Kazuo Ishiguro, Nobel Prize in Literature 2017: Official interview

Well, I mean, until October, it was something that, you know, very great people, and I, in my imagination, you know, I always thought, you know, older people won, and it wasn't anything I would win, but I mean, but I'm going to say this when I deliver my banquet speech later, but I first heard about the Nobel Prize when I was a small child in Japan, and my mother, I remember still my mother explaining it to me, and I'm looking at a, it must have been some sort of educational book, telling the readers about the history of the Nobel Prize, so for me, it's been embedded in my imagination, you know, all through my life, that's probably, yes, the greatest prize that a person can win in the world. Well, I think it's better not to be too self-conscious about being a role model, you know, I've been, you know, ever since I became a kind of published writer and became well-known, I think you have that sense anyway, that you have to be, you have to be, you know, responsible to some extent, but also, but to try and inspire younger people and so on, and your, you know, fellow writers, and the Nobel, becoming a Nobel laureate has made me more conscious of this role. I think this is a, it's put me on a different level in terms of being a role model, my responsibility as a public figure, so that's something I'm going to have to think about and get used to. I'm no longer just a writer, you know, of interest to people who are interested in writers. I thought I'm occupying some other special position as a Nobel laureate, so it's something I haven't quite worked out yet, but I think I have to be very careful, because I noticed already in the two months since the announcement, I've been asked to do all kinds of things, you know, sign petitions, support all kinds of campaigns, take part in discussion programs I have no qualification to take part in. Many invitations have come in that I wouldn't have received before October, and I think I've had this advice from past Nobel Prize winners I've met, to be careful. I mustn't put myself on a platform for which I'm not qualified, and so I think that's a very important piece of advice, not just for me, but for the world. We don't want people who are not experts talking as though they are. This is one of the problems in the world today, so that's something I'm going to be quite disciplined about. I'm only going to talk about things I know about. Well, the importance of any prize, I mean, there are many prizes in the world, you know, and so the importance of any prize, how seriously we take the prize, for me, I think it depends on the integrity of the people who give the prize, and also on the history of past winners. I think those are the two important things, because prizes themselves are used as a tool all around the world now, to promote things, most often to promote a company or to promote something, but sometimes they are used to promote political ideas, and sometimes quite subtly and sometimes less so. There have been prizes that I've turned down because I thought, they weren't hideously bad prizes, but I thought I don't necessarily wish to be helping to promote something, and so I think we have to be aware that prizes are a technique, they are sometimes propaganda, they are sometimes promotional tools for organisations, corporations, institutions, and so I always ask myself this question about any prize, whether somebody else is getting it or whether I'm being offered it. Who is giving it, do I respect the values that lie behind the prize and the people who are giving it, and do I respect the previous winners, and I think that this is the first thing I said quite spontaneously when I received the call from the Swedish Academy. I said, you know, I feel emotionally, you know, truly honoured by the Nobel because I can absolutely honestly say that the Nobel is an institution that I deeply respect, and I deeply, deeply respect the past winners in literature that have received it since 1901. I mean, a lot of my greatest heroes are there on that list. So, the Nobel, I think, is a prize that has managed to capture the imagination of the world, not as a promotional tool, but as something that exemplifies an ideal about humanity and what we strive for, and that's quite a rare thing. I think there are many great prizes, but I think the Nobel sets a very high standard because it's not just about the specialist area that we may or may not excel in. There is a higher ideal, I think, about peace, cooperation between people, the striving of human beings to improve our civilisation, and I think these are very, very high ideals. I think earlier in my career, I was always very interested in looking at individuals who struggled with their past and their memories. So, typically, I would look at a character in late middle age or old age, someone who'd been quite proud of himself or herself, but then, quite late in life, gains a perspective about his life, let's just say his life, and he starts to think, oh, actually, I had all my values wrong, I backed the wrong things. I backed the wrong causes. Does that mean my life has been wasted? I lived my life by the wrong values, even though for most of my life, I thought I was living by the right values. That was a typical situation I became fascinated in. I wrote at least three or four novels around these kinds of ideas. As I got older as a writer, I became interested in that same question, but applied to societies and nations, and that's something I'm still trying to figure out, how best to express that question. How would a nation or country struggle with a nation's dark or shameful memories? When is it better to just leave these things buried and move on? We can see all around the world now, and in history, cases where conflict just goes on and on and on. You just can't stop it, stop the cycle, because people will not forget atrocities from the past. Sometimes, generations are fighting over something that happened centuries ago. Hatred has developed. Sometimes it's not good to remember, but particularly in