Kazuo Ishiguro: ‘Why do people stay in terrible marriages? Most of the time, we don’t rebel’
Kazuo Ishiguro is toying with an alternate reality in which Anthony Hopkins’s role as Stevens, the emotionally repressed butler in the 1993 film of his third novel The Remains of the Day, had gone instead to John Cleese.
“It was an early suggestion,” says Ishiguro, over sandwiches and scones in a hotel tearoom a short drive from his Cotswolds bolthole. But Cleese, whose name was put forward for the part by Harold Pinter (who loved the 1989 Booker-winner, bagged the rights and drafted the initial screenplays), declined. While extolling the “magnificent” Hopkins, Ishiguro admits: “I was sorry that John Cleese felt he couldn’t do it. I think he could have been an even greater actor… but he never really moved on from Basil Fawlty.”
For Ishiguro, who was born in Nagasaki in 1954 but has lived in the UK since his father, an oceanographer, relocated the family to Guildford, in Surrey, when he was five, The Remains of the Day proved a turning point. “It freed me from being the writer who wrote Japanese people,” he says. “All my reviews until that point compared my writing to sushi and sumo, even Hitachi portable tape-recorders; it was ridiculous. I thought, will people allow me to not write about Japanese things? With hindsight, that’s an interesting question: back then, there wasn’t this [obsession] with identity politics and appropriation, it was just a personal decision.”
He “made a similar decision after The Remains of the Day: I wanted the emphasis to be on the metaphorical layers underneath the story,” he says. “I didn’t want people to scrutinise the settings. So I decided to ditch a lot of the realism.”
It is sometimes reported that The Remains of the Day was the only modern novel known to have been read by the late Queen. Ishiguro can’t confirm this, but points out that she was given a copy by the charity BookTrust. He was knighted (by Charles) in 2019 – no small distance travelled from the summer of 1973 when he worked as a grouse-beater, recruited to drive the birds from cover, on the Balmoral estate.
“The Queen Mother was our em-p-loyer and would often chat to us on the moors in between beats,” he recalls. “At the end of the season, she had the beaters – around 16 of us, mostly undergraduates from St Andrews or Aberdeen universities – to her own quarters for a farewell drinks party. She was unfailingly pol-ite and kind. Oddly, and -embarrassingly, she had the idea that I was ‘a very fine pianist’ – definitely not – and whenever I encountered her, she would bring this up and I would have to deny it all over again.” That Balmoral summer would in time make him “less intimidated about writing about the English upper classes”.
We’re meeting ahead of a new stage adaptation of Never Let Me Go (2005), Ishiguro’s dystopian sixth novel, which takes place in a realm that is “obviously not a ‘real Britain’, but isn’t a dreamscape, either”. Like The Remains of the Day, its story centres on an English country house: in this case, a boarding school, Hailsham, whose grim function is revealed to be the state-sanctioned rearing of cloned children (among them, the book’s narrator, Kathy H) to provide vital organs for the wider population. This monstrous activity is masked by meretricious language: the clones are described as “donors”; death as a result of giving up their organs is “completion”.
The central conceit for the book, which Ishiguro says he “first tried to write in the late 1980s”, did not come easily. “I had a group of young people that I called ‘the students’ and something had happened to them which shortened their lives. But I couldn’t actually figure out a context, so I gave up.” Then, after completing his fourth novel, 1995’s The Unconsoled – a labyrinthine tale of a pianist’s discombobulating experiences in the run-up to a major concert, which the author himself des-cribes as “strange and weird” – he tried again. “I had ideas about nuclear contamination, or some sort of virus. Again, I couldn’t get anything that worked. Then, at the third attempt, it suddenly felt there was a more liberated atmosphere in our small literary world; it occurred to me that I could use sci-fi methods.”
Effectively, he re-ran British social history from the 1970s to the 1990s, with one significant change: “I decided that instead of the atomic bomb being developed after the Second World War, the breakthroughs in science would be in biotechnology. Given how out of control we went with nuclear weapons, I could imagine we would be equally out of control [with biotech]. There isn’t a point when people go, shall we take this further or not? It just develops.”
In some ways, it feels as though the present is catching up with Ishi-guro’s vision. “People worry about AI,” he says, “but I don’t think they worry enough about the huge prog-ress that has been made in gene tech-nologies.” He identifies recent dev-el-opments in CRISPR gene -editing as “an incredible breakthrough that will present a challenge. Many opportunities are opening up, not least being able to create more intelligent or athletic children.
