[Music] Kazuo Ishiguro: Yes when I go to Japan I feel
intensely British, you know… [laughter] KI: Yeah, I turn into Hugh Grant when I’m
in Japan. [laughter] Yvonne Hunter: Good evening everyone. My name
is Yvonne Hunter and I'm the head of programming here at the Appel Salon at the Toronto Public
Library. Eight months ago, with great excitement, I booked my first author into the salon. It
was none other than Kazuo Ishiguro, and now I invite you to come on a journey led by a
masterful writer. If the test of great fiction is that a book takes you somewhere, in this
case, the answer is an unqualified yes. The Buried Giant is enchanting, I wanted to read
it over again the moment I finished the book, in case I missed some brilliant fragment. YH: Mr. Ishiguro turns his readers into ghosts
and you will travel a breath away from these characters. Tonight is also a reunion of sorts.
As host, I'm delighted to welcome a familiar face to many of you in the salon, Tina Srebotnjak.
Tina has spent much of her career in broadcasting in both radio and television, first as the
host of CBC's Midday and then as the host of TVO Ontario's Imprint from 2000 until 2005.
Tina was my predecessor in this role as the Head of Literary and Cultural Programming
at the Toronto Public Library until eight months ago. Ladies and gentlemen, please help
me welcome Tina back to the stage. [applause] Tina Srebotnjak: Hello everyone. So very nice
to be back and so great to be back in this room, my favorite room in the city. I'll just
tell you before I introduce our fabulous superstar, I'll just tell you that we're going to be
on stage, Kazuo Ishiguro is going to do a short reading from the book. We're gonna have
an on stage conversation, and then, of course, we welcome questions from the audience, and
there's a microphone set up there for that, and I'll give you plenty of notice, but if
you think of things while we're chatting just write it down, and then you can come up to
the microphone and ask away. So I'm going to introduce the man who probably doesn't
need much of an introduction, but here it goes. Kazuo Ishiguro is a spectacular writer.
His haunting, often dream-like, stories stay with us long after we've turned the last page,
whether we've been in post war Japan or the grandest of English country homes or a dystopian
world of clones. TS: In his trademark style, he seems to tell
us very little, but, of course, he tell us everything. Kazuo Ishiguro was born in Japan
but came to England when his family as a young boy when his oceanographer father accepted
what was to be a temporary job in England. As a boy he loved Sherlock Holmes. As an adolescent,
he wanted nothing more than to make music, and I'm told he still plays a mean guitar.
He worked as a social worker before turning his hand to writing full time. He published
his first novel," A Pale View of Hills" to wide acclaim in 1982, and the next year, he
was named to Granta's as Best Young British Writers list along with those other light
weights, Salman Rushdie, Martin Amis, Ian McEwan and Julian Barnes. TS: He went on to publish five more novels
and a collection of short stories. He won the Booker Price for the Remains of the Day,
a novel which has given us one of literature's most iconic characters, the Butler Stevens.
His novel Never Let Me Go, has been called a masterpiece and was made into a wonderful
film as, of course, was Remains of the Day. Now, as Yvonne said, comes his first novel
in ten years, The Buried Giant. It's set in a semi mythical England in the time following
King Arthur, when a strange mist has settled over the land, a mist that seems to rob people
of their memories. And it tells the story of two wonderful lovers, Axle and Beatrice,
an old married couple who set off to visit their son in a distant village. Please welcome
Kazuo Ishiguro. [applause] Kazuo Ishiguro: Thank you. That's a very warm
welcome; thank you so much. TS: You're gonna read? KI: Alright, so this is just gonna be a brief
reading. I'm just gonna read the opening three pages just so that... There's nothing particularly
special about these three pages, just the opening three pages, but since Tina and I
are gonna spend probably a little bit of time talking about the new book, if you haven't
read it then at least it gives you something to refer to. Okay, so this is literally chapter
one. [laughter] KI: The Buried Giant. [laughter] KI: "You would have searched a long time for
the sort of winding lane or tranquil meadow for which England later became celebrated.