Europe, America, Japan, we have problems of memories that have been suppressed, and the society is not at peace with itself about racism or what happened in the Second World War. There's a sense that issues have not been addressed, and this leads to all kinds of tensions. At the moment, America is in a terrible turmoil because there's a feeling that certain things about its past, about African-Americans particularly, have not been addressed properly. I think Europe has been in a state of tension ever since the Second World War. This question about personal memory and national memory is something that interests me very much. I never really think very much about genre. Often, I'm drawn to a particular project which I've chosen quite carefully because I don't have many ideas. I have one good idea every five years or something, so it's not as though I have a big choice. I don't sit there thinking, now I'll write a thriller or now I'll write a love story or a period thing. I have an idea, and it's usually an idea that doesn't yet have a setting. I don't really have a time and place, geographically or in time, where I'm going to put this story down. I just think, wouldn't it be interesting to write a story about a person who has this particular issue, and then this happens emotionally? It's something quite abstract. I find myself almost like the way movie people go location hunting. When they've got a script, where would be a good place to film this? I find myself looking through history or looking through different genres to try and figure out what is the best way to express this story. I never start off by saying, I might do something that's a bit like a science fiction book or something like a detective story. I become desperate and I use whatever I can to express the particular idea. It's only when I finish that somebody might look at what I've written from the outside and say, well, that looks like a piece of fantasy or that looks like science fiction. For me, I haven't looked at it from the outside. I'm like a crazy person trying to build a flying machine in my garage or in my back garden, and I'm just putting anything on that will make this thing fly. I might steal something from next door, I'll borrow things, anything that will make this thing go up in the air and fly. It's only when it's flying that people look at it and say, that looks like a period love story or something like this. I never really had a big ambition to be a writer until I was almost in my mid-twenties. From the time I was around 15 years old, my big ambition was to be a songwriter, and I spent a lot of time writing songs in my bedroom with a guitar. I was very much inspired by the man who won the Nobel Prize for Literature last year in 2016, Bob Dylan. I remember buying an album of his when I was 13 years old, and I still remember the John Wesley Harding. I think that was when I first became very excited about the idea that you could use words in a very mysterious way and create entire worlds just with a few words. Of course, the music and the singing and all these things are very important to me, it's that whole combination, but the excitement about words and the fact that you could use them in this way, that really happened to me when I first listened to my very first Bob Dylan album when I was 13 years old. Then I became interested in all these singer-songwriters who are at what you might call the literary end of the 1970s boom. Leonard Cohen was very important to me, Joni Mitchell. I learned to play all their songs myself. I knew all their lyrics off by heart, and I wrote over 100 songs myself in my bedroom, and I played them with my friends. In a way, I feel that was my apprenticeship for becoming a writer of fiction. Somewhere in my 20s, I made, to me, a transition that didn't seem like a very big one between writing songs and writing short stories. It was only over a period of about a year when I was writing songs at the beginning of this year. Towards the end of that year, that energy had gone into writing short stories. After years of getting nowhere professionally as a singer-songwriter, around the age of 24, when I was 24, 25, as soon as I started to write short stories, they were being accepted and published by magazines. I was actually spotted by the publishing house that is still my publishing house in London, Faber and Faber, a company that's published many, many Nobel Prize winners. I wrote my first novel under a contract with them. It's like many things in life. I was knocking on one door for a long time, and then another one opened. From then on, fiction has been my focus. But somewhere at the back of my mind, I'm still a singer-songwriter. Yes, I still write song lyrics for the American jazz singer Stacey Kent. In fact, an album of hers came out in October, I think, and two of the tracks have my lyrics on. I work as a song lyricist. For me, it's quite an important part of my writing life. It's another kind of outlet, and I feel it's quite important for me to have this other writing life, where I think in a different kind of way because I'm collaborating. I think that's always a healthy thing to have collaborators. One of the disadvantages of being a novelist, as opposed to being a lot of these scientists working in big teams. If you work in the theatre or films, you work with teams of people. The danger for novelists, I think, is that we work in isolation, and so there's a problem. You may not grow and develop in the same way. It's easier to become ossified. For me, it's quite important to collaborate with people in other fields, like music or film. I find it very stimulating, and I learn many things from what I'm obliged to do in collaboration. I've spoken about my early influences from the world of music, singer-songwriter music, but if we're talking about literary influences, people never seem to say this when they're looking at my work, but I know that the novelist that's influenced me the most is Charlotte Bronte, the 19th-century British novelist, and particularly two books, Jane Eyre and Villette. I re-read Jane Eyre and Villette about five years