The man who wrote The Remains of the Day in the pitch-perfect voice of an English butler is himself very polite. After greeting me at the door of his home in London’s Golders Green, he immediately offered to make me tea, though to judge from his lack of assurance over the choice in his cupboard he is not a regular four P.M. Assam drinker. When I arrived for our second visit, the tea things were already laid out in the informal den. He patiently began recounting the details of his life, always with an amused tolerance for his younger self, especially the guitar-playing hippie who wrote his college essays using disembodied phrases separated by full stops. “This was encouraged by professors,” he recalled. “Apart from one very conservative lecturer from Africa. But he was very polite. He would say, Mr. Ishiguro, there is a problem about your style. If you reproduced this on the examination, I would have to give you a less-than-satisfactory grade.”

Kazuo Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki in 1954 and moved with his family to the small town of Guildford, in southern England, when he was five. He didn’t return to Japan for twenty-nine years. (His Japanese, he says, is “awful.”) At twenty-seven he published his first novel, A Pale View of Hills (1982), set largely in Nagasaki, to near unanimous praise. His second novel, An Artist of the Floating World (1986), won Britain’s prestigious Whitbread award. And his third, The Remains of the Day (1989), sealed his international fame. It sold more than a million copies in English, won the Booker Prize, and was made into a Merchant Ivory movie starring Anthony Hopkins, with a screenplay by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. (An earlier script by Harold Pinter, Ishiguro recalls, featured “a lot of game being chopped up on kitchen boards.”) Ishiguro was named an Officer of the Order of the British Empire and, for a while, his portrait hung at 10 Downing Street. Defying consecration, he surprised readers with his next novel, The Unconsoled (1995), more than five hundred pages of what appeared to be stream-of-consciousness. Some baffled critics savaged it; James Wood wrote that “it invents its own category of badness.” But others came passionately to its defense, including Anita Brookner, who overcame her initial doubts to call it “almost certainly a masterpiece.” The author of two more acclaimed novels—When We Were Orphans (2000) and Never Let Me Go (2005)—Ishiguro has also written screenplays and teleplays, and he composes lyrics, most recently for the jazz chanteuse Stacey Kent. Their collaborative CD, Breakfast on the Morning Tram, was a best-selling jazz album in France.

In the pleasant white stucco house where Ishiguro lives with his sixteen-year-old daughter, Naomi, and his wife, Lorna, a former social worker, there are three gleaming electric guitars and a state-of-the-art stereo system. The small office upstairs where Ishiguro writes is custom designed in floor-to-ceiling blond wood with rows of color-coded binders neatly stacked in cubbyholes. Copies of his novels in Polish, Italian, Malaysian, and other languages line one wall. On the other are books for research—for example, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 by Tony Judt and Managing Hotels Effectively by Eddystone C. Nebel III.   

INTERVIEWER

You had success with your fiction right from the start—but was there any writing from your youth that never got published?

KAZUO ISHIGURO

After university, when I was working with homeless people in west London, I wrote a half-hour radio play and sent it to the BBC. It was rejected but I got an encouraging response. It was kind of in bad taste, but it’s the first piece of juvenilia I wouldn’t mind other people seeing. It was called “Potatoes and Lovers.” When I submitted the manuscript, I spelled potatoes incorrectly, so it said potatos. It was about two young people who work in a fish-and-chips café. They are both severely cross-eyed, and they fall in love with each other, but they never acknowledge the fact that they’re cross-eyed. It’s the unspoken thing between them. At the end of the story they decide not to marry, after the narrator has a strange dream where he sees a family coming toward him on the seaside pier. The parents are cross-eyed, the children are cross-eyed, the dog is cross-eyed, and he says, All right, we’re not going to marry.

INTERVIEWER

What possessed you to write that story?

ISHIGURO

This was a time when I was starting to think about what my career was going to be. I’d failed to make it as a musician. I’d had lots of appointments with A&R people. After two seconds, they’d say, It’s not going to happen, man. So I thought I’d have a go at a radio play. 

Then, almost by accident, I came across a little advertisement for a creative-writing M.A. taught by Malcolm Bradbury at the University of East Anglia. Today it’s a famous course, but in those days it was a laughable idea, alarmingly American. I discovered subsequently that it hadn’t run the previous year because not enough people had applied. Somebody told me Ian McEwan had done it a decade before. I thought he was the most exciting young writer around at that point. But the primary attraction was that I could go back to university for a year, fully funded by the government, and at the end I would only have to submit a thirty-page work of fiction. I sent the radio play to Malcolm Bradbury along with my application. 

