You know, usually when we talk about the great
masters of literature, there's this expectation
of a very specific, almost preordained path.
Oh, totally, like they're born with a quill in
their hand. Right. You picture them locked in
a dusty library from birth, studying the classics,
just being groomed by professors for literary
greatness. But what if I told you that one of
the most celebrated, critically acclaimed contemporary
fiction authors in the English language didn't
actually start out wanting to write books at
all? Yeah, it completely upends that whole traditional
image we have. It really does. Because what if
I told you he basically just wanted to be like...
the next Bob Dylan. And he spent time working
as a gross beater at Balmoral Castle and then
kind of accidentally stumbled his way into a
Nobel Prize. I mean, we expect our literary giants
to be these solemn academics from day one, not
kids trying to hustle their way into the music
industry. Exactly. Well, welcome to today's Deep
Dive. We've got a really fascinating stack of
sources in front of us today. Articles, interviews,
biographical beta, literary critiques, and it's
all centered on the life. the mind and the incredibly
unique style of Sir Kazuo Ishiguro. It's going
to be a good one. It is. Our mission today is
to figure out exactly how he creates such massive
emotional impact in his work. We're going to
explore what his life tells us about memory.
about the nature of truth and what he actually
thinks about the future of human emotion in our
increasingly automated world. Which is a huge
topic right now. It is. OK, let's unpack this.
Because to really understand his unique perspective,
we have to start with how geographically and
culturally displaced he was at a very young age.
Yeah, that displacement is basically the skeleton
key to his entire body of work. So he was born
in Nagasaki, Japan in 1954, but his family didn't
stay there. Right. In 1960, when he was just
five years old, His father, who was a physical
oceanographer, was invited to do research at
what is now the National Oceanography Center
in the UK, so the whole family moves to Guildford
Surrey. who has spent his formative, highly impressionable
early years completely immersed in Japanese language
and culture, and he has suddenly just dropped
into a very traditional, leafy English environment.
Exactly, a massive culture shock. And the detail
from the sources that really caught my eye here
is that he didn't return to Japan for almost
30 years. Like, not a single visit until 1989.
Not once. He grew up entirely in England. But
what's interesting is his first two novels, A
Pale View of Hills and An Artist of the Floating
World, they are set entirely in Japan. Oh, wow.
Yeah. And when he later spoke with the Nobel
laureate, Kinzo Bushi, Ishiguro admitted something
crucial about those books. He actually said the
Japan he was writing about was an imaginary Japan.
Well, yeah, because he hadn't seen the real one
since he was in kindergarten. Precisely. The
real Japan was rapidly modernizing, right? It
was turning into this massive economic powerhouse.
But Ishiguro was essentially isolated from all
of that. He was kind of frozen in time. Exactly.
He was building up this picture of the country
in his head, patching it together from his own
faded childhood memories, from the values his
parents taught him at the dinner table and from
old stories. He had this really strong emotional
tie to another country that he was constantly
just constructing from scratch. It's almost like
it's like he was building a literary snow globe.
Oh, I like that. Yeah, like if you take a child's
fragmented memories, mix them with family values
and seal them inside this perfectly preserved,
completely fictional world. It looks like reality
from the outside, but it's completely isolated
from actual history. It's beautiful, but it's
a closed system based on an illusion. What's
fascinating here is how accurate that snow globe
analogy really is because it explains his psychology
perfectly. Growing up in a Japanese speaking
home in the UK, he was actively kept in touch
with Japanese values, but he was experiencing
them entirely out of context. He was occupying
this liminal space. So he's basically stuck in
the doorway. He's not fully inside English culture,
but he's totally locked out of the real modern
Japan. Exactly. And he explained in an interview
that this gave him a completely distinct background.
He literally thought differently than his English
peers. His perspectives were always slightly
off -center from the culture he was living in.
