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In 1960, Kazuo Ishiguro was five years old when his family moved from Nagasaki to Great Britain. He was educated at the University of Kent at Canterbury, studying English and philosophy. He received his undergraduate degree in 1978 and his creative writing post-graduate degree in 1980 from the University of East Anglia. His novels have been translated into 28 foreign languages, winning numerous accolades. His newest novel Never Let Me Go is narrated by Kathy H, a 30-year-old caregiver who looks back fondly at the somewhat gleeful and pleasant time she spent as a child in a boarding school called Hailsham with friends Tommy, Ruth, and others. Halfway through the novel, we find out that Kathy isn't exactly a person but a clone, reproduced to nurse fellow clones like her friends who donate organs until they have "completed," or, in a sense, passed away. As readers we are kept in foreboding, for the assumption is that there will be time when Kathy too must donate her organs to save the life of original humans. Although it is indeed strange because of the subject matter (or maybe because of it), one can argue that this text is able to discuss loss, love, nostalgia, memory, and other registers of feeling quite refreshingly.
I interviewed Kazuo Ishiguro over the phone on April 20, 2005. Although initially scheduled for 30 minutes, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that the Booker prize-winning author of Remains of The Day was generous with his time (the conversation ended up being an hour long), thoughtful in his answers, and completely open about his writing process. Although focused on his most recent project, I was also very much interested in getting his commentary on a range of issues, roughly around how his oeuvre-spanning more than 20 years now-has been read and interpreted. I was particularly keen on having identity as a part of the conversation, thinking about how his first two books, A Pale View of Hills (winner of Winifred Holtby Prize of the Royal Society of Literature) and An Artist of the Floating World (winner of the Whitbread Book of the Year Award), were often reviewed through the lens of a Japanese novelist writing about Japanese content. These and other curiosities are clearly present in the conversation. Ishiguro's other novels are The Unconsoled, winner of the Cheltenham Prize and When We Were Orphans, which was "short-listed" for the Booker Prize. ________________________________________________________________________________
RD: I was wondering why you chose Hailsham as the setting for a large part of the novel.
KI: Hailsham, you know the first third, maybe slightly more than a third, is indeed set in that place. For me, it is a kind of concrete embodiment of an aspect of childhood that I think is more or less universal, in that when the children are kept in an institution like that, we do as parents or as guardians of one sort or another keep small children anyway in a kind of bubble, and we try and keep out the darker truth about the world that awaits them. I think that's only right. Young children have to be protected in that bubble. Now, I was very conscious that this was what I did with my own daughter, and yeah, to the extent that when you walk around the street with a young child, everyone wants to enter into the conspiracy with you: they stop having rowels when the child is coming along and they put on a smiley face and cartoonish voice. Everyone wants children to believe that their inner world is much kinder than it actually is. So, it seems to me (that) from a child's point of view, their inside is a protected bubble, but they're getting little clues and little leaks from the outside world. They're trying to make sense of it. As they get older, I guess they gradually discuss amongst themselves what might be out there, and they interpret the different message coming from the adults. The adults manage very carefully, as far as they can, the flow of information into the children's bubble. And so to me, that's what tends to happen in most childhoods. To actually have something like that happen in Hailsham was a kind of concrete image for me of childhood, a place were physically the children are sealed off from the rest of the world, where the staff of Hailsham very carefully manage when and how they find out about what lies in the world outside. And the reader, too, I wanted them to be in a similar position as the children. I think it's a strange world that takes place and the reader doesn't quite know what is out there either. So they're finding out along with the children. That was my reason for having a kind of boarding school setting, if you like. I didn't have a special interest in boarding schools per say. I didn't go to one like that myself. I just went to a regular day school.
RD: I was struck by the importance of gossip, rumor, secrecy, and the policing of knowledge in the work. Are these themes important to you as a writer, and are they particularly crucial in Never Let Me Go?
KI: Only in a sense that, as far as I am concerned, I guess am very interested in that question in so far as it affects that passage from childhood into adulthood, and gradually discovering the world around you. I don't know if gossip, rumor, speculation, all these things play such a huge part in my other novels, or in this one when they move away from that aspect. I'm trying to think about that. I think that's the area I'm most interested when it comes to mysterious clues and people trying to decipher (them). I am interested in individuals who don't have much of a perspective on where they fit in in the larger scheme of things, and maybe it's only later on that they discover how they fit into the larger pattern. Then they come into a different view of their life and what they've done. In that sense I guess, rumor, gossip, when they're trying to tease things out on where they belong, that's where these might come into it. In this book, Kathy and Tommy share a curiosity about this question of what is the larger world, what is the larger framework they operate in. They share that curiosity, which isn't perhaps shared to the same extent by their peers. Maybe that's one of those things that distinguish them from their companions. Right from the start they have a curiosity, and they kind of want to find out, maybe to find out much more than the others do, and they have this investigative instinct.