I was slightly taken aback when I was accepted, because it suddenly became real. I thought, these writers are going to scrutinize my work and it’s going to be humiliating. Somebody told me about a cottage for rent in the middle of nowhere in Cornwall that had previously been used as a rehabilitation place for drug addicts. I called up and said, I need a place for one month because I’ve got to teach myself to write. And that’s what I did that summer of 1979. It was the first time I really thought about the structure of a short story. I spent ages figuring out things like viewpoint, how you tell the story, and so on. At the end I had two stories to show, so I felt more secure.

INTERVIEWER

Was it during that year at East Anglia that you first wrote about Japan?

ISHIGURO

Yes. I discovered that my imagination came alive when I moved away from the immediate world around me. When I tried to start a story: “I came out of Camden Town tube station and went into McDonald’s and there was my friend Harry from university,” I couldn’t think of what to write next. Whereas when I wrote about Japan, something unlocked. One of the stories I showed the class was set in Nagasaki at the time the bomb dropped, and it was told from the point of view of a young woman. I got a tremendous boost to my confidence from my fellow students. They all said, This Japanese stuff is really very exciting, and you’re going places. Then I got a letter from Faber accepting three stories for their Introduction series, which had an excellent track record. I knew that Tom Stoppard and Ted Hughes had been discovered like this.  

INTERVIEWER

Is that when you began writing A Pale View of Hills? 

ISHIGURO

Yes, and Robert McCrum at Faber gave me my first advance so that I could finish it. I had started a story set in a Cornish town about a young woman with a disturbed child, who had a murky background. I had it in my mind that this woman would alternate between saying, I’m going to devote myself to the child, and, I’ve fallen in love with this man and this child is a nuisance. I’d met many people like this when I was working with the homeless. But when I got this tremendous response to the Japanese short story from my classmates, I went back and looked at the story set in Cornwall. I realized that if I told this story in terms of Japan, everything that looked parochial and small would reverberate.

INTERVIEWER

You hadn’t been back to Japan since you were five, but how typically Japanese were your parents?

ISHIGURO

My mother’s very much a Japanese lady of her generation. She has a certain kind of manners—prefeminist Japanese by today’s standards. When I see old Japanese movies, I recognize a lot of the women behaving and speaking exactly like my mother does. Japanese women traditionally used a slightly different formal language from men, and these days that’s gotten much more mixed up. When my mother visited Japan in the eighties, she said she was stunned that young girls were using male language. 

My mother was in Nagasaki when the atomic bomb was dropped. She was in her late teens. Her house got kind of distorted, and only when it rained did they realize the extent of the damage. The roof started leaking all over the place, like a tornado had hit it. As it happened, my mother was the only one in her family—four siblings, two parents—who suffered an injury when the bomb dropped. A flying piece of debris hit her. She was at home recovering when the rest of her family went off to other parts of the city to help. But she says that when she thinks of the war, the atomic bomb wasn’t what frightened her most. She remembers being in an underground air-raid shelter in the factory where she worked. They were all lined up in the dark and the bombs were landing right on top of them. They thought they were going to die. 

My father wasn’t typically Japanese at all because he grew up in Shanghai. He had a Chinese characteristic, which was that when something bad happened, he smiled.

INTERVIEWER

Why did your family move to England? 

ISHIGURO

Initially it was only going to be a short trip. My father was an oceanographer, and the head of the British National Institute of Oceanography invited him over to pursue an invention of his, to do with storm-surge movements. I never quite discovered what it was. The National Institute of Oceanography was set up during the cold war, and there was an air of secrecy about it. My father went to this place in the middle of the woods. I only went to visit it once.

INTERVIEWER

How did you feel about the move?

ISHIGURO

I don’t think I understood the implication of it. My grandfather and I had been to a department store in Nagasaki to buy this great toy: there was a picture of a hen, and you had a gun, and you fired at the hen. If you hit the right part, an egg would drop out. But I wasn’t allowed to take the toy with me. That was the main thing I was disappointed about. The journey took three days on a BOAC jet. I remember trying to sleep on a chair and people bringing grapefruit around and waking me up every time the plane stopped for refueling. I was nineteen before I got on a plane again.

I don’t remember being unhappy at all in England, though. Had I been older, I think it would have been much more difficult. And I don’t remember struggling with the language either, although I never had lessons. I loved cowboy films and TV series, and I learned bits of English from them. My favorite was Laramie, with Robert Fuller and John Smith. I used to watch The Lone Ranger, which had been famous in Japan as well. I idolized these cowboys. They’d say sure instead of yes. And my teacher would say, Kazuo, what do you mean by sure? I had to figure out that the way the Lone Ranger spoke was different from the way the choirmaster spoke. 