Which is perfect for a writer. Right. It laid
the absolute groundwork for his lifelong obsession
as an author. Because when you grow up preserving
a memory of a place that doesn't actually exist
the way you remember it, you become acutely aware
of how unreliable memory is. You realize memory
isn't a hard drive of recording facts, it's a
coping mechanism. That makes so much sense. He's
looking at how we deceive ourselves about the
past just to make the present bearable. You know,
knowing what he writes about is only half the
story. The other half is how he writes about
it. And this is where the grouse -beating Bob
Dylan wannabe phase actually becomes incredibly
important. Because this subtle, almost haunting
writing style wasn't born in some creative writing
seminar. No, it's one of the greatest plot twists
in his biography. As a teenager, he wasn't studying
the great literary canon. He was listening to
Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell, and Bob Dylan.
Just a total music nerd. Absolutely. He learned
the guitar. He took a gap year, traveled through
the U .S. and Canada, kept a journal and was
actively sending demo tapes to record companies.
He seriously thought he was going to be a professional
singer songwriter. And he even worked as a grouse
beater at Balmoral Castle during this time, right?
Driving game birds out of the brush for hunters.
Just this incredibly gritty random job while
he's dreaming of musical stardom. Yeah, it's
such a funny image, but eventually Actually,
reality hit. He has this fantastic quote where
he reflects on this period, realizing he just
wasn't glamorous enough to be a rock star. Oh,
the corduroy jacket quote. Yes. He looked in
the mirror and realized, quote, I'm one of these
people with corduroy jackets with elbow patches.
It was a real come down. A very humbling moment
for him, I'm sure. But the crazy thing is, he
didn't just abandon that musical background,
he repurposed it. Looking at the sources, he
explicitly states that his style as a novelist
comes substantially from what he learned writing
songs. It really does. But hold on a second.
I have to push back on this a little bit. Yeah.
Because I'm looking at this stack of sources,
and we are talking about a guy who writes dense,
300 -page historical fiction. A three -minute
acoustic folk song is basically a totally different
art form. You strum a few chords, you sing a
chorus. How does writing a verse about a train
station actually translate into writing complex,
Booker Prize -winning literature? Well, it comes
down to the mechanics of delivery and the relationship
with the audience. Ishiguro realized that in
an intimate first -person song, like a jazz singer
sitting on a stool spotlighted on a dark stage,
the meaning cannot just be spelled out on the
page. Oh, because it would sound clunky. Exactly.
It has to be oblique. You're singing directly
to an audience, and you have to approach the
meaning subtly. As he puts it, you have to nudge
it into the spaces between the lines. So instead
of an omniscient narrator just feeding you the
facts of the story, you have a character just,
you know, talking to you, trying to convince
you of their version of events. Yes, and often
trying to convince themselves. With the exception
of his 2015 novel, The Buried Giant, all of his
novels use this intimate first -person narrative
style. Think about the mechanics of this. If
an author uses an omniscient narrator, they can
just write, the man was deeply sad about his
wasted life. Which is a bit boring. Right. But
Ishiguro puts you inside the mind of someone
who refuses to admit they are sad. Ah, so you
have to play detective with their emotions. Exactly.
Let's look at his 1989 breakthrough, The Remains
of the Day. The narrator is Stevens, an aging
English butler. Right, very famously played by
Anthony Hopkins in the movie. Yes. So Stevens
has dedicated his entire life, sacrificed his
chance at romantic love, and neglected his own
dying father, all to serve an English lord who
ultimately turns out to be a Nazi sympathizer.
That is just a devastating realization for a
character to face. But Stevens doesn't face it
directly. Instead of crying or screaming, Stevens
talks to the reader endlessly about the dignity
of his profession. He goes on and on about the
proper way to polish silver and manage a staff.
So he's distracting himself. Exactly. As a reader,
you were sitting there reading a 10 -page description
of household management. And because of the way
Ishiguro writes it, you slowly realize, oh, this
man's heart is breaking. The obsession with the
silver is the sound of his grief. The tragedy
is entirely in the unsaid. Oh, wow. OK, I completely
see the song analogy now. The melody of the prose
carries the emotion of the words he refuses to
say. And he didn't actually give up songwriting
entirely either. No, he didn't. He still writes
lyrics today. The source has mentioned he's co
-written multiple songs for the Grammy nominated
jazz singer Stacey Kent. Albums like Breakfast
on the Morning Tram and The Changing Lights.
