Kazuo Ishiguro (b. 1954, Nagasaki, Japan)
& A Pale View of Hills (First Published: 1982)
Vintage International-Random House, 1990.
http://www.cocc.edu/cagatucci/classes/eng339/coursepack/Ishiguro.htm

Chronology:  Kazuo Ishiguro & His Works | Bibliography

1982: A Pale View of the Hills, Kazuo Ishiguro's first novel, won the Winifred Holtby Prize of the Royal Society of Literature, was hailed as "a first novel of uncommon delicacy..., an extremely quiet study of extreme emotional turbulence" by the Times Literary Supplement, and has been translated into 13 languages. Critic Cynthia F. Wong judges A Pale View of Hills, with a first person narrator who tells the story of the suicide of one of her daughters, as an excellent example of Maurice Blanchot's theory that narrators recall and relate past experiences to divest themselves of memories and their past. Like his next two novels, the protagonist of A Pale View of Hills, looks back on his or her life, trying to assess the events that have shaped it. The widow recalls her former life in Nagasaki, and while she never mentions the Bomb, it silently stands behind the events recounted in Ishiguro’s first novel.

“Christopher Banks’s father--a British businessman involved in the opium trade--disappears from the family home in Shanghai, the boy and his friend Akira play at being detectives: ‘Until in the end, after the chases, fist-fights and gun-battles around the warren-like alleys of the Chinese districts, whatever our variations and elaborations, our narratives would always conclude with a magnificent ceremony held in Jessfield Park, a ceremony that would see us, one after another, step out onto a specially erected stage ... to greet the vast cheering crowds.’

“But Christopher's mother also disappears, and he is sent to live in England, where he grows up in the years between the world wars to become, he claims, a famous detective. His family's fate continues to haunt him, however, and he sifts through his memories to try to make sense of his loss. Finally, in the late 1930s, he returns to Shanghai to solve the most important case of his life.  But as Christopher pursues his investigation, the boundaries between fact and fantasy begin to evaporate. Is the Japanese soldier he meets really Akira? Are his parents really being held in a house in the Chinese district? And who is Mr. Grayson, the British official who seems to be planning an important celebration? "My first question, sir, before anything else, is if you're happy with the choice of Jessfield Park for the ceremony? We will, you see, require substantial space.

“In When We Were Orphans Kazuo Ishiguro uses the conventions of crime fiction to create a moving portrait of a troubled mind, and of a man who cannot escape the long shadows cast by childhood trauma. Sherlock Holmes needed only fragments--a muddy shoe, cigarette ash on a sleeve--to make his deductions, but all Christopher has are fading recollections of long-ago events, and for him the truth is much harder to grasp. Ishiguro writes in the first person, but from the beginning there are cracks in Christopher's carefully restrained prose, suggestions that his version of the world may not be the most reliable. Faced with such a narrator, the reader is forced to become a detective too, chasing crumbs of truth through the labyrinth of Christopher's memory.

In an interview published in 1998, Kazuo Ishiguro notes that he first became interested “in words being used in a literary way through [Bob] Dylan” and listening to Dylan’s lyrics (Krider).  Ishiguro wrote songs and played acoustic guitar at first, but then realized that his talents were in “writing short stories,” rather than in writing songs (Krider). 

“In the first two books [that Ishiguro wrote, including A Pale View of Hills], I very much wanted to appeal to the Japanese side of me” (Krider).  But afterwards, the media started casting Ishiguro in the “role as a kind of Japanese foreign correspondent in residence in London.  Newspapers and magazines would call me up because there was a Japanese book to be reviewed or a Japanese issue that I could comment on, and I started to feel very uncomfortable because I knew very little about Japan” (Krider).  Ishiguro left Japan when he was very young.  His family brought him up as Japanese, and “…I understood very deeply how a Japanese family works and about parent/child relationships, marriages, and so on”—“Obviously, I knew more about Japan than just some regular English guy who lived in England, but I probably didn’t know much more than someone who had just developed a keen interest in Japanese culture” (Krider).  Ishiguro says he did some research but mostly “relied on memory” to write his first two novels.  “Over the years, being Japanese, I naturally absorbed a hell of a lot of information about Japan and Japanese history” (Krider).  His wanting to write at all, Ishiguro says, had much to do with his being Japanese:  “…Japan was a very strong place for me because I always believed I would eventually return there, but as it turned out, I never went back.  This very important place called Japan which was a mixture of memory, speculation, and imagination was fading with every year that went by.  I think there was an urgent need for me to get it down on paper before it disappeared altogether” (Krider).

