Kazuo Ishiguro at the Sorbonne 20th March 2003
Texte intégral
1Kazuo Ishiguro was born in 1954 in Nagasaki, Japan and has been living in England since the age of five. He only went back to Japan for a short visit in 1989 and visited Japan again in October 2001. He read philosophy and English at Kent University and did an M.A. in creative writing at East Anglia. His first novel, A Pale View of Hills (1982), is narrated by a Japanese widow, Etsuko, who has settled in England after her eider daughter’s suicide. She recalls her past at the time of the reconstruction of Nagasaki after the war. In An Artist of the Floating World (1986), Masuji Ono, an elderly painter, who was famous when he did propaganda work for the Japanese imperial militarists, tells his own story in 1948–50, remembering the time before the forties. He finally admits his errors during the war so that his daughter, Noriko, can marry the man she wants. The Remains of the Day, Booker Prize for 1989 and on the baccalauréat syllabus in France, was adapted by James Ivory in 1993. It follows the six-day expedition to the west country of Stevens, an almost too perfect British butler, in July 1956 to visit Miss Kenton who used to be part of the staff twenty years before. It also allows him to explore his past during the twenties and thirties when an international conference was organized by his master Lord Darlington who was in favour of the collaboration with Germany. The Unconsoled (1995) is set in an unspecified city in Eastern Europe where a pianist, Ryder, is to stay for three days to give a concert but has lost his schedule. In a very unusual hotel he meets characters of his past in a dreamlike atmosphere. In Kazuo Ishiguro’s latest novel, When we were Orphans (2000), Christopher Banks, aged nine, learns in Shanghai, where he was born, that both his parents have disappeared. He is taken to England where he becomes a famous detective and tries to solve this personal mystery. The recollection of his past in the thirties sends the reader back in a very fragmented time to London, Cambridge and Shanghai.
2On March 20th 2003, Kazuo Ishiguro was invited at the Sorbonne, in the Louis Liard lecture room, on the occasion of a two-day international conference on his work: ‘Narrative detours in the fiction of Kazuo Ishiguro’. The event was organised by the research centre of Paris IV-Sorbonne, ‘Écritures du roman contemporain de langue anglaise’ (Ercla), and the Institut de Formation des Maîtres of Paris, with the help of the English Department, the École Doctorale IV, the Scientific Council of Paris IV, the Société d’Études Anglaises Contemporaines (SEAC), and Gallimard.
François Gallix: My first question is linked to the general theme of this conference ‘Narrative detours in the fiction of Kazuo Ishiguro’. It includes the way your first person narrators use an indirect transversal strategy, a mode of avoidance with many ellipses and silences. They avoid direct confrontations with what may hurt them and prefer dilatory diversions. Most of your characters use language to hide the truth. They talk about others not to reveal themselves and to hide from the truth asking the reader to read between the lines and to fill in the gaps. Could you tell us why you are particularly fond of this indirect way of writing?
Kazuo Ishiguro: Certainly when I started to write I was profoundly interested in this question of how people hid from themselves and perhaps hid from their pasts and their history. But I was not just interested in how people used Ianguage and stories to hide from themselves, I was also interested in how they finally faced up to very uncomfortable things about themselves. So it is not just one way; it is not just hiding, hiding, hiding; it is a kind of hide and seek game. I asked myself the question when I was a young man: if I got to a more advanced stage and there were things about what I had done that I did not want to face up to, but on the other hand there is nevertheless some demand that says I should face up to it, what sort of psychological battle would take place? There could be ail kinds of reasons why I was interested in that when I was a certain age. I was of a Japanese background of a certain generation, and it was very easy for me to look at my parents’ generation, of Japanese people who had been involved with the militarism—we might like to call it a kind of Japanese fascism of that era—who were caught up in a whole political fervour. I suppose it is very natural for people of my generation from a Japanese background, or perhaps from a German background, to ask that question: if I had been just one generation older, what would I be doing? Would I be searching through my actions, my past, trying to forgive myself for some things, unable to forgive myself for other things? So, for me, I was not just fascinated in how people hid from themselves; it was also how people finally faced up with some kind of courage and dignity, how they finally faced up to the most uncomfortable truths about themselves. So those early books are not simply about running away. I tried to portray in a small way a courageous coming to terms with failure, sometimes guilt.
These days, as I continue to write, I suppose I have moved away; I do not feel that I have such a deep interest in that area. What I worry about is that of course, you develop a habit as a writer, of using certain strategies, certain voices, a certain Ianguage, and this is one of the perils of being a writer. You get to a mid-career point, as I do, and you have to be quite careful about what you continue to do. It is very easy having acquired a certain voice and manner and to carry on using it, long after the real reasons why you came to these things have gone. So I ask myself often: am I still using that kind of writing purely as a kind of habit, purely for technical convenience, when a lot of the deeper themes and deeper questions are no longer there in my heart when I am writing? But you are right: I continue in some way or the other to use narrators like this or language like this.
François Gallix: In other words, if you had to rewrite some of your short staries or your navels, would you say that there would be episodes and possibly writing strategies that you would alter?
Kazuo Ishiguro: It depends how you are asking that question. I would never wish to change any of my early works because to me, they represent who I was at the time. It is a little like looking at photographs of myself taken twenty years ago. You look at them and you wonder why on earth you were wearing trousers like that, how you could possibly have thought your hair looked good like that. But of course, unless you are a very strange persan, you do not then alter the photos, you do not put them in a Photoshop software programme and change it ail. You want to keep these things because they are a faithful sincere representation of who you were at the time. I know some authors have now started to do this: they have started to change books that they have written. There are new editions coming out and they are different. I would never do this myself.
