When We Were Orphans - Brossura

"Ishiguro is a stylist like no other, a writer who knows that the truth is often unspoken." — Maclean's

"A detective story, childhood memoir and political fable in one.... A rich exploration of the rupture of childhood and the baggage we carry from that 'foreign land', filled with suspense, intrigue and a lightning-flash denouement." — The Guardian

"Beautifully written...[capturing] the joys, pains and adventures of two young boys, one not quite English and one not quite Japanese, in a protected enclave in a foreign land. This is superb writing which addresses the complexities of national and racial loyalties and the struggle to live up to the higher human ideals found beyond such limiting notions." — National Post

"One of the finest prose stylists of our time." — Michael Ondaatje

“Ishiguro, along with Kafka, is the great bureaucratic fabulist of anxiety. Anxiety is his imaginative architecture.”--The Guardian

“Ishiguro’s riskiest, funniest, most chaotic book yet.... Subtle and sad at first, the book shades into black hilarity.”--The Globe and Mail

“[Ishiguro] takes the notion of an unreliable narrator to new heights of tension.”--Boston Globe Books

“A real page-turner...an enigmatic crime, a vivid portrait of old Shanghai, a hero whose blindness to his own inner life lets readers see something of themselves.”--Vogue

“Ishiguro intends surrealism. Through that lens, we repeatedly glimpse and hurt for the perpetual lost boy in Banks as he rewrites his guilt-ridden manhood. The novel’s poignancy is deepened, and the prevailing metaphor – our futile descent into childhood’s fictive consolations – reveals wonders.”--The Calgary Straight

“Ishiguro shows immense tenderness for his characters, however absurd or deluded they may be.... In its use of an array of techniques to illuminate psychological and political truths, When We Were Orphans confirms Ishiguro as one of Britain’s most formally daring and challenging novelists.”--The Guardian

“Don’t expect a heartwarming read when you open When We Were Orphans. But it’s not depressing, either, because Ishiguro knows how to keep the nightmare interesting, even buoyant.... Like certain other contemporary writers, such as Paul Auster, Ishiguro has discovered a strong narrative can just as easily convey existential reality.”--The Toronto Star

“Ishiguro is probably the most interesting writer about war working at present. Even when he seems to be writing about something else, Ishiguro’s writing is infused with a profound sense of the effect that great historical events have on people’s lives. This, not blood and guts and perfectly researched period underwear details, is the real story of the cataclysmic century just closed.”--The Independent

Kazuo Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki, Japan, in 1954. His father, an oceanographer, was hired by the British government in 1960, and the family moved to Surrey, England, never expecting to stay long. His grandfather, to whom he was close, sent him packages of Japan’s most popular children’s magazine, so he wouldn’t feel out of touch when he returned. But they remained in England, and Ishiguro (known to friends as “Ish”) “never properly said goodbye to Japan” or his grandparents. When his grandfather died in their old house in Nagasaki, they had not visited Japan in ten years. Even now, he has only returned once, on an author tour, though he has travelled throughout Europe and North America. While in some ways it might seem as though he has lost his “Japanese-ness”, he has avoided going back mainly because “in my head...the world of my childhood is still intact.” Perhaps that vision contributed to the beautifully conjured lost paradise of Banks’ youth in the novel, and for the metaphor of the orphan, torn from the sheltered haven of childhood. It may also account for Ishiguro’s persistent fascination with memory.

After his first year at Kent University, where he read English and Philosophy, he took a sabbatical to work on a housing estate outside Glasgow; after finishing his degree, he volunteered in London for an organization that looked after the homeless. He read little as a teenager, and wanted to be a singer-songwriter until around age twenty-four. But, he ventures, “you bang on a door and it doesn’t open, and another one happens to open, so you go through it.” Thus, he enrolled in the top-notch creative writing program at the University of East Anglia, where his tutors were Malcolm Bradbury and Angela Carter. His first short stories were included in a prominent volume of promising young writers, and his first novel was published soon after. Now he writes full-time, working very regular hours of 9:00 a.m. — 5:30 p.m., at home in Golders Green, a leafy and now multicultural suburb of north London, which allows him to spend a lot of time with his wife and partner of twenty years and their young daughter. In his spare time, he plays jazz, folk and blues on his collection of guitars.

