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[music] kazuo ishiguro: yes when i go to japan i feelintensely british, you know… [laughter] ki: yeah, i turn into hugh grant when i’min japan. yvonne hunter: good evening everyone. my nameis yvonne hunter and i'm the head of programming here at the appel salon at the toronto publiclibrary. eight months ago, with great excitement, i booked my first author into the salon. itwas none other than kazuo ishiguro, and now i invite you to come on a journey led by amasterful writer. if the test of great fiction is that a book takes you somewhere, in thiscase, the answer is an unqualified yes. the

buried giant is enchanting, i wanted to readit over again the moment i finished the book, in case i missed some brilliant fragment. yh: mr. ishiguro turns his readers into ghostsand you will travel a breath away from these characters. tonight is also a reunion of sorts.as host, i'm delighted to welcome a familiar face to many of you in the salon, tina srebotnjak.tina has spent much of her career in broadcasting in both radio and television, first as thehost of cbc's midday and then as the host of tvo ontario's imprint from 2000 until 2005.tina was my predecessor in this role as the head of literary and cultural programmingat the toronto public library until eight months ago. ladies and gentlemen, please helpme welcome tina back to the stage.

[applause] tina srebotnjak: hello everyone. so very niceto be back and so great to be back in this room, my favorite room in the city. i'll justtell you before i introduce our fabulous superstar, i'll just tell you that we're going to beon stage, kazuo ishiguro is going to do a short reading from the book. we're gonna havean on stage conversation, and then, of course, we welcome questions from the audience, andthere's a microphone set up there for that, and i'll give you plenty of notice, but ifyou think of things while we're chatting just write it down, and then you can come up tothe microphone and ask away. so i'm going to introduce the man who probably doesn'tneed much of an introduction, but here it

goes. kazuo ishiguro is a spectacular writer.his haunting, often dream-like, stories stay with us long after we've turned the last page,whether we've been in post war japan or the grandest of english country homes or a dystopianworld of clones. ts: in his trademark style, he seems to tellus very little, but, of course, he tell us everything. kazuo ishiguro was born in japanbut came to england when his family as a young boy when his oceanographer father acceptedwhat was to be a temporary job in england. as a boy he loved sherlock holmes. as an adolescent,he wanted nothing more than to make music, and i'm told he still plays a mean guitar.he worked as a social worker before turning his hand to writing full time. he publishedhis first novel," a pale view of hills" to

wide acclaim in 1982, and the next year, hewas named to granta's as best young british writers list along with those other lightweights, salman rushdie, martin amis, ian mcewan and julian barnes. ts: he went on to publish five more novelsand a collection of short stories. he won the booker price for the remains of the day,a novel which has given us one of literature's most iconic characters, the butler stevens.his novel never let me go, has been called a masterpiece and was made into a wonderfulfilm as, of course, was remains of the day. now, as yvonne said, comes his first novelin ten years, the buried giant. it's set in a semi mythical england in the time followingking arthur, when a strange mist has settled

over the land, a mist that seems to rob peopleof their memories. and it tells the story of two wonderful lovers, axle and beatrice,an old married couple who set off to visit their son in a distant village. please welcomekazuo ishiguro. kazuo ishiguro: thank you. that's a very warmwelcome; thank you so much. ts: you're gonna read? ki: alright, so this is just gonna be a briefreading. i'm just gonna read the opening three pages just so that... there's nothing particularlyspecial about these three pages, just the opening three pages, but since tina and iare gonna spend probably a little bit of time talking about the new book, if you haven'tread it then at least it gives you something

to refer to. okay, so this is literally chapterone. ki: the buried giant. ki: "you would have searched a long time forthe sort of winding lane or tranquil meadow for which england later became celebrated.there were instead miles of desolate, uncultivated land; here and there rough-hewn paths overcraggy hills or bleak moorland. most of the roads left by the romans would by then havebecome broken or overgrown, often fading into wilderness. icy fogs hung over rivers andmarshes, serving all too well the ogres that were then still native to this land. the peoplewho lived nearby, one wonders what desperation led them settle in such gloomy spots mightwell have feared these creatures whose panting

breaths could be heard long before their deformedfigures emerged from the midst." ki: "but such monsters were not cause forastonishment. people then would have regarded them as everyday hazards. and in those days,there was so much else to worry about. how to get food out of a hard ground. how notto run out of firewood. how to stop the sickness that could kill a dozen pigs in a single dayand produce green rashes on the cheeks of children. in any case, ogres were not so badprovided one did not provoke them. one had to accept that every so often, perhaps followingsome obscure dispute in their ranks, a creature would come blundering into a village in aterrible rage. and despite shouts and brandishing of weapons, rampage about injuring anyoneslow to move out of its path. or that every

so often, an ogre might carry off a childinto the midst." ki: "but people of the day had to be philosophicalabout such outrages. in one such area, on the edge of a vast bog, in the shadow of somejagged hills lived an elderly couple, axle and beatrice, perhaps these were not theirexact or full names, but for ease, this is how we will refer to them. i will say thiscouple lived an isolated life, but in those days, fewer isolated in any sense we wouldunderstand. for warmth and protection, the villagers lived in shelters. many of themdug deep in the hillside. connecting one to the other by underground passages and coveredcorridors. our elderly couple lived within one such sprawling warren. building wouldbe too grand a word, with roughly 60 other

villagers. if you came out of their warrenand walked for 20 minutes around the hill, you would have reached the next settlement,and to your eyes, this one would have seemed identical to the first. but to the inhabitantsthemselves, there were to be many distinguishing details of which they would have been proudor ashamed." ki: "i have no wish to give the impressionthat this was all there was to the britain of those days. but at a time when magnificentcivilizations flourished elsewhere in the world, we were here not much behind the ironage. had you been able to roam the countryside at will, you might well have discovered castlescontaining music, fine food, athletic excellence, or monasteries with inhabitants steeped inlearning, but there is no getting around it.