But if you are asking that in a more abstract way, I suppose there are many things that change when you are aider, just in terms of the way the world has moved on. I think a lot of my early works and that voice in particular that you talk about, corne, I suppose, from having absorbed in an unconscious indirect way, a lot of Freudian ideas about repression. It is a very sixties and seventies thing. You can look at my books in that way that they are often about people who cannot quite say things, and there is often a kind of cathartic moment when they reveal things to themselves and to the reader. They articulate in words the most uncomfortable things about their past and there is a kind of a catharsis; they are, in some limited sense, healed. Sometimes when I look at my early works, I think it is some kind of Mickey Mouse Freudian idea that once you face up, once you stop suppressing things, you will corne to some accommodation with your life. Now, I am not sure as I have got older whether I would be so keen on making that the centre of the way I write. To some extent I feel that the problem living in the world these days is the opposite one, that it is not that we are ail suppressing ail these inner desires and inner evasions. It seems tome that we live in a world where we are bombarded from ail directions to try and feel things, and a lot of the crises often corne from not being able to hold a centre in our sense of our own identities. There is always some other lifestyle that we think might be better. We see a movie or an advert that taunts us to say that just over the horizon, there is a different way to be, there is a different way to live, we can always change ourselves, we can adapt, we can have a new life, we can go abroad, we can get married to somebody else. I think it is almost the opposite to the old Freudian assumption that ail our suffering cornes from holding things down because we are too inhibited. It is almost as if we are being pulled apart by ail these different forces. The modern world bombards us with these temptations and role models. Soif I were a young writer writing today, starting up for the first time, I probably would not make that the kind of the centre of my voice and my strategy.
Paul Veyret: You were just now talking about this change: first you wanted to go on carrying that same voice and at the same time you felt you had to write differently. So how cathartic are The Unconsoled and When We Were Orphans? I think that most readers have the feeling that with the first three novels indeed, it was ail about denying, self-denial, keeping things up, silence and delaying the realization that your life has been utter chaos, and with The Unconsoled and When We Were Orphans you seem to start off with the chaos. So how much control do you need to portray Jack of control, to portray chaos?
Kazuo Ishiguro: This is a very interesting question. I suppose artists of ail sorts have grappled with this dilemma. We can probably make a very rough distinction. On the one hand there is this question of how you portray chaos, how you portray the Jack of control. You perceive that the world is a place with very little control and that is what you want to express, if that is the appropriate thing to express. Then of course you set about trying to recreate the experience of being out of control. But of course this is different from a writer or an artist of any sort actually being out of contrai of the way he works. But there might be a relationship between these two things. So, this was an intriguing question for me. I suppose if somebody—let us say an author, to keep things simple—if a novelist is too much in contrai of his novel, if he knows every detail, if he goes about his work on a day to day basis, very very in contrai, knowing exactly where the story is going, having written many notes and files on each character, having worked out diagrammatically the way the themes interweave and so on, is it possible to write like that about the whole experience of being out of contrai, the sense that it is very difficult to contrai your life?
That is nota question I have quite resolved. But certainly at the time when I wrate The Unconsoled, there was an uneasy feeling that a book like The Remains of the Day, which is the book that I had just finished before that, for ail its attractions, was perhaps too contralled. It was almost as if I had written a prescription for myself and I had fulfilled it. I thought that perhaps if I wanted to write about my feeling as I appraach the middle of my life, that actually should change. For most people, life is not defined by clear choices that you make, or by your political affiliations or by the moral stances that you take. At least it is far less like that than I thought when I was younger. We often start off with very clear intentions about how we will lead our lives but actually when we get going, when we are out there in the mess of our lives, so many things—sometimes just fate, just chance, social obligations, obligations of friends and family and your work—ail these things actually end up pulling us one way or the other. And it is very difficult to lead your life saying: ‘I believe, these are my political beliefs, these are my moral beliefs, I believe life should be like this. Now let us set off.’ I felt it was not really like that and I was trying to portray this whole experience of someone just pulled apart by obligations, just trying desperately to fulfil just the next obligation on the list. And I did actually think perhaps I should write in a slightly different way as well, I should not plan my work so carefully. So I did enter a period of experimenting just purely at the technical level. I still have not decided whether that was a mistake or not. I do not know actually if there is any relationship between these two things I was talking about, whether if you want to portray chaos, you have to some extent be chaotic when you are writing. I do not know if that is true. I suspected it was but now I am not so sure. I can see that it might be very possible to be a complete control freak, and yet praduce a work that beautifully represents the chaotic jarring experience of life.
Vanessa Guignery: My question is actually partly inspired by the title of one of your novels, The Unconsoled. This title reminded me of a quote by George Sand in her correspondence. She wrate a letter to Gustave Flaubert in December 1875, that is towards the end of Flaubert’s writing career. She was writing to him about their respective literary production and here is what she wrote: ‘you produce desolation and I produce consolation.’ You yourself, during a public meeting in Beaubourg in 1997, said that ‘art is a form of consolation’. And yet, many of your novels focus on a sense of despair, of woundedness, of pain, of not being consoled. So I wonder how you would articulate these two notions, desolation and consolation, yourself as a writer but also as related to your characters and maybe also the reader. I guess there are different points of view according to which side you decide to view that question from.
Kazuo Ishiguro: It is an interesting dichotomy: you put desolation on the one hand and consolation on the other. It is an interesting way to look at writers or film makers or painters, to think that some are in a desolation camp and some are in a consolation camp. Of course, if you look at that simplistically, it looks like you are saying that there are some people who want to comfort us, and as long as it is not done in a crudely sentimental and obviously crass way, as long as it is not too escapist, that is a very valuable fonction of art. Desolation also has its role because we need to know that other people have these bad experiences too.