But Ishiguro notes that he was not a survivor of the Nagasaki bombing.  “I’ve always been very conscious that I’m not like Primo Levi who was a prisoner at Auschwitz and then wrote all these books about the Auschwitz experience….someone who actually lived through a crucial period of history, and found a big need to bear witness to it” (Krider).  Though he is careful not to distort history, his first priority is not necessarily “to portray history accurately.  Japan and militarism, now these are big, important questions, and it always made me feel uneasy that my books were being used as a sort of historical text” (Krider).  Of A Pale View of Hills, Ishiguro states:

When I wrote that first novel, I couldn’t quite believe it was going to be published anyway, and I certainly didn’t think beyond the group of people I happened to know.  When [A Pale View of Hills] got published, here it was in the bookstore and I thought, God, anyone could read this.  Then when it started to get translated, there was a mild feeling of panic, and I wanted to reread everything to see how it would look from the point of view of some old lady in Finland or something.  Then having to go around the world and account . . . [for my book] in lots of different cultural contexts—to people in Sweden or people in Japan or wherever—it does kind of remind me that the next time I’m sitting down writing, if I want to continue to be interesting to all these people, I have to write things that are universal.

Annan, G.  "On the High Wire."  New York Review of Books 7 Dec. 1989: 3 (2pp).  EBSCOHOST Academic Search Elite (2000): Article Number: 8912250313.
Abstract: "Reviews three novels by Kazuo Ishiguro, including `The Remains of the Day,' `A Pale View of Hills,' and `An Artist of the Floating World.'"

Bass, Randall (Assistant Professor of English, Georgetown University).  “Kazuo Ishiguro's Life and Works (1954- )”
http://www.stg.brown.edu/projects/hypertext/landow/post/ishiguro/ishiguroov.html
http://www.stg.brown.edu/projects/hypertext/landow/post/ishiguro/kibio.html

---.  “Kazuo Ishiguro: A Timeline”:
http://www.stg.brown.edu/projects/hypertext/landow/post/ishiguro/kichron.html

Bryson, B.  "Between Two Worlds."  New York Times Magazine 29 April 1990: 38 (4pp).  EBSCOHOST Academic Search Elite (2000): Article Number: 9005141790.
Abstract:  "Profiles Japanese-born, London novelist Kazuo Ishiguro. Quiet, spare narrative; Simple life style; Recurring themes of self-deception and devalued ideals; Subjects remote from Ishiguro's own experience; Ishiguro's latest novel `The Remains of the Day' receives high acclaim."

Chira, S.  "A Case of Cultural Misperception."  New York Times 28 Oct. 1989: 13.  EBSCOHOST Academic Search Elite (2000): Article Number: 8911201545.
Abstract: "Profiles novelist Kazuo Ishiguro, 34, who was born in Japan, raised in England, who writes in English and is currently promoting his third novel `The Remains of the Day.'"

"Kazuo Ishiguro." [Interview.]  Writer 114.5 (May 2001): 24 (4pp).  EBSCOHOST Academic Search Elite (2000): Article Number: 4284601 [Full Text Available].  
Abstract: "Interviews Japanese author Kazuo Ishiguro. Personal background on Ishiguro; Depiction of Shanghai, China in his novels; Books that influenced his literary style; Advice to young writers."

Krider, Dylan Otto.  “Rooted in a Small Space: An Interview with Kazuo Ishiguro.”  Kenyon Review 20.2 (Spring 1998): 146(9pp).  Rpt. EBSCOHost Academic Search Elite, Item No. 969781  (29 Nov. 2000). [Full text available]
Abstract:  "Features an interview with Japanese novelist Kazuo Ishiguro about the effect of his British upbringing on his literary works."