even on a strong horse in good weather, youcould have ridden for days without spotting any castle or monastery looming out of thegreenery. mostly, you would have found communities like the one i have just described, and unlessyou had with you gifts of food or clothing or were ferociously armed, you would not havebeen sure of a welcome. i'm sorry to paint such a picture of our country at that time,but there you are." ki: "to return to axle and beatrice, as isaid, this elderly couple lived on the outer fringes of the warren, where their shelterwas less protected from the elements and hardly benefited from the fire in the great chamberwhere everyone congregated at night. perhaps there had been a time when they had livedcloser to the fire. a time when they had lived

with their children. in fact, it was justsuch an idea that would drift into axle's mind as he lay in his bed during the emptyhours before dawn; his wife soundly asleep beside him. and then a sense of some unnamedloss would gnaw at his heart preventing him from returning to sleep. perhaps that waswhy on this particular morning, axle had abandoned his bed altogether and slipped quietly outsideto sit on the old warped bench beside the entrance to the warren and wait for the firstsigns of daylight." ki: "it was spring, but the air still feltbitter even with beatrice's cloak which he had taken on his way out and wrapped aroundhimself. yet he had become so absorbed in his thoughts that by the time he realizedhow cold he was, the stars had all but gone.

a glow was spreading on the horizon and thefirst notes of birdsong were emerging from the dimness. he rose slowly to his feet, regrettinghaving stayed out so long; he was in good health, but had taken a while to shake offhis last fever, and he did not wish it to return. now, he could feel the damp in hislegs, but as he turned to go back inside, he was well satisfied for he had this morningsucceeded in remembering a number of things that had eluded him for some time. moreover,he now sensed he was about to come to some momentous decision, one that had been putoff far too long and felt an excitement within him which he was eager to share with his wife." ki: okay. i'll stop there. that's the firstthree pages of the buried giant.

ki: thank you. thank you very much. ts: so, since you've set it up for us by givingus the first three pages, let's start with the setting because it's an unusual setting.i said in my introduction. it's semi-mythical; it's the time after arthur. it's an unusualsetting, and the book has been called a fantasy or what kind of book is it. why did you choosethat settings? dragons, ogres. ki: yeah, we'll come to the dragons and ogresin a minute. why did i choose this setting initially? at the beginning, actually, wheni had the kernel of this story together in my mind, i still didn't have a setting atall. this was almost the last piece of the jigsaw. it's a very frustrating kind of pointin the creative process for me. i was kind

of location hunting. i wanted a place where,for some reason, the community, the society, were having these kind of a collective memorylapse about certain things. so i was wondering, "well, how do i contrive this?" and i didactually think about a kind of a dystopian setting or kind of a galaxy far away kindof setting so that i could devise some high tech reason or some sinister political reasonwhy the memory lapses were occurring, but in the end, i decided i would actually goway back in time, and i should explain why did i want a setting like this at all? i wasactually thinking about many contemporary historical situations, things that happenedin the '90s when yugoslavia disintegrated or the rwandan genocide, the situation insouth africa after apartheid.

ki: the situations where societies had tograpple with this question, "to what extent should we remember our past? to what extentshould we forget it?" i mentioned both rwanda and bosnia, kosovo, partly because we hadsituations there where people had coexisted quite peacefully. at least for a generationor so and then suddenly, old, societal memories seem to get awakened. perhaps they were deliberatelyawakened for political reasons, and this incredible hatred and the murderous hatred erupted amongstpeople who had been using each other for baby sitters the day before and living intimately,and so i was wanting to write about situations where, yes, people have managed to kind ofenforce a peace by forgetting, but somehow that wasn't enough. those memories kind ofsuddenly erupted and the cycle of violence

started again, but rather than write a novelactually about bosnia or one of these places, 'cause i didn't feel those were my strengths,i didn't feel i was that kind of reportage, journalistic kind of novelist. i wanted towrite something a little bit more metaphorical. something that suggested that here was a kindof a, yes, if you'd like to call it a fantasy, mythical landscape, but played out here wassomething that has been going on over and over in history, and i was interested in thisquestion. how does a nation, how does a society decide when it is better to remember things?and when is it better to keep certain dark memories just buried? ts: and the drama, the tension in the bookis that this mist that makes people forget.