ago, and I was quite embarrassed. It was full of things that I could recognise. I had stolen from those books, but I read those books at a particularly crucial point in my writing life, I think, before I actually started to write fiction, but when I was starting to think about writing fiction, and so particularly the use of first person, the first-person technique. What the narrator hides from the reader and hides from myself in the Charlotte Bronte books became the foundation for me, and so Charlotte Bronte remains a big influence. There are other writers that are great favourite writers of mine, possibly Dostoevsky is my favourite novelist, but probably he hasn't influenced my style very much. He writes in a very, very different way. However, I think influence is a very interesting and subtle thing. Sometimes somebody who's very different to me in temperament, because of that difference, it's almost like it creates a tension, a natural tension, and I think that's very good. Something is pulling me away from my comfort zone, and I think, oh yes, I have to do that. What would Dostoevsky do with this? And of course, I could never write like Dostoevsky, but I think a little bit of Dostoevsky would help here. Marcel Proust was very important to me, more technically, how to tell a story, not necessarily through the plot or through chronology of how the events unfold in your story, but the great freedom I see in Proust's work of just following the drifting memories or the thought associations of the narrator. So you can have an episode from yesterday, and it goes right into a memory from 30 years ago. There's a much more abstract way of ordering your canvas as a writer. I learned an enormous amount from Proust, but everybody, Kafka is another writer who's very important to me. Kafka and Samuel Beckett, and actually Harold Pinter, I think Kafka isn't, but the other two are Nobel Prize winners, people who give me guidance and inspiration about how to deviate from realism, from doing something to distort the familiar reality that we see around us. Once you move away from orthodox realism, the question becomes, well, so what do you do? What are your new laws? If you're an outlaw, you have to, in fact, this is the Bob Dylan line, isn't it? To live outside the law, you have to be honest. But I think that's very true when you deviate from realism. And so the great writers like Kafka, Beckett, Pinter, they are models for how you deviate from conventional realism. Well, I've had many people who have been important editors and advisors in my writing over the years. Many of them are professional people, my editors at the publishing house. My first agent, Deborah Rogers, who's passed away now, and my first editor, Robert McCrum, were very important influences. But the person who has a very deep influence on what I write, at all kinds of levels, is my wife Lorna. And I think part of it is because she is my wife, and she tends to boss me around in many aspects of my life. And so my work is not excluded. However, the key thing here is that we were together, we were a couple, at a time before I started to write fiction. So somewhere in her mind, she doesn't think that I'm this famous author, and that she is criticising the work of a famous author. She still thinks I'm this postgraduate student who's got this crazy idea that he can write fiction. She still thinks of me like that. So she looks at it and says, what is this? That has never changed, because she was there looking at the very first things I wrote, in the little room we shared together when we were both postgraduate students. And I don't think the relationship has changed very much. And the problem is that once you start to become well-known, well-established, and for me, I won the Booker Prize in Britain when I was 34 years old. The trouble with that is that, there are many great things about becoming respected young, but because a lot of people stop criticising you. They're afraid to criticise you, or professional publishers think you'll move to a different publishing house if they speak frankly. So I need somebody like my wife, who thinks of me as an upstart, who has all these ideas above my station about writing. And she can be quite brutal. I've sometimes abandoned whole projects, because she has taken one glance, usually when she's in perhaps not a very good mood, and says, no, this won't do. Do something else. A lot of people ask me, do you have any advice for aspiring writers or young writers? Of course, these days, I don't know how it is in Sweden, but certainly in the English-speaking world, every university seems to have a creative writing course. There are private creative writing programmes everywhere. Everyone is very keen to be a writer these days. That wasn't the case when I was young. Nobody was interested in literature. But it's very difficult for me to come out with any kind of useful advice about how you write. Everybody must do it in their own way. But there is one fundamental thing I would say to people at the early stages, or people who have these ambitions. I would say, particularly in the world as it is today, you have to ask yourself, do you really want to write, or do you want to be a writer? I think many people have this ambition to be a writer. They want the status, the position of being a writer. But actually, they may find that they don't particularly want to write. I think to be a successful writer, and I mean successful not just commercially, but to be a writer who achieves something worthwhile, regardless of whether it is published or sold, you have to have a special relationship with writing. I think part of the difficulty at the moment is that it's quite difficult for people to find out themselves which it is they really want. Because being a writer has become such a coveted position now. A lot of people dream of being a writer, but sometimes perhaps that isn't the right thing, because writing isn't for you. And that's all right, something else may be for you. I would say, get that very clear. Try and find out, do you really want to write? That's the important thing.