“The thing I find most nightmarish about Never Let Me Go is that people’s lives are being saved by this clone technology. I made it up, but can you really see us turning our backs on all that and saying, ‘It’s a bit unethical, so we won’t do it’? For decades, there has been a black market in organs – poor people giving up their kidneys to sell to rich people. If there’s a way of harvesting organs, it’s going to be very difficult to stop society from using it.”
However, his books aren’t theses, he gently insists. “I’m not a very clever writer. I’m trying to make people experience an emotion. I think one of the important things about a good book, or a good play, is that it has an unfathomable quality… you cannot reduce it to one thing and lock it away in your head.”
Ishiguro describes himself today as “essentially a writer of metaphorical fiction”, and the greatest stab to the guts you get when reading Never Let Me Go, or seeing the 2010 film (which was a box-office flop, despite a stellar cast featuring Keira Knightley, Carey Mulligan, Andrea Riseborough and Andrew Garfield), is the dawning realisation that these clone “others” are, in their acceptance of their destiny, shadows of ourselves. “It is much more interesting to me to look at people who don’t rebel, even if their fate seems unfair,” Ishiguro says. “They’ll internalise it, and feel a sense of duty to live out that fate. The question that comes up over and over again with Never Let Me Go is, why do they comply? But it seems to me, most of the time we do comply, at every kind of level. You see people who just remain in terrible marriages or in terrible jobs.”
In this respect, Never Let Me Go shares DNA with a number of Ishi-guro’s other novels. “With The Remains of the Day, I was looking for a metaphor for the position that most of us are in, in the context of larger historical movements,” he says. “I was wanting to say that even if we are more privileged or educated than Stevens, we are like butlers. We do our little jobs, and try to do them to the best of our ability, hoping we’re contributing something positive – but often just taking orders from the person above us.”
The new stage version of Never Let Me Go, based on a script by Suzanne Heathcote, will be directed by Christopher Haydon, who impressed Ishiguro with his staging of The Remains of the Day five years ago. In broad terms, the novelist is comfortable with the idea of adaptation, he says, but as a punter he tends to steer clear of theatre these days. “I object to high ticket prices. An art form can’t survive if it narrows its demographic like that.”
Still, in his youth, alongside his songwriting, much of it inspired by Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen (“I was a long-haired hippie, playing guitar”), Ishiguro had brushes with fringe theatre, even writing the odd revue sketch, though none that saw the light of day. Then there was the bizarre submission that earned him a place on the creative writing course at the University of East Anglia in 1979, where he would study under Malcolm Bradbury and Angela Carter: a radio play called Potatoes and Lovers. “It was in quite bad taste,” he laughs, acknowledging that if it were aired today, “I’d probably get cancelled. It was about two cross-eyed people who fall in love but can’t acknowledge that this is what has drawn them together.”
Such are Ishiguro’s achievements, capped by the Nobel in 2017, I had anticipated a few airs and graces. Or at least a hint of the reserve that -Stevens shares with many of the -narrators of his rigorously pared-back prose, from the wistful painter in his second novel, An Artist of the Floating World (1986), to the titular AI robot in his eighth novel, 2021’s Klara and the Sun.
But, Ish, as he likes to be called, has an amused air and a boyish demeanour, grey hairs aside; he is easy company. He speaks drolly about being pursued for selfies by Japanese tourists in the Cotswolds, and his reluctance to write bedroom scenes – “I was never much interested in writing about sex… and I didn’t see many good examples of it in my contemporaries’ books.”
He also relives the whirlwind of that October day in 2017 when, at home in Golders Green, north-west London, where he lives with his wife, Lorna, a social worker (and mother to his novelist daughter Naomi, 32), he found out that he had become the first British writer since Doris Lessing to win the Nobel. “It was a genuine surprise,” he says. “I was writing an email at the kitchen table at 11am, badly dressed, and my agent phoned to say he’d watched the announcement on YouTube and thought they’d said it was me. A queue formed outside the front door, up the garden path and out onto the pavement; these were news reporters from round the world. The neighbours must have thought I was a serial killer or something.”
One of the first emails of -congratulations came from his friend Salman Rushdie – a gesture he still recognises as magnanimous. “I know he has spent years wondering if he was going to get it,” Ish-iguro tells me now, “for reasons outside of his actual work, too.”