i won't give away the plot of the book, butthere's some attempt made to get rid of the source of this mist, but it's an open question.which is the better way to go, right? because the danger, as you say, of reawakening allthese old wounds is exactly that, endless warfare. in this case, it happens to be thebritons and the saxons who had murderous interactions for years and were now living quite peacefullytogether. so what's the danger in losing your collective memory? what's the danger in notremembering? ki: they're dangerous both ways. you can takean analogy with individuals, and we've heard this a lot in psychotherapy circles and soon. is it a good idea to rake over traumatic childhood memories? isn't it better just toleave them buried and just get on with your

life? just try and sort yourself out and justtry and forget that and move on. and then other people will say, "but that will neverwork because all that stuff will somehow come back in some kind of way, and you'll neverbe able to function." and i think that... that's a very crude simplification of thedynamic, but to some extent, i think that very difficult dynamic applies to societiesand nations, and i can well understand. i'm not on one side or the other. i think it'salmost impossible to make a generalization about this. i can well understand that thereare times in the life of a community or a nation when maybe the right decision is tobury certain things. let's all agree to forget because to do otherwise means that we're gonnadisintegrate. we're gonna end in civil war.

i think south africa after apartheid is agood example where i think they've got that balance more or less right, through a veryformalized process. ts: through the truth and reconciliation commission,yeah. ki: exactly, yeah. because obviously there'sa lot of seething anger and need for vengeance on the part of people who've suffered indignities,terrible things under apartheid. so there's a real balancing act that was done very skillfully,i think, in the 20 years that has gone since apartheid. to say, "look, we'll address theanger and the sense of grievance. but on the other hand, we've got to agree not to pursueevery grievance down every road. because that way, we're just going to end up in turmoiland inevitable civil war." and i think that

balance was struck very well. but i can wellunderstand in, say, many of the countries that were occupied by germany during the secondworld war, let's say france is a prime example. i can understand that urge to say at the endof the second world war that, "let's forget the extent to which we collaborated. let'sjust forget the crimes that we committed when we were occupied. let's just pretend we wereall brave, resistance warriors. and maybe further down the line, we'll be able to facethe real darkness of how we behaved. but right now, we're too sick, we're too fragile. wehave to hold together." ki: i can see that some people would be madevery angry by that position. but i can also understand why decisions have been made overand over again, nation after nation. you have

to make that kind of pragmatic decision toavoid another cycle of awful violence or disintegration. ts: you've dealt so often with memory in yourbooks. i would say it's one of your grand themes, both individual memory and now collectivememory in this book. what is it about the idea of remembering and how we remember thatyou find so interesting? ki: well, it's quite a complicated questionfor me because i think that's been different at different points in my life, in my careeras a writer. i think i kind of got stuck on memory right at the very beginning of my career.because i think what, and i only realized this with hindsight actually, but i thinkwhat made me a novelist in the first place was the need to remember my childhood memoriesabout japan. so for me, writing fiction and

laying down memories were intimatelylinked. and i think that's why i became a writer. i wasn't really a very bookish personwhen i was a teenager. ts: yeah, you didn't read a lot as a kid.i was surprised to read that. ki: i was a typical boy. i didn't read, iwas playing my guitar, i was writing songs, but i didn't really read. i didn't have greatambitions to be a writer until i was in my early 20s. and then i think what happenedwas, by the time i was about 22, i realized that there was a very precious place in myhead that i called japan. and i'd left japan as a child when i was five. and i'd alwaysthought i was gonna go back there. so all through my growing up, i thought about thisplace called japan. and i speculated about

what it would be like when i went back andlived there. and so it was a very important place for me, and it was a place of my childhoodmemories. it was a place, my favorite toys that i'd left behind, garden, my kindergarten,my grandparents. all those people were there in my japan. ki: and then as i'd grown older i'd addedthings to it, out of imagination, out of books that i read, comic books and so on. and irealized when i was about 22 that this precious place that i called japan didn't really existin reality. maybe it had existed once, but it didn't exist anymore. maybe it had neverexisted, maybe it was just something to do with my childhood. it's a strange fictionalworld that i created made out of memory, imagination,

and speculation. and so i think i felt i hadto get this japan down in a book before it faded from my head altogether. because nobodyelse knew about it. i couldn't go there on a plane. and i think i turned to fiction asthe most obvious way of kind of conserving and preserving i suppose what i felt weremy memories, even though they were probably kind of made up memories to some extent. andso i think right from the start, there's a very intimate link for me between writingfiction and memory. and then since then, i think, to some extent, it's become a deviceor a habit. i sometimes worry that i'm stuck on this. i should move on. ts: oh no. [chuckle]

ki: but it's become a kind of, for me, a veryinteresting lens through which to look at a lot of the things i'm interested in. ts: well, i remember you said once in an earlierconversation, actually, that we had some years ago. we were talking about the role of memoryand does it betray you or protect you? and i think you had said then that you thoughtit protected you. that we manipulate our memories to give us the kind of life that makes ourcurrent life livable. ki: i think there's certainly an element ofthat, but i guess central to my new novel, the buried giant, is this relationship betweenan elderly couple. and i think what i'm interested in looking at memory in their terms is therole of shared memories in something like

a marriage, and that same question comes up:does it protect them? i mean, is it something that threatens the marriage? any long marriagelike this is bound to have dark passages. so the couple have agreed somehow to kindof just to... well, to bury them. but i think shared memories are fascinating, not justin a marriage, but in any important long-term relationship, your parent-child, siblings,your friends... what do you do with the difficult memories? and i suppose for this couple, theythink their love is strong enough so that they can look at everything that happened.surely, their love will survive the resurrection of even the darkest memories of their lifetogether. that's what they think at the beginning. and i think they think if they don't facethe dark memories, is their love a false one?

