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Kazuo Ishiguro and His View of Life: Idealism, Nostalgia, Fatalism

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Kazuo Ishiguro and His View of Life: Idealism, Nostalgia, Fatalism 博士論文 Kazuo Ishiguro and His View of Life: Idealism, Nostalgia, Fatalism （カズオ・イシグロとその人生観――理想主義、ノスタルジー、運命論） MORIKAWA, Shinya 森川 慎也 Acknowledgements My highest gratitude goes to Professor Yoshifumi Saito and Professor Shiro Yamamoto. Without their academic guidance, as well as their unflagging support and encouragement, I could never have written this thesis. Professor Saito and Professor Yamamoto have guided me over a span of ten years, giving me a lot of advice about my research, my academic career, and my life. I am one of the luckiest who have been allowed to study under these two great masters at the University of Tokyo. I am also profoundly grateful to Professor Kazuhisa Takahashi, Professor Masaaki Takeda, and Professor Noriyuki Harada for their penetrative comments and suggestions on my manuscript, which were of immense help to my being able to revise it. My wife, Noriko, and all four of my parents, too, should receive my gratitude for their consistent support all these years. Finally, I would like to express my deepest gratitude to Mr Tatsuro Matsumoto (1936-), who has been my mentor ever since I became the last of his many students at Himeji Dokkyo University and to whom this thesis is dedicated. CONTENTS INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................................................ 1 Part I IDEALISM .................................................................................................................. 15 1 Idealistic generation ..................................................................................................... 17 2 Instinct for contribution ................................................................................................ 22 3 Fear of the future .......................................................................................................... 28 4 Value judgement .......................................................................................................... 33 5 Pride in profession ........................................................................................................ 39 6 Ethics ............................................................................................................................ 44 7 Optimism in the denouement ....................................................................................... 74 Part II NOSTALGIA ............................................................................................................... 88 8 Embarking for memories .............................................................................................. 90 9 Nostalgia for childhood bubble .................................................................................... 95 10 Wound to caress ......................................................................................................... 103 11 In their mid-thirties ..................................................................................................... 109 12 Guilty wound .............................................................................................................. 118 13 Fantasy ....................................................................................................................... 132 14 Staging wounds .......................................................................................................... 149 15 Reconciliation ............................................................................................................. 188 Part III FATALISM ................................................................................................................ 206 16 Perspective ................................................................................................................. 208 17 Out of control ............................................................................................................. 228 18 Fate ............................................................................................................................. 245 CONCLUSION ........................................................................................................................... 262 WORKS CITED ......................................................................................................................... 266 1 INTRODUCTION Rationales This is a study in Kazuo Ishiguro and more particularly in his general view of life. The primary aim of this thesis is to describe a trajectory of the formation of Ishiguro’s visions on life, by recourse to his literary works and his interviews. Ishiguro is well known for his unreliable narrators, his narrative stages of historical significance and cultural dimensions, and above all, his calm and clear writing style. A variety of studies on Ishiguro’s works have been conducted from these diverse perspectives, in addition to many others as well.1 What rationale then does one have to address the writer’s vision? The business of literary studies basically revolves around analyses of literary works. It has been assumed that the object of literary studies should be literary texts, not an author.2 Everything crucial about literary works lies in works themselves, not in external comments an author makes about them. That is why we criticise literary texts, not their author: criticism is for literature, not for authors. Isn’t that what literary criticism is for? 1 For guides to the critical studies of Ishiguro’s fiction, especially from theoretical points of view, see Wai-chew Sim’s Kazuo Ishiguro (2010) and Matthew Beedham’s Kazuo Ishiguro: A Reader’s Guide to Essential Criticism (2010). 2 This echoes a judgement offered by Malcolm Bradbury of the condition of literary criticism in the late 1980s: ‘Literary study today is not really to do with writers but writing, not with authors but texts, not with penny lives but conceptual theories’ (No, Not Bloomsbury 309). And, as Bradbury notes, analytical stress on texts, not authors, dates back to ‘the New Criticism of the 1940s and 1950s [that] questioned biography’s dominance’ (312). 2 It is as true as the claim above, nonetheless, that there is a person, or an author, behind every literary work and that our interest more often than not gets drawn towards the author behind. We know, from our own experience, not a few cases of reading some literary works feeling irresistibly compelled towards the mind and thoughts of their creator. We come across such literary works as make our attention gradually shift from literary phenomena in the texts towards the very presence of an author who creates them. The shift tends to involve contemplation on these questions: what view does this writer have on life? How does that view inform his fiction? Gradually we find ourselves probing a view of life that literary works draw on. When encountering such writers we cannot evade posing these questions to ourselves while reading their works. Kazuo Ishiguro is one of such writers. In addition to this very personal rationale there are at least two others that allow us to examine Ishiguro’s visions on life. One rationale is that Ishiguro himself demands examination of his visions. Ishiguro is a writer who is highly articulate about his aim in fiction—how he wants his fiction to work and how he wants it read. The aim of his fiction is, Ishiguro declares, ultimately to ‘communicate a vision’ (Interview, 1990, Vorda and Herzinger 83; italics added).3 Communicating his vision is tightly linked to his ambition as a writer. He describes his ambition in the author 3 Citation of interviews in this thesis follows the rule set here. A year refers to the one when a given interview was conducted, not the year when the interview was published. For instance, Brian W. Shaffer’s interview with Ishiguro, included in Conversations with Kazuo Ishiguro, was conducted in 2000 and printed in 2001 originally in Contemporary Literature. In the works cited at the end of this thesis the interview is cited as follows: ‘Shaffer, Brian W. “An Interview with Kazuo Ishiguro” (2001). Shaffer and Wong, 161-73. Print’. However, referred to in the main text it is cited as follows to make explicit the year of interviewing: (Interview, 2000, Shaffer 166). 3 statement he made in 1989, part of which British Council carries on its website. He wants to write ‘an international novel’, one ‘that contains a vision of life that is of importance to people of varied backgrounds around the world’ (Brandmark; qtd. in Sim, Kazuo Ishiguro 20; italics added). Ishiguro’s statement about what should be an international novel encapsulates his view of how his fiction works.4 The term ‘international’ can be interpreted as referring to universalism of the impact of a literary work on readers across countries. Thus he says: ‘I think, the deeper the work, and the deeper the truth of the work, the more likely it is to be international, whether the author is consciously addressing a small group of people or a large number of people’ (Interview, 1989, Oe 60). Ishiguro’s emphasis on a vision of life as something crucial to his own literary endeavours appears in a more recent interview, too: ‘I want people to read my books not because they might learn something about the period in which these things happened, but because I might be able to share some more abstract vision of life and the world with them’ (Interview, 2001, Wong 175; italics added). The other rationale for exploration of Ishiguro’s visions comes from the way he has actually been
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