Kazuo Ishiguro in 2017. Photograph by Frankie Fouganthin, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Each week, The Paris Review unlocks stories, poems, and interviews from our archive for our readers. This week, we’ve unlocked Kazuo Ishiguro’s Art of Fiction interview, selected from the archive by Angie Sijun Lou, whose story “Bubble” appears in our recent Fall issue.

The first book I tried to read by Kazuo Ishiguro was The Remains of the Day. I was disturbed by how convincingly Ishiguro adopts the voice of a midcentury English butler: politely deferential, with tediously long descriptions of his pleasant, unremarkable days. Stevens’s curated inner life made him feel like a mirage of a person.

Years later, a friend lent me his copy of The Unconsoled, a five-hundred-page anxiety dream about a pianist, Ryder, who travels to a quasi-mystical town to play a career-defining concert only to be stymied by a web of endless errands. Ryder is asked to mediate feuds between people he barely knows and gets lost every time he leaves his hotel, perpetually failing to rehearse for his recital as he navigates an elusive and shifting schedule of appointments. Many critics panned the book as among the worst they’d ever read, but I was obsessed with its sense of refusal. “It’s never my intention to be willfully obscure,” Ishiguro tells Susannah Hunnewell in his Art of Fiction interview. “The novel was as clear as I could make it.”

What I couldn’t stand in The Remains of the Day was exactly what I loved about The Unconsoled: too often a writer creates a character who is a tepid translation of themselves, but Kazuo Ishiguro inhabits his characters as if there were no true Kazuo Ishiguro to be known. It comes as no surprise, reading the interview, that he has lived several lives. After he failed to become a musician, he hitchhiked up the Pacific Coast Highway and train-hopped from Washington to Montana, living on a dollar a day. He has worked as a baby-food packager and a grouse beater for the Queen Mother, a job in which he marched through the moorlands at Balmoral Castle, flushing birds from the heather to be shot.

His work shifts chameleonically across genre, time, and space. Klara and the Sun takes place in an undefined future, and The Buried Giant in post-Arthurian Britain. His settings might be elastic, but his characters fall prey to the same flimsy and enduring fiction: that we have agency over our fates. “In so many of your novels, the main character seems tragically to miss his or her chance at love by seconds,” Hunnewell says. “I don’t know if they miss it by seconds,” Ishiguro responds. “In a way they’ve missed it by miles.”

INTERVIEW
The Art of Fiction No. 196
Kazuo Ishiguro

INTERVIEWER

How did the English setting come about for The Remains of the Day?

ISHIGURO

It started with a joke that my wife made. There was a journalist coming to interview me for my first novel. And my wife said, Wouldn’t it be funny if this person came in to ask you these serious, solemn questions about your novel and you pretended that you were my butler? We thought this was a very amusing idea. From then on I became obsessed with the butler as a metaphor.

From issue no. 184 (Spring 2008)

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Angie Sijun Lou’s stories have appeared in BOMB, ZYZZYVA, Joyland, and  Fence. She is at work on a novel.