For me, when I was talking about art being a consolation, I do not think I necessarily meant it in perhaps quite that way. What I had in mind was different. I often ask myself: ‘Why do people participate in art? Why do people write books? Why do people read books? Why do we spend so much of our time doing this?’. And certainly I looked at many of my fellow authors just as people I know, trying to ask myself: ‘Why do people do these strange things?’. And this concerns not just the successful ones. I know many writers who are never published but who disrupt their lives enormously, sitting at home, writing novel after novel that they never get published. It is a very interesting urge of human beings: they want to do this. I suppose the inescapable conclusion I came to was that ail these people—and perhaps I have to include myself in this—are trying to address some sort of wound, or at least something that is broken in their lives or at least a perception that there is something broken in their world. And often it is too late to mend, or if it is a wound it will never heal, and they know this. And in writing a novel or composing a piece of music, I do not think the persons seriously think that by writing these novels they can actually heal this thing or mend this thing that is broken—often it is something that broke a long long time ago in their lives. So it is in this sense that I talked of art as a consolation. It is often the case that if you have a wound that you know will never heal, nevertheless you sometimes want to touch it or in some kind of interesting way examine the wound again from time to time, have a relationship with it. Soit cannot heal, it cannot mend in art, but it can be a consolation. You have lost this thing, but just by creating something that makes sense of what has gone wrong, it is a consolation. I think when we value writers or value artists, it is because these people do this for us. That is why we are drawn to books, films, music that strike a certain chord with things that we have felt. I know there are writers who do write because they think their work could contribute to changing the world. There are probably writers now who are writing about the current political situation seriously thinking they want to contribute to some larger debate that would make the world better. I have enormous respect for writers who write like that, but I think predominantly art does not seriously think it can go out there and change things to that extent. It is often valued both by the consumers and by the producers as a kind of consolation. It is broken but let us look at it: here is a way, here is a perspective on this broken thing that helps us to corne to terms with it more, or live with it more, and so for me it is a consolation in that sense, rather than in a sense it is going to make us feel better.
Vanessa Guignery: How would you relate this idea of consolation or lack of consolation to Ryder in The Unconsoled, as of course the title is meaningful?
Kazuo Ishiguro: There are perhaps people in the audience who do not know the book, so I do not want to go into too much detail. But this book is about somebody for whom it is too late to mend something that was wrong in his family. His parents have a very unhappy marriage. As a boy, he feels in some sense responsible for making this marriage happier, for stopping ail this suffering. He is somebody who Iater on in his life becomes a great pianist because somewhere he thinks that by some strange logic, if he becomes a good enough pianist, perhaps the greatest pianist in the world, somehow his parents will start to love each other. But of course in reality it is much too late for that. His parents have long ago died or something. But this is the reason why he continues, the reason why the impetus is still there, the artist is still left. So that is what he does with his life. Because somewhere, in a almost illogical, irrational way, that is a motivating force. Looking around, I think many people do do this, people corne to ail kinds of work, not just artistic work, they put a lot of passion into it, whether it is teaching or whether it is government work or charity work or political work. They do it with great passion and commitment but sometimes the initial motivation, the spark that started them off was something very private. Of course they know it is far too late to do anything about whatever sparked them off in the first place but of course they carry on with their work. In a sense that is why Ryder is unconsoled. He can never quite fulfill what he wishes to fulfill with his music. It will never mend things.
François Gallix: I would like to build my next question on two quotes, one from a fictitious character and the other one from a real person. The first quote cornes from When We Were Orphans when Christopher Banks is at the police station and Colonel Asegawa comments on a Japanese poem that seems to have anticipated L.P Hartley’s well-known incipit in The Go Between: ‘She wrote of how our childhood becomes like a foreign land once we have grown.’ And this is the quotation from a real person, your mother, after the publication of your first short stories in 1980: your mother said that now that you had entered the public realm you should make sure that there were certain things that should not die with her. One often speaks of the duty of memory. Recalling the past and the fear of not remembering is certainly at the core of ail your fiction. It takes two aspects: how individuals try to remember and how a country remembers or is being remembered. For what effects of sense do you associate this search for the individual and for the collective memory?
Kazuo Ishiguro: We should perhaps explain just to put that quote into context. My mother was in Nagasaki when the atomic bomb fell, and the first short story I ever published, now twenty-three years ago, was a story about the atomic bomb in Nagasaki, I suppose to some extent, put together from small things that she had told me as I was growing up. So this was published, and we were rather surprised. Actually she said tome: ‘Of course there are ail these things you have got wrong, ail these social details.’ But I remember what did make an impression on me and I think this is what you referred to. She had never talked to me in a kind of formai, explicit way about the experience of the war or the atomic bomb in Nagasaki, but after that story was published and perhaps because I made ail these little silly mistakes, she started to tell me ail kinds of things about it. We had some long conversations when she just told me about what had happened and the different experiences. And indeed she said something like this: ‘Now that it seems you will be going out into the public domain, it is important that you somehow carry on this memory. Because I am nota writer, I will not have this kind of platform.’
So this happened right at the beginning of my working life as a writer and I have not really gone back to talking about Nagasaki or the bomb. My first novel did touch on it but I have never felt a direct reponsibility to carry on my parents’ memory or anything like this. But lately, in the last four or five years, I have begun to think much more about that idea again. It is something to do with the fact that the older generation who experienced the war directly and are, ail over the world, getting to a certain age and now beginning to die. I think there is this feeling in my generation—I am fortyeight years old—that although we did not experience the war directly, we were brought up by parents who had, who knew about it intimately. We grew up in a very post war atmosphere, the cold war was there, we heard about the war a lot. Perhaps now we are the best there is left to preserve the memory. When I was young, I felt the war and all those memories were somebody else’s responsibility. I was not interested at ail. Now I feel there is a new responsibility on my generation.