RD: As a literature teacher who also tries to talk about society, culture, identity formation, one of the first thoughts or questions that immediately came to my mind about this book was: "How do I teach this book to students in a course about identity?" This seems to be one of the most compelling and powerful aspects of Never Let Me Go. What excites me about the "clone" as a category, if we should even consider it as such, is that it seems to refuse the easy identification or lack of identification one can choose have to the subject or narrator of a book. I'm thinking of previous interviews you've done in the past, where you state a tenuous relationship to the assumption that a Japanese writer will write this specific form of narrative with these specific characters, etc. So, I was wondering if you saw the "clone" figure as challenging this assumption, about write, reader, subject, and narrative. Simply, how does the clone reconfigure and complicate possible identificatory practices between the reader and the novel?
KI: Yeah, well, your special subject is identity, and you're mainly talking about ethnic identity?
RD: Yes. And I mean identity as a construct in general to encompass gender, race, sexuality, and so on, how we are identified by society and how we identity ourselves.
KY: I've always tried to write books that can have a universal application. But at certain points in my career, people were quite keen to say that I was talking about the Japanese experience, or about some kind of English class experience. And when I wrote my earlier books, I felt there was a danger that I was being misread, or I was putting myself up as charlatan in that I didn't know that much, not qualified to explain the Japanese to the West. But somehow my novels were being used in that way. While at the same time as a novelist, I am trying to write about universal themes that apply to everybody across the board. These characters just happen to be in a Japanese setting. So I kind of thought that whatever I was achieving was being limited by everything that said this (book) just applied to Japanese society or Japanese people. I wanted people to say, "Oh, yes, isn't this like us, isn't this what I feel?" rather than, "Isn't it fascinating? That's the way the Japanese felt after the war," typically taking my earlier novels. And I think I did make a conscious decision between my second novel and The Remains of The Day to stop using a Japanese setting. I just wanted to see what would happen to me as a writer and what would happen to the way people read me if I removed that Japanese setting. I thought maybe people would apply my fiction more universally. So people would say, "Isn't he talking about human beings everywhere?" To some extent that happened when I dropped the Japanese thing, but people then started to say, "Oh, he's starting to look at English history, he's looking at English class system." That wasn't much of a problem. I didn't feel like such a charlatan there because I think people did read it as, or tended to read it more as a metaphor for the human condition and so on. And they did ask themselves to what extent am I like Stevens the Butler, they didn't just say, "Isn't that fascinating what extent servants go up to back in those days?" Although, there was some of that too. I guess I've always moved to a more and more abstract way to present my narrative. And you might be right, maybe consciously or unconsciously, I have been trying to avoid being tacked down, in terms of ethnic or racial identity. I don't want my stories to be speaking on behalf of any one particular group or to be summing up the experience of any one particular racial group or any generation. And maybe that is partly why I was attracted to a world of clones. It almost means that you have to abandon preconceptions about this group and you come to almost fear of prejudice.
So yeah, it's almost like it does enable us to get a fresh perspective on a lot of things. It seems to me in fiction, for a little while, that is, the clone is almost neutral. I had the freedom to, it gives me a certain freedom at the moment anyway. Soon I think we'll have a huge body of work with clones, featuring clones in one sort or another, and there'll be all kinds of preconceptions and so on. But for now, it almost seems like an empty space, and it's quite a good place to go to ask the question, "What does it mean to be human? Are human beings more than a sum of their parts, and what are the things that make our lives dignified and worthwhile?" And yeah, even things like origin. When you start to think about how these people tackle this question of their roots and their origins, and what implications this has on their aspirations or where they might go, I think that, too, is quite fascinating. So I have that little passage or that part about them looking for their "possibles." All right, you can see all kinds of things there, echoes of things like looking for lost parents, looking for ethnic groups. But it does open up a lot of interesting things for me. And to narrate from the point of view of a clone, even the question, "What would the person's vernacular be?" This is all quite interesting to me.
RD: Do you think the book can be read as a discussion of aging and dying? How does time affect and frame various categories within the novel? I was very much fascinated by the how dying is termed as "completion", or how identity as "carer" or "donor" is marked by how many times one has donated organs.