is it based on something not real, if theyevaded and kind of censored out a whole hunk of their history? ki: so, at the beginning, they're kind ofconfident; they think they want all their memories back, it's something very preciousto them. they sense that their time together won't be long now; they're getting old, andit's very important for them to get their shared memories back, but as their story goeson they start to... each of them become quite afraid. is our love strong enough to withstandthe resurrection of certain memories? this insecurity starts to creep in, and i thinkit's a difficult thing that when is it better to remember, when is it better to forget?as she has just put it just now, do memories

protect? do they threaten? and it's not justat the individual level, it's at the level of relationships, families. we do need tosometimes keep some things buried and are we strong enough to resurrect these thingsand look at them? ts: this book ten years in the making as wesaid in the introduction, and wow, to say it was anticipated, everybody's calling itthe literary event of the year, and i was thinking how... maybe you're such a pro now,it's not scary... but isn't it scary to come out after ten years with "okay, here it is,you've been waiting ten years!"? ki: i don't know. i didn't realize it wasten years. i mean... ki: i was just busy. i was busy trying toget my novel together. i have done other things.

i did publish a book of... ts: short stories. ki: short stories. everyone talks about shortstories as though that's something you just fling off, you know? ts: yes, yes, yes, yes. it just took a weekor two. that's right, yeah. ki: even in the land of alice munro, peopleare saying, "well, and then there was, of course, you wrote that book of short stories,but why has it been ten years?" and i had a couple of movies to worry about in thattime. but i guess it takes a long time sometimes. sometimes i can't... i'm not really worryingabout what happens at publication or what's

happening in the public world. when i'm strugglingto make a story work, i feel like kind of a very lonely sense of success and failure.the pressures i feel are just solo ones, they'll apply to me. i'm just desperately trying tomake this kind of funny machine that, i want it to fly, and it won't fly, and i'm kindof hammering away in my garage. ki: i'm kind of grabbing odd bits of piecesthat i find lying around and it won't fly, it still won't fly. and it's only much muchlater on, when it kind of more or less flies, that i'm up there with this funny flying machine,and it occurs to me, "well, people are looking at me, what does this thing look like?" idon't really feel that kind of public pressure until i'm out here like this, and then i think,"oh, it's been ten years" and there's all

this anticipation. i'm flattered, deeply flatteredby the anticipation, but when i'm writing, that's the last thing on my mind. i genuinelyfeel i'm never gonna get this novel finished. i'm never gonna get it to work. ts: are you... there's been a lot of reactionto the book, you've had some excellent reviews and some not-so-great reviews. what if anything,has surprised you in the way people have reacted to the novel? ki: well, you're probably alluding to the...a lot of the passionate feelings one way or the other about this book seems to revolvearound the presence of what you might call fantasy elements.

ts: yes. dragons and ogres. ki: yeah. ts: pixies. ki: yeah, yeah. they're there. and once again,maybe this is very naã¯ve of me. i'm probably a very naã¯ve kind of person. it didn't occurto me that they were gonna be an issue. ki: as i explained, i was just trying to getmy book to work, and i really needed ogres and pixies. this was the landscape that ichose, and it just seemed to me very kind of natural that there would be ogres and pixiesin this landscape. that's partly why i wanted them. and so i'm kinda slightly surprisedthat there's such an issue. i have heard people

saying things like "oh, i love never let mego and remains of the day, but i hear your new book's got ogres and pixies in it... ki: i don't usually read books with ogresand pixies in it... ki: so i'm not sure if i should read yourbook, as much as i like your work usually." and i'm slightly offended on behalf of myogres and pixies... 0:30:26 ts: of ogres and pixies, yes. ki: they weren't so big in my book before;they're kinda like extras, that i didn't pay them very much. i asked them to come on... ki: but i feel they did a very good job forme when i needed them.

ki: and so now i'm gonna stand up for them.if people are prejudiced against ogres and pixies, i'm gonna stand up for them. ki: i'm on their side. they did a great jobfor me. they do... ts: a new movement starts here. ki: they are there for quite important reasons,i have to say. they're there for serious reasons. for instance, the pixies are there, they'revery... but they only come up once or maybe twice. they're closely associated with illnessand death, in my book. because i've gone back to a time that's pre-scientific, what we mightcall a "superstitious time". all right, so my rule of thumb is that i'm gonna... if thepeople of that day could very reasonably believe

in certain supernatural forces, my decisionwas that, yeah, i would allow those things to exist literally in my world. but i wouldn't...this isn't the world where anything could happen. i couldn't have a spaceship land inthe world of the buried giant, or a time traveller to appear because this is outside of the realmof kind of the normal kind of person who lives in this kinda world. but if you lived in thatkind of society, with kind of very terrifying miles and miles of dark kind of moorland betweenyou and the next village, it's absolutely sensible to believe in ogres and pixies. ki: somebody very dear to you gets ill, maybeseriously ill, there's no explanation for it. you don't have a scientific explanation.so it seems to me perfectly reasonable to

say "well actually i remember a couple ofmonths ago, something was moving in the darkness of our room, in the dead of night. and i wassure it was some kinda pixie. and it's that pixie brought the illness. and that's whymy wife is ill." that seems to me as good an explanation as any, if you're living inthat kind of belief system. so in my book, i go with that. those were the rules i hadin creating my fantasy world, if you like. and it seemed to me, that we've used thingslike this ever since people started to tell stories. look at homer or iliad or beowulfor whatever. and in my case, a lotta japanese kind of folktales. so i just use them as asecond nature. as i say, i'm slightly taken aback by why the pixies are such an issueand...