Surprisingly, Ishiguro admits that his novels are, to some extent, deliberately “going over the same ground,” often told in a pseudo-diary form by a single central narrator, with flashbacks as the narrator looks back from different points. “That’s the foundation of the structure for me – the state of mind of the narrator shifting slightly but ever so significantly.” With Banks, determined to fulfill his mission no matter how destructive or selfish it might seem, he was “tracing someone’s obsessions and how certain agendas...set emotionally, early in life, can continue to assert themselves throughout adulthood.... Peculiar things govern the big decisions that we make in our lives. Often it’s something rather irrational.” Ishiguro compares the book to an expressionist painting, where the world is distorted by the emotion of the artist’s perspective: it is “an attempt to paint a picture” of the world “according to someone's crazy logic.”

The taking-off point was the ‘30s English detective novel, such as those of Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers, which he read as a child. “What interested me...was that they often portrayed this idyllic view of English society...this community that would work really beautifully if there wasn’t this one thing that had gone wrong.” The villain is always found, and life is perfect again: pure escapism. But after World War I, people didn’t need reminding of the real nature of evil and suffering. “I had the image of such a detective let loose in the modern world, still with the idea that he can counter evil by these methods. And how absurd it would look going round with a magnifying glass trying to stop the Second World War.” In a sense, Banks represents the naïve, innocent, idealistic part of all of us. “It’s tempting to say that there was an evil man called Hitler who decided to kill the Jews,” but that is to deny the “chaos and blood-lust” of a century of history.

Of his tendency to write about World War II, he comments: “Part of me is very affected by the fact that I was born in Nagasaki nine years after the atomic bomb hit that city.” On August 9, 1945, thirty-nine thousand people were killed, and the surviving half of the city had to burn the bodies before disease set in; his mother was eighteen. When Ishiguro published his first short stories, she told him: “You are in the public realm now, you have some power.” A recent visit to Auschwitz made him particularly conscious of the fact that when the survivors are gone, there is a danger the memory will have no more relevance to future generations than the Napoleonic Wars. For the first time in a century, there is a generation who has never known military conflict, with leaders who did not experience a war directly. He feels “it is the duty of all my generation to keep memories alive, we who grew up in the shadow of war.”

However, he chooses the setting of each novel to bring out his themes and is not interested in historical reconstruction, which he says is for films, not books. “To make that projector come on inside a reader’s head, you...have to give just enough so that the reader brings all these other images that are floating around in his or her head.... To a certain extent you can muck about with stereotypes and stereotypical images and you can juxtapose them in unlikely ways.” Just as the England of The Remains of the Day was “highly mythological,” he uses the image of pre-war Shanghai as a city of international intrigue. He’s less and less interested in realism, and aims for what cannot be done in cinema and television. “One of the strengths of novels over camera-based storytelling is that you are able to get right inside people’s heads...to explore people's inner worlds much more thoroughly and with much more subtlety.”

Each of his understated, finely wrought novels has been published to international acclaim beyond most writers’ dreams. He was in both of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists anthologies, and won the Booker Prize at thirty-four. But The Unconsoled baffled many: “600 pages of plotless, circular, sustained hallucination,” said the Guardian, who wondered if When We Were Orphans was an attempt to get his point across better. Some dislike his style here, too. Neil Bissoondath in the National Post was not alone in commenting that the novel was “strangely flat.” The Observer said the protagonist’s diction was unsuited to his character; others complained of too subtle humour and instabilities of tone. While author Catherine Bush, in The Globe and Mail, agreed that reading When We Were Orphans was an “increasingly bewildering experience,” concluded: “Ishiguro’s novels require a reader to read aslant, to play detective, if you will, alive to clues, to what’s left out as much as what’s revealed.” The novel should provide plenty of debate.

Ishiguro says he’s a less controlled writer than he used to be – he actually threw out 110 pages, almost a year’s work, of a story-within-a-story showing the Golden Age sleuth at work. The Remains of the Day was his easiest book to write. He plans his novels less rigidly now, allowing room for surprises. (“Some of the most interesting writing can be stuff that is quite uncomfortable for the writer.”) He feels a sense of urgency about his writing, worrying that publicity — which he does so well, giving long and detailed interviews – takes so much time. He also feels that makes writers very self-conscious about their work, for better or worse, and aware of their international audience. “I think when people look back on this era, and when they look at the literature produced in this era, they’ll have to look at the tour to understand why writing has gone in a certain direction.”

Ishiguro’s work is often compared to that of Franz Kafka, and sometimes to the work of Dostoevsky, whom he names as one of his favourite writers. He also admires Chekhov’s short stories, Raymond Carver, Richard Ford, James Ellroy, Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, the Jeeves novels of P. G. Wodehouse, and the adventures of Sherlock Holmes stories.