There were instead miles of desolate, uncultivated land; here and there rough-hewn paths over
craggy hills or bleak moorland. Most of the roads left by the Romans would by then have
become broken or overgrown, often fading into wilderness. Icy fogs hung over rivers and
marshes, serving all too well the ogres that were then still native to this land. The people
who lived nearby, one wonders what desperation led them settle in such gloomy spots might
well have feared these creatures whose panting breaths could be heard long before their deformed
figures emerged from the midst." KI: "But such monsters were not cause for
astonishment. People then would have regarded them as everyday hazards. And in those days,
there was so much else to worry about. How to get food out of a hard ground. How not
to run out of firewood. How to stop the sickness that could kill a dozen pigs in a single day
and produce green rashes on the cheeks of children. In any case, ogres were not so bad
provided one did not provoke them. One had to accept that every so often, perhaps following
some obscure dispute in their ranks, a creature would come blundering into a village in a
terrible rage. And despite shouts and brandishing of weapons, rampage about injuring anyone
slow to move out of its path. Or that every so often, an ogre might carry off a child
into the midst." KI: "But people of the day had to be philosophical
about such outrages. In one such area, on the edge of a vast bog, in the shadow of some
jagged hills lived an elderly couple, Axle and Beatrice, perhaps these were not their
exact or full names, but for ease, this is how we will refer to them. I will say this
couple lived an isolated life, but in those days, fewer isolated in any sense we would
understand. For warmth and protection, the villagers lived in shelters. Many of them
dug deep in the hillside. Connecting one to the other by underground passages and covered
corridors. Our elderly couple lived within one such sprawling warren. Building would
be too grand a word, with roughly 60 other villagers. If you came out of their warren
and walked for 20 minutes around the hill, you would have reached the next settlement,
and to your eyes, this one would have seemed identical to the first. But to the inhabitants
themselves, there were to be many distinguishing details of which they would have been proud
or ashamed." KI: "I have no wish to give the impression
that this was all there was to the Britain of those days. But at a time when magnificent
civilizations flourished elsewhere in the world, we were here not much behind the Iron
Age. Had you been able to roam the countryside at will, you might well have discovered castles
containing music, fine food, athletic excellence, or monasteries with inhabitants steeped in
learning, but there is no getting around it. Even on a strong horse in good weather, you
could have ridden for days without spotting any castle or monastery looming out of the
greenery. Mostly, you would have found communities like the one I have just described, and unless
you had with you gifts of food or clothing or were ferociously armed, you would not have
been sure of a welcome. I'm sorry to paint such a picture of our country at that time,
but there you are." KI: "To return to Axle and Beatrice, as I
said, this elderly couple lived on the outer fringes of the warren, where their shelter
was less protected from the elements and hardly benefited from the fire in the great chamber
where everyone congregated at night. Perhaps there had been a time when they had lived
closer to the fire. A time when they had lived with their children. In fact, it was just
such an idea that would drift into Axle's mind as he lay in his bed during the empty
hours before dawn; his wife soundly asleep beside him. And then a sense of some unnamed
loss would gnaw at his heart preventing him from returning to sleep. Perhaps that was
why on this particular morning, Axle had abandoned his bed altogether and slipped quietly outside
to sit on the old warped bench beside the entrance to the warren and wait for the first
signs of daylight." KI: "It was spring, but the air still felt
bitter even with Beatrice's cloak which he had taken on his way out and wrapped around
himself. Yet he had become so absorbed in his thoughts that by the time he realized
how cold he was, the stars had all but gone. A glow was spreading on the horizon and the
first notes of birdsong were emerging from the dimness. He rose slowly to his feet, regretting
having stayed out so long; he was in good health, but had taken a while to shake off
his last fever, and he did not wish it to return. Now, he could feel the damp in his
legs, but as he turned to go back inside, he was well satisfied for he had this morning
succeeded in remembering a number of things that had eluded him for some time. Moreover,
he now sensed he was about to come to some momentous decision, one that had been put
off far too long and felt an excitement within him which he was eager to share with his wife." KI: Okay. I'll stop there. That's the first
three pages of The Buried Giant. [applause] KI: Thank you. Thank you very much. TS: So, since you've set it up for us by giving
us the first three pages, let's start with the setting because it's an unusual setting.
I said in my introduction. It's semi-mythical; it's the time after Arthur. It's an unusual
setting, and the book has been called a fantasy or what kind of book is it. Why did you choose
that settings? Dragons, ogres. KI: Yeah, we'll come to the dragons and ogres
in a minute. Why did I choose this setting initially? At the beginning, actually, when
I had the kernel of this story together in my mind, I still didn't have a setting at
all. This was almost the last piece of the jigsaw. It's a very frustrating kind of point
in the creative process for me. I was kind of location hunting. I wanted a place where,
for some reason, the community, the society, were having these kind of a collective memory
lapse about certain things. So I was wondering, "Well, how do I contrive this?" And I did
actually think about a kind of a dystopian setting or kind of a galaxy far away kind
of setting so that I could devise some high tech reason or some sinister political reason
why the memory lapses were occurring, but in the end, I decided I would actually go
way back in time, and I should explain why did I want a setting like this at all? I was
actually thinking about many contemporary historical situations, things that happened
in the '90s when Yugoslavia disintegrated or the Rwandan genocide, the situation in
South Africa after apartheid. KI: The situations where societies had to
grapple with this question, "to what extent should we remember our past? To what extent
should we forget it?" I mentioned both Rwanda and Bosnia, Kosovo, partly because we had
situations there where people had coexisted quite peacefully. At least for a generation
or so and then suddenly, old, societal memories seem to get awakened. Perhaps they were deliberately
awakened for political reasons, and this incredible hatred and the murderous hatred erupted amongst
people who had been using each other for baby sitters the day before and living intimately,
and so I was wanting to write about situations where, yes, people have managed to kind of
enforce a peace by forgetting, but somehow that wasn't enough. Those memories kind of
suddenly erupted and the cycle of violence started again, but rather than write a novel
actually about Bosnia or one of these places, 'cause I didn't feel those were my strengths,
I didn't feel I was that kind of reportage, journalistic kind of novelist. I wanted to
write something a little bit more metaphorical. Something that suggested that here was a kind
of a, yes, if you'd like to call it a fantasy, mythical landscape, but played out here was
something that has been going on over and over in history, and I was interested in this
question. How does a nation, how does a society decide when it is better to remember things?
And when is it better to keep certain dark memories just buried? TS: And the drama, the tension in the book
is that this mist that makes people forget. I won't give away the plot of the book, but
there's some attempt made to get rid of the source of this mist, but it's an open question.