"Ishiguro, Kazuo."  Current Biography 51.9 (September 1990): 30 (4pp). EBSCOHOST Academic Search Elite (2000): Article Number: 9012240820.  
Abstract:  "Presents a biography of British writer Kazuo Ishiguro. Booker prize for `The Remains of the Day'; Birth and early years in Japan; Education; `A Pale View of Hills'; More."

Iyer, Pico.  Tropical Classical: Essays from Several Directions."  New York:  A. A. Knopf - Random House, 1997.  [ORBIS: PS3559.Y47 T76 1997]
Includes:  "Waiting upon History": The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro -- A Martian in Mittel Europe": The Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguro.

Jaggi, Maya.  "A Buttoned-Up Writer Breaks Loose."  World Press Review 42.7 (July 1995): 45.  EBSCOHOST Academic Search Elite (2000): Article Number: 9507114735 [Title Held locally].
Abstract:  "Profiles the Japanese writer, Kazuo Ishiguro. Study of the characters in `The Remains of the Day'; Change of the author's evident in the new novel `The Unconsoled'; Interest in how people lie to themselves to make things palatable."

Janik, Del Ivan.  “No End to History: Evidence from the Contemporary English Novel.”  Twentieth Century Literature 41 (Summer 1995): 160 (30pp). Rpt. Infotrac 2000

Lee, H.  "Quiet Desolation."  New Republic 22 Jan 1990: 36 (4pp).  EBSCOHOST Academic Search Elite (2000): Article Number: 9001221965 [Title Held locally].
Abstract:  "Reviews three short novels by Kazuo Ishiguro. `The Remains of the Day'; `An Artist of the Floating World'; `A Pale View of Hills.' Fiction."

Lewis, Barry.  Kazuo Ishiguro.  Contemporary World Writers Series.  Manchester: Manchester University Press; & New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000.  [ORBIS: PR6059.S5 Z641 2000].

Lodge, David.  The Art of Fiction."  New York: Viking 1993.
[The unreliable narrator (Kazuo Ishiguro)]
ORBIS:  PR826 .L63 1993

Mason, Gregory.  "An Interview with Kazuo Ishiguro."  Contemporary Literature 30.3 (Fall 1989): 335 (13pp).  EBSCOHOST Academic Search Elite (2000): Article Number: 5037256.  
Abstract:  "Presents an interview with Kazuo Ishiguro, a novelist in South London, England. Effect of the immigration from Japan to England on the education of Ishiguro; Views on literary tradition; Japanese influences on the style of writing."

McLeod, John Martin.  Rewriting History: Postmodern and Postcolonial Negotiations in the Fiction of J.G. Farrell, Timothy Mo, Kazuo Ishiguro and Salman Rushdie.  Unpublished Thesis [Ph.D.] University of Leeds, 1995.  [ORBIS]

Oyabu, Kana.  Cross-Cultural Fiction: The Novels of Timothy Mo and Kazuo Ishiguro.  Unpublished Thesis [Ph.D.] University of Exeter, 1995.  DX 194951. [ORBIS]

Petry, Mike.  Narratives of Memory and Identity: The Novels of Kazuo Ishiguro.  Frankfurt am Main - New York:  P. Lang, 1999.  
[ORBIS:  PR6059.S5 Z85 1999]

Phillips, Caryl, ed.  Extravagant Strangers: A Literature of Belonging. [Originally published: London : Faber and Faber, 1997.]   New York:  Vintage International, 1999.  [Includes: From The Remains of the Day (1989) / Kazuo Ishiguro.]  [ORBIS]

Raphael, Linda Schermer.  Narrative Skepticism: Moral Agency and Representations of Consciousness in Fiction.  Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press / London: Associated University Presses, 2001.  [ORBIS:  PR830.D53 R37 2001]  
On "Remains of the Day: Skepticism in a First-Person Narrative.