I can see already a whole new generation of world leaders who have never experienced the war—it sounds peculiarly appropriate to say this now but this is something that many people have said for the Iast few years. So what will happen when the generation of world leaders becomes those who have not directly experienced the war? Because, whatever their political leanings were in the past, the former generation had that memory of the war, the world war, and how terrible that was on the communist side, on the western side. I think this informed so much of the global leadership’s manoeuvres. I think there was always the fear of what would happen when a generation came along who did not know much about the war. Of course when we are Iooking at people who are now seventeen, eighteen, to them even the cold war is something that is very distant. The fall of the Berlin wall is something very distant. Something like the holocaust might as well be something from the nineteenth century. It is just way way back in the past. So yes, they might study it but it no longer has that urgency of something that touched us or nearly touched us.
So I suppose I have begun to feel a new responsibility now, but this is a difficult question for a writer. Am I under the obligation to somehow preserve the memories of the aider generation? Am I in a position to do it? Do I have the qualifications to do it as somebody who did not genuinely experience it? Should I actually write about these very issues, about people forgetting and how quickly people can forget?
You asked earlier, when looking back at my past navels, whether I would rewrite them. I suppose this is another thing, but if I look back at my early work, I notice there is often someone struggling with memory, using memory to manipulate their idea of who they are. There is also a historical background. There is Japan that has just corne through this terrible period and is trying to reconstruct itself after the war. There is a butler in England as Europe goes through these traumatic times, the thirties, fascism, the holocaust and then the second world war.
I think often my books present an individual struggling with his own persona! memory and his own persona] history on the one hand, and then this question which is implied about how a nation remembers and cornes to terms with its past. Does a nation deceive itself? Does it exercise self-deception in a way that an individual human being would? When I look at my early works, the relationship between these two things is rather vague: they are thrown up and to me they are not really considered very deeply. For me those early books beg this question: what is the relationship? Is it similar? Can you use as a metaphor an individual struggling with his own memories and hiding from his past? Is that really a metaphor for a whole nation doing that? Are there indeed valid parallels between individual evasions and guilt, and the way a whole nation hides from what it might have done in the past? I think there are perhaps very interesting parallels but there are some very important differences as well. I think it is too easy to suggest that an individual can stand for a whole nation. For me there are very important differences.
We can just take one example. An individual’s life is very short and they often do not have enough years in their life to have a second go. Most people have enough energy to do one thing, perhaps two, but that is it, and most individuals do not have a huge amount of perspective to stand above the climate of their times. They are very much at the mercy of the society around them. So I think there was a real sadness and poignancy to people whose individual lives, their best intentions, their ambitions, have been flawed or undermined by mistakes, and the best they can often do is just to face up to them and then grow old and die. On the other hand, the interesting thing about a nation is that it can forever keep regenerating unless there is a terrible genocide and a nation cornes to a complete end. I think there was that positive thing about countries like Germany or Japan in the twentieth century, and perhaps one hopes Russia: ail these countries could go through these terrible periods and they can Iearn from their mistakes and they can go on. So I think the whole process of how you should look at your past, the moral onus is different. The tragedy of life being too short and having only one, at most two chances, is not there in the case of a nation. For me that is a profound difference between the two kinds of memory but when I look at my early works I think these things are not really explored in much depth, they are just there in the book.
François Gallix: One cannot help thinking that obviously what you are saying today, particularly today in March 2003, takes a totally different meaning from what it would have in 1999.
Kazuo lshiguro: Yes, probably yes.
Paul Veyret: I have one question about what you were talking about earlier on, about the idea that your narrators at some point in their life discover that it is too late. I remember another quotation from an interview you gave, in which you said that you never properly said goodbye to Japan. Would not that be a sort of, not explanation perhaps, but a kind of metaphor for your narrators that they have not properly said goodbye to their past? Would not that be the essence of nostalgia, the feeling that they know it is too late, yet at the same time they cannot help feeling drawn towards the past?
Kazuo Ishiguro: I am not sure if anybody ever properly says goobye to their past. I remember that just before we came in here, we were talking about this and you mentioned the phrase ‘The Long Goodbye’ which is a Raymond Chandler title. I think it is a very apt phrase. We do not really say goodbye to our childhoods, to our pasts. They haunt us, they determine the way we look at life, and nostalgia is an emotion that I become increasingly fascinated by. Perhaps here in France too but in England, nostalgia does not have a very good press. It is thought to be a cheap emotion at best, something that the tourist industry uses to sell holidays in the countryside. At worst it is associated with some kind of rather sinister imperial agenda. You can use nostalgia to say: yes, the world was a better place before immigrants started to appear or before trade unions became powerful, whatever.
So nostalgia, quite rightly I think, is viewed with suspicion but I am very interested in the actual pure human emotion of nostalgia. Of course it is used and manipulated but I think we all recognize that this feeling of nostalgia is quite a deep feeling. To me, in its purest form, it is something to do with this childhood that we have all had, that we have not quite said goodbye to, and that is why we feel a certain kind of tug there. I think there is a kind of nostalgia that is actually a very profound emotion that is worth exploring in our thoughts, in our fiction, because to some extent, it is almost like the emotional equivalent to idealism. We remember a time when we were more innocent in our childhood, when the world seemed a kinder place, before we discovered that our parents and the adults were pretending to us, and that there is not this beautiful place with teddy bears and toys, where everyone smiles in the street. As we get older we realize that there are much darker things out there and then we grow up and then we realize what the world is like. But I think there is a part of us that remembers that innocence, the time when we thought the world was like that. Of course we know that that was a mistake, but there is that emotional feeling that every now and again, we remember what it felt like when we thought the world was a kinder place, just as idealism imagines a world that is hopelessly impossible to achieve but nevertheless it is sometimes useful to intellectually have some idealism. I think emotionally, in some kind of emotional way, nostalgia is a very important emotion and certainly recently I have wanted to explore that sense of nostalgia in my work.
