Last month the Nobel Prize for literature 2017 was awarded to Kazuo Ishiguro, the English writer born in 1954 in Japan, who came with his parents as a young boy to the UK and has lived there ever since.

In 1982 I picked up his debut novel A Pale View of Hills, and got fascinated by the struggle for identity and meaning placed in the story of a Japanese woman who had moved to England with her daughter. I was hooked and followed his writing ever since. Through the years I have used his books and stories in various writings and workshops on story. In 2007 I wrote a little essay called ‘Learning about Life through Narrative’. It was based on the books that were shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2005. One of them was Never Let Me Go, Ishiguro’s 6th novel with which he surprised the literary world by suddenly placing his story in a dystopian, science fiction setting.

At first glance Never Let Me Go seems to be about a politically controversial topic, entering into the world of cloning and mass production of organs. But Ishiguro’s novels are not about political issues. If you are familiar with his previous five novels, then you know that he has an unbelievable skill to position his stories in microcosmic worlds where nothing really is what it appears to be. Within this microcosmos things go on, people are confronted with the big issues of love, despair and hope, guilt and shame, but in Ishiguro’s worlds this is never fully in the open.

In his first two books he creates this atmosphere through the Japanese mind. The conventions and inhibitions of Japanese history and culture make them prisoners, and hardly leave them space to realize themselves. This claustrophobic sense is always present in Ishiguro’s works, in the alienation of Etsuko and her daughter in A Pale View of Hills, in Masuji Ono, the painter in An Artist of the Floating World, in the butler Stevens of The Remains of the Day, in the surreal world of Ryder in The Unconsoled and in the world of the boarding school in England in Never Let Me Go. In his short story collection Nocturnes we are led into the microscopic world of musicians.

His subtle and elegant prose seems designed to postpone clarity. He is the poet of the unspoken. All we know in the early reading is that we don’t quite know what is going on. A typical Ishiguro atmosphere is when he tells that the guardians at Hailsham, the boarding school which Kathy H. attended, “timed very carefully and deliberately everything they told us, so that we were always just too young to understand properly the latest piece of information”.

Ishiguro brilliantly explores the question: do we really understand what is going on? And if we finally do: what inner and outer freedom do we have to respond to what we understand? He doesn’t give answers, not even asks open questions. They are built into the text. You are taken along with deceptive simplicity into unsettling emotions and questions.

I also want to mention the three films he has written the script for. Two of them are based on his books The Remains of the Day(1993) and Never Let Me Go (2010). He also wrote the script for The White Countess from 2005. Both The Remains of the Day and The White Countess were directed by James Ivory. Never Let Me Go was directed by Mark Romanek.

I think it is fair to say that in all three cases the book is better than the film. It is very difficult to translate the evasive, microscopic, claustrophobic atmosphere of his books into picture. That does not take away that The Remains of the Day in particular is an exquisite, excellent film. Anthony Hopkins as the butler Stevens and Emma Thompson as the head of the household give shape to an unforgettable, repressed love story, once again showing how the desired course of our lives can be  hindered by duty, honor and society.

The Remains of the Day ends with the butler returning to the manor, and finding a white dove in the tower room. The bird struggles against the windows and finally finds his way out into the open. This is however not Ishiguro’s ending. Ishiguro does not tell us the ending, nor will we ever know if Katie (in Never Let Me Go) escapes her fate. Can the dove find his way out of the closed room when he finally has understood where he is? What are my particular inhibitions as a human being? How can my humanity be honored or denied? That is the question we all face, and the answer we find is pretty defining for our lives!

Interview with Kazuo Ishiguro at The Guardian, BBC

Rinus Baljeu

Photo by Peter Nguyen on Unsplash

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