When We Were Orphans: Kazuo Ishiguro

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All of your novels -- with the exception of The Unconsoled -- are set during the World War II era. What is it that draws you to this historical period? Is it possible that those of us born since World War II and living in Western democratic societies lead such comfortable lives that we can't grapple with these questions? Many contemporary authors just don't seem able to write about great passion or great evil. In Ishiguro’s creations, we move along a diagonal pane of glass, sliding down with every step we take. Banks glimpses – briefly but with alarming clarity – that the world is askew or that he has never seen things as they are. This knowledge dissolves as if on instinct so that he might, despite everything, persevere and survive as the person he imagines himself – that he needs himself – to be.

For 21 years this novel has gnawed away at me. I’ve read a thousand other things in the meantime, but When We Were Orphans occupies my thoughts, still bothering me with its questions: What if my clarity of thought has never touched reality? What if the fantasies of our childhoods, mixed in with childhood’s grief, are the obscuring coil around our adult lives? Have I completely misunderstood my own actions? What if we – and our governments – are only playing at knowing? Like previous Ishiguro protagonists, Christopher uses other characters to understand or express aspects of himself. Sarah's crumbling relationship with the elderly Sir Cecil, whom she sought to goad to greater fame when "what he wanted was a rest", is a projection of his own parents' relationship; his mother's exacting standards may have "broken" his father. The novel redeploys the innovative technique of The Unconsoled - dubbed "appropriation" by the author - where, as in a dream, other characters feature as projections of the narrator's fears and desires, people from his past or himself at different stages of life. For the first fifteen minutes or so, Osbourne moved restlessly around my drawing room, complimenting me on the premises, examining this and that, looking regularly out of the windows to exclaim at whatever was going on below. Eventually he flopped down T)he reader is left with the impression that instead of envisioning -- and rendering -- a coherent new novel, Mr. Ishiguro simply ran the notion of a detective story through the word processing program of his earlier novels, then patched together the output into the ragged, if occasionally brilliant, story we hold in our hands." - Michiko Kakutani, The New York TimesHowever, not fitting into one’s milieu is part of Ishiguro’s point. As a boy he was uprooted, this time from Japan at the age of five, and transplanted in England, where he grew up always viewing England from both outside and inside simultaneously. His works reflect the postmodern writer’s increasing concern with the blending and blurring of international boundary lines. What goes for Ishiguro also applies to his lead character. At home neither in England nor in Shanghai, Christopher cultivates an imaginary zone in between where he can combat evil to make up for the loss of his parents. While Banks has his successes in criminal detection, Ishiguro ultimately exposes him as naïve about his roots in the world. He needs to return to Shanghai to see through his delusions of recovering his parents. Five years have passed since Kazuo Ishiguro published The Unconsoled, an ambitious novel experimental in form and significantly different from the work that had brought him to prominence -- books such as the commercially and critically successful Booker Prize-winner The Remains of the Day (1989), and the novels An Artist of the Floating World (1986) and A Pale View of Hills (1982). Unlike his first three novels, precise and subtle stories with unreliable narrators attempting to come to terms with their war-time pasts, The Unconsoled features a narrator who is by turns omniscient and clueless as he wanders through the surreal landscape of an unrecognizable modern European city. Many critics and readers didn't seem to know what to make of it. Nostalgia, incidentally, is an emotion I’m very interested in these days. This book’s a lot about nostalgia. I think nostalgia is a much-maligned emotion, and I’d like to speak up on its behalf. Of course, it can be a vehicle for a lot of shoddy, reactionary baggage. But in its purest forms, I think nostalgia is to the emotions what idealism is to the intellect. It’s a way we have of longing for a better world. We remember a time–often from our distant childhood–when we believed the world to be much kinder place than it proved to be when we grew up. I think nostalgia is a profound emotion that’s all too often dismissed unfairly. He learns from Philip (a former lodger at their residence in Shanghai whom Christopher called uncle as a boy) that his father ran away to Hong Kong with his new lover and that his mother a few weeks later insulted Chinese warlord Wang Ku, who then seized her to be his concubine. Philip is a Communist double agent. He was complicit in the kidnapping and made sure Christopher was not present when this kidnapping took place. He offers Christopher a gun to kill him, but Christopher refuses. He learns that his father later died of typhoid but that his mother may still be alive. Philip reveals the source of Christopher's living expenses and tuition fees during his schooling in England. His mother extracted financial support for her son when Wang Ku seized her. the drawing room, which received plenty of sun throughout the first half of the day, contained an ageing sofa as well as two snug armchairs, an antique sideboard and an oak bookcase filled with crumbling encyclopaedias

When I started to write my novels, around 1980-1981, I was quite preoccupied with Japan and the militaristic period it went through, and then the war. In some ways that's not surprising. If you are someone of Japanese or German origin, there is a stronger inclination to wonder how you would have behaved had you been born just one generation earlier. This is a question I was asking from a position of some comfort and safety -- I was living in England, and though it was the time of the Cold War, there was no real danger of fascism taking over. I suppose I feared that my generation was in danger of becoming slightly complacent about certain things. We took up political positions very easily. It was kind of an exercise on my part to imagine what I would have done had I been born just a few years earlier than I was. Would I really have had the strength of mind and clarity of vision to not go along with that kind of fervor or would I have been swept up as well? My first three books arose out of that kind of inquiry, looking at what happened before and after a big cataclysm. But I revealed nothing to him, and before long got him arguing again about philosophy or poetry or some such thing. Then around noon, Osbourne suddenly remembered a lunch appointment in Piccadilly and began to gather up his belongings. It was as he was I believe it was at this point I finally assented to his suggestion for the evening — an evening which, as I shall explain, was to prove far more significant than I could then have imagined — and showed him out without betraying in any part left the school; he had been the one real friend I had made since arriving in England, and I missed him much throughout the latter part of my career at St. Dunstan's. I first read The Remains of the Day when I was 17, because I was required to for school. Since my tastes then ran to the melodramatic, I disliked the dry, self-defeating voice of its narrator, and bent grimly to what I thought would be a tedious bit of homework. What I encountered, in fact, was a novel so persuasive, and so desperately moving, that the following week the entire class escalated into a towering argument on the nature of love.I'm quite serious. I'd been meaning to pop over to you long ago, just never got round to it. It'll be at the Charingworth."