Paul Veyret: You have been describing Christopher Banks, and that is precisely what he does in your latest novel, When We Were Orphans. François Gallix was mentioning the fact that your narrators keep coming back to the scene of crime, and he does that literally since he is a detective. I was wondering: how wrong does he realize he is, because that could be said about ail your narrators? How far does the realization go?
Kazuo Ishiguro: Christopher Banks probably does finally corne to accept that his attempt to recreate or hold on to some past is hopeless. But I think you are quite right: nostalgia, although it can act as a hopeful thing in that we remember happier times, and we can imagine a world that is better than the one we live in, can also be a very dangerous thing because it can make us very deluded. And someone like Christopher Banks who refuses to look at reality to some extent, can be a very dangerous person. Just recently, I reread the Odyssey twice because there is a new quite recent American translation by Robert Fagles which I thought was very beautiful. I suppose that you are more familiar with the Odyssey than with my novels, so I will use this as an example as this nostalgia theme is there. Here is a hero, Odysseus, who has been at war for ten years. Then he spends ten years imagining this home, this island where he lived, and this family that he had, and he cannot quite get back there. With ail these troubles, these strange monsters, these sea-creatures, he is longing to get back there, he has a very strong sense of nostalgia. Now when he does get back there, ail is not as he wants it to be. In Homer of course, there is no question we are supposed to sympathize with Odysseus. He of course takes his weapons and rearranges things so that it fits his dream of his home. But when I was reading this recently, I thought this is only a tiny step away from these films about Vietnam vets that corne back and cannot fit in to normal society: they have a very strong sense of the home that they left behind, and when it is not quite the way they want it to be when they corne back, they get their guns out and go berserk. To some extent, this is the story of the Odyssey too. If I was doing a modem version of the Odyssey, perhaps it would be like that. So you can see how fragile this kind of nostalgia is: it can be this wonderful, driving force that pulls Odysseus back across ail these oceans and trials, because he wants to corne back to love and family and ail these things, but when it is divorced from reality, it can be avery dangerous and destructive thing as well.
Paul Veyret: You were mentioning these heroes that do not quite fit in anymore. Would you say that your narrators are archetypes of these misfits, like those American frontier heroes that do not quite belong?
Kazuo lshiguro: I guess you mean people like the John Wayne figure who is very hernie but has no place on the homestead and has to go back on the range at the end of the film. I am not sure this is the case for my narrators. A lot of my narrators like Stevens the butler or Christopher Banks the detective, are outsiders I suppose. But I think those kinds of figure, the hernie outsiders who no longer fit in, are people who are often portrayed as people being out of their time. What they were good at doing was valued by society, but society no longer has a place for them, because their work to some extent is done. John Wayne, his violence, his strength was needed once, but once civilization has been achieved, there is no place for that. This is the great paradox of a certain kind of hero, and this continues to be the fate of many soldiers in war. I do not think my narrators are outsiders in that sense. Certainly someone like Stevens the butler is an outsider as much because of self-denial as because of time moving on without him. For me this is quite an important aspect of ail my characters, that there is a part of them that is determined to fulfill some idea of themselves. They feel that there is a right way to live their lives, there is a right way to spend their energies, and they actually deny many things that might bring comfort and love into their life, because they are pursuing this goal. And that is what often makes them outside of things, outside of love, outside of family, rather than that they would once have belonged but the world has moved on. For me, the self denial aspect is quite an important part of why they are quite sad and interesting.
Vanessa Guignery: In some of your novels you include other artistic forms apart from literature, be it music in The Unconsoled or painting in An Artist of the Floating World. You yourself played music when you were younger, and wanted to become a songwriter. You often say that you were more influenced by films than by other books, and The Remains of the Day has been turned into a film. I was wondering whether you could tell us more about the influence of various artistic forms apart from literature on your production as a whole.
Kazuo Ishiguro: I suppose it has partly to do with my age. I grew up at a time when there was television. When I was a child, there were not ail these video games and things, but there was TV—perhaps my generation was the first that grew up with televisions in the house. So inevitably, when you look at what kinds of ways of telling a story I became familiar with, well I did not read a huge amount when I was a boy. I read lots of Sherlock Holmes staries, then I think I stopped reading altogether at a certain age, until I had to study for my exams. I was a typical kind of boy. But of course there were films and television staries, television programmes on all the time that we were consuming on a daily basis. So inevitably, the way I have corne to see a story, how you tell things, the shape, the kind of structures I take for granted, the devices I take for granted, ail this cornes just as much from the visual way of telling a story on television. I also saw many, many movies, even when I was young. I preferred to watch the old movies rather than the sitcoms. So I think I am very much a product of that kind of cultural background although I was trying to impress you just now by referring to Homer. I am not somebody who grew up reading Virgil and Homer and Shakespeare. I am very much somebody who grew up watching Hollywood films on television, and then supplemented this at a certain point by reading a few literary books. And in some ways I do not think I am untypical.