Which is the better way to go, right? Because the danger, as you say, of reawakening all
these old wounds is exactly that, endless warfare. In this case, it happens to be the
Britons and the Saxons who had murderous interactions for years and were now living quite peacefully
together. So what's the danger in losing your collective memory? What's the danger in not
remembering? KI: They're dangerous both ways. You can take
an analogy with individuals, and we've heard this a lot in psychotherapy circles and so
on. Is it a good idea to rake over traumatic childhood memories? Isn't it better just to
leave them buried and just get on with your life? Just try and sort yourself out and just
try and forget that and move on. And then other people will say, "but that will never
work because all that stuff will somehow come back in some kind of way, and you'll never
be able to function." And I think that... That's a very crude simplification of the
dynamic, but to some extent, I think that very difficult dynamic applies to societies
and nations, and I can well understand. I'm not on one side or the other. I think it's
almost impossible to make a generalization about this. I can well understand that there
are times in the life of a community or a nation when maybe the right decision is to
bury certain things. Let's all agree to forget because to do otherwise means that we're gonna
disintegrate. We're gonna end in civil war. I think South Africa after apartheid is a
good example where I think they've got that balance more or less right, through a very
formalized process. TS: Through the Truth and Reconciliation Commission,
yeah. KI: Exactly, yeah. Because obviously there's
a lot of seething anger and need for vengeance on the part of people who've suffered indignities,
terrible things under apartheid. So there's a real balancing act that was done very skillfully,
I think, in the 20 years that has gone since apartheid. To say, "Look, we'll address the
anger and the sense of grievance. But on the other hand, we've got to agree not to pursue
every grievance down every road. Because that way, we're just going to end up in turmoil
and inevitable civil war." And I think that balance was struck very well. But I can well
understand in, say, many of the countries that were occupied by Germany during the Second
World War, let's say France is a prime example. I can understand that urge to say at the end
of the Second World War that, "Let's forget the extent to which we collaborated. Let's
just forget the crimes that we committed when we were occupied. Let's just pretend we were
all brave, resistance warriors. And maybe further down the line, we'll be able to face
the real darkness of how we behaved. But right now, we're too sick, we're too fragile. We
have to hold together." KI: I can see that some people would be made
very angry by that position. But I can also understand why decisions have been made over
and over again, nation after nation. You have to make that kind of pragmatic decision to
avoid another cycle of awful violence or disintegration. TS: You've dealt so often with memory in your
books. I would say it's one of your grand themes, both individual memory and now collective
memory in this book. What is it about the idea of remembering and how we remember that
you find so interesting? KI: Well, it's quite a complicated question
for me because I think that's been different at different points in my life, in my career
as a writer. I think I kind of got stuck on memory right at the very beginning of my career.
Because I think what, and I only realized this with hindsight actually, but I think
what made me a novelist in the first place was the need to remember my childhood memories
about Japan. So for me, writing fiction and laying down memories were intimately
linked. And I think that's why I became a writer. I wasn't really a very bookish person
when I was a teenager. TS: Yeah, you didn't read a lot as a kid.
I was surprised to read that. KI: I was a typical boy. I didn't read, I
was playing my guitar, I was writing songs, but I didn't really read. I didn't have great
ambitions to be a writer until I was in my early 20s. And then I think what happened
was, by the time I was about 22, I realized that there was a very precious place in my
head that I called Japan. And I'd left Japan as a child when I was five. And I'd always
thought I was gonna go back there. So all through my growing up, I thought about this
place called Japan. And I speculated about what it would be like when I went back and
lived there. And so it was a very important place for me, and it was a place of my childhood
memories. It was a place, my favorite toys that I'd left behind, garden, my kindergarten,
my grandparents. All those people were there in my Japan. KI: And then as I'd grown older I'd added
things to it, out of imagination, out of books that I read, comic books and so on. And I
realized when I was about 22 that this precious place that I called Japan didn't really exist
in reality. Maybe it had existed once, but it didn't exist anymore. Maybe it had never
existed, maybe it was just something to do with my childhood. It's a strange fictional
world that I created made out of memory, imagination, and speculation. And so I think I felt I had
to get this Japan down in a book before it faded from my head altogether. Because nobody
else knew about it. I couldn't go there on a plane. And I think I turned to fiction as
the most obvious way of kind of conserving and preserving I suppose what I felt were
my memories, even though they were probably kind of made up memories to some extent. And
so I think right from the start, there's a very intimate link for me between writing
fiction and memory. And then since then, I think, to some extent, it's become a device
or a habit. I sometimes worry that I'm stuck on this. I should move on. TS: Oh no. [chuckle] KI: But it's become a kind of, for me, a very
interesting lens through which to look at a lot of the things I'm interested in. TS: Well, I remember you said once in an earlier
conversation, actually, that we had some years ago. We were talking about the role of memory
and does it betray you or protect you? And I think you had said then that you thought
it protected you. That we manipulate our memories to give us the kind of life that makes our
current life livable. KI: I think there's certainly an element of
that, but I guess central to my new novel, The Buried Giant, is this relationship between
an elderly couple. And I think what I'm interested in looking at memory in their terms is the
role of shared memories in something like a marriage, and that same question comes up:
Does it protect them? I mean, is it something that threatens the marriage? Any long marriage
like this is bound to have dark passages. So the couple have agreed somehow to kind
of just to... Well, to bury them. But I think shared memories are fascinating, not just
in a marriage, but in any important long-term relationship, your parent-child, siblings,
your friends... What do you do with the difficult memories? And I suppose for this couple, they
think their love is strong enough so that they can look at everything that happened.
Surely, their love will survive the resurrection of even the darkest memories of their life
together. That's what they think at the beginning. And I think they think if they don't face
the dark memories, is their love a false one? Is it based on something not real, if they
evaded and kind of censored out a whole hunk of their history? KI: So, at the beginning, they're kind of
confident; they think they want all their memories back, it's something very precious
to them. They sense that their time together won't be long now; they're getting old, and
it's very important for them to get their shared memories back, but as their story goes
on they start to... Each of them become quite afraid. Is our love strong enough to withstand
the resurrection of certain memories? This insecurity starts to creep in, and I think
it's a difficult thing that when is it better to remember, when is it better to forget?