He's literally writing jazz lyrics while simultaneously
writing Nobel winning fiction using the exact
same emotional muscles. It's all about restraint.
That restraint forces the reader to lean in closer.
And that quiet restraint method proved to be
incredibly powerful. Winning the Booker Prize
for the Remains of the Day really proved that
his sensibility wasn't just tied to his own Japanese
heritage. Right. Salman Rushdie actually called
the book a masterpiece, specifically because
it proved Ishiguro's talent was capable of travel
and metamorphosis. He could take that same theme
of self -deception and apply it perfectly to
the repressed British class system. He became
an absolute master of genre hopping. Like in
2005, he published Never Let Me Go. which Time
magazine named the best novel of the year. An
incredible book. It is. And on the surface, it
has these science fiction qualities. It's set
in a parallel dystopian version of the 1980s
and 90s, focusing on human clones raised for
organ donation. But he doesn't focus on the sci
-fi world building or some action -packed rebellion.
Yeah, not at all. He uses that exact same intimate,
confiding voice to explore how these young people
accept their grim fate. He focuses on their friendships
and trivial school rivalries rather than the
horror of their reality. They're building a snow
globe again, a safe little bubble of illusion
to hide from the terrible truth, and all of this
relentless exploration of the spaces between
the lines, culminated in 2017 when he won the
Nobel Prize in Literature. Which is just the
ultimate validation. It is. The citation from
the Swedish Academy praised him for uncovering,
and this is a direct quote, the abyss beneath
our illusory sense of connection with the world.
The abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection.
It's a haunting phrase. It really is. Here's
where it gets really interesting to me. When
I read that word abyss in the sources, it made
me rethink how his books actually feel to the
reader. It's not like someone just violently
pulling the rug out from under you. It's more
like imagine you've lived in this beautifully
decorated, perfectly normal house your entire
life. You know, every creak in the floorboards,
you feel completely safe. Then one day you happen
to look at an old architectural blueprint of
your house and you realize there's a massive
hidden room right behind your bedroom wall, a
room you never knew about. Suddenly the house
isn't safe anymore. The structure is totally
different. Your entire understanding of your
own reality has been quietly wrong the whole
time. If we connect this to the bigger picture,
that feeling of sudden terrifying realization
is exactly what Ishiguro is engineering. It's
why he is so drawn to specific historical eras.
He has said he tends to be attracted to pre -war
and post -war settings. Why is that? Because
those are moments in history that aggressively
test people's ideals. Ah, so the war is the blueprint
that reveals the hidden room. Exactly. A war
happens, a regime changes, a paradigm shifts,
and suddenly the society you live in demands
a reckoning. You have to look at the life you've
built, the loyalty you gave to an employer like
Stevens the butler, or the sacrifices you made,
and realize your deeply held ideals were fundamentally
wrong. They just crumble. Right. The ideals are
tested by history, and they fail. And the character
has to stare into that hidden room. They have
to face the abyss. That is terrifying. But it
is universally human. We all build those illusory
connections, those comforting stories about ourselves,
just to get through the day. But Ishiguro isn't
just a historian of human self -deception. He's
actively looking at how we're building those
exact same illusions today, right now, with technology.
And this is where his more recent work and his
public commentary become incredibly urgent. In
2021, he published his eighth novel, Clara and
the Sun. Right. This one is narrated from the
perspective of an artificial friend, an AI companion
named Clara. Through her highly observant but
naive eyes, he tackles the dangers of technological
advancement and what it fundamentally means to
be human in a world that is rushing toward automation.
