Danton Remoto
Lodestar
One of the last books I bought from Kinokuniya Bookstore in Malaysia was
Kazuo Ishiguro’s Nobel Prize for Literature lecture published by Faber and
Faber. Called My Twentieth Century Evening and Other Small
Breakthroughs, it is a helpful book for all aspiring writers.
Instead of giving a lecture bristling with critical theory, Ishiguro talks
about his beginnings as a writer and his creative process. At the age of
five, he came to England with his parents and sister in April of 1960. They
lived in Guildford, Surrey, thirty miles south of London. His father was an
oceanographer who came to work for the British government. The machine
that he went on to invent is today part of the permanent collection at the
Science Museum in London.
The family thought it would only be a temporary stay; they were
always prepared to return to Japan. His parents clung to the ways of the
old homeland. The young Kazuo, meanwhile, was living in two worlds.
“All our neighbours went to church, and when I went to play with their
children, I noticed they said a small prayer before eating. I attended
Sunday school, and before long was singing in the church choir, becoming,
aged ten, the first Japanese Head Chorister seen in Guildford. I went to the
local primary school—where I was the only non-English child, quite
possibly in the entire history of that school—and from when I was eleven, I
travelled by train to my grammar school in a neighbouring town, sharing the
carriage each morning with ranks of men in pinstripe suits and bowler hats,
on their way to their offices in London.”
Outwardly he had become very English indeed: polite, proper and
restrained.
But at home it was different. His parents had different rules,
expectations, and language. They thought they were coming home to
Japan, and so his parents’ attitude was more of visitors, rather than
immigrants.
“The assumption remained that I would return to live my adult life in
Japan, and efforts were made to keep up with the Japanese side of my
education. Each month a parcel arrived from Japan, containing the
previous months’ comics, magazines and educational digests, all of which I
devoured eagerly. These parcels stopped arriving sometime in my
teens—perhaps after my grandfather’s death—but my parents’ talk of old
friends, relatives, episodes from their lives in Japan all kept up a steady
supply of images and impressions.”
And these images and impressions would be stored in the house of
memory that Ishiguro built in his mind. It became the Japan of memory, rich
with details even if he never returned to the old country again. “The fact
that I’d never physically returned to Japan during that time only served to
make my own vision of the country more vivid and personal.”
Did these memories inflect his early work? Not at all. He took a
postgraduate course in Creative Writing at the famous University of East
Anglia, with Malcom Bradbury as a tutor, as well as the formidable English
novelist, Angela Carter. Paul Bailey was the writer-in-residence. He
submitted a radio play that the BBC had earlier rejected. UEA accepted it,
and with five other students, they formed that year’s cohort. He wrote
stories that were decidedly English, but found something lacking in them.
And one day soon, “the emotional construct put together by a child
out of memory, imagination, and speculation” began to appear in his fiction.
It was first evident in his 1982 novel, “A Pale View of Hills,” which deals
with the memories of Etsuko, a Japanese woman coping with the suicide of
her daughter, Keiko. His next work, “An Artist of the Floating World”
published in 1986, details the life of old Masui Ono, who recalls his former
career as a political artist for imperialist propaganda. Both novels deal with
a Westernized Japan that is leaving behind the bitter memories of the
Second World War, and hurtling into the comforts and alienation of the First
World.
Now how did he make the leap from these two early Japanese novels
to the writing of “The Remains of the Day,” the Booker Prize-winning novel
that sealed his global reputation?
One day he was ill, and found among his bedclothes the first volume
of Marcel Proust’s “Remembrance of Things Past.” He was thrilled not only
with the marvellous prose but also the technique of Proust.
“The ordering of events and scenes didn’t follow the usual demands
of chronology, nor those of a linear plot. Instead, tangential thought
associations, or the vagaries of memory, seemed to move the writing from
one episode to the next…. I could suddenly see an exciting, freer way of
composing my… novel; one that could produce richness on the page and
offer inner movements impossible to capture on any screen.”
He thought of writing a novel whose shape follows the narrator’s
thought associations and flow of memory. Ishiguro was influenced not just
by other writers, but by music as well. He was writing “The Remains of the
Day” when he knew that something was amiss. Should he show emotion in
the life of Stevens, an elderly British butler torn between duty and love, at
the novel’s end?
He listened to Tom Waits’ song, “Ruby’s Arms,” about a soldier
leaving his girlfriend one early morning to go to the train station. “And there
comes a moment, midway through the song, when the singer tells us that
his heart is breaking. The moment is almost unbearably moving. . .” This
moment in the song allowed Ishiguro to finally write the novel’s last scene,
where he “had to allow a vast and tragic yearning to be glimpsed
underneath.” Life is seen an iceberg then, only the tip showing above the
sea, while a whole unseen world lives in the depths below.
*
Danton Remoto has published “Riverrun: A Novel” and “The Heart of
Summer: Stories and Tales” with Penguin Books Southeast Asia. He has
also translated three classic Tagalog novels by Lope K. Santos and Amado
V. Hernandez into English. These books are available at
www.acrephils.com and Fully Booked online store.