As she has just put it just now, do memories protect? Do they threaten? And it's not just
at the individual level, it's at the level of relationships, families. We do need to
sometimes keep some things buried and are we strong enough to resurrect these things
and look at them? TS: This book ten years in the making as we
said in the introduction, and wow, to say it was anticipated, everybody's calling it
the literary event of the year, and I was thinking how... Maybe you're such a pro now,
it's not scary... But isn't it scary to come out after ten years with "Okay, here it is,
you've been waiting ten years!"? KI: I don't know. I didn't realize it was
ten years. I mean... [laughter] KI: I was just busy. I was busy trying to
get my novel together. I have done other things. I did publish a book of... TS: Short stories. KI: Short stories. Everyone talks about short
stories as though that's something you just fling off, you know? TS: Yes, yes, yes, yes. It just took a week
or two. That's right, yeah. KI: Even in the land of Alice Munro, people
are saying, "Well, and then there was, of course, you wrote that book of short stories,
but why has it been ten years?" And I had a couple of movies to worry about in that
time. But I guess it takes a long time sometimes. Sometimes I can't... I'm not really worrying
about what happens at publication or what's happening in the public world. When I'm struggling
to make a story work, I feel like kind of a very lonely sense of success and failure.
The pressures I feel are just solo ones, they'll apply to me. I'm just desperately trying to
make this kind of funny machine that, I want it to fly, and it won't fly, and I'm kind
of hammering away in my garage. KI: I'm kind of grabbing odd bits of pieces
that I find lying around and it won't fly, it still won't fly. And it's only much much
later on, when it kind of more or less flies, that I'm up there with this funny flying machine,
and it occurs to me, "Well, people are looking at me, what does this thing look like?" I
don't really feel that kind of public pressure until I'm out here like this, and then I think,
"Oh, it's been ten years" and there's all this anticipation. I'm flattered, deeply flattered
by the anticipation, but when I'm writing, that's the last thing on my mind. I genuinely
feel I'm never gonna get this novel finished. I'm never gonna get it to work. TS: Are you... There's been a lot of reaction
to the book, you've had some excellent reviews and some not-so-great reviews. What if anything,
has surprised you in the way people have reacted to the novel? KI: Well, you're probably alluding to the...
A lot of the passionate feelings one way or the other about this book seems to revolve
around the presence of what you might call fantasy elements. TS: Yes. Dragons and ogres. KI: Yeah. TS: Pixies. KI: Yeah, yeah. They're there. And once again,
maybe this is very naïve of me. I'm probably a very naïve kind of person. It didn't occur
to me that they were gonna be an issue. [laughter] KI: As I explained, I was just trying to get
my book to work, and I really needed ogres and pixies. This was the landscape that I
chose, and it just seemed to me very kind of natural that there would be ogres and pixies
in this landscape. That's partly why I wanted them. And so I'm kinda slightly surprised
that there's such an issue. I have heard people saying things like "Oh, I love Never Let Me
Go and Remains of the Day, but I hear your new book's got ogres and pixies in it... [laughter] KI: I don't usually read books with ogres
and pixies in it... [laughter] KI: So I'm not sure if I should read your
book, as much as I like your work usually." And I'm slightly offended on behalf of my
ogres and pixies... 0:30:26 TS: Of ogres and pixies, yes. KI: They weren't so big in my book before;
they're kinda like extras, that I didn't pay them very much. I asked them to come on... [laughter] KI: But I feel they did a very good job for
me when I needed them. [laughter] KI: And so now I'm gonna stand up for them.
If people are prejudiced against ogres and pixies, I'm gonna stand up for them. [laughter] KI: I'm on their side. They did a great job
for me. They do... TS: A new movement starts here. [laughter] KI: They are there for quite important reasons,
I have to say. They're there for serious reasons. For instance, the pixies are there, they're
very... But they only come up once or maybe twice. They're closely associated with illness
and death, in my book. Because I've gone back to a time that's pre-scientific, what we might
call a "superstitious time". All right, so my rule of thumb is that I'm gonna... If the
people of that day could very reasonably believe in certain supernatural forces, my decision
was that, yeah, I would allow those things to exist literally in my world. But I wouldn't...
This isn't the world where anything could happen. I couldn't have a spaceship land in
the world of The Buried Giant, or a time traveller to appear because this is outside of the realm
of kind of the normal kind of person who lives in this kinda world. But if you lived in that
kind of society, with kind of very terrifying miles and miles of dark kind of moorland between
you and the next village, it's absolutely sensible to believe in ogres and pixies. KI: Somebody very dear to you gets ill, maybe
seriously ill, there's no explanation for it. You don't have a scientific explanation.
So it seems to me perfectly reasonable to say "Well actually I remember a couple of
months ago, something was moving in the darkness of our room, in the dead of night. And I was
sure it was some kinda pixie. And it's that pixie brought the illness. And that's why
my wife is ill." That seems to me as good an explanation as any, if you're living in
that kind of belief system. So in my book, I go with that. Those were the rules I had
in creating my fantasy world, if you like. And it seemed to me, that we've used things
like this ever since people started to tell stories. Look at Homer or Iliad or Beowulf
or whatever. And in my case, a lotta Japanese kind of folktales. So I just use them as a
second nature. As I say, I'm slightly taken aback by why the pixies are such an issue
and... [laughter] KI: And I want to say to all of you here,
give my ogres and pixies a break. [laughter] KI: Don't not come to my restaurant because
ogres and pixies are on the staff. Do come... TS: He's on a roll. [laughter] KI: Yeah, yeah, okay. [chuckle] TS: You mentioned, you talked about being...