I suppose one of the things that film does is that the history of film is very strong in terms of genre. It is very difficult to talk about cinema without talking about genre. The way the film industry works, it always says: ‘Is this a romantic comedy? Is this a western? Is this a musical?’. And it becomes a kind of a shorthand way of actually referring to films. These are different kinds of realities in which the story can take place. We do not have to reinvent the world each time, by saying: let us suppose that there is this slightly realistic world, but not entirely realistic world, where people wear these strange hats and ride horses, and when they have an argument, they stand in front of each other and draw guns. We do not have to do this every time. I think cinema has this kind of quick shorthand and increasingly, if you are writing novels now, you are able to utilise that same shorthand because the cinema audience is to a large extent the same as the reading audience. I suppose when I write I am assuming that, particularly if I am trying to create worlds that are slightly away from straight reality. This is something I rely on a lot, I rely on a kind of prior knowledge, a kind of sophistication on the part of my reading audience.
Music has always been a very important thing for me and I still play a lot. Partly I like it because there are not any words, and if you spend a lot of time working with words, it is very relaxing to escape. Also I often think that when you are writing fiction, when you are writing a novel, you have to make decisions that cannot be justified logically ail the time. If I am writing an argument, a polemic, then of course I stick to logic, I argue a point. But when you are writing fiction it is different, you often make artistic decisions that you cannot really back up. If somebody said: ‘Why did you do that?’, of course you can pretend, you can say: ‘Weil, I did this because you need this structurally, and of course it balances this thing’, but often it is a more instinctive thing, very similar to the decisions that people make in the abstract arts, in painting and music. You write a scene in a certain way because it looks better that way, it sounds better that way. If you ask a jazz musician, when they are recording an album: ‘Why did you choose that take rather than that one? Why is this solo better than this solo?’, it is very difficult to corne up with logical answers. They just say: ‘It sounds better and it feels better. It is emotionally true, but I cannot back it up.’
I find that the trouble with writing fiction is because it involves words, which are also used in newspaper articles, in philosophical arguments, in all these other kinds of ways, there is a temptation to seek a logical backing for everything you do in a way that you would not do if you were working in painting or in music. I find it is very important to somehow keep fit that other side of me that makes these decisions instinctively, as the musician would do. You want that scene there because that is how it looks beautiful, you cannot think of any other logical reasons to back that up. Sometimes of course when you start reading lots of reviews, when you enter into discussions in places like this where people discuss books and work in a very thorough, detailed way, there is always a temptation to backup everything you have done, in words, in argument, and it is sometimes very interesting to do so. But I think it is very important for novelists not to make the mistake of thinking that they can rely on their intellect to make artistic decisions, because in the end that is an evasion, it is the easy way out. I think you have got to rely on that more dangerous thing where you make decisions because it looks better, it feels better, it sounds better. . .
François Gallix: Indeed there is always something magic in writing that cannot necessarily be very coldly analyzed as we are used to doing. We do need the magic touch.
Kazuo lshiguro: I think it is fine for people to analyze things as much as they want afterwards, but the terrible thing is when somebody tries to create something from purely intellectual positions. They say: so this scene must go like this because it fits in with these arguments about how things should happen in a story.
Pascal Zinck: In most of your novels you have honed your skills with a short story to test some of your devices and ideas. Is there such a thing as a previous short story for When We Were Orphans and is it related to The White Countess?
Kazuo lshiguro: Generally I would ideally like to be able to write a lot of short staries in private, because in the past I have felt short staries have helped me to test things. People who are principally short story writers will think this is a terrible thing to say, but I do find them a very useful way of testing certain things.
This probably shows that I am not a genuine short story writer. But I think there is something about the short story form that !ends itself very much to experiment. In some ways I wish that the short story form was regarded more highly in the world, in the crass, commercial world of literature, because I think artists and writers have to experiment, have to keep moving on. I think when people practice short stories, it encourages an atmosphere where people experiment and move on. It is getting increasingly hard to be brave or to try something new if you are a novelist working in today’s world. There is almost a hierarchy where they tend to place novels above short stories. Certainly in the way the commercial world rewards one’s work, it is very much that.
Often many writers I know spend three or four years working on some novels, sometimes longer. These Americans seem to think nothing of spending ten years working on some big novel. Everything has to be placed into this one work. And then they know that there is a big industry out there that will then promote this thing and you would have to go around the world talking about it for three or four years after that. So there is a sense that you are investing so much in this next step that it tends to discourage risks. It tends to discourage people trying to let go of things that worked very well in the past, and I think that it leads to a kind of inflexibility in the world of writing and artists—let us just say writing, I do not know enough about the other forms. So I would like to see short stories having a much larger place in writers’ lives and certainly in my own. I know for a fact that if I could write more short stories, I would discover ail kinds of new ways, new things about myself as a writer, but in a way I am too inhibited. I do not dare take certain risks if it is going to mean that that is going to be my artistic identity for the next seven years, so I have to play safe to some extent, but ideally that would be my relationship.
You mention something called The White Countess. That is a movie script, a film script. As it happened, just earlier this afternoon I was actually talking to James Ivory just across the road there in a café, because that is the film he is going to make next. That is a film script, and indeed that takes place in Shanghai as did my last novel, but the relationship is the other way around. I did a lot of research to write
3When We Were Orphans. I researched a lot about Shanghai before the second World War, and I found that I could only use a small part of that research. I am not very good at research and I do not really like to do research, and I was very proud of the fact that I had done so much research and that I had spent so much money on very rare books written at the time. So I had ail this leftover research, and I wrote a film script about ail these different people who were living in Shanghai at the time. That is the relationship to When We Were Orphans. The White Countess is about people who have fled the Russian Revolution and ended up in Shanghai in great poverty, aristocrats who ended up as bouncers in nightclubs and prostitutes, and which have nothing to do with my novel.