Lodestar
One of the last books I bought from Kinokuniya Bookstore in Malaysia was
Kazuo Ishiguro’s Nobel Prize for Literature lecture published by Faber and
Faber. Called My Twentieth Century Evening and Other Small
Breakthroughs, it is a helpful book for all aspiring writers.
Instead of giving a lecture bristling with critical theory, Ishiguro talks
about his beginnings as a writer and his creative process. At the age of
five, he came to England with his parents and sister in April of 1960. They
lived in Guildford, Surrey, thirty miles south of London. His father was an
oceanographer who came to work for the British government. The machine
that he went on to invent is today part of the permanent collection at the
Science Museum in London.
The family thought it would only be a temporary stay; they were
always prepared to return to Japan. His parents clung to the ways of the
old homeland. The young Kazuo, meanwhile, was living in two worlds.
“All our neighbours went to church, and when I went to play with their
children, I noticed they said a small prayer before eating. I attended
Sunday school, and before long was singing in the church choir, becoming,
aged ten, the first Japanese Head Chorister seen in Guildford. I went to the
local primary school—where I was the only non-English child, quite
possibly in the entire history of that school—and from when I was eleven, I
travelled by train to my grammar school in a neighbouring town, sharing the
carriage each morning with ranks of men in pinstripe suits and bowler hats,
on their way to their offices in London.”
Outwardly he had become very English indeed: polite, proper and
restrained.
But at home it was different. His parents had different rules,
expectations, and language. They thought they were coming home to
Japan, and so his parents’ attitude was more of visitors, rather than
immigrants.
“The assumption remained that I would return to live my adult life in
Japan, and efforts were made to keep up with the Japanese side of my
education. Each month a parcel arrived from Japan, containing the
previous months’ comics, magazines and educational digests, all of which I
devoured eagerly. These parcels stopped arriving sometime in my
teens—perhaps after my grandfather’s death—but my parents’ talk of old
friends, relatives, episodes from their lives in Japan all kept up a steady
supply of images and impressions.”
And these images and impressions would be stored in the house of
memory that Ishiguro built in his mind. It became the Japan of memory, rich
with details even if he never returned to the old country again. “The fact
that I’d never physically returned to Japan during that time only served to
make my own vision of the country more vivid and personal.”
Did these memories inflect his early work? Not at all. He took a
postgraduate course in Creative Writing at the famous University of East
Anglia, with Malcom Bradbury as a tutor, as well as the formidable English
novelist, Angela Carter. Paul Bailey was the writer-in-residence. He
submitted a radio play that the BBC had earlier rejected. UEA accepted it,
and with five other students, they formed that year’s cohort. He wrote
stories that were decidedly English, but found something lacking in them.
And one day soon, “the emotional construct put together by a child
out of memory, imagination, and speculation” began to appear in his fiction.
It was first evident in his 1982 novel, “A Pale View of Hills,” which deals
with the memories of Etsuko, a Japanese woman coping with the suicide of
her daughter, Keiko. His next work, “An Artist of the Floating World”
published in 1986, details the life of old Masui Ono, who recalls his former
career as a political artist for imperialist propaganda. Both novels deal with
a Westernized Japan that is leaving behind the bitter memories of the
Second World War, and hurtling into the comforts and alienation of the First
World.
Now how did he make the leap from these two early Japanese novels
to the writing of “The Remains of the Day,” the Booker Prize-winning novel
that sealed his global reputation?
One day he was ill, and found among his bedclothes the first volume
of Marcel Proust’s “Remembrance of Things Past.” He was thrilled not only
with the marvellous prose but also the technique of Proust.
“The ordering of events and scenes didn’t follow the usual demands
of chronology, nor those of a linear plot. Instead, tangential thought
associations, or the vagaries of memory, seemed to move the writing from
one episode to the next…. I could suddenly see an exciting, freer way of
composing my… novel; one that could produce richness on the page and
offer inner movements impossible to capture on any screen.”
He thought of writing a novel whose shape follows the narrator’s
thought associations and flow of memory. Ishiguro was influenced not just
by other writers, but by music as well. He was writing “The Remains of the
Day” when he knew that something was amiss. Should he show emotion in
the life of Stevens, an elderly British butler torn between duty and love, at
the novel’s end?
He listened to Tom Waits’ song, “Ruby’s Arms,” about a soldier
leaving his girlfriend one early morning to go to the train station. “And there
comes a moment, midway through the song, when the singer tells us that
his heart is breaking. The moment is almost unbearably moving. . .” This
moment in the song allowed Ishiguro to finally write the novel’s last scene,
where he “had to allow a vast and tragic yearning to be glimpsed
underneath.” Life is seen an iceberg then, only the tip showing above the
sea, while a whole unseen world lives in the depths below.
*
Danton Remoto has published “Riverrun: A Novel” and “The Heart of
Summer: Stories and Tales” with Penguin Books Southeast Asia. He has
also translated three classic Tagalog novels by Lope K. Santos and Amado
V. Hernandez into English. These books are available at
www.acrephils.com and Fully Booked online store.
Kazuo Ishiguro’s take on the world