The Japan that you had in your mind. And when you were growing up, so you came at five,
and then are you saying you didn't go back until you were 22? You never... KI: I didn't go back till I was 35. TS: Wow. So was the Japan you went back to
anything like the Japan in your head, or it had moved on, I guess? KI: No, it wasn't. My wife and I were guests
of the Japan Foundation, a kinda cultural government thing, and they looked after us
wonderfully, and they put together a program for us to travel around Japan and meet kind
of interesting people. And it was absolutely fascinating, but to me, it was like a really
interesting, very foreign country until I got to Nagasaki, which is the place where
I was born. I realized that Nagasaki was a very different place to the rest of Japan.
Japanese people go there for an exotic holiday. It's a tiny corner right in the south, on
the Kyushu Island, it's the one place that was open to kind of foreigners when the rest
of Japan was closed. In fact David Mitchell wrote a very interesting novel about that
period, about Nagasaki. And so because of that, it's a strange place, with kinda Dutch
and Portuguese and Chinese kinda influences, special cuisines. Even visually, it's very
different. KI: And when I got back there, I suddenly
realized what I thought was Japan was just this little corner of Japan, that everybody
else in Japan found exotic and beautiful and strange. And then I felt like "Yes, I'd come
back." But the rest of Japan was like a fascinating, exciting, but very foreign place to me. And
that's how it remains today. TS: Did you feel more British when you were
in Japan, than you did at home? KI: Yeah, I was... Yes, when I go to Japan,
I feel intensely British. [laughter] KI: I find myself really playing up my British... TS: The accent gets even plummier. KI: Yeah, I turn into Hugh Grant while I'm
in Japan. [laughter] KI: It's a kind of defense mechanism... [laughter] KI: In case they start expecting me to know
how to behave in a Japanese way. TS: Exactly. I'm going to turn questions over
to the audience in a few minutes. I just wanted to end with asking you, you wrote in the New
York Times, or they did the interview with you I think a couple weeks ago, and you talked
about your influences, and you said that you owed your career to Jane Eyre. Can you talk
about that? Charlotte Bronte's wonderful book, of course. KI: Yeah, well as I said to you before, I
wasn't a big reader. I think the moment when I thought actually maybe fairly soon I might
write a novel was when I kind of fell in love with Charlotte Bronte. Not just Jane Eyre,
but the other great Bronte novel, Villette. In some ways that perhaps made more of an
impact on me. It's not quite such a satisfying work of fiction, but I think that's a very
deep and interesting book. And I re-read them both relatively recently. I realized how much
I'd ripped off from those books. [laughter] KI: I'm relieved that nobody ever seems to
realize this. [laughter] KI: It's really the use of the first person,
and it's a very coy, skillful use of the first person. 'Cause in both of those books the
narrator, Lucy Snow in Villette, Jane Eyre in Jane Eyre, they seem to be confiding in
their reader so much, their intimate thoughts. But they leave out hugely important things
like, I am passionately in love with this man. They just leave that out. [laughter] KI: All reference to that big emotion is left
out. Everything else is poured out and just little things stick out every now and again
that give you the clue to that. I realized that so much of the way I taught myself to
write fiction came from those two books. There are even actually kind of certain scenes.
There's a scene in Jane Eyre where you only realize that Jane Eyre's crying because in
the dialogue, she never says "I was weeping." Just in the dialogue, it's revealed. The person
she is with, Rochester, says "Those are tears aren't they?" And she says "No, they're not."
That's the only, there's some sort of exchange, but that's the only way that you know is because
she happens to report the conversation and what the other person is saying. And I thought,
"oh, actually there's a scene very much like that in The Remains of the Day." TS: Yes, yeah. KI: Yeah. TS: So you ripped off Jane Eyre? [laughter] KI: Yeah. [chuckle] TS: First the pixies then plagiarism. [laughter] KI: No. I realized how much I learnt from
Charlotte Bronte. TS: Yeah. KI: And I guess I used to always say Dostoevsky
was my favourite novelist. I realized recently that probably Charlotte Bronte is. I owe so
much to Charlotte Bronte, great writer. TS: Wonderful writer. Okay the microphone
is there in the centre if you'd like to come and give us your questions. I'll just ask
you, are you writing another novel? Or perhaps a wonderful collection of short stories? KI: No, I'm not doing anything. I'm on a world
tour. [laughter] TS: He's a rock star. KI: It's impossible to write I find, when
I'm doing this, but it's very stimulating, and a lot of ideas are forming in the back
of my mind. Simply because I'm engaged in conversations like this and the kind of questions
I'm about to receive. [laughter] KI: All these things actually go towards shaping
my next project. TS: Excellent. Go ahead. Speaker 4: So, I had some difficulty deciding
which question to ask you. I might give you your choice. My first is, who or what are
the pixies and ogres amongst us in the fog now? And if you don't like that question... [chuckle] S4: I was at your discussion last evening
at the Light Box, where we also talked about Hugh Grant, and what is this fixation with
Hugh Grant? [laughter] KI: I don't think I've mentioned Hugh Grant
ever, in public, until last night when The Remains of the Day was being shown at Tiff.
