Kazuo Ishiguro on learning about politics from real life
The questions matter
Winner of the Nobel Prize in literature in 2017, the English writer (he moved with his family from Japan when he was five) Kazuo Ishiguro is best known for Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go (both turned into a movie). He describes his experiences working on a Scottish housing estate in his Paris Review interview.
Ishiguro has just described taking a second year off from college.
I went to a place called Renfrew, near Glasgow, for six months to volunteer as a community worker on a housing estate. I was completely at sea when I first arrived. I’d grown up in a very middle-class environment in southern England, and this was the industrial Scottish heartland at a time of declining manufacturing.
Typically these little housing estates, which were really no more than two streets, divided themselves into enemy factions that hated each other. There was a tension between the third-generation people who’d been living in the area and the families who’d suddenly arrive having been evicted from some other estate.
Politics was very much alive there, but it was real politics. It was a different planet from student politics, which tended to be about whether or not you were going to protest the latest NATO move.
The interviewer asks “ What impact did this experience have on you?”
I grew up a lot. I stopped being this person who whizzed around at a hundred miles an hour saying that everything was “far out.” When I was traveling around America, the third question, after “What bands are you into?” and “Where are you from?” was “What do you think is the meaning of life?”
Then you’d exchange views and weird quasi-Buddhist meditation techniques. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was being passed around. No one really read it, but it was a cool name.
When I came back from Scotland, I’d grown out of that. I’d seen a world where that kind of thing meant nothing. These were people who were struggling. There was a lot of drink and drugs. Some people were going about things with real courage, but it was quite easy just to give up.
Addendum: This experience helped him as a writer. Reflecting on his first published novel, A Pale View of Hills, he said:
Let’s say somebody is talking about a mutual friend, and he’s getting angry about this friend’s indecisiveness about a relationship he’s in. He’s getting absolutely furious. Then you realize that he’s appropriating the friend’s situation to talk about himself. I thought this was an interesting way to narrate a novel: to have somebody who finds it too painful or awkward to talk about his own life appropriate someone else’s story to tell his own.
I’d spent a lot of time working with homeless people, listening to people’s stories about how they’d got to this place, and I’d gotten very sensitive to the fact that they weren’t telling those stories in a straightforward way.
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