Audience: I found interesting what you said about short stories because it reminded me of something that Margaret Atwood said about poetry, that poetry helps her to discover new artistic identities for herself. I was wondering what your relationship was to poetry.
Kazuo Ishiguro: I have to say I have almost no relationship to poetry at ail. Along with opera, these are the two big things in the world that I do not understand at all. I have a complete blind spot for these things. When I was younger I used to listen to records by people like Bob Dylan or Leonard Cohen. I was drawn in by their lyrics, and some lyrics I still love. I love traditional Celtic folk songs, this kind of folk lyric or Mississippi blues lyrics. Purely lyrically, I find them very beautiful, I often just listen. But as for poetry written on the page, I certainly cannot write it and I do not understand it. I do not understand how it works, and I do not know if this is just simply my ignorance. I have tried very hard. If there is a narrative there, then it is okay. Soif I am reading a translation of Dante or something, I am reading it rather like I am reading prose, but I suppose it is poetry. It often is the case, particularly for a lot of modern poetry, if there is nota title I really would not even know where the thing was set. If the poem is called ‘A Conversation in a Restaurant’ or something like this, so I know it is a conversation in a restaurant, or something like ‘The Return to the Funeral’, that gives me a clue. Otherwise I would not know what on earth was going on. I find myself completely lost, I am afraid, in the world of poetry. I do not know what that says about me. With opera, I have a similar problem.
Audience: You do work on a denser form before you expand it into a nove), which is the short story rather than the poetry, but you feel that it is interesting to go from a very dense form to a form which has more breath, don’t you?
Kazuo Ishiguro: I think I am not a genuine short story writer. As I was saying earlier, I think people who are passionate about writing short stories or reading short stories would be horrified by me. I am just using them, and I think it is an abuse of the form to use them as a way of helping one write a novel. So in that sense, I do not think my short stories are particularly dense. I think genuinely successful short stories are dense. The stories of Chekhov are dense. While they appear to be very simple, they are dense in the sense that they have great human depth, and they imply a whole massive universe, although there is only a tiny fragment of it. I think that it is perhaps a much harder form than the novel, and I suspect I am not good enough to do it. So when I say short staries, I use the phrase in a very literai sense: a story that is short rather than something that satisfies the form. I have very rarely written a short story that I think really qualifies as a proper short story because I think essentially I am a novelist. I have published short staries, but I was experimenting with a certain technical thing often, a way of using a certain voice, or a certain device, or a certain way of manipulating expectations. Because the short story is so short, you can often tell very clearly what works and what does not, and it does not take nearly as long. I am very aware that I should not really be talking about short staries in this way. It is a great art form.
Hubert Teyssandier: I would like to ask a question about the presence or possibly the absence—I do not know quite which—of music in The Unconsoled. I have a specific interest in the relationship between literary forms and other art forms. Of course when I am reading a novel I know perfectly well I am not going to hear any music. Still I keep thinking, in the case of The Unconsoled, about music. What I am wondering about—it is my experience throughout my reading of The Unconsoled—is what musical form we are being referred to. Was the book referring to existing, actually written, played, music, or was it the kind of music that existed only in the emptiness between the words?
Kazuo Ishiguro: Certainly I did not have any specific pieces of music in mind. In that book, The Unconsoled, what basically happens is that this man has arrived in the community that is in some kind of crisis. Everything used to work fine in this community, they used to have music by Beethoven, Mozart, Brahms, and so on, but for some reason, these forms have been deemed unsuitable, and people do not understand the new kind of music that they have to grapple with. I suppose that I was using this as a kind of a metaphor, the sense that the world has become very complex.
We are ail faced with things like economic theories that we do not understand. We are ail supposed to be democratic citizens, we are supposed to be articulate and informed enough to be able to make a decision about which party to vote for and so on, but quite often the main arguments go into very specialist areas, and most of us, however much we keep up with the news, are not experts on economic strategies, particularly around economics and the way finance works in the world. We do not really understand how that works. Military strategy, global strategy, the whole complex area of international relations, ail that is very difficult to understand, particularly so, I think, since the Cold War ended. And these are just two areas. It seems tome that we recognize that these are very important areas that touch all our lives. When we exercise our responsibility as democratic citizens, we feel we should have good informed opinions on these subjects, and yet we feel rather powerless in the face of the complexity of these things and often we find ourselves tuming to so-called experts. So there is a professor of economics who says: ‘If you follow what that politician says it will lead to disaster; if we follow this line of foreign policy it will lead to disaster.’ So there is a certain sense of helplessness now. It is very difficult to contrai our lives, because there are all these very complex theories and things.
In order to express this I created this rather strange world where everything revolves around music. They do not discuss anything else but musical theory. People feel that once they understood music, things used to have melodies, but now there is this very difficult, modem, strange, probably atonal, post-Schoenberg music played by people like Mr. Ryder, the hero. They feel that they have to corne to grips with this, and they are powerless to judge for themselves, so they live in the world where they look for saviours and experts. For me probably, if I had to put a soundtrack to the film I would make the new kind of music, something very difficult to relate to.
Hubert Teyssandier: So music has become just as complex and incomprehensible as economics.
Kazuo Ishiguro: Yes, metaphorically in my world, yes.
Audience: Given the success that you have had in your life—you are a Booker prize winning novelist, you have been accepted into the literary cannon in England and here in France, it seems, as well—do you find yourself running dry on the need for consolation and therefore the kind of literary creative fervour you were talking about earlier? And if not, what is the never-healing wound that you need? Can you talk about that and about why you need to console that through creative expression?