INTERVIEWER

What did you think of Guildford?

ISHIGURO

We arrived at Easter time, and my mother was taken aback by what seemed to be gory, sadistic images of this man nailed to a cross, bleeding. And these images were being shown to children! If you look at it from a Japanese point of view, or even a Martian’s point of view, it looks almost savage. My parents were not Christians. They did not believe that Jesus Christ was a god. But they were very polite about it, of course, in much the same way you would respect the customs of a strange tribe if you were their guest. 

To me, Guildford looked completely different. It was rural and austere and quite monochrome—very green. And there were no toys. In Japan, everything’s dizzy with images, you know, wires everywhere. It was quiet in Guildford. I remember being taken by this nice English lady, Auntie Molly, to buy some ice cream in a shop. I’d never seen a shop quite like it. It was so blank, just one person behind a counter. And the double-decker buses. I remember going on one of those during the first few days. It was quite a thrill. When you ride in those buses in narrow streets, it feels like you’re riding up on the hedges. I remember associating this fact with hedgehogs. Do you know what a hedgehog is?

INTERVIEWER

The quintessential English rodent?

ISHIGURO

You’ll never see one these days, even in the country. I think they’ve become quite extinct. But they were everywhere where we lived. They look like porcupines, except they’re not vicious. They’re sweet little creatures. They would come out at night and typically they’d get run over. You’d see this little thing with prickles, and innards bubbling around the outside, neatly swept into the gutter at the side of the road. I remember being puzzled by this. I saw these flattened, dead things, and I associated them with the buses that ran so close to the pavement.

INTERVIEWER

Did you read much as a child? 

ISHIGURO

Just before I left Japan, this superhero called Gekko Kamen was very popular. I used to stand in bookshops and try to memorize images from his adventures in illustrated children’s books, and then I would go home and draw my own. I’d get my mother to stitch my pages together so they’d look like a proper book.

As a child in Guildford, though, probably the only English things I read were Look and Learn comics. They’re educational books for British children, dull articles about how you get electricity and so on. I didn’t like them. Compared to the stuff I was being sent from my grandfather in Japan, they were rather colorless. There’s a particular Japanese series that I think still exists, a much livelier version of Look and Learn. It’s a big digest, and some of it is just pure entertainment, comic strip and prose with colorful illustrations. All kinds of learning aids would fall out when you opened it. 

Through these books I became aware of characters who’d become famous in Japan after I left, like the Japanese version of James Bond. He was called James Bond but he had little resemblance to either Ian Fleming’s or Sean Connery’s James Bond. He was a manga character. I thought him quite interesting. In the respectable British middle classes, James Bond was seen as representing everything that was wrong about modern society. The movies were disgusting—foul language was used. Bond had no morals because he would beat up people in a way that wasn’t gentlemanly, and there were all these girls in bikinis with whom he was presumably having sex. To see the movies as a child, you had first to find an adult who didn’t think James Bond was corroding civilization. But in Japan he appeared in this educational, approved context, so that showed me that the attitudes were very different.

INTERVIEWER

Did you do any writing at school?

ISHIGURO

Yes. I went to the local state primary school where they were experimenting with modern teaching methods. It was the mid-sixties, and my school rather complacently had no defined lessons. You could muck about with manual calculating machines, or you could make a cow out of clay, or you could write stories. This was a favorite activity because it was sociable. You wrote a bit, then you read each other’s things, and you read out loud. 

I created a character called Mr. Senior, which was the name of my friend’s scoutmaster. I thought this was a really cool name for a spy. I got into Sherlock Holmes around then in a big way. I’d do a pastiche of a Victorian detective story that began with a client arriving and telling a long story. But a lot of the energy went into decorating our books to look exactly like the paperbacks we saw in the shops—drawing bullet holes on the front and putting quotations from newspapers on the back. “Brilliant, chilling tension.” —Daily Mirror.

INTERVIEWER

Do you think the experience affected you as a writer?

ISHIGURO

It was good fun, and it made me think of stories as effortless things. I think that stayed with me. I’ve never been intimidated by the idea of having to make up a story. It’s always been a relatively easy thing that people did in a relaxed environment. 

INTERVIEWER

What was your next obsession, after detective stories?

