The day after the front-page review of his latest book in the New York Times Book Review had announced Kazuo Ishiguro an important writer, Ishiguro spent a cold, wet, and thus somehow very English evening in a book-lined reading room off a basement café in Seattle. It was his first West Coast stop on a promotional tour. A small crowd of readers waited, curious to see as well as hear this suddenly famous author. There was the name, first of all: not Anglo-Saxon, of course, and exotic enough to make the audience wonder not simply how he came to write novels but indeed English. Was this a Japanese writer writing Japanese novels? An English writer writing English novels? Or some peculiar hybrid of the two?
Before this varied audience appeared a pleasant and unassuming young man as well mannered and groomed as Stevens, the narrator of The Remains of the Day. Like a servant who is careful not to notice his employer's foibles, Ishiguro dealt with the audience's misplaced assumptions as patiently - even warmly - in Seattle as he must everywhere. Dressed in a black pullover sweater and black pants; wearing large silver aviator-style glasses that he adjusted frequently; and speaking in a voice that revealed both his education - the University of Kent - and suburban origins (Guildford, a third of the way from London to Portsmouth), Ishiguro not only read from his new novel but answered the unavoidable queries about his atypical background.
Born in Nagasaki in 1954, Ishiguro was taken to England by his oceanographer father while still a young child. He has not been back to Japan since. He did not grow up in England, as might a Jamaican or Pakistani, in the midst of a community of fellow countrymen who would have instilled in him something of Kingston or Lahore. In fact, the Japanese community in England was once so small that Ishiguro's father - indeed all resident Japanese - were annually invited to the embassy for New Year's celebrations. The result was a Kazuo Ishiguro who lacks familiar, or indeed any, answers to questions of his own ethnicity. As he explained in Seattle, when he gets up in the morning to confront his typewriter, whether he is English or Japanese is not one of the several issues he faces. Or, as he replied with perhaps a hint of exasperation to a persistent admirer, "Yes, I suppose I could give you all the various pieces what make up what I am - but then, what would you do with them?"
Multicultural Background
Kazuo Ishiguro considers himself, succinctly if not simply, a British writer with a multicultural background. As such, he has a great deal of company today. The England he inhabits is quite different from that Stevens knows. The only foreigners who appear in The Remains of the Day are the distinguished Continental notables who Lord Darlington, Stevens' employer before and during World War II, entertains at his country estate; and Mr. Farraday, the wealthy American who acquires Darlington Hall after the war. Ishiguro's milieu, audience, and fellow writers are considerably more cosmopolitan. England's cities, and especially London, now increasingly reflect the aftermath of a defunct multinational empire and the consequences of a thriving multinational economy¨ a multicultural society defined by the diverse diaspora that has created the centers of power in our modern - some say postmodern - world.
Writers such as Ishiguro emerge not quite by chance; they are here to rescue English
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