Atypically English : Books: Japanese-born author Kazuo Ishiguro explores power and self-deception from a unique and very British vantage point.

An observer watching Kazuo Ishiguro serve small cups of Japanese tea in his hotel suite would assume that this is a right and hereditary ritual.

The connection between the crushed tea leaves steeping in the blue china pot and the man with the Japanese name is due, however, solely to the well-meaning courtesy of the hotel management.

“There’s very little you can do to resist these stereotypes,” the novelist laments in a distinctly British accent, wondering what sort of refreshments would have awaited him had he registered with a French or a Russian name.

Born in Nagasaki, Japan, Ishiguro, who is 35, has lived in England since he was 5 years old. Last fall he was awarded that country’s highest literary honor, the Booker Prize, for his novel, “The Remains of the Day,” which uses as its narrator the quintessentially English stereotype, the butler.

So convincing is the portrait that an article in the Sunday Times of London, Ishiguro notes, quoted a source close to the queen as reporting that after reading the novel, she fretted, “Is this really how it was for the servants?”

The book has also attracted Harold Pinter, who is halfway through writing a film script, and Mike Nichols, who is set to direct the movie for Columbia Pictures. Meanwhile, the novel has been published this fall in paperback by Vintage International Books, bringing Ishiguro on tour to Los Angeles, where he is pouring Japanese tea and discussing stereotypes.

With due respect for his royal, as well as his ordinary, readers, Ishiguro calls concern for his butler, Stevens, “slightly beside the point. I was never really interested in what it was like for real butlers,” he says.

The gentleman’s gentleman--most widely known in the stylized personages of Jeeves in P. G. Wodehouse’s books and Hudson in the television series, “Upstairs, Downstairs”--offered a comically cardboard figure through whom Ishiguro could explore the introspective themes of self-deception and betrayed ideals. English author Doris Lessing has commented that such a contrast has produced a book, “which is very funny and one of the saddest I can remember.”

While on a scenically restful trip through the English countryside, Stevens, who has served for 35 years in one of the country’s greatest houses, struggles painfully to justify his unfaltering professionalism and thereby accord a dignity to his life. By seeing that the silver gleamed in the sideboard drawers and the port was served to the gentlemen in the drawing room--even as his father lay upstairs dying--Stevens rationalizes that he has contributed to the important events of the between-war years being decided within his master’s house and readily subsumes any personal desires into the cause of serving “this land of ours Great Britain.”

But as stealthily as the shadow of a killer creeping across the pages of a good mystery thriller, shards of Stevens’ disillusionment quietly lodge themselves in his consciousness as he “motors” on in his terrible voyage of self-discovery.

For his creator, however, Stevens’ anguish is but a practical means of exploring the suppression of emotions and the relationship of small, ordinary people to political power.

“In British and Japanese society, the ability to control emotions is considered dignified and elegant,” Ishiguro points out. In Stevens, there is “the tendency to mistake having any emotions at all with weakness.”

“Ultimately,” he says, “the book is about the tragedy of a man who takes that thing too far, who somehow denies himself the right to love and be human. This is something the middle-class and upper-middle-class English do a lot.”

Ishiguro attributes the historical source of classic British restraint to mandatory stints in boarding school, endured by generations of boys and girls who were separated from their parents at an early age.

“Any boy who spent all his time crying would very rapidly become the butt of all his fellows. The ability not to show your emotion must have been paramount to surviving with any kind of reputation.”

This early emotional discipline was deliberate, Ishiguro thinks, “because the British public schools were a training ground for people who would go out and administer the colonies. So people were taught how to maintain a stiff British exterior in far-flung corners of the world where they’d feel desperately homesick. But they must never show that the British were weak.”

A similar outward reserve in the Japanese has different origins, he believes. While British restraint is based on “a fear of revealing how human you actually are,” he says, Japanese formality derives from “a fear of offending.”

It is “about avoiding at all costs anything that might lead to open conflict,” says Ishiguro, adding, “I know less about Japanese society, but my guess would be that it has to do with a lot of people living on top of each other in very confined circumstances, which the Japanese have always had to do. . . . You have to learn not to say what you feel sometimes.”

Beyond social mores, however, Ishiguro has delved into the more universal impulse to protect “that very vulnerable terrain in all of us where we expose ourselves to feelings and put ourselves at risk in the search for friendship and love.” Often what appears to be the exercise of dignity and restraint, he observes, “is merely a kind of alibi for cowardice.”

The subject of self-restraint was brought to Ishiguro’s attention by his critics. Reviewers almost universally commented that his first two novels, “A Pale View of Hills” and “An Artist of the Floating World,” both set in Japan, were written in an understated style in which meaning was to be found in the spaces between what was said.