ki: and i want to say to all of you here,give my ogres and pixies a break. ki: don't not come to my restaurant becauseogres and pixies are on the staff. do come... ts: he's on a roll. [laughter] ki: yeah, yeah, okay. [chuckle] ts: you mentioned, you talked about being...the japan that you had in your mind. and when you were growing up, so you came at five,and then are you saying you didn't go back until you were 22? you never... ki: i didn't go back till i was 35. ts: wow. so was the japan you went back toanything like the japan in your head, or it

had moved on, i guess? ki: no, it wasn't. my wife and i were guestsof the japan foundation, a kinda cultural government thing, and they looked after uswonderfully, and they put together a program for us to travel around japan and meet kindof interesting people. and it was absolutely fascinating, but to me, it was like a reallyinteresting, very foreign country until i got to nagasaki, which is the place wherei was born. i realized that nagasaki was a very different place to the rest of japan.japanese people go there for an exotic holiday. it's a tiny corner right in the south, onthe kyushu island, it's the one place that was open to kind of foreigners when the restof japan was closed. in fact david mitchell

wrote a very interesting novel about thatperiod, about nagasaki. and so because of that, it's a strange place, with kinda dutchand portuguese and chinese kinda influences, special cuisines. even visually, it's verydifferent. ki: and when i got back there, i suddenlyrealized what i thought was japan was just this little corner of japan, that everybodyelse in japan found exotic and beautiful and strange. and then i felt like "yes, i'd comeback." but the rest of japan was like a fascinating, exciting, but very foreign place to me. andthat's how it remains today. ts: did you feel more british when you werein japan, than you did at home? ki: yeah, i was... yes, when i go to japan,i feel intensely british.

ki: i find myself really playing up my british... ts: the accent gets even plummier. ki: yeah, i turn into hugh grant while i'min japan. ki: it's a kind of defense mechanism... ki: in case they start expecting me to knowhow to behave in a japanese way. ts: exactly. i'm going to turn questions overto the audience in a few minutes. i just wanted to end with asking you, you wrote in the newyork times, or they did the interview with you i think a couple weeks ago, and you talkedabout your influences, and you said that you owed your career to jane eyre. can you talkabout that? charlotte bronte's wonderful book,

of course. ki: yeah, well as i said to you before, iwasn't a big reader. i think the moment when i thought actually maybe fairly soon i mightwrite a novel was when i kind of fell in love with charlotte bronte. not just jane eyre,but the other great bronte novel, villette. in some ways that perhaps made more of animpact on me. it's not quite such a satisfying work of fiction, but i think that's a verydeep and interesting book. and i re-read them both relatively recently. i realized how muchi'd ripped off from those books. ki: i'm relieved that nobody ever seems torealize this. ki: it's really the use of the first person,and it's a very coy, skillful use of the first

person. 'cause in both of those books thenarrator, lucy snow in villette, jane eyre in jane eyre, they seem to be confiding intheir reader so much, their intimate thoughts. but they leave out hugely important thingslike, i am passionately in love with this man. they just leave that out. ki: all reference to that big emotion is leftout. everything else is poured out and just little things stick out every now and againthat give you the clue to that. i realized that so much of the way i taught myself towrite fiction came from those two books. there are even actually kind of certain scenes.there's a scene in jane eyre where you only realize that jane eyre's crying because inthe dialogue, she never says "i was weeping."

just in the dialogue, it's revealed. the personshe is with, rochester, says "those are tears aren't they?" and she says "no, they're not."that's the only, there's some sort of exchange, but that's the only way that you know is becauseshe happens to report the conversation and what the other person is saying. and i thought,"oh, actually there's a scene very much like that in the remains of the day." ts: yes, yeah. ts: so you ripped off jane eyre? ki: yeah. [chuckle] ts: first the pixies then plagiarism.

ki: no. i realized how much i learnt fromcharlotte bronte. ts: yeah. ki: and i guess i used to always say dostoevskywas my favourite novelist. i realized recently that probably charlotte bronte is. i owe somuch to charlotte bronte, great writer. ts: wonderful writer. okay the microphoneis there in the centre if you'd like to come and give us your questions. i'll just askyou, are you writing another novel? or perhaps a wonderful collection of short stories? ki: no, i'm not doing anything. i'm on a worldtour. ts: he's a rock star.

ki: it's impossible to write i find, wheni'm doing this, but it's very stimulating, and a lot of ideas are forming in the backof my mind. simply because i'm engaged in conversations like this and the kind of questionsi'm about to receive. ki: all these things actually go towards shapingmy next project. ts: excellent. go ahead. speaker 4: so, i had some difficulty decidingwhich question to ask you. i might give you your choice. my first is, who or what arethe pixies and ogres amongst us in the fog now? and if you don't like that question... [chuckle]

s4: i was at your discussion last eveningat the light box, where we also talked about hugh grant, and what is this fixation withhugh grant? ki: i don't think i've mentioned hugh grantever, in public, until last night when the remains of the day was being shown at tiff.and i wanted to say a couple of things in the introduction. then it occurred to me thatactually i suppose i was wanting the movie to take some credit for the kind of the hughgrant, the star, hugh grant. because he was in the remains of the day movie before hebecame a star. and i thought he did the, that's the first time he kind of road tested thehugh grant character. ki: and i thought we should take some creditfor...