Rothfork, John. Zen Comedy in Commonwealth Literature: Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day (essay) available: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Sparta/6997/mosaic.html

Shaffer, Brian W.  "An Interview with Kazuo Ishiguro."  Contemporary Literature 42.1 (Spring 2001): 1 (14pp). EBSCOHost Academic Search Elite 2000, Article Number: 4421791. [Full Text Available]
Abstract: "Presents an interview with novelist Kazuo Ishiguro concerning the nature of his writings. Representation of orphans in 'The Unconsoled'; Concerns over the relative degree of realism presented in the novel; Definition of nostalgia in Ishiguro's writings; Intertextuality between 'The Unconsoled' and 'When We Were Orphans.'"

---.  Understanding Kazuo Ishiguro.  Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1998.  [ORBIS: PR6059.S5 Z87 1998]
Includes: A Pale View of Hills, An Artist of the Floating World, The Remains of the Day, and The Unconsoled.

Stade, George, and Carol Howard, ed.  British Writers - Supplement IV.  New York:  Charles Scribner's Sons / London: Simon & Schuster and Prentice Hall International, 1997.  [Includes entry for Kazuo Ishiguro.}
ORBIS:  PR85 .B688 Suppl. 4

Steinberg, Sybil.  "Kazuo Ishiguro: 'A Book about Our World.'"  Publishers Weekly 18 Sept. 1995: 105 (2pp).  EBSCOHost Academic Search Elite 2000: Article Number: 9510161663 [Title held locally].
Abstract:  "Features Kazuo Ishiguro and his literary works. Personal background; Writing style; Books. INSET: Kazuo Ishiguro selected bibliography."

Steinberg, Sybil, and Jonathan Bing, ed.  Writing for Your Life #3. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart; and New York: W. W. Norton, 1997. [ORBIS: PN151 .W75 1997]
Includes:  Kazuo Ishiguro.

Walkowitz, Rebecca L.  "Ishiguro's Floating Worlds."  ELH 68.4 (Winter 2001): 1049 (28pp). EBSCOHost Academic Search Elite 2000, Article Number: 5946553.
Abstract: "Presents on interpretations and criticisms on the works of Kazuo Ishiguro, a novelist. Comments on the indirect writing style; Description on the relation between writing and identity; Plot of the 'A Family Supper.'"

Wong, Cynthia F.  Kazuo Ishiguro. Writers and Their Work Series. Tavistock, Devon, U.K.: Northcote House, in association with British Council, 2000.  [ORBIS: PR6059.S5 Z975 2000]

---.  "Like Idealism Is to the Intellect: An Interview with Kazuo Ishiguro." Clio 30.3 (Spring 2001): 309 (17pp). EBSCOHost Academic Search Elite 2000, Article Number: 5587426.
Abstract: "Presents an interview with novelist Kazuo Ishiguro on personal idealism. Family background; Literary accomplishments and awards; Views and principles on the history and literature."

---.  "The Shame of Memory: Blanchot's Self-Possession in Ishiguro's A Pale View of Hills." Clio 24.2 (Winter 1995): 127 (19pp).  EBSCOHost Academic Search Elite 2000, Article Number: 9508223079.
Abstract:  "Focuses on literary theorist Maurice Blanchot's concept of self-dispossession in Kazuo Ishiguro's novel `A Pale View of the Hills.' Features of Blanchot's theory of self-dispossession; Type of narrative strategy employed by Ishiguro; Trends in Ishiguro's novels."

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Source:  Contemporary Authors Online. The Gale Group, 2001.