ISHIGURO

Rock music. After Sherlock Holmes, I stopped reading until my early twenties. But I’d played the piano since I was five. I started playing the guitar when I was fifteen, and I started listening to pop records—pretty awful pop records—when I was about eleven. I thought they were wonderful. The first record that I really liked was Tom Jones singing “The Green, Green Grass of Home.” Tom Jones is a Welshman, but “The Green, Green Grass of Home” is a cowboy song. He was singing songs about the cowboy world I knew from TV. 

I had a miniature Sony reel-to-reel that my father brought me from Japan, and I would tape directly from the speaker of the radio, an early form of downloading music. I would try to work out the words from this very bad recording with buzzes. Then when I was thirteen, I bought John Wesley Harding, which was my first Dylan album, right when it came out. 

INTERVIEWER

What did you like about it?

ISHIGURO

The words. Bob Dylan was a great lyricist, I knew that straightaway. Two things that I was always confident about, even in those days, were what was a good lyric and what was a good cowboy film. With Dylan, I suppose it was my first contact with stream-of-consciousness or surreal lyrics. And I discovered Leonard Cohen, who had a literary approach to lyrics. He had published two novels and a few volumes of poetry. For a Jewish guy, his imagery was very Catholic. Lot of saints and Madonnas. He was like a French chanteur. I liked the idea that a musician could be utterly self-sufficient. You write the songs yourself, sing them yourself, orchestrate them yourself. I found this appealing, and I began to write songs.

INTERVIEWER

What was your first song?

ISHIGURO

It was like a Leonard Cohen song. I think the opening line was, “Will your eyes never reopen, on the shore where we once lived and played.” 

INTERVIEWER

Was it a love song?

ISHIGURO

Part of the appeal of Dylan and Cohen was that you didn’t know what the songs were about. You’re struggling to express yourself, but you’re always being confronted with things you don’t fully understand and you have to pretend to understand them. That’s what life is like a lot of the time when you’re young, and you’re ashamed to admit it. Somehow, their lyrics seem to embody this state. 

INTERVIEWER

When you finally got on a plane again, at age nineteen, where did you go?

ISHIGURO

I went to America. That was my ambition from quite early on. I was obsessed with American culture. I saved up money working at a baby products company. I packed baby food and checked 8mm films with names like “Quads Are Born” and “Caesarean” for damages. In April of 1974, I got on a Canadian plane, which was the cheapest way to get over there. I landed in Vancouver and crossed the border by Greyhound in the middle of the night. I was in the United States for three months, traveling on a dollar a day. At that time, everyone had a romantic attitude toward these things. You had to figure out where you were going to sleep, or “crash,” each night. There was a whole network of young people hitchhiking along the West Coast. 

INTERVIEWER

Were you a hippie?

ISHIGURO

I suppose I was, at least superficially. Long hair, mustache, guitar, rucksack. Ironically, we all thought we were very individual. I hitchhiked up the Pacific Coast Highway, through Los Angeles, San Francisco, and all over northern California. 

INTERVIEWER

What did you think of the whole experience? 

ISHIGURO

It more than fulfilled my expectations. Some of it was nerve-racking. I rode a freight train from Washington state across Idaho to Montana. I was with a guy from Minnesota, and we’d spent the night in a mission. It was a pretty sleazy place. You had to strip at the door and enter a shower with all these winos. You tiptoed your way through black puddles, and at the other end they gave you laundered nightclothes and you slept in bunks. The next morning, we went to the freight yard with these old-fashioned hobo types. They had nothing to do with the hitchhiking culture, which mostly consisted of middle-class student types and runaways. These guys traveled by freight, and they went from skid row to skid row in different cities. They lived by donating blood. They were alcoholics. They were poor and sick, and they looked awful. There was nothing romantic about them at all. But they gave us a lot of good advice. They told us, Don’t try to jump the train when it’s moving, because you’ll die. If anyone tries to get on your boxcar, just throw them off. It doesn’t matter if you think it might kill them. They’ll want to steal something and you’re stuck with them until the train stops. If you go to sleep, you’ll be flung out just because you’ve got fifty dollars. 

INTERVIEWER

Did you ever write about this trip? 

ISHIGURO

I was keeping a diary, in this kind of pastiche Kerouac prose. Every day I would write what happened: Day 36. Met so-and-so. We did this. When I got home, I took these thick diaries and sat down and wrote out two of the episodes, in depth, using a first-person narrator. One was about the time my guitar was stolen in San Francisco. That’s the first time I started thinking of a structure. But I’d adopted this strange transatlantic twang in my prose, and because I’m not American, it sounded phony. 