ts: absolutely. ki: for the hugh grant. and i guess hugh grantwas on my mind from having mentioned him last night. or having seen him in the movie lastnight. so yeah, i could've easily said i turned into laurence olivier or something like this. ki: but i mean there's something about hughgrant that's kind of delightfully english. but the other question, what are the pixiesand ogres? it's not so much the pix... the pixies and ogres are kind of like, they'rethe extras. they're the kind of the walk on parts. i think what your question should reallybe is, what are the buried giants in our midst at the moment? what are we burying? and ithink every nation. i wouldn't presume to

ask in your marriages, in your relationshipswith your parents or your children, what are the buried giants? ki: but that's probably quite an interestingquestion to take home and ask, but if you want to ask that. but i think it's an interestingquestion to ask, "what are the buried giants of a lot of the countries, a lot of nations?"and i live in britain. i think there are big, buried giants in british society. that's tosay, the bits of societal memory that's deliberately suppressed so that we can keep going. i thinkin the united states, definitely, the big buried giant that is actually threateningto rear up every week, at the moment, is the business about race. i think... i've heardthat some republican politicians are suggesting,

with fully good intentions that a lot of thathistory about slavery and segregation get removed from the school books because allthat's doing is fuelling another generation of bitterness and anger. ki: and other people are outraged by sucha proposal. and i've heard somebody on the radio, just before i came to canada, sayingthat there should be a formal kind of truth and reconciliation process in america to addressthe whole question of race and that whole history. because without that, there's gonnabe this open wound all the time. there's gonna be new fergusons occurring every month. iguess in france, as i suggested before, i think it's something to do with what happenedin the second world war. it's still unspoken.

and when the charlie hebdo incident occurredrecently, in fact, the jewish supermarket killings that occurred alongside that... wewere in paris very recently after that and in fact, it was an american journalist therethat said to me, "the french are really awkward about this because they would like to wholeheartedlysay, 'we are going to protect our jewish community from this kind of terrorism.' but they'revery awkward about it because they've got this strange suppressed memory about the factthat during the second world war, they sent thousands of their own jews to the concentrationcamps without any help from the germans. and they feel very awkward about attacks on thejewish community." ki: japan, the big other country in my background...the japanese don't... they've forgotten what

they did in the second world war. they'veforgotten they were the aggressors. and this continues to cause all kinds of problems inthe relationship with china and southeast asia. i think with britain, it's somethingto do with the empire. the acquiring of empire, the maintaining of empire, and the way empirewas let go. which has so much to do with what's happening today in the middle east. we couldgo on and on and on. i wouldn't even presume to ask, "what are the buried giants here incanada?" ki: i wouldn't... i'm a visitor, i can't speculateabout things like that. but i think... it's a difficult thing. there's sometimes goodcause to keep these things buried, but maybe there are times when we have to try and lookat them as well.

ts: we'll move on to the next question. ki: we'll move on, yeah. ts: but i would say, just on the canada thing,i think a lot of people would say it's the way we treated our first nations. but let'sjust move on now, go ahead. speaker 5: hello. hi there. ki: hi. s5: first of all, i just wanna say thank youso much for coming, and you are a rock star. and it doesn't how long it takes you to writea novel, we will wait, and we will read it when you are done. my question, you may haveaddressed this last night at the light box

event, but i wasn't there so i apologize ifyou have to address it twice. you are also a screenwriter but you didn't adapt "remainsof the day" and "never let me go". and i'm wondering, were you just too close to it,you didn't wanna touch it, did you not get the job, what happened? those are two prettysignificant projects. ki: i think people would be very foolish togive me the job. because i have worked as a screenwriter, i can see the thing from theother side as well. and my view is that usually, it's not a good idea for the author of thebook to get too creatively involved in the film adaptation. because i think it's veryimportant that films of books should be seen not as translations... yes, the french editionof "the remains of the day" say, should really

be a translation of my version of "remainsof the day". now, i'd be pretty upset if the translator said, "well, i wanted to expressmyself, and so i put a lot of myself into this translation. that's why it's all completelydifferent at the end." but i think for film, i do want the filmmakers to do that, to someextent. i do want the film to be a work of art. if it's successful, a really good workof art in its own right, i don't want it to be some kind of thing that doesn't reallywalk and talk in its own right. and so i'm always saying to filmmakers, "look, can weuse the novel as a kind of raw material, but i want it to be an authentic expression ofwhat you wanna say." i wouldn't quite go so far as to say, "just produce the best movieyou can with the same title, that's my book."

