The London Monk’s Philosophy on the Art of Life and Writing

It’s drizzling and gusty in London. People don’t come in off the street, they blow in. Men stand in phone boxes, their eyes lifted heavenward as they scan the business cards with photos that line the walls for the perfect prostitute, London’s answer to street violence and cat fights. One must step over puddles of vomit that signal the understated entrances to trendy West End pubs. In better neighborhoods, book parties and readings announce one of the city’s most glittering literary seasons in years. Anita Brookner, Will Self, William Trevor, Jeanette Winterson and Caryl Phillips all have books out in October.

But perhaps the most exciting of these, the most hopefully awaited by fans on both sides of the Atlantic is Kazuo Ishiguro’s new novel, “When We Were Orphans.” Ishiguro, author of some of the most arresting novels of his generation (“A Pale View of Hills,” “An Artist of the Floating World,” “Remains of the Day” and “The Unconsoled”), sits quietly at the center of London’s famously nasty literary life. Everyone likes him (suspicious, eh?). He engages just enough to be a player, but not enough to fall into the kinds of squabbles that clutter the careers of writers like Martin Amis.

On the morning I visit Ishiguro at home in Golders Green, the Times reads more like Agatha Christie than a source of news. The front page sports an oversized photo of the tony blond who was so recently aide to a duchess and who, it seems, has killed her boyfriend with a single stab. She, who was born to the lower middle, the reporter gloats, always thought she was posh, dressed a little too fancy.

“Which duchess was it?” Ishiguro wants to know. “Must have been the Duchess of York.”

Like Christopher Banks, private detective, the hero of “When We Were Orphans,” the author’s mind wanders a ways down the path to solving the case. One can imagine this latest intrigue rippling through the city’s subconscious, an echo of the gray car carrying the famous politician that moves through a London morning in Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway.” These are the currents that Ishiguro, like Woolf, plugs into. His books often begin with the feeling of an era, then the feeling of a culture, then a city, moving like arrows shot from an extremely focused consciousness, into the minds and hearts of his characters. The prose is restrained, precise and very evocative.

Ishiguro did time on the fringes of society as well. In 1974, age 19, with long hair and a Fu Manchu mustache, he hitchhiked for two months down the west coast of America, searching at one point for a boy guru in San Francisco, yeah. His guitar was stolen in his $1.30-a-night lodging--and it was a relief to get rid of it, to travel light. Ishiguro (publishing nerds who want to seem cool call him Ish; only a few close friends call him Kazuo) picks up one of several guitars leaning against the walls of the light-filled room.

It’s a Dobro, a Delta Blues guitar with a rich, belly-provoking sound. He picks a few perfect chords, then demonstrates how it sounds