And I wanted to say a couple of things in the introduction. Then it occurred to me that
actually I suppose I was wanting the movie to take some credit for the kind of the Hugh
Grant, the star, Hugh Grant. Because he was in The Remains of the Day movie before he
became a star. And I thought he did the, that's the first time he kind of road tested the
Hugh Grant character. [laughter] KI: And I thought we should take some credit
for... TS: Absolutely. KI: For the Hugh Grant. And I guess Hugh Grant
was on my mind from having mentioned him last night. Or having seen him in the movie last
night. So yeah, I could've easily said I turned into Laurence Olivier or something like this. [laughter] KI: But I mean there's something about Hugh
Grant that's kind of delightfully English. But the other question, what are the pixies
and ogres? It's not so much the pix... The pixies and ogres are kind of like, they're
the extras. They're the kind of the walk on parts. I think what your question should really
be is, what are the buried giants in our midst at the moment? What are we burying? And I
think every nation. I wouldn't presume to ask in your marriages, in your relationships
with your parents or your children, what are the buried giants? KI: But that's probably quite an interesting
question to take home and ask, but if you want to ask that. But I think it's an interesting
question to ask, "What are the buried giants of a lot of the countries, a lot of nations?"
And I live in Britain. I think there are big, buried giants in British society. That's to
say, the bits of societal memory that's deliberately suppressed so that we can keep going. I think
in the United States, definitely, the big buried giant that is actually threatening
to rear up every week, at the moment, is the business about race. I think... I've heard
that some Republican politicians are suggesting, with fully good intentions that a lot of that
history about slavery and segregation get removed from the school books because all
that's doing is fuelling another generation of bitterness and anger. KI: And other people are outraged by such
a proposal. And I've heard somebody on the radio, just before I came to Canada, saying
that there should be a formal kind of truth and reconciliation process in America to address
the whole question of race and that whole history. Because without that, there's gonna
be this open wound all the time. There's gonna be new Fergusons occurring every month. I
guess in France, as I suggested before, I think it's something to do with what happened
in the Second World War. It's still unspoken. And when the Charlie Hebdo incident occurred
recently, in fact, the Jewish supermarket killings that occurred alongside that... We
were in Paris very recently after that and in fact, it was an American journalist there
that said to me, "The French are really awkward about this because they would like to wholeheartedly
say, 'We are going to protect our Jewish community from this kind of terrorism.' But they're
very awkward about it because they've got this strange suppressed memory about the fact
that during the Second World War, they sent thousands of their own Jews to the concentration
camps without any help from the Germans. And they feel very awkward about attacks on the
Jewish community." KI: Japan, the big other country in my background...
The Japanese don't... They've forgotten what they did in the Second World War. They've
forgotten they were the aggressors. And this continues to cause all kinds of problems in
the relationship with China and Southeast Asia. I think with Britain, it's something
to do with The Empire. The acquiring of empire, the maintaining of empire, and the way empire
was let go. Which has so much to do with what's happening today in the Middle East. We could
go on and on and on. I wouldn't even presume to ask, "What are the buried giants here in
Canada?" [laughter] KI: I wouldn't... I'm a visitor, I can't speculate
about things like that. But I think... It's a difficult thing. There's sometimes good
cause to keep these things buried, but maybe there are times when we have to try and look
at them as well. TS: We'll move on to the next question. KI: We'll move on, yeah. TS: But I would say, just on the Canada thing,
I think a lot of people would say it's the way we treated our First Nations. But let's
just move on now, go ahead. Speaker 5: Hello. Hi there. KI: Hi. S5: First of all, I just wanna say thank you
so much for coming, and you are a rock star. And it doesn't how long it takes you to write
a novel, we will wait, and we will read it when you are done. My question, you may have
addressed this last night at the Light Box event, but I wasn't there so I apologize if
you have to address it twice. You are also a screenwriter but you didn't adapt "Remains
of the Day" and "Never Let Me Go". And I'm wondering, were you just too close to it,
you didn't wanna touch it, did you not get the job, what happened? Those are two pretty
significant projects. KI: I think people would be very foolish to
give me the job. Because I have worked as a screenwriter, I can see the thing from the
other side as well. And my view is that usually, it's not a good idea for the author of the
book to get too creatively involved in the film adaptation. Because I think it's very
important that films of books should be seen not as translations... Yes, the French edition
of "The Remains of the Day" say, should really be a translation of my version of "Remains
of the Day". Now, I'd be pretty upset if the translator said, "Well, I wanted to express
myself, and so I put a lot of myself into this translation. That's why it's all completely
different at the end." But I think for film, I do want the filmmakers to do that, to some
extent. I do want the film to be a work of art. If it's successful, a really good work
of art in its own right, I don't want it to be some kind of thing that doesn't really
walk and talk in its own right. And so I'm always saying to filmmakers, "Look, can we
use the novel as a kind of raw material, but I want it to be an authentic expression of
what you wanna say." I wouldn't quite go so far as to say, "Just produce the best movie
you can with the same title, that's my book." I don't wanna go quite that far but almost
that. KI: And you need to be really ruthless. A
screen play is at most gonna only contain about a fifth of the number of words of a
novel, and so someone needs to actually look at the material very ruthlessly, and I don't
think the author of the book is in a good position to do that. You need a certain amount
of dispassion, and you need a lot of skill as a film maker, and I'm probably... You asked,
"Did I not get the job?" I probably wouldn't have got the job even if I'd asked. [laughter] TS: Were you happy with the two movies that... KI: Yeah. I've been incredibly lucky. I have
seen many, many screen plays of some other novels; A Pale View of Hills and When We Were
Orphans. I've seen various screen plays go by, and they haven't been good, and they haven't...