i don't wanna go quite that far but almostthat. ki: and you need to be really ruthless. ascreen play is at most gonna only contain about a fifth of the number of words of anovel, and so someone needs to actually look at the material very ruthlessly, and i don'tthink the author of the book is in a good position to do that. you need a certain amountof dispassion, and you need a lot of skill as a film maker, and i'm probably... you asked,"did i not get the job?" i probably wouldn't have got the job even if i'd asked. ts: were you happy with the two movies that... ki: yeah. i've been incredibly lucky. i haveseen many, many screen plays of some other

novels; a pale view of hills and when we wereorphans. i've seen various screen plays go by, and they haven't been good, and they haven't...everyone's agreed that they weren't good, they didn't make it to the screen. in thecase of the remains of the day and never let me go, i think they were fantastic screenplays, they were fantastic films. ts: they were. and this one's going to bemade into a film as well, right? ki: well, you never... with movies, you nevercount on anything. scott rudin has the option, incredible, a very good producer, scott rudin.the latest, the last few films of his that you might know about or you might have seenwould be the grand budapest hotel, captain phillips, inside llewyn davis. he's an extraordinaryfilm maker who balances kind of wide commercial

appeal with quite challenging material. soi'm optimistic, but you never count on anything. ts: no. ki: but i really like what actors do withmy characters. i always learn a huge amount of stuff i didn't know about my charactersfrom actors, and so that's one of the things i always look forward to when i know there'sa film in the offing. ts: thank you very much. ki: hi. good evening. speaker 6: mr. ishiguro, one of my other favoriteauthors, donna tartt, says that what defines her, or what she looks in her prose is forspeed and density. as a writer, i've noticed

that what kind of defines your writing isthat you're constantly changing your prose to match the characters that you want to speakthis prose, and so i'm wondering as an author, what do you think defines your prose? ki: my actual prose, the actual kind of wordson the page? s6: yes. ki: yeah. i don't know if there's any singlething that defines that. i don't pay probably as much attention to the actual style. i don'treally think about my style that consciously. i just think about things project by project.maybe i should worry a bit more about my overall style, but to me, that's what i'm left with.the style or the prose is what i'm left with

after i've made all the other big artisticdecisions like who is going to narrate this story? is it going to be a first person narration?is it gonna be third person? until this book and it's usually, the answer is usually beingfirst person, and so then i have to kind of think about the character. what is that characterrevealing? what is that character hiding? is the character kinda shy? is that charactercoy? and all these things go to determine that question, what should that prose be like? ki: who is the character? who is the narratortalking to? that's a very important decision for me because often in my books, i like tohave a you, not just an i, but a you, and that you is almost always not the reader.it's... for cathy, in never let me go, she's

addressing another clone like her. stevens,the butler, when he's addressing another servant. these people can't really imagine an audiencebeyond their small world, and so the reader is put in a position of kinda almost eavesdropping.so all these kinds of decisions go towards determining what the language should be like,what the voice should be like, and then after that, yes, i try and do my best to write inkind of a way that people will understand. by and large, i try to make things as cleanand understandable as possible after that. ki: but essentially the stylistic decisionsall come as a by product i think of the decisions about the character and what kind of strategythe narrator has. what kind of game is the narrator playing in the kinda hide and seekwith himself, herself, and the person whose

being addressed. so that's what goes intokinda my prose if you like. ts: thank you. speaker 7: hello. s7: a good number of years ago when i firstread remains of the day, i loved it and immediately went out to find the next novel of yours thati could; that was the unconsoled, which i started reading immediately. the writing wasas brilliant as in remains of the day, but a very different novel and what started outin a linear fashion was not that, i guess, by the end. and seeing as you're here, itleft me confused in a way that perhaps very few novels i've ever read, have done. youmentioned memory came up earlier as a theme,

and that seemed to be something that in retrospectwas a strong theme in the unconsoled, and i was wondering was that important to youas you were writing it or in the way that became less linear and its ending was notperhaps... the way remains of the day or other novels sort of ended more discreetly, if youcould just talk a little bit about that because you're here, and i thought i may as well askyou in person what i may have missed or what you were hoping from your readers to takeaway from it. ki: i very rarely go to an event like thiswithout somebody during the q&a asking me a question very much like the one you justasked me. the unconsoled, i published 20 years ago, but it continues to kinda arouse, let'ssay, curiosity and sometimes, fury and frustration.

s7: i'm seething within. ki: and i'm always asked to explain it. infact, i recently had to do a live web chat in london for the guardian reading group 'causethey decided they were going to have a big argument about this book. and so, i actuallyhad to re-read the thing. ts: and did you get it? did you understandit? ki: well, i'll tell you, the annoying thingwas i had very little time, and it's a kind of 500-page book. i had about 20 pages leftwhen i had to do this live web chat, and the most intense questions were coming at me,and half of them were about the ending. ts: and you were going, "wait, just let me..."

ki: i've done all this work, and i didn'tquite know what they were asking about the ending. it's hard to talk about a whole bookvery concisely, but i would say, now re-reading it again, i would say a couple of things.there's two standard ways of telling a story about somebody's life. one is you do the kindof david copperfield thing in chronological unfolding, linear narrative, go from childhoodthrough to adulthood and so on. another method, a very common method that many people use,and i used in books like remains of the day, never let me go, you take a narrator at onepoint in their life, and they're remembering back to episodes, and so that way the readercan piece together the life that this person has had, and that's quite a subtle way becauseyou introduce the whole thing about the how

is the narrator remembering and evaluatingcertain episodes from the past? are they manipulating the memories and so on? so i kinda like todo that. but in the unconsoled perhaps foolishly, perhaps not, i thought i would attempt thethird way of doing things. and i thought maybe nobody had done it before, maybe for goodreason. ki: i was looking at the way when we dream.often people from the past, hunks of our memory kinda turn up almost like in real time. i'mlooking at you now, and your face might stay with me, and i might appropriate your facetonight in a dream, and so, you might pop up in my dream, but actually it's not reallyyou. it's somebody from my childhood, my old maths teacher from my childhood, but he happensto have your face because your face was here

