1987: KAZUO ISHIGURO Interview | Bookmark | Writers and Wordsmiths | BBC Archive

"I'm quite keen on England at the moment, it's a peculiar country."

Kazuo Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki, but has lived in England since he was six. His first novels - A Pale View of Hills and An Artist of the Floating World - are both set in Japan, and certain critics have made much of their "Japaneseness". Ishiguro, however, has not returned to Japan since he left, and as such, he feels that the Japan of his novels is largely his own, fantasy idea of Japan, a "mismash of imagination, speculation, memory".

He chats with Ian Hamilton about An Artist of the Floating World, and addresses this idea of an inherent Japaneseness in his writing. Is this just projection on the part of reviewers, due to his name? Aren't many of the qualities considered Japanese in his novels also present and revered in the quintessentially English works of Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte - and indeed in the stoic American heroes of Ernest Hemmingway?

Ishiguro is currently working on a new novel, The Remains of the Day, which will be set entirely in England, with English characters.

Clip taken from Bookmark, originally broadcast on BBC Two, 8 January, 1987.

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