Although he is wary of “the perennial tendency on the part of commentators to ‘explain’ imaginative works in terms of fairly crude autobiographical factors”, when I mention the aching sense one gets from Never Let Me Go of the young protagonists only gradually grasping the reality of the life mapped out for them, Ishiguro offers a salient image from his own childhood. “There’s a photograph that I’m fond of, which was taken of me at the age of five, standing in front of a massive globe, which shows Japan. I’m not sure where it was, a museum possibly. I seem pensive and, looking back on it, exactly these thoughts come to my head: that boy doesn’t know he’s about to leave that bit on the globe – and maybe he’s looking a bit worried because he’s got an inkling life isn’t going to stay on the same track.”
Ishiguro’s relationship with Japan is complex. His debut novel, A Pale View of Hills (1982), partly set in Nagasaki, together with its successor, An Artist of the Floating World, evoked the country of his birth, combining memory and imagination. His mother was in Nagasaki when the bomb was dropped, and was injured by a piece of flying debris. Some of her family subsequently contracted cancer. But young Kazuo’s awareness of the cata-clysm was only ever at one remove. “I remember reading about it in an encyclopaedia and feeling a kind of pride that it was part of history,” he says. A film of A Pale View of Hills will be released next year, to coincide with the 80th anniversary of the bombing, but Ishiguro doesn’t think he will attend commemorations. “I haven’t been to Nagasaki since 1989,” he says.
As a child, he carried a fear of going back to Japan. “There was true dread of the day we might have to return,” he says. “As much as I remembered my early childhood with nostalgia, from the age of seven I was aware that I would face every kind of difficulty if I had to return. There was an era of my -adolescence when I ignored any attempts on my parents’ part to interest me in Japan, in case they were paving the way to some journey ‘home’. I was very happy in England. It was only in my mid-20s, when the threat was no longer there, that I became a complete Japanophile, seeking out late-night screenings of rare Japanese movies, buying translations of Japanese fiction and so on.”
He also has immense affection for England: he talks with undisguised fondness of the near-rural condition of suburban Surrey when he was growing up, with cows down the lane. “I sang in the local church choir. It was all very English – and when I look back and see photographs of me in that era, it feels almost further back than the photos from Japan.” His Nobel Prize address acknowledged, in daunted terms, the challenges facing human-ity, but his abiding sense is that, over his lifetime, England hasn’t changed all that much under the surface. “I was very moved by the transition of power from the Tories to Labour – and the nice -civilised things that Sunak said, and then Starmer said – which contrasted rather obviously with what happened when Trump failed to win last time,” he says. “England remains an admirably calm country, though under great stress.”
As he sips mint tea, he wonders aloud why, given that stress, there haven’t been riots (and, sadly, events in the weeks after we meet will prove that concern correct). But rather than get overly drawn on the subject, he checks himself. “I was warned about this thing that happens with Nobel winners,” he explains, “‘genius syndrome’, where you get asked to talk about all the big questions of the day.”
That said, he is adamant about the need for creative freedom in the face of rising demand for lived experience and authenticity. “I think it’s essential that writers feel free to imagine and write from all points of view about all kinds of characters,” he says. “If they don’t do it well then they can face the wrath of the critics but what I would not ever want to see is any kind of self-censorship on the part of writers – that they feel they can’t write this book, or that book – that you can only write a book that is autobiographical in a literal sense.”
Although he self-deprecatingly referred to himself in his Nobel speech as “a tired author, from an intellectually tired generation”, it turns out that he has not quite exhausted his creativity yet. There’s a novella in progress – “I’m writing a lighthearted comedy thriller” – and he has scripted a film musical “based on a not very well-known novel” (title undisclosed).
“One of the things I like about musicals is that the form creates a strange reality. When people can burst into song, it’s a way to get between the literal surface and the metaphorical layer.” There’s even talk about turning his superb, Oscar-nominated screenplay for Living – the 2022 film based on Kurosawa’s Ikiru, in which Bill Nighy starred as a dying bureaucrat discovering the value of life – into a stage play, though nothing is fixed as yet.
Whatever happens, as he approaches his 70th birthday this November, Ishiguro is determined to make the best use of what remains of his days. “I have to be realistic,” he says. “I’m not expecting to die immediately, but people don’t tend to do very good work after a certain point. And I’m OK with that. I feel I’ve been very fortunate I’ve been able to write the books that I wanted to.” A sage smile. “I wasn’t pressured into writing anything I didn’t want to and wasting tons of time.”
Never Let Me Go is at the Rose Theatre, Kingston (rosetheatre.org), from Sept 20-Oct 12, then touring. Kazuo Ishiguro was interviewed at the Lygon Arms Hotel in Broadway; lygonarmshotel.co.uk