tonight. i think we all have this kind ofexperience. maybe your mother turns up in a dream with somebody else's face. ki: and so i thought, well, maybe this isanother way of doing memory or another way of telling a story of somebody's life: havethem turn up in some place, and they keep running into strangers who introduce themselvesto him, but actually he's appropriated these faces. behind the faces of the local mayoror the local person at the concert hall, there's somebody much more significant, somebody fromtheir childhood, their ex-wife, or somebody from their past, even people who are projectionsof themselves in the future, versions of themselves and younger versions of themselves. all thesepeople would actually appear as though they

were in a dream kind of real people comingat them. and so, that was the way i was going about things in the unconsoled. that mightbe a slight explanation for why it's kind of rather odd. ts: does it clear things up? s7: that was a very interesting and helpfulanswer, so thank you. ts: okay, next. speaker 8: first, i want to say "go team ogre,team pixie." s8: second thing was, i guess you sort ofthought this, too. i sort of bothered when people were saying, "it's his first book in10 years," and thought "no, it's not. he had

a book of short stories." i really like shortstories so it sort of bothered me. my question was, you've spoken a couple, two or threetimes now about almost analyzing your own characters, so at what point in the creationof a character do you sort of have to take a step back and really analyze them? or analyzethe relationships between two of them? ki: yeah, i don't know actually if i analyzeindividual characters that much actually. i think a lot about who should be the narratoror something like that. but i probably worry much more about relationships than characters.this came to me as a revelation not all that long ago, maybe about 15 years ago. i havebeen writing for quite a long time before this occurred to me. actually, but since then,it has made my life a lot easier. rather than

worrying about individual characters, andare they three-dimensional, are they interesting enough, should i give them more of a backstory, should i make them more colourful? i thought, well, actually... i'm not thatinterested in their back story or giving them quirky little characteristics. if i just actuallythink instead about relationships, rather than individual characters, if i ask myself,"is that an interesting relationship, or is this just a stereotypical cliche relationship?"does this relationship actually develop and move on? is it like a three-dimensional relationship,it classically enforced the terminology? does the relationship surprise convincingly? andthen it becomes maybe a three-dimensional relationship.

ki: and so i started to think about the relationship,rather than the characters. and then i... when i started to try and create interestingrelationships, i found then that the characters, at either end of the relationship, just tookcare of themselves. and i do sometimes wonder. maybe that's what we really care about whenthey're reading. we really care about the relationship. because often i have had thisexperience of coming across rather colourful characters in a novel, and i'm puzzled asto why i'm not more interested in this character. and then it occurred to me, it's because they'revibrant, interesting characters in isolation. they're not connected to any other characterin a meaningful way, and maybe that's why i'm not very interested. maybe i'm just talkingabout myself as a writer and a reader, but

i decided for the last couple of decades,what i'm interested in is the relationship, not the individual characters. and for me,that's made the writing process a lot easier, actually. ts: thank you, and we'll make the woman...hello, hi. you can be our last question of the night, and then we'll get to the booksigning. speaker 9: okay, great. i guess i read, "nocturnes,"your collection of short stories, and a lot of it was around music, and i guess how itbrings you back to a certain point in your life, and it has a lot to do with nostalgia,which is different from memory. and so my question is, is there a song that you willoften listen to because it brings you back

to a certain moment in your life, or is therea song that you can absolutely not listen to ever again because it reminds you of somethingthat happened in your life? ki: a song? i don't think there's any particularsong that i find so painful that i can't listen to. there are songs... there are many, manysongs that do take me back to certain points in my life through association. but actually...i have to say, there's a certain kind of song, there's a certain genre of song that i loveprecisely because it does... it's about what you just said, that there are songs like say,"georgia on my mind" or the irish song, "mountains of mourne," where you're not quite sure whetherthe singer... they're very nostalgic songs about missing say, "georgia," but you're notquite sure whether georgia is a woman, or

is it the place, georgia, or actually is ita particular time in that person's life that they're yearning for? and i think, "mountainsof mourne... i don't know if it's a song that you know... it's st. patrick's day today,isn't it? yeah? ts: oh, yes. s1: it's one of the great, kind of weepy irishsongs, and i think it's a beautiful song, "nostalgia." you're not quite sure whetherthe singer is missing the village in ireland because he lives in london, or if he's missingthe woman, mary, that he addresses, or is it the time, that period in his life thathe misses. and one of the greatest songs like that, i think is, "hickory wind." and i lovethe emmylou harris' version of that. it's

a gram parson's song, that also does that.but i love those songs where you can't decide whether it's a particular person, a place,or the time in your life. and so, i find it hard to answer your question cleanly. i can'tbring out one song that... but the songs that actually address the very issue that you raisedthere, i think it's quite special for me. ts: thank you very much, and i'm glad youasked a question about music, 'cause i had meant to get to it in our conversation, buti didn't, so i'm glad you talked about music. i think we've all been so thrilled to haveyou here tonight, and i know you're gonna sign books at the back. people are liningup already. i just wanted to say, thank you, what a pleasure, definitely worth the wait.thank you very much.

ki: okay, thank you very much. thank you.thank you very much for coming, and thank you to tina.

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