Everyone's agreed that they weren't good, they didn't make it to the screen. In the
case of The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go, I think they were fantastic screen
plays, they were fantastic films. TS: They were. And this one's going to be
made into a film as well, right? KI: Well, you never... With movies, you never
count on anything. Scott Rudin has the option, incredible, a very good producer, Scott Rudin.
The latest, the last few films of his that you might know about or you might have seen
would be The Grand Budapest Hotel, Captain Phillips, Inside Llewyn Davis. He's an extraordinary
film maker who balances kind of wide commercial appeal with quite challenging material. So
I'm optimistic, but you never count on anything. TS: No. KI: But I really like what actors do with
my characters. I always learn a huge amount of stuff I didn't know about my characters
from actors, and so that's one of the things I always look forward to when I know there's
a film in the offing. TS: Thank you very much. KI: Hi. Good evening. Speaker 6: Mr. Ishiguro, one of my other favorite
authors, Donna Tartt, says that what defines her, or what she looks in her prose is for
speed and density. As a writer, I've noticed that what kind of defines your writing is
that you're constantly changing your prose to match the characters that you want to speak
this prose, and so I'm wondering as an author, what do you think defines your prose? KI: My actual prose, the actual kind of words
on the page? S6: Yes. KI: Yeah. I don't know if there's any single
thing that defines that. I don't pay probably as much attention to the actual style. I don't
really think about my style that consciously. I just think about things project by project.
Maybe I should worry a bit more about my overall style, but to me, that's what I'm left with.
The style or the prose is what I'm left with after I've made all the other big artistic
decisions like who is going to narrate this story? Is it going to be a first person narration?
Is it gonna be third person? Until this book and it's usually, the answer is usually being
first person, and so then I have to kind of think about the character. What is that character
revealing? What is that character hiding? Is the character kinda shy? Is that character
coy? And all these things go to determine that question, what should that prose be like? KI: Who is the character? Who is the narrator
talking to? That's a very important decision for me because often in my books, I like to
have a you, not just an I, but a you, and that you is almost always not the reader.
It's... For Cathy, in Never Let Me Go, she's addressing another clone like her. Stevens,
the butler, when he's addressing another servant. These people can't really imagine an audience
beyond their small world, and so the reader is put in a position of kinda almost eavesdropping.
So all these kinds of decisions go towards determining what the language should be like,
what the voice should be like, and then after that, yes, I try and do my best to write in
kind of a way that people will understand. By and large, I try to make things as clean
and understandable as possible after that. KI: But essentially the stylistic decisions
all come as a by product I think of the decisions about the character and what kind of strategy
the narrator has. What kind of game is the narrator playing in the kinda hide and seek
with himself, herself, and the person whose being addressed. So that's what goes into
kinda my prose if you like. TS: Thank you. Speaker 7: Hello. KI: Hi. S7: A good number of years ago when I first
read Remains of the Day, I loved it and immediately went out to find the next novel of yours that
I could; that was The Unconsoled, which I started reading immediately. The writing was
as brilliant as in Remains of the Day, but a very different novel and what started out
in a linear fashion was not that, I guess, by the end. And seeing as you're here, it
left me confused in a way that perhaps very few novels I've ever read, have done. You
mentioned memory came up earlier as a theme, and that seemed to be something that in retrospect
was a strong theme in The Unconsoled, and I was wondering was that important to you
as you were writing it or in the way that became less linear and its ending was not
perhaps... The way Remains of the Day or other novels sort of ended more discreetly, if you
could just talk a little bit about that because you're here, and I thought I may as well ask
you in person what I may have missed or what you were hoping from your readers to take
away from it. KI: I very rarely go to an event like this
without somebody during the Q&A asking me a question very much like the one you just
asked me. The Unconsoled, I published 20 years ago, but it continues to kinda arouse, let's
say, curiosity and sometimes, fury and frustration. S7: I'm seething within. [laughter] KI: And I'm always asked to explain it. In
fact, I recently had to do a live web chat in London for the Guardian reading group 'cause
they decided they were going to have a big argument about this book. And so, I actually
had to re-read the thing. [laughter] TS: And did you get it? Did you understand
it? KI: Well, I'll tell you, the annoying thing
was I had very little time, and it's a kind of 500-page book. I had about 20 pages left
when I had to do this live web chat, and the most intense questions were coming at me,
and half of them were about the ending. TS: And you were going, "Wait, just let me...
" KI: I've done all this work, and I didn't
quite know what they were asking about the ending. It's hard to talk about a whole book
very concisely, but I would say, now re-reading it again, I would say a couple of things.
There's two standard ways of telling a story about somebody's life. One is you do the kind
of David Copperfield thing in chronological unfolding, linear narrative, go from childhood
through to adulthood and so on. Another method, a very common method that many people use,
and I used in books like Remains of the Day, Never Let Me Go, you take a narrator at one
point in their life, and they're remembering back to episodes, and so that way the reader
can piece together the life that this person has had, and that's quite a subtle way because
you introduce the whole thing about the how is the narrator remembering and evaluating
certain episodes from the past? Are they manipulating the memories and so on? So I kinda like to
do that. But in The Unconsoled perhaps foolishly, perhaps not, I thought I would attempt the
third way of doing things. And I thought maybe nobody had done it before, maybe for good
reason. [laughter] KI: I was looking at the way when we dream.