“I started to wonder where this was coming from,” says Ishiguro, who decided to make understatement part of his theme rather than a mere accident of style.

The author’s concern for participation in political systems is a more conscious outgrowth of his experience in coming of age in the late 1960s and early ‘70s, when an idealistic generation thought it was destined to better the world.

“As time has gone on, I’ve felt this growing frustration that on the one hand it’s ordinary people such as ourselves who are supposed to be responsible for the way a country is run because we are supposed to live in a democracy. On the other hand, most of us don’t live in the big world where these big decisions are made. We just struggle with everyday life. . . .

“So I was drawn to this figure of the butler who tries to gain his dignity by doing these menial things very well. . . . What he says is what most of us say, that we’re offering our little services up to an organization or an employer. . . . Our little contribution is going up there somewhere. We all hope it is going to be used in a way we approve of.

“That’s the position I felt most of us who had been radical and idealistic had ended up in--social workers, teachers, journalists, writers. . . . what happens to our contribution is often out of our hands.”

Educated at the University of Kent, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in philosophy and literature, and the University of East Anglia, where he received a masters in creative writing, Ishiguro was part of the scene of student sit-ins and rock ‘n’ roll.

Taking time off from his studies, he worked in a housing development project in Scotland for six months and later worked for several years helping the homeless in London, and living for a time in a hostel, while campaigning for housing rights.

In one year he worked as a grouse beater, driving birds from cover during hunts at the Queen Mother’s holiday castle, Balmoral, on the Scottish moors, and hitchhiked across the United States.

“At that time in England it wasn’t such an eccentric thing to want to do something useful,” he says. “We were as competitive as the would-be Trumps of today, but in other terms. . . . In those days we used to vie with each other about how worthily we were living our lives. We would actually pull rank on each other. We’d look down on somebody who got a regular job at a bank.

“This is why I’m fascinated by that--wanting to live your life well rather than simply wanting to live your life comfortably.”

Ishiguro’s technical apprenticeship to becoming a novelist came as a songwriter and guitar player in a student band.

“There were a lot of these wild experimental splurges where I’d be playing thousands of jazz chords and writing this free-form, free-association poetry with lots of brilliant pyrotechnical images flashing around,” he says.

By the end of his musical career, Ishiguro had settled down to the artistic economy of form and expression that mark his literary work. “I try to say things as simply and cleanly as possible,” he says, “rather than trying to reach out for some meaning that’s just beyond your grammar.”

In the abstract art of music, he also learned to trust his instinct.”Because you are a writer working in the medium of words, there is sometimes a tendency to think you have to logically justify everything you do. You have to think of some kind of argument, why one passage is better than another possible passage. You just know that’s the way you conceived it when you are a musician.”

Turning to the subject of his Japaneseness, Ishiguro is on less solid ground. Ishiguro’s father, an oceanographer sent to England to do research related to the North Sea, and his mother, planned every year to return to Japan. Their son received monthly packages of educational material about his homeland. “Throughout my childhood I had grown up with this very precious country that I called Japan, which was a very intense and real place in my imagination.”

By the time he was 22, and the family had made no move to return, Ishiguro decided to commit this ever-fainter mix of memory and imagination to paper, which he did in his first novel.

It was not until he won the Booker Prize a year ago, however, that he made his first trip to Japan. “When I went back to Nagasaki I felt I was returning home,” he says, noting that this “beautiful place of hills and sea” was as different from Tokyo as Portland, Ore., is from New York. “That was quite a nostalgic visit.”

But, Ishiguro states firmly, “I couldn’t survive in Japan. It’s as alien a place (for me) as it is for the next person.”

But unlike bona fide foreigners, Ishiguro’s predicament is being Japanese-born. “I would have to keep explaining myself,” he says. “I would not be exempt from the very complicated social etiquette.”

As a successful Japanese living abroad, Ishiguro says, he is the embodiment of the people’s “worst nightmare and their best dream.” Nightmare because he is “a child who went away with his parents and lost his Japaneseness and became contaminated,” and dream because “they think, ‘Oh, but that can happen to our children. They can be accepted and successful in other countries.’

“Precisely at this moment in Japanese history, people like me hit an odd sort of nerve. It’s a country opening up psychologically long after it has done so commercially. . . . They’re having to redefine Japaneseness.”

For his part, Ishiguro plans to continue to live in London, where he owns a house with his wife, Lorna MacDougall, a social worker, on the south side of the city. They manage the house together, doing quite well, he says, without a butler.