Source Database:  Contemporary Authors

"Sidelights"

Ishiguro's highly acclaimed first novel, A Pale View of Hills, is narrated by Etsuko, a middle-aged Japanese woman living in England. The suicide of her daughter, Keiko, awakens somber memories of the summer in the 1950s in war-ravaged Nagasaki when the child was born. Etsuko's thoughts and dreams turn particularly to Sachiko, a war widow whose unfortunate relationship with an American lover traumatizes her already troubled daughter, Mariko. Etsuko, too, will eventually embrace the West, and leave her Japanese husband to marry an English journalist. "Etsuko's memories, though they focus on her neighbor's sorrows and follies, clearly refer to herself as well," wrote Edith Milton in the New York Times Book Review. "The lives of the two women run parallel, and Etsuko, like Sachiko, has raised a deeply disturbed daughter; like her, she has turned away from the strangling role of traditional Japanese housewife toward the West, where she has discovered freedom of a sort, but also an odd lack of depth, commitment, and continuity." Surrounded that summer by a new order that has shattered ancient ways, the two women chose the Western path of self-interest, compromising--to varying degrees--their delicate daughters. "In Etsuko's present life as much as in her past, she is circled by a chain of death which has its beginning in the war," suggested New Statesman reviewer James Campbell.

Reviewing A Pale View of Hills in the Spectator, Francis King found the novel "typically Japanese in its compression, its reticence, and in its exclusion of all details not absolutely essential to its theme." While some reviewers agreed with Times Literary Supplement writer Paul Bailey--who stated "that at certain points I could have done with something as crude as a fact"--many felt that Ishiguro's delicate layering of themes and images grants the narrative great evocative power. "[It] is a beautiful and dense novel, gliding from level to level of consciousness," remarked Jonathan Spence in New Society. "Ishiguro develops [his themes] with remarkable insight and skill," concurred Rosemary Roberts in the Los Angeles Times Book Review. "They are described in controlled prose that more often hints than explains or tells. The effect evokes mystery and an aura of menace." And King deemed the novel "a memorable and moving work, its elements of past and present, of Japan and England held together by a shimmering, all but invisible net of images linked to each other by filaments at once tenuous and immensely strong."

------------
Source: See below...

Kazuo Ishiguro's literary reputation was established by three novels published over seven years: A Pale View of Hills won the Royal Society of Literature's Winifred Holtby Prize for the best first novel of 1982; An Artist of the Floating World won the 1986 Whitbread Book of the Year Award, the largest cash prize for literature in Britain; and The Remains of the Day received the 1989 Booker Prize, Britain's highest literary award. As impressive as the prizes he received during that period, however, is Ishiguro's passion for re-creating his art. He distanced himself from the "new internationalism" in British literature, an association prompted in part by the Japanese settings of his first two novels, by focusing his third on that most English of archetypes, the butler. Then, rejecting the mistaken praise for that work's "realism," Ishiguro invented an unquestionably surreal world for his fourth novel, The Unconsoled (1995). These diverse fictions are linked, nonetheless, by the author's consistent interest in narrative unreliability, a technique he has used with great effect in the development of his plots, in the complexity of his characters, and in the manipulation of his readers.

Kazuo Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki, Japan, on 8 November 1954 and moved with his parents to Guilford, Surrey, in 1960, where his father, an oceanographer, was to be temporarily employed by the British government. Though the family left with the expectation of returning to Japan after a year or two, the assignment was repeatedly renewed, until they found themselves settled in England permanently, and Ishiguro's first trip back to Japan came only in 1989.

Ishiguro was educated at the Woking County Grammar School for Boys in Surrey, then studied American literature at the University of Kent, taking an honors degree in English and philosophy in 1978. He found employment as a social worker, first in Glasgow and, after graduating from Kent, in London. While working in London, Ishiguro pursued an interest in fiction by enrolling in the creative- writing program at the University of East Anglia, where he received an M.A. in 1980. Ishiguro continued as a social worker until 1983, a year after the publication of his first novel, when he found he could support himself as a writer of television scripts, and fiction. In 1986 he married Lorna Anne MacDougall; they have a daughter, Naomi, who was born in 1992. He has received honorary degrees from both the University of Kent and the University of East Anglia. In 1995 the Order of the British Empire was conferred on him for "services to literature."

