Before Kazuo Ishiguro was a commercially and critically acclaimed writer, he was a 20-something failed singer-songwriter getting by in London. “I used to see myself as some sort of musician type,” he said in a 2015 interview, “but there came a point when I thought: actually, this isn’t me at all. I’m much less glamorous. I’m one of these people with corduroy jackets with elbow patches.” Nonetheless, an affinity for music is obvious in the author whom the Swedish Academy has confusingly described as a mixture of Jane Austen and Franz Kafka.
Never Let Me Go (2005) is named for a song in the novel that, for its narrator Kathy H, signifies all the yearning and loss of childhood. (For Nobel trivia enthusiasts, Never Let Me Go is coincidentally also the title of a blues standard from the 1950s that was performed by Bob Dylan and Joan Baez in 1975.) Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall (2009) is a collection of vignettes about musicians, with shifts of tone and mood imitating the structure of an instrumental suite.
In 2007 he wrote the lyrics for four songs on jazz singer Stacey Kent’s Grammy-nominated album Breakfast on the Morning Tram, including the titular one (below) about a heartbroken person finding consolation in breakfast with fellow commuters (“So things didn’t quite meet expectations/ But you’re bound to conclude upon reflection/ There’s no reason you should give a damn/ Just treat yourself to a cinnamon pancake/ Very soon you’ll forget your heartache/ When you have breakfast on the morning tram.”) Ishiguro has said that writing song lyrics helped him refine the confiding, intimate “voice” of his first-person narrators. The style of his sparse prose evokes chamber music – the thread of reminiscence runs on like piano harmonies, quiet and almost ambient, the composition’s larger design revealing itself by degrees.
Confronting memory
Kazuo Ishiguro was born in 1954 in Nagasaki, Japan. His mother had survived the atomic bombing a decade earlier, and his father was an oceanographer whose work with the British government caused the family to emigrate to England in 1960. In his early twenties Ishiguro worked, among other things, as a grouse-beater for the Queen Mother at Balmoral Castle and a social worker in London before joining the now-famous creative writing programme at the University of East Anglia where he was taught by Malcolm Bradbury and Angela Carter. The thesis he wrote during this time became his first novel, A Pale View of Hills (1982).
This novel and the next, An Artist of the Floating World (1986), are set in post-Second World War Nagasaki as remembered by ageing protagonists. By Ishiguro’s own admission, the settings in his books are primarily a tool to magnify character and human relationships. The English country manor in The Remains of the Day (1989) is to Stevens the butler what the Migi-Hidari drinking house is to the retired painter Masuji Ono – places of belonging fast fading away in the post-war, post-empire era.
Here you will not find intricacies of plot or the rich detailing of historical fiction (or Merchant Ivory-style drama). Ishiguro’s protagonists are as ordinary as those of Anton Chekhov and Yasujirō Ozu. Their observations are loosely threaded together, shifting between the present and the past, digressing, forgetting, absentmindedly revealing crucial details. The themes are recurrent – memory, ageing, confronting one’s personal responsibility – but, chameleon-like, he migrates across genres, experimenting with dystopian world-building in Never Let Me Go, dabbling in magic realism with The Unconsoled (1995), borrowing from Anglo-Saxon legend in The Buried Giant (2015).
And the trick seems to have worked, for rarely has he been accused of repetitiveness. “I was afraid that people would say, ‘Oh, it’s the same book again, about an old guy looking back over his life with regret when it’s too late to change things,’” recalled Ishiguro in 2015 about the publication of The Remains of the Day. “Instead, they were saying, ‘Your books are always set in Japan; this is a giant leap for you.’ I get this with almost every book.”
The message behind the Nobel?
On the one hand, the Nobel going to a writer of English literary fiction following the Dylan controversy of 2016 seems a safe choice by the Swedish Academy. On the other, what does it mean in the post-Brexit era that the most prestigious honour in literature has been awarded to a naturalised immigrant author whose most famous novel is about the self-harming nature of British national character? The tragedy of Stevens (who is correct to a fault, as fictional butlers are) is one of mistaken judgement. Recognising that he had thrown in his lot with the wrong side of history, he has no choice but to proverbially keep calm and carry on.
In the words of the Academy, “[Ishiguro is] exploring what you have to forget to survive as an individual and a society.” The author’s empathy extends to all these wilful amnesiacs, humanising those who were complicit in national trauma. “We at least acted on what we believed and did our utmost,” says one old man to another in An Artist of the Floating World, reflecting on their role in promoting militant nationalism in imperial Japan. “It’s just that in the end we turned out to be ordinary men. Ordinary men with no special gifts of insight.”
One wonders if such sympathy for the fallibility of human beings is a luxury in our politically polarised times. Given his outspoken criticism of the 2016 British referendum, perhaps we can expect current politics to be more explicit in Ishiguro’s future work. He is only still 62 and, if The Buried Giant is a sign of things to come, in his most innovative period yet. This Nobel feels less like a lifetime achievement award than recognition of a gifted contemporary artist who continues to remake himself.