Kazuo Ishiguro

Interview

Kazuo Ishiguro: 'I was quite ready for something that would be quite difficult for me to write'

Bathetic self-deception, and unfulfilled dreams have been the defining themes of almost all Kazuo Ishiguro’s work. Decca Aitkenhead meets the author.

Decca Aitkenhead
Monday 27 April 2009

K

azuo Ishiguro's new book features an American woman who claims to be a virtuoso on the cello. She befriends a young Hungarian cellist earning his living playing in cafes, and every day she tutors him, earnestly and intensely. "You have it," she tells him. "Most definitely. You have ... potential." As the days turn into weeks, he wonders why she does not appear to own a cello herself, and eventually, as summer draws to a close, he discovers why. She cannot actually play the instrument at all. So convinced was she of her own musical genius, no teacher ever seemed equal to it, and so rather than tarnish her gift with imperfection, she chose never to realise it at all. "At least I haven't damaged what I was born with," she says.

Bathetic self-deception, and unfulfilled dreams - a lament to passing time, and life not working out quite as one had hoped - have been the defining themes of almost all Ishiguro's work. They are, on the face of it, puzzling preoccupations for one of Britain's most successful writers.

His potential was certainly identified at a young age; in 1983, he was named as one of Britain's best young novelists, alongside Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie and Ian McEwan, his second novel won the Whitbread prize and his third, The Remains of the Day, won the Booker. But his early promise has been more than fulfilled; at 54, he remains a literary phenomenon - his last novel, Never Let Me Go, is currently being made into a film starring Keira Knightley - and in person he conveys the self-contained confidence of a writer who knows his new work, Nocturnes, will be another major publishing event.

We meet at his home in north London, where he lives with his wife and their 17-year-old daughter - an expansive house full of art and books and music. To anyone looking for crude clues to the motivation behind his latest work, the half dozen or so guitars dotted around the living areas suggest themselves at once. Ishiguro's dream in his teens and early 20s was to become a singer-songwriter - he busked on the Paris underground, submitting hopeful demo tapes - and Nocturnes is a collection of five short stories about jobbing musicians who have never quite achieved the success of which they dreamed. But the poignancy of their loss is not, he says, his.

"No, the bittersweet 'can you hold on to a dream or can you not?' isn't to do with my feeling that there was a career I didn't have, because what I wanted to be evolved into being a novelist. I always wanted to create certain atmospheres and stories, and by the time I was in my early 20s I was feeling the limits of what I could do as a songwriter.

"I couldn't take it any further. Whereas then I found I could if I wrote fiction. So I feel I made a natural evolution from writing songs to novels - and that style I've still got, which is very evident in the Nocturnes, is very pared down, like a songwriter."

After six novels, Nocturnes is Ishiguro's first collection of short stories. Although linked by the pathos of their nostalgic aesthetic, they read as five discrete short stories, but he seems uncomfortable about describing them as such, referring to Nocturnes instead as a "story book".

"Well I'm not quite sure what you're supposed to call it," he admits. "I've been resisting calling it a collection of short stories because sometimes novelists do publish collections of short stories, and they're basically a rag bag of stories they've had sitting around for the last 30 years. Whereas this book I actually sat down and wrote from start to finish.

"I don't know what proper short story writers would think of this, but I've gone about this in the way a novelist would. I don't claim to be a short story writer, and I have no idea if I'm doing it properly; I'm just writing this almost like a novelist. It sounds very pretentious, but you know some music forms, like sonatas, you get five what seem like totally separate pieces of music but they go together."

So it definitely isn't a novel? "No, it isn't a novel. I didn't want the stories to interweave as they would in a novel. So yes, they're short stories. But I've always said I don't want them published separately, I don't want them split up. I think that's a bit unreasonable of me because they would probably work alone, but I personally always thought of them as a single book. It's just a fictional book that happens to be divided into these five movements." He pauses for a moment to reconsider, and smiles apologetically. "I don't like these musical analogies, because it sounds wildly pretentious. Maybe it's better to say it's more like an album, and you don't sometimes want a track released as a single."

I wonder if some of his semantic unease stems from a worry about the popular perception of short stories as not quite "proper" literature.

"Well it's certainly a much smaller market, there's no doubt about it. I did ask people beforehand - because I was curious, I wanted to know, in a slightly mercenary way. I said what is the short story market compared to the novel market? And in America I was told it's between a third to a half of what I would sell as a novelist. Here in this country more like a quarter." And that didn't put him off? "Well no, because I've always wanted to have a short story collection."

Ishiguro's fiction is acclaimed for the spare elegance of the writing, a testament to the power of what is left unsaid. But he is not spare in conversation - in fact, he talks readily for more than two hours. The curious thing is that, by the end of it, I still have no idea what he's like. You couldn't say he was closely defended - he is too personably forthcoming for that - but there is an opacity about him that eludes description, giving no glimpse of what might lie within.

His features are unlined, his voice smooth, his movements compact and fluid, almost feline, and, as always, he is dressed in black. Even his house is difficult to read, for though spacious and book-lined, it sits in unfashionable Golders Green, and looks from the outside like somewhere an accountant - or my grandparents - might live. I have no idea what makes him laugh, or what could make him angry, and realise later that he is very good at talking without conveying any real sense of himself. I've never met anyone who lends himself less to characterisation. I get the feeling I'm not the first person to have encountered this, because when I ask how he feels about being interviewed, he offers: "I'm told that in war situations when people are interrogated, you're supposed to build up two or three layers of story about who you are and what you're doing, so that if you're caught by the enemy, they torture you and after 10 days you finally break, then you're trained to come up with your second layer; and then they torture you even further until you break down into the next one. When you're just a shrieking skull, you're shrieking the third prepared story. That's apparently how you're trained to do it.

