his memory itself and his thoughts on memory as the central axis.

At this point, I would like to share the literary world of Kazuo Ishiguro, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2017. "A Pale View of Hills," published in 1982, and "An Artist of the Floating World," published in 1986, are set in Japan around World War II and depict people trying to find their own position amidst violent shifts in values through the medium of their past lives. These early works were written in precise English firmly based on grammar, and I was greatly surprised by the technical nature of the narrative.

For me, whose job is to read British novels, it was an original kind of English I had never encountered before. Some British critics and readers found exoticism in this English and the Japanese setting. "The Remains of the Day" (1989), which won the Booker Prize—the highest award given to a British novel—is written in a more fluid English, a departure from the previous two works. Set in a large English manor, the life woven by the upper-class people involved in politics and those who serve them from the post-WWI to post-WWII era is reflected through the narrative of a man who continues to work as a butler. This work deals with themes common to the previous two. Namely, it tells of the memories of people who were forced to live through histories imposed by others—such as the external pressure of war or the duties forced by the class system—and the traces of their efforts to express those memories.

"The Unconsoled," published in 1995, is a work full of strange charm. This story about the memory, forgetting, and awakening of Ryder, a world-renowned pianist who cannot clearly grasp the purpose of his journey, requires the reader to create a single world by collecting the fragments scattered throughout the work. In contrast to this highly experimental work, the next novel, "When We Were Orphans" (2000), while containing the same theme of collecting fragments of memory, clearly depicts the history of a detective searching for his own past and his missing mother, making it easier to enter the story's world. The charm of Shanghai around the time of World War II is also vividly captured.

"Never Let Me Go" (2005), which like "The Remains of the Day" was made into a film and received great interest and acclaim worldwide, is set in England in the late 1990s and depicts the life and death of clones created for the clear purpose of organ transplantation and kept alive until they are ready for donation. The brief lives of these young clones create a quiet but very powerful world. "The Buried Giant" (2015), published ten years later, tells of the harsh journey forced upon an elderly couple searching for their missing son against the backdrop of Arthurian legend. People's memories are lost due to a lingering mist, but they gradually return during the journey. This return from oblivion is, in fact, a device that reveals the cracks in the couple's bond.

While the spaces and eras that serve as the backgrounds for these seven novels are different, all the works take human memory and forgetting as their themes. In the open interview at Mita, the conversation expanded in various directions, but what Ishiguro spoke about consistently was memory and forgetting. What left a strong impression was his idea that even if people experience a war or disaster at the same time, the memory of a collective like a nation or society is not necessarily the same as the memory of an individual. The idea that one must not push private memories into oblivion while being conscious of public memories is a recognition possessed by a writer with excellent empathy.

His favorite authors and the artists who influenced him, his deep interest in the worlds of music and film, and the episodes from when he started as a novelist—his attitude of speaking carefully was charming. Many people who were there later shared messages that stayed in their hearts, but among them, the words "I wished I could listen to this interview forever" probably represent a common feeling held by those who touched the depth of Ishiguro as a storyteller who speaks quietly but powerfully. When I visited Cambridge University for a seminar on British novels, I had the opportunity to speak with journalists from across Europe, and I vividly remembered many of them stating that the most wonderful writer to interview was Kazuo Ishiguro.

Though not during the interview, there was something Ishiguro told me that I found interesting. He said (though the actual words might be slightly different), "The world emphasizes that 'The Buried Giant' is my first work in ten years since 'Never Let Me Go'—that is, a work after a long time—but I personally don't feel that such a long time has passed." It took ten years for that novel, which could be called a new myth, to be completed. Moreover, during this time, the author responded to interviews in many parts of the world and completed "Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall," a collection of short stories centered on music. Those ten years flowed heavily, deeply, and creatively.

Various parts of Britain, Japanese locations like Nagasaki and Kamakura, Italian cities, and Shanghai. The Middle Ages, the period around World War II, and the present day. These are regions and eras that actually exist, but the writer does not realistically reproduce them in his works. Using various spaces and times as a medium, Kazuo Ishiguro has created his own unique landscapes in each work, depicting the themes of memory and forgetting that form the basis of all human activity. The Mita Campus, which he visited twice, might mature in the novelist's brain and appear in his next work as a new landscape. That possibility cannot be denied. For the world of this man of memory with his fertile words exists deeply and widely.

Finally, I would like to thank Mr. Hiroshi Hayakawa of Hayakawa Publishing, who made the happy encounter between Ishiguro and the Juku possible by saying, "I want to make an interview at his alma mater, Keio University, a reality." And I would like to heartily congratulate Kazuo Ishiguro, the creator of a literary world that radiates a sense of vivid life, on winning the Nobel Prize in Literature.