And looking at his recent essays and interviews,
Ishiguro takes aim at the current political and
social climate. And I should note, for the listener,
we're just imparting his critique here as presented
in the sources. But he observes that in the post
-truth Trump era, we are seeing relentless attacks
on accredited news media. And he says the result
is a general atmosphere where the truth is completely
subjective. Yeah. He points out that if people
don't like the evidence presented to them today,
they feel completely empowered to just claim
an alternative emotional truth for themselves.
Alternative emotional truth. Wow. Yeah. The boundary
between what is factually true and what we merely
wish were true has become dangerously blurred
on a societal level. He's basically saying society
as a whole is acting like one of his narrators.
We are just choosing to talk about polishing
the silver while the world burns around us, creating
our own alternative emotional truths. That's
a great way to put it. And he ties this directly
into his fears about the rise of artificial intelligence.
He warns that AI is going to go far beyond just
crunching data, driving cars, or writing code.
He believes that very soon AI will become highly
skilled at manipulating human emotions. It will
figure out the exact algorithm required to create
anger, sadness, or laughter in us purely mechanically.
This raises an important question, doesn't it?
Because you have an author whose entire career
has been spent studying how human beings deceive
themselves. He understands the mechanics of illusion
better than almost anyone alive. So what does
this all mean for us? If Ishiguro is right, are
we just sleepwalking into a future where our
emotions, the most intimate, authentic parts
of who we are, can be perfectly hacked by machines?
That is exactly the alarm he is sounding. He
is uniquely positioned to see this threat because
he is the absolute master of engineering that
alternative emotional truth in his readers. Right.
His characters have been doing it for decades,
inventing comforting lies to hide from the abyss.
What terrifies him is the idea of technologies
that could automate and weaponize that exact
self -deception on a mass scale. Which is a terrifying
thought. It is. If a machine knows how to make
you feel a profound sense of connection, even
an illusory one, it can control you. If it learns
how to nudge the meaning into the spaces between
the lines better than a human can, we are in
an uncharted territory. It's a chilling thought,
and it really reframes his entire career when
you look back at it. We've traced this incredible
journey today. Sir Kazuo Ishiguro started as
a displaced kid in England, inventing a version
of Japan in his head just to feel anchored. He
wanted to be a guy in a corduroy jacket playing
folk songs, but instead he learned to hide profound
meaning in the silent spaces between his words.
He took that songwriter's intimacy, that restraint,
and used it to write masterpieces that won the
Booker Prize and the Nobel Prize. He even earned
an Academy Award nomination recently for his
2022 screenplay Living, adapting a classic Kurosawa
film about a man facing his own mortality. But
it always comes back to that central theme of
facing the truth. It really does. And for you...
Listening to this deep dive, I think the major
takeaway here is that reading Kazui Shiguro isn't
just about enjoying a beautifully crafted, slightly
melancholy story. It is a mental exercise. Absolutely.
It's a prompt to look beneath the surface of
your own life, to question your own assumptions.
Are you absolutely certain about the narrative
you've constructed for yourself? Will your own
ideals hold up when the test comes? Or are you
operating on an alternative emotional truth to
avoid looking in the hidden room? It's the kind
of literature that demands you stay awake to
your own life. It forces you to ask if the connections
you feel are real or just a comforting illusion.
And as we wrap up, I want to leave you with a
final thought to mull over, building on his warnings
about our technological future. Ishiguro. built
his entire legendary career on his profoundly
human ability to evoke massive emotions, sadness,
joy, nostalgia, deep regret, using nothing but
words printed on a page. He is a master emotional
hacker in the best, most artistic sense of the
word. But if, as he warns, a future AI eventually
learns to write a story that perfectly manipulates
your emotions in the exact same way, hitting
all the right notes, nudging the meaning into
the spaces between the lines, just perfectly
to break your heart. Would the tears you cry
over that machine's story be any less real than
the ones you cry reading an Ishiguro novel? Wow.
That is the real abyss right there. It really
is. Something to think about next time you feel
profoundly moved by a piece of art. Thanks for
joining us on this Deem Dive.