Often people from the past, hunks of our memory kinda turn up almost like in real time. I'm
looking at you now, and your face might stay with me, and I might appropriate your face
tonight in a dream, and so, you might pop up in my dream, but actually it's not really
you. It's somebody from my childhood, my old Maths teacher from my childhood, but he happens
to have your face because your face was here tonight. I think we all have this kind of
experience. Maybe your mother turns up in a dream with somebody else's face. KI: And so I thought, well, maybe this is
another way of doing memory or another way of telling a story of somebody's life: Have
them turn up in some place, and they keep running into strangers who introduce themselves
to him, but actually he's appropriated these faces. Behind the faces of the local mayor
or the local person at the concert hall, there's somebody much more significant, somebody from
their childhood, their ex-wife, or somebody from their past, even people who are projections
of themselves in the future, versions of themselves and younger versions of themselves. All these
people would actually appear as though they were in a dream kind of real people coming
at them. And so, that was the way I was going about things in The Unconsoled. That might
be a slight explanation for why it's kind of rather odd. TS: Does it clear things up? S7: That was a very interesting and helpful
answer, so thank you. [laughter] TS: Okay, next. Speaker 8: First, I want to say "Go Team Ogre,
Team Pixie." [laughter] S8: Second thing was, I guess you sort of
thought this, too. I sort of bothered when people were saying, "It's his first book in
10 years," and thought "No, it's not. He had a book of short stories." I really like short
stories so it sort of bothered me. My question was, you've spoken a couple, two or three
times now about almost analyzing your own characters, so at what point in the creation
of a character do you sort of have to take a step back and really analyze them? Or analyze
the relationships between two of them? KI: Yeah, I don't know actually if I analyze
individual characters that much actually. I think a lot about who should be the narrator
or something like that. But I probably worry much more about relationships than characters.
This came to me as a revelation not all that long ago, maybe about 15 years ago. I have
been writing for quite a long time before this occurred to me. Actually, but since then,
it has made my life a lot easier. Rather than worrying about individual characters, and
are they three-dimensional, are they interesting enough, should I give them more of a back
story, should I make them more colourful? I thought, well, actually... I'm not that
interested in their back story or giving them quirky little characteristics. If I just actually
think instead about relationships, rather than individual characters, if I ask myself,
"Is that an interesting relationship, or is this just a stereotypical cliche relationship?"
Does this relationship actually develop and move on? Is it like a three-dimensional relationship,
it classically enforced the terminology? Does the relationship surprise convincingly? And
then it becomes maybe a three-dimensional relationship. KI: And so I started to think about the relationship,
rather than the characters. And then I... When I started to try and create interesting
relationships, I found then that the characters, at either end of the relationship, just took
care of themselves. And I do sometimes wonder. Maybe that's what we really care about when
they're reading. We really care about the relationship. Because often I have had this
experience of coming across rather colourful characters in a novel, and I'm puzzled as
to why I'm not more interested in this character. And then it occurred to me, it's because they're
vibrant, interesting characters in isolation. They're not connected to any other character
in a meaningful way, and maybe that's why I'm not very interested. Maybe I'm just talking
about myself as a writer and a reader, but I decided for the last couple of decades,
what I'm interested in is the relationship, not the individual characters. And for me,
that's made the writing process a lot easier, actually. TS: Thank you, and we'll make the woman...
Hello, hi. You can be our last question of the night, and then we'll get to the book
signing. Speaker 9: Okay, great. I guess I read, "Nocturnes,"
your collection of short stories, and a lot of it was around music, and I guess how it
brings you back to a certain point in your life, and it has a lot to do with nostalgia,
which is different from memory. And so my question is, is there a song that you will
often listen to because it brings you back to a certain moment in your life, or is there
a song that you can absolutely not listen to ever again because it reminds you of something
that happened in your life? KI: A song? I don't think there's any particular
song that I find so painful that I can't listen to. There are songs... There are many, many
songs that do take me back to certain points in my life through association. But actually...
I have to say, there's a certain kind of song, there's a certain genre of song that I love
precisely because it does... It's about what you just said, that there are songs like say,
"Georgia on My Mind" or the Irish song, "Mountains of Mourne," where you're not quite sure whether
the singer... They're very nostalgic songs about missing say, "Georgia," but you're not
quite sure whether Georgia is a woman, or is it the place, Georgia, or actually is it
a particular time in that person's life that they're yearning for? And I think, "Mountains
of Mourne... I don't know if it's a song that you know... It's St. Patrick's Day today,
isn't it? Yeah? TS: Oh, yes. S1: It's one of the great, kind of weepy Irish
songs, and I think it's a beautiful song, "Nostalgia." You're not quite sure whether
the singer is missing the village in Ireland because he lives in London, or if he's missing
the woman, Mary, that he addresses, or is it the time, that period in his life that
he misses. And one of the greatest songs like that, I think is, "Hickory Wind." And I love
the Emmylou Harris' version of that. It's a Gram Parson's song, that also does that.
But I love those songs where you can't decide whether it's a particular person, a place,
or the time in your life. And so, I find it hard to answer your question cleanly. I can't
bring out one song that... But the songs that actually address the very issue that you raised
there, I think it's quite special for me. TS: Thank you very much, and I'm glad you
asked a question about music, 'cause I had meant to get to it in our conversation, but
I didn't, so I'm glad you talked about music. I think we've all been so thrilled to have
you here tonight, and I know you're gonna sign books at the back. People are lining
up already. I just wanted to say, thank you, what a pleasure, definitely worth the wait.
Thank you very much. KI: Okay, thank you very much. Thank you.
Thank you very much for coming, and thank you to Tina.