INTERVIEWER

Like your cowboy phase?

ISHIGURO

There was an echo of that. There was something cool to me about the American accent. And words like freeway instead of motorway. I loved to be able to say with impunity, How far is it to the freeway? 

INTERVIEWER

It seems as if there was this pattern throughout your youth: you idolize something and then you mimic it. First with Sherlock Holmes, then Leonard Cohen, and then Kerouac.

ISHIGURO

When you’re an adolescent, that’s how you learn. Songwriting was actually one area where I appreciated that I had to do more than imitate. If my friends and I walked past somebody who was playing the guitar and sounding like Bob Dylan, we had utter contempt for him. It was all about finding your own voice. My friends and I were very conscious of the fact that we were British, and we couldn’t authentically write American-type songs. When you said “on the road,” you imagined Highway 61, not the M6. The challenge was to get an equivalent sound that felt authentically English. Being stuck on some lonely road in the drizzle, but by some gray roundabout on the Scottish border with the fog coming in, rather than in a Cadillac on a legendary freeway in America. 

INTERVIEWER

It says in your biographies that you were a grouse beater. Please explain.

ISHIGURO

My first summer after leaving school I worked for the Queen Mother at Balmoral Castle, where the royal family spend their summer holidays. In those days they used to recruit local students to be grouse beaters. The royal family would invite people to shoot on their estate. The Queen Mother and her guests would get into Land Rovers with shotguns and whiskey and drive over bits of the moor from shooting butt to shooting butt. That’s where they would aim and shoot. Fifteen of us would walk in formation across the moor, spaced about a hundred yards apart in the heather. The grouse live in the heather, and they hear us coming, and they hop. By the time we arrive at the butts, all of the grouse in the vicinity have accumulated and the Queen Mum and her friends are waiting with shotguns. Around the butts there’s no heather, so the grouse have got no choice but to fly up. Then the shooting starts. And then we walk to the next butt. It’s a bit like golf.

INTERVIEWER

Did you meet the Queen Mother?

ISHIGURO

Yes, quite regularly. Once she came round to our quarters, frighteningly, when there was only me and this other girl there. We didn’t know what on earth to do. We had a little chat, and she drove off again. But it was very informal. You’d often see her on the moors, though she herself didn’t shoot. I think there was a lot of alcohol consumed and it was all very chummy. 

INTERVIEWER

Was that the first time you were in a world like that?

ISHIGURO

It was the last time I was in a world like that.

INTERVIEWER

What did you make of it?

ISHIGURO

I thought it was interesting. But more fascinating was the world of the people who ran those estates, the gillies. They spoke in a Scottish dialect that none of us—including the Scottish students—could understand. They knew the moors very, very well. They were tough characters. And they were deferential toward us because we were students—until the actual grouse-shoot started. It was their job to keep us in absolute formation. If any of us went out of line, there was a chance that the grouse would escape. So they’d turn into these mad sergeant majors. They’d stand up on the cliff and curse at us in this strange Scottish, just absolutely scream their heads off—You bloody bastard! Then they’d come down off the cliff and be utterly polite and deferential again. 

INTERVIEWER

What were your university years like?

ISHIGURO

I studied English and philosophy at the University of Kent. But I found university dull compared to the year that had taken me from the royal family to freight trains via baby-product packaging. After a year, I decided to take another year out. I went to a place called Renfrew, near Glasgow, for six months to volunteer as a community worker on a housing estate. I was completely at sea when I first arrived. I’d grown up in a very middle-class environment in southern England, and this was the industrial Scottish heartland at a time of declining manufacturing. Typically these little housing estates, which were really no more than two streets, divided themselves into enemy factions that hated each other. There was a tension between the third-generation people who’d been living in the area and the families who’d suddenly arrive having been evicted from some other estate. Politics was very much alive there, but it was real politics. It was a different planet from student politics, which tended to be about whether or not you were going to protest the latest NATO move. 

INTERVIEWER

What impact did this experience have on you?

ISHIGURO

I grew up a lot. I stopped being this person who whizzed around at a hundred miles an hour saying that everything was “far out.” When I was traveling around America, the third question, after “What bands are you into?” and “Where are you from?” was “What do you think is the meaning of life?” Then you’d exchange views and weird quasi-Buddhist meditation techniques. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was being passed around. No one really read it, but it was a cool name. When I came back from Scotland, I’d grown out of that. I’d seen a world where that kind of thing meant nothing. These were people who were struggling. There was a lot of drink and drugs. Some people were going about things with real courage, but it was quite easy just to give up.