Counter-point
KAZUO ISHIGURO, AUTHOR OF THE NOVEL THE REMAINS OF THE DAY, IS THE 11TH BRITON AND 114TH WRITER TO WIN THE NOBEL PRIZE FOR LITERATURE SINCE IT WAS FIRST AWARDED IN 1901
Kazuo Ishiguro initially thought the telephone call he received from the Swedish Academy announcing he had won the Nobel prize for literature was a hoax, “fake news.” He was stunned when the press began to call and television teams assembled on his doorstep. He responded by saying there were other more worthy authors who were honoured with the prize but observed, “..that is the nature of prizes. They are a lottery.” He took the news calmly and gave thoughtful interviews to the BBC and other outlets. His goal, he said, has always been to tell stories that overcome “barriers of race, class and ethnicity.”
Ishiguro was born in 1954 in Nagasaki, the Japanese city devastated by the second US atomic bomb at the end of World War II. His mother, 18 at the time, survived the blast and inferno and lived to see her son win the chief of literature prizes. The family moved to Guilford in Surrey, in Britain, when Kazuo was five. His father had been employed to carry out research at the National Institute of Oceanography on a two-year contract but stayed for 15 years before deciding to settle. Since their parents had intended to return to Japan, the children spoke Japanese at home and were raised according to their country’s traditions.
Although intimately connected with and fascinated by Japan, Ishiguro did not visit the country until 1989, after he had written two novels set in an “imaginary” Japan. “I grew up with a very strong image in my head of this other country, a very important other country to which I had a strong emotional tie.”
Although the family arrived soon after World War II when there was widespread resentment against Japanese for ill treatment of British prisoners of war, he said, “People were incredibly kind to our family and went out of their way to help” its members feel at home. Since the Ishiguros are Christians they connected with Gilford through their church, where Kazuo joined the choir.
He became a British citizen in 1983 when he had to decide where to live. In spite of his parents’ efforts, he felt he “couldn’t speak Japanese very well. But I felt British and my future was in Britain.” On the practical level, being British would make him “eligible for literary awards” which he collected at a rapid rate.
After finishing school, where he was the “only non-white kid,” he toured the US and Canada before enrolling at the University of Kent in Canterbury. He graduated with a BA honours in English and Philosophy. In 1980, he took his MA degree in creative writing at the University of East Anglia where his tutors included well established authors Angela Carter and
Malcolm Bradbury. Although he had studied the writing of fiction, his original goal was to compose music and become a rock star.
In the hope of securing a top publisher, a hippy Ishiguro — long hair and torn jeans — turned up at the offices of Faber and Faber in 1979 and proffered three short stories. Writing in The Guardian, then Faber editor Robert Mccrum said the firm signed “Ish” up and received the first 100 pages of his first novel, A Pale View of Hills, the story of a Japanese family’s life in England. This novel, his MA thesis, generated interest in Ishiguro as a new voice on the British literary scene.
To pay the bills, he worked in a West London homeless charity, dealing with difficult people, often with mental illness. While there he met his wife, Lorna Macdougall, a social worker, whom he married in 1996. They have a daughter, Naomi, who is 25.
He argues he can use his writing to give fresh insights about British society and people from the point of view of a well-informed outsider. His third novel, The Remains of the Day, published in 1989, demonstrated he could successfully bring off a work about English characters. The story is about Stevens, a butler in a grand house, and his professional and personal relations with his employer and the housekeeper Miss Kenton. The book was awarded the Booker prize for fiction, Britain’s more prestigious, and was adapted for a film starring Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson. The film was nominated for eight Academy awards but won none due to stiff competition that year.
In spite of its lack of Oscars, The Remains of the Day made Ishiguro’s name as a writer of fiction although his body of work includes seven novels, six novellas, four film scripts, and lyrics for half a dozen songs.
His fifth book, When We Were Orphans, is a detective story set in Britain and China. The Buried Giant, a fantasy novel about Britain at the time of King Arthur, is about an elderly couple’s search for their missing son during conflict between “Britons” and Saxons.
Critics of his work argue it is uneven and, at least one book, The Unconsoled, is deemed a flop. His latest novel, Never Let Me Go, is a bleak comment on the state of the world in the 21st century. It opens at a boarding school for children who realise they have been cloned to donate their organs for transplants.
Kazuo Ishiguro is the 11th Briton and 114th writer to win the Nobel prize for literature. Like nine of the other Britons awarded the prize, he writes in English. Elias Canetti, born in Bulgaria, writing in German and dwelling in Britain, was a Nobel laureate in 1981.
As Ishiguro admits, he is not among the most illustrious writers to win the Nobel prize since it was first awarded in 1901 by the foundation founded by the inventor of dynamite Alfred Nobel. Among the greatest authors include Rudyard Kipling (1907), Rabindranath Tagore (1913), T.S. Eliot (1948), Winston Churchill (1953), Earnest Hemmingway (1954), Albert Camus (1957), John Steinbeck (1962), Boris Pasternak (1958) and V.S. Naipaul (2001). Nevertheless, Ishiguro is also not a minor writer like some of the other laureates.