Kazuo Ishiguro: I do not want to go into what I am trying to console or anything like that. For me the interesting part of your question, quite aside from the actual writing and the art being a consolation, is about whether the acclaim and the material success are a consolation: does that add to the consolation? This is quite an interesting idea. I think you have to make a few distinctions. It is very gratifying when people read your work in a serious way, and if a lot of people read your work in a serious way, not simply from an egotistical point of view, although that is very nice, it strokes one’s ego. To some extent when you are trying to write fiction of this sort—let us go back to the metaphor of caressing the wound—you are caressing a very persona! wound in some way, and if other people respond to it, I suppose you feel Jess alone. It is a signal that it has struck a chord, and this is not something that has just happened to you or that you feel. So that in itself becomes a kind of extra consolation, the fact that there is a community of people with these emotions, these kinds of wounds. I think that that becomes a very gratifying feeling, the notion that people have valued your work for that kind of reason.
The business of winning prizes or eaming large amounts of money from book sales is something quite separate altogether. It would be very hypocritical to pretend that that does not bring a good feeling, and once again, a sense of well-being. Like any career, you want to be regarded highly rather than not, but I think it is qualitatively a very different feeling when you are talking about consolation. Famously, we know of many people—at least we think we know of many people, even if we do not know them personally—who have much in the way of public acclaim or financial reward or whatever, but who, at that emotional level, do not feel consoled or that their work has actually fulfilled the deeper things. So I think these two things have to be separated. When we were talking earlier about art and consolation, we were talking about what the act of putting together an imaginary world can do to dress the wounds that have been received in the real world. Certainly I think that if your work is read sympathetically and people respond toit in the wider world, that acts as a further consolation. I think that is definitely the case.
Claire Pégon-Davison: I wanted to ask quite a specific question. I am fascinated in your novels by the almost two-dimensional aspect of the adults. For me they are underground men from Dostoievsky, or they walk straight out of Uncle Vanya, and yet the children just bubble off the page. I wondered if this was a deliberate ploy or whether you were conscious of making your adults these almost cardboard eut-outs with emotions that they feel they can place and talk about, whether children fall over and wave their legs in the air. They seem as if they were straight out of the school playground. I wondered if you could comment a little bit on that complete dichotomy in the presentation of personalities.
Kazuo Ishiguro: I am not aware of making any distinction between children and adults when I am writing. Certainly until very recently, when I wrote about children, I referred to my own experiences as a child in a much more direct way than when I wrote about adults. I have a daughter who is eleven years old, and perhaps now I tend to look at children from the outside a little bit more. I think it is difficult to find direct autobiographical references in my work, but perhaps it cornes closest in certain portraits of children in my work. They often reflect a certain side of me as a small child, and this might account for a letting go of a certain restraint that appears when I am drawing other characters. I suppose that we ail are more indulgent with children in real life, and similarly in books. With my adult characters—and this touches on this thing we discussed earlier about contrai in a novel—I do not really allow them to do very much more than play the actual role I wish them to play in a larger structure. This is one of the things I increasingly have doubts about. I have an instinct for economy and so on, and so I often do not like too many gratuitous things in a character. So Stevens the butler has no first name, or you do not know what kind of mother he had, or anything. He probably never had a mother or never had a first name. They kind of exist insofar as they are needed for the book. I think with children, I probably do indulge them more. They are allowed to do things just for the sake of doing them and that probably accounts for your experience.
Ben Winsworth: I was wondering how important the comedy or the absence of comedy is in your fiction. I am thinking of Stevens and his inability to tell jokes, or to joke with Farraday for example. I wonder if you had any comments you could make about that.
Kazuo Ishiguro: The Remains of the Day was supposed to be a kind of comedy, and I suppose the main joke is that the narrator, the central character, has no sense of humour. So almost ail of the jokes arise from that paradox. He says very earnestly things that anybody else would say with irony. There are many situations that he reports with a completely dead straight face, that other people would actually see the funny side of, right to the point of him saying things like he feels he should practice his joking more. This is a shortcoming in his repertoire as an excellent butler, so maybe he should work on it. This is all supposed to be humour, on my part.
The other book I intended to be a comedy was this book called The Unconsoled. I had a strange experience with this, because my feeling is that 20% /30% of the people who have read that book actually think it is a comedy and it is rather funny. Other people do not see that there is any attempt at humour, not just that I have been unsuccessful at being funny, but they assume that it portrays this utterly humourless bleak landscape. This did surprise me actually, because as far as I was concerned, a lot of The Unconsoled was there for laughs. Okay it was a slightly odd kind of humour, perhaps it is bad taste or something, but for me that was a driving force throughout the book to have a kind of surrealistic humour. I think this underlines how difficult humour is to make assumptions about. Of course it varies greatly from culture to culture, but I have leamt that even within a group of people you know pretty well, who live in more or Jess what you define as the same culture, certainly on the outer fringes of humour, there seems to be very little agreement. This raises very interesting questions about what exactly humour is, what it is for, where it is coming from. It is a far Jess predictable force in fiction than many of the other things that an author uses, and for that reason alone I think humour is something worth exploring more.
François Gallix: If Stevens Jacks a sense of humour, you certainly do not.
4Thank you very much Kazuo Ishiguro.
Kazuo Ishiguro: Thank you very much.
5Transcribed by Elisabeth Buzay, Magali Lhotelais and Vanessa Guignery. Edited by Kazuo Ishiguro and Vanessa Guignery.
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Franois Gallix, Vanessa Guignery et Paul Veyret, « Kazuo Ishiguro at the Sorbonne 20th March 2003 », Études britanniques contemporaines [En ligne], 27 | 2004, mis en ligne le 25 juillet 2025, consulté le 25 janvier 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/ebc/16693 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/14z5k
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