BIOGRAPHY & SUMMARY, by Aurora Ledesma
Kazuo Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki, Japan, on the 8th of November 1954. He went to live in Great Britain in 1960, when his father began to research at the National Institute of Oceanography, and was educated at a grammar school for boys in Surrey. As a boy, Kazuo enjoyed television, Westerns and spy stories, and wrote easily without entertaining any serious ambition of becoming a writer.
The great creative awakening of his
adolescence came at the age of 13, when he discovered the songs of Bob Dylan.
He spent the next years learning to play guitar, writing songs and studying the
work of Dylan, Cohen... and other singer-songwriters of the time. After
graduating in 1973, he took a year off to travel around the United States and
Canada, and to make the round of record companies with demos of his songs, but
these efforts were unsuccessful.
Although he still planned a career in
music, Ishiguro studied literature and philosophy at the University of Kent in
Canterbury. He was also employed as a community worker in Glasgow (1976), and
after graduating, he moved to London. He supported himself by working in a
homeless shelter in Notting Hill. While working at the shelter, he also met a
young social worker, Lorna MacDougall. They fell in love and married in 1986.
Early novels
Ishiguro went to study creative writing at the University of East
Anglia, in England. He began writing full-time following the success of his
first novel, A Pale View of Hills (1982), which it is a first-person
narrative of a Japanese widow living in England. Ishiguro’s next novel
was An Artist of the Floating World (1986). These two novels
reflected on life and culture in post-World War II in Japan. However, for his
next novel, he wanted to write for an international audience. So he chose an
iconic British character known throughout the world: the English butler. The
themes of guilt and regret are seen in the butler’s lost chance for love
in The Remains of the Day (1989). This novel won the Booker Prize for
fiction (1989), a prize dedicated to the best novel published in the United
Kingdom and written in English. The novel was adapted to a film in 1993, starring Anthony
Hopkins and Emma Thompson.
Later Work
Ishiguro continued to experiment with different genres and styles
in his subsequent novels, The Unconsoled (1995) and When We Were
Orphans (2000). Taking the leap to science fiction, Ishiguro wrote a tale
about genetic engineering and human cloning in Never Let Me Go (2005).
Although he’s best known for his novels, Ishiguro has also published a
collection of short stories, Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall
(2009), and several screenplays, as The White Countess (2005).
His most recent book, The Summer We Crossed Europe in The Rain
(March 2024), is a collection of lyrics written for the jazz singer Stacey
Kent. Ishiguro and Kent have been friends and collaborators for a long time,
and he wrote lyrics for a handful of songs on Kent’s Breakfast on the
Morning Tram.
Ishiguro has won many
awards, perhaps most notably the 2017 Nobel Prize for Literature. Now he is a
British citizen and lives in London with his wife and his daughter Naomi, who
is also an author and published the book Escape Routes.
SUMMARY
This is the story of a Japanese family.
The protagonist is a young man who returns to Tokyo from California to visit
his father and his sister, Kikuko. At the beginning, the protagonist describes
“Fugu”, a type of poisonous fish and its dangerous properties, if you don’t
prepare it correctly. He tells us how his mother died two years ago because she
ate “Fugu” prepared by a friend. When his mother died, he was living in
California and he didn’t attend the funeral.
The son’s father picks him up from the airport and tells him the circumstances in which his mother died. His father is a very intimidating man, and he is proud of the pure samurai blood that runs in his family. He is a man who values a traditional family and is very strict. He and his son don’t have a good relationship; for this reason, the son did not return to his country until two years after his mother’s death. While they are waiting for the arrival of Kikuko, they talk a little about his father’s business partner, Watanaba, who killed himself and his family after the firm’s collapse, because he didn’t wish to live with the disgrace.
Soon after, Kikuko arrives. She is a student in Osaka. Despite the fact that the brother is much older, the siblings had always been close. They decide to go for a walk in the garden, while their father prepares the supper. Kikuko smokes a cigarette and tells him about her boyfriend and his plans for them to hitch-hike in America; she also tells him that their mother always blamed herself for him leaving Japan, that she thought she hadn’t raised him correctly. They have an open conversation, talking about their lives, childhood and recalling events like when he thought there was a ghost living in the garden near the well.
After this, the father calls Kikuko
into the kitchen and tells her to help him with the final preparations of the
supper. Then the father takes his son to another room to discuss his regrets
about how he raised his children and how he should have been a more attentive
father.
When the food is ready, the father
encourages the son to eat a lot of the fish that he and Kikuko have prepared.
During the meal, the son discovers a photograph on the wall with an old woman
in a white kimono. His father reveals that it’s their mother, who resembles the
ghost he used to see when he was younger. After the meal, Kikuko prepares some
tea while the son and his father speak about the son’s future plans.
The story ends with a peaceful supper and
a serious dialogue. The father expresses his hope that his children will come
back home to live with him.
Some
Reflections
It is possible that the father has made a
decision: to repeat his partner’s actions. Perhaps he realizes that he could no
longer manage the situation and decides to commit a form of suicide, and his
children don’t know anything about it.
I think
that the author wants to show how rebellion is an escape from social
conventions and family expectations. Japanese culture puts a lot of pressure on
children. They are usually raised very strictly, and we begin to understand why
the protagonist left Japan and his family. Now his younger sister intends to do
the same as her brother did in the past.
QUESTIONS
-What
do you know about the poisonous fish “aranya” they fish in Blanes?
-What
do you think it happened to the protagonist’s mother?
-What
is it for you, the “honour”? Was Watanabe a man of principle? What is your
opinion of the celebrated sentence “Those are my principles, and if you don’t
like them... well, I have others.”?
-In
your view, what was the ghost in the well or in the garden?
-According to your opinion, why
did the son go back to Japan?
-What
is the meaning of the mother’s picture in the story?
-What
do you think it’s going to happen after supper? Why?
VOCABULARY
gutting,
haunted, swayed, giggle