Roll over Bob Dylan, it’s time to raise a toast to Ishiguro’s Nobel

When the BBC contacted him after he won the Nobel Prize for literature for 2017, Kazuo Ishiguro said he wasn’t sure whether it was a hoax. He hadn’t received the communication from the Swedish Academy. Though highly acclaimed from the very start of his career for sensitive, intriguingly crafted, sometimes obscure tales in which much of the meaning lies beneath the surface, Ishiguro is rather modest and self-effacing. He responded to the news of the award with “genuine shock”, finding it “flabbergastingly flattering.” With his special kind of irony and wit, he quipped, “If I had even a suspicion, I would have washed my hair this morning.”

Born in Nagasaki in 1954, ten years after the city was destroyed by nuclear bombs, Ishiguro moved to Britain at the age of six when his father got a research position at the National Institute of Oceanography in Guildford, Surrey. When he was young, he wanted to be a musician and actually sent demo tapes to record companies after high school, taking a gap year after school to travel through the US and Canada. Not surprisingly, music has remained important to him throughout his writing career spanning over 35 years.

Dedicated to his first love, music, one of his lesser-known books is Nocturnes (2009), a collection of five short stories appearing after six earlier novels. Each of these end-of-the-day stories is about music and musicians, delicately evoking and mingling some of his pet themes and devices. The passing of time, fading of love, sense of regret — all conveyed through unreliable male narrators who are outsiders. But music also played such a big role in fashioning the end of his most praised novel, The Remains of the Day (1989).

Ishiguro retreated to a secret hideout, what he and his wife Lorna called a ‘crash’. There he shut himself up to write from 9:30 in the morning to 10:30 at night, with only three hours off for meals. That he actually wrote the novel in these four weeks of frenetic creativity is the stuff of which legends are made. But after he thought he’d finished the novel, he heard Tom Waits’ Ruby’s Arms. In it a soldier is departing on a train leaving his ladylove behind. Though tough and stoical, the man finally declares that his heart is breaking.

Ishiguro found “the tension between the sentiment itself and the huge resistance that’s obviously been overcome to utter it… unbearably moving” as Tom Waits “sings the line with cathartic magnificence, and you feel a lifetime of tough-guy stoicism crumbling in the face of overwhelming sadness.” Ishiguro reversed his decision that his main character, the butler, Mr Stevens, “would remain emotionally buttoned up right to the bitter end”. Instead, “his rigid defence would crack, and a hitherto concealed tragic romanticism would be glimpsed.” It was this decision that possibly made Remains a masterpiece, not only winning him a Booker Prize, but also worldwide renown from its 8 Academy awards nominated Merchant-Ivory adaptation, starring Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson.

I always thought it rather ironic, as well as moving, that this quintessential novel about what it means to be British was actually written by an outsider, someone born elsewhere, whose mother-tongue was not even English. It makes us ponder on how ‘Britishness’ might be as much a literary-cultural construct as a reality. Darlington Hall, the great country estate that Stevens serves so faithfully, is an allegory of the British Empire itself, hollowed out from within, doomed to expire, and bought over by the Americans in the end. But rather than class, reserve, or loyalty, what is truly exceptional about the British is the language they gave the world, which, despite or because of its colonial past, remains the most hospitable to outsiders. No wonder, it also attracts and demonstrates talent — of the 114 winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature since its foundation in 1901, 29 or over 25 per cent write in English.

Of these, one of the greatest, Salman Rushdie, was one of the first to toast Ishiguro: “Many congratulations to my old friend Ish, whose work I’ve loved and admired ever since I first read A Pale View of Hills. And he plays the guitar and writes songs too! Roll over Bob Dylan.” Ishiguro, with characteristic generosity, had actually named Rushdie among notables such as Murakami and Atwood as equally or more deserving: “Part of me feels like an imposter, and part of me feels bad that I’ve got this before other living writers… wow, this is a bit of a cheek for me to have been given this before them.” Nothing buttoned-up there, but no reason as yet for Rushdie to be “unconsoled” at the remains of this day. He still has time.

The author is a poet and professor at JNU.
Views expressed are personal.