The quantity of Ishiguro's output as a writer has always been modest. When, for example, the editors of Esquire magazine wanted to run a short story by the author for their March 1990 issue, following the success of The Remains of the Day, they eventually settled for "A Family Supper," a seven- year-old piece that had already been published twice before. Ishiguro first appeared in print in the Faber and Faber anthology Introduction 7: Stories by New Writers, (1981) with three stories that were produced for his creative-writing degree. The longest of these, "A Strange and Sometimes Sadness," was developed into his first novel, A Pale View of Hills. During the 1980s Ishiguro completed three relatively short novels--a book every three or four years, each somewhat longer than the previous one. But the critical and popular success of those three works was remarkable: by the end of the decade Ishiguro's fiction had won the most prestigious literary awards in Britain. The wait for The Unconsoled, Ishiguro's fourth novel and almost as long as the first three put together, was six years, and the critical reaction was not nearly as encouraging.

Ishiguro has said that his initial interest in writing fiction was as a way of preserving memories of Japan that were beginning to fade, and he attributes his meteoric rise, in part, to his Japanese name and the Japanese subject matter in his first two novels. His first novel was published a year after Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children won the 1981 Booker Prize and, as Ishiguro recalled in a 1991 Mississippi Review interview, "everyone was suddenly looking for other Rushdies. . . . Usually first novels disappear, as you know, without a trace. Yet I received a lot of attention, got lots of coverage, and did a lot of interviews. I know why this was. It was because I had this Japanese face and this Japanese name and it was what was being covered at the time." But he has also had to deal with assumptions made by numerous critics and readers based solely on his ethnicity. "I often have to battle to speak up for my own individual territory against this kind of stereotyping," Ishiguro said, discussing comparisons between his fiction and Japanese literature. "Now if I wrote under a pseudonym and got somebody else to pose for my color jacket photographs, I'm sure nobody would think of saying, 'This guy reminds me of that Japanese writer.'" Moreover, Ishiguro made it clear that the images of Japan in his early novels were not intended to be historically accurate: "I did very little research. . . . I just invent a Japan which serves my needs. And I put that Japan together out of little scraps, out of memories, out of speculation, out of imagination." Nor was this problem entirely solved by using a European setting for his third and fourth novels, since reviewers such as David Gurewich continued to compare, for example, the narrator's description of the English countryside in The Remains of the Day to the "Japanese criteria for beauty" and his emphasis on ritual, duty, and loyalty to "prominent aspects of the Japanese collective psyche."

In a personal way, however, Ishiguro's early experiences in leaving Japan have, indeed, colored his art. "I had very strong emotional relationships in Japan that were severed at a formative age," he told Maya Jaggi in an interview for The Guardian. "I've only recently become aware that there's this other life I might have had, a whole person I was supposed to become." His first novel deals directly with the results of such a severing, but all of his fictions touch at least indirectly on the "other lives"--imagined, denied, repressed, or projected--of their narrators.

Another consistent element in Ishiguro's first four novels is his fascination with narrative unreliability, which he takes considerably beyond the familiar techniques of writers such as Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford, where the narrators' account of events can be trusted, if not their interpretations or explanations of those events. In his first novel, A Pale View of Hills, for example, Ishiguro's narrator fabricates not only motives but also actions and even characters. In his later fictions Ishiguro's challenge is to surprise the reader with some unanticipated permutation of unreliability, which he achieves through multiple levels of complexity. In An Artist of the Floating World the narrator's unreliability seems to involve his initial denial of wrongdoing in prewar Japan, and only after he has recalled and accepted responsibility for those increasingly reprehensible activities does the reader grasp that the activities themselves never took place. In The Remains of the Day this greater level of complication is achieved through the narrator's memories of two involvements, one a reluctantly revealed romantic relationship and the other an even more guarded political venture, which both transpired at Darlington Hall over the same fourteen-year period. And in The Unconsoled Ishiguro subverts even physical laws by expanding the realm of unreliability from the past to the present in order to make the external world a projection of the narrator's contorted psychology.

FURTHER READINGS ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Interviews:

References:

About this Essay:  D. Mesher, San José State University

Source:  Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 194: British Novelists Since 1960, Second Series. A Bruccoli Clark Layman Book. Edited by Merrit Moseley, University of North Carolina at Asheville. The Gale Group, 1998. pp. 145-153.

Source Database:  Dictionary of Literary Biography