KI: Well for me, it was all about aging and dying. I've never had a special interest in biotechnology or cloning. When I started this novel, that aspect wasn't there. This is my third attempt to write the novel. I tried to write this novel first in 1990, before I wrote The Unconsoled. I was playing around then with young people and students, in the sense that we know students. They were in the English countryside. But I didn't quite know what fate hung over them, who they were. I was playing around with stories (that have) to do with nuclear weapons being used around Britain, and this was somehow tied to some kind of doomed fate. What was important for me was that I wanted to have some device that would enable me to talk about our normal lifespan. So the way we think or try not to think about our mortality, the limits on the number of years we have, I wanted all those things. I wanted us to get a fresh perspective on these things by looking at a group of people for who at most thirty years was their lifespan. And so, for me a metaphorical application of this story was always very important. I guess the first third, that Hailsham part of the book, is about childhood. The middle section is about reaching early adulthood, but still a lot of the kinds of fantasies of childhood are still there. And the last section of the book is very much about old age and coming to terms with dying. Although mentally, or even physically I guess because they've been donating so they're frail, its an odd situation because they are still young people but really to all intensive purposes they're old, and they're coming to face the end of their lives. Words like "completing" and so on, they were just euphemisms that I just invented for them because I thought they would be the rough equivalent to the kind of euphemisms we use all the time. For them "completing" has the implication that they are completing the purpose that they were here on earth (for). They are completing their duty. And it's often used in that context, that there is a sense of achievement or something about "completing." And that fascinated me as well, that they would passively accept their destiny and actually try and take some sense of pride from the institute. The question of whether they should escape or not never interested me because I was ultimately looking at our condition as human beings, that there is no escape from the fact that we are mortal. We are limited to a certain number of years. And we might wage endlessly and uselessly when we learn that a loved one is going to die or that we are going to die. There's nothing to rebel against, a regime to overthrow in our lives. Unless one is religious and in which case one might turn against one's religion of something. So, if you like, the fictional world I created just reflects that. I don't think there are really any questions these kids face in this book that isn't a direct echo of the big questions that we face in all our lives.
RD: Time also brings the mind memory. From the beginning, the narrator seems to have a very problematic relationship to memory, and in a sense Kathy H's storytelling seems to perform a desire to reclaim and preserve memory. Can you discuss how you saw memory functioning in this work? Do you see the connections between how memory functions in Never Let Me Go in comparison to your previous works?
KI: I think memory works slightly differently in this book to the way it did in a lot of my previous work. Just to keep it simple, if you compare it to the way memory works in The Remains of The Day. In The Remains Of The Day I think memory is a very treacherous thing as far as the narrator Stevens is concerned. He knows that his life is messed up somewhere. He knows he's taken wrong turns. He knows that he's got to abandon a kind of smug sense of achievement that he has to rely on. And so by going back, it's a very threatening thing for him. But at the same time there is a part of him that wants to do that because he needs to explain to himself why his life ended up as it has. So it's a treacherous place. He's kind of wanting to see it and not wanting to see it as the same time. And the vagueness of memory allows for an enormous amount of self-deception in trying to defend his sense of dignity and his delusions about himself. But there is a part of him that wants honesty and being able to see clearly. So I guess a lot of the book is a battle between the two sides of him through memory. Whereas I don't see that's what's happening in Never Let Me Go. For Kathy, I think principally, memory is a source of consolation for her. She isn't as an unreliable a narrator I think as my previous narrators. She isn't as self-perceived; of course there are elements of that because we are talking about memory. But for her, as her world empties of the things she loves, and the people she loves, and it darkens, her memories are the things that she clings onto for consolation. I found that kind of sad when I was writing it. That her life although it was very curtailed, she clings on to these memories as a source of great happiness or great nostalgia. In this book, that is what I wanted to emphasize about memory, its ability to provide consolation. You can cling onto the things you love long after they're gone and taken away from you -- through memory.
RD: Of a personal curiosity, I was wondering if you had read any contemporary Asian American literature and had found specific one's as compelling or influential to your project? Also, and as you have mentioned in previous interviews but also in this one, I know that indeed as a writer you have often been belabored with the sort of "Asian identity" question. So I almost want to apologize for this curiosity. But I wanted to know if early in your career you were influenced by writing typically considered as Asian American Literature?
KI: I don't really see a huge kinship there. I look at the work of someone like Haruki Murakami; you know I am a huge fan of his work. There are things that I look at there and think, "I wish I can do that" or I look at something and think, "Oh that's the kind of effect I was trying for here or there in that book." I do recognize things there in Haruki Murakami's work. Actually, sometimes when I see some modern Japanese movies, modern say, the 1950s onwards, but even movies coming out now, I'm quite surprised of the extent to which there seems to be things that I see a kinship with that I can't really account for in any obvious way, because I've come from a very different world from those particular artists. I don't know if that is something that has to do with some Japanese root I have here.
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