"But I'm not suggesting, by the way," he laughs, "that I have a second or third layer. I'm just always reminded of this because of the layers; interviewers read past interviews, so when you come out with the same stuff as before they treat it like your first cover story, and they want the next layer. And after about the 90-minute mark you start to say OK, yes, it was all based on my childhood trauma!"

His wistful concern with wasted potential certainly doesn't appear to owe anything to childhood trauma. He was born in Japan, but moved with his parents and two sisters to Surrey when he was five, and has lived here ever since. His parents found British culture quite bewildering, and Ishiguro was inevitably cast in the role of anthropological go-between, but this left him with a fascination with the minutiae of class rather than any wound of dislocation. After graduating in English he worked for a homeless charity, where he met and married his Glaswegian wife, and then enrolled on Malcolm Bradbury's creative writing course at the University of East Anglia.

"I was in the right place at the right time, I think I was lucky to be emerging just at that time, and I wrote the kind of books that were right for that time. So I was very fortunate. And I think what that does to some extent, if you publish three books and go a decade into your career and you've won the Booker and the Whitbread and lots of other prizes, it takes away that edge, that hunger to be praised. Other ambitions, and other criteria - quite lonely criteria - for success and failure start to come in. Even when I wrote The Remains of the Day it was a little too easy for me, the writing process wasn't quite so interesting for me as it could have been because it felt like a book I was already very familiar with.

"By then I think I was quite ready for something that would be quite difficult for me to write. In some ways I was quite hungry for a different relationship with critics. I had felt that I was in danger of becoming too cosy as a writer."

His fourth novel, The Unconsoled, was so startlingly different - and so spectacularly difficult - that one critic suggested he should commit hara-kiri, and others wondered if he had gone mad. But it was fiercely defended by some literary grandees, such as Anita Brookner, and has since been reappraised. When the Observer published a poll some years ago of the greatest contemporary novels, The Unconsoled came third, equal with Atonement and Midnight's Children, and above The Remains of the Day.

Does he feel vindicated? "It's not that I feel vindicated - but without The Unconsoled I would not have been able to do the things I did subsequently. It enabled me to write in a certain way, and it got me out of a certain kind of intellectual corner I was in."

The passage of time does worry him, though, for, until now, he has published a novel only once every five years. By this standard, he smiles, Nocturnes is "a year early - I think because I was so aware of how slowly I was publishing. There comes a point when you can more or less count the number of books you're going to write before you die. And you think, hmm, God, there's only four left, and so you start," he laughs, "well - it's a bit alarming. So I thought I'd better adopt a less leisurely attitude."

It is often said that Ishiguro is obsessed with the fact that a writer's best work is produced in their youth, but when I mention this, he says quickly, "Yeah, that's not quite my obsession so much as Martin Amis's. He keeps quoting me. Quite recently he was on the Today programme, and I was listening in bed and I was startled to hear him mention my name. When he got on to this topic about people fading with age, he said, 'Oh, Ishiguro has got a chart on his wall, showing what age certain authors were when they wrote their masterpieces.' And I remember him saying this on the South Bank Show as well."

Isn't it true? "No, I haven't got a chart on my wall. I think I said it to him once as a joke when he was about to turn 40, and it's obviously hit a nerve with him. He's worried about this, but he says I'm worried about it."

Ishiguro does seem worried about it, though. When he was about 30, he says, it dawned on him that most of the literary masterpieces had been written by people under 40. "So you can't get complacent in your 30s, saying, 'Oh I'll fart about and do some restaurant reviews and have a good time and when I'm in my 50s I'll settle down to write my masterpiece.' There's something very misleading about the literary culture that looks at writers in their 30s and calls them 'budding' or 'promising', when in fact they're peaking."

When I ask if he thinks he peaked in his 30s, he pauses for just a second before replying, "In some ways, yeah. Yeah, in some ways. This is why I try to change and write different kinds of things, I think this is the only way out of it. You peak - and then you go and do something else."

I'm still not sure why he seems to feel such compassion for his character in Nocturnes who considers herself a virtuoso cellist but has never dared test it by learning to play. She is a hauntingly sad character, but portrayed sympathetically, and Ishiguro agrees that he is not mocking her. But he is not, he finally explains, writing about himself.

"A lot of my friends are in that situation. They've been convinced since they were young that they were geniuses. I remember one friend wrote to me once, with a quote saying, is there life after potential? He was having one of these great crises, and sometimes you get addicted to the idea that you have tremendous potential. It's a position I feel a lot of sympathy for, because - well I have a lot of sympathy for people who do want to do something. They just don't have the technique.

"I don't hang out with the glitteringly successful people, I hang out with people who've been friends for many years, and to some extent I feel my worldly success is a bit uncomfortable for them. I'm almost like an indictment. It's difficult for me - when I meet certain old friends, I try not to make any reference at all to certain things I do in this world. One of my oldest friends comes round to play music and we're still close. He's a person I've known since I was 12, and we've managed to keep that friendship going really by pretending that I'm not a successful writer. Well, we're not pretending that I'm not. We just don't refer to it. So I'm aware that some people are having experiences like the people in this book, they have built up quite carefully a protection around them, or they comfort each other by saying it's impossible to achieve dreams without severely compromising yourself."

Isn't it just vain self-delusion? "Well," he grins, "it is that sometimes, yes"

 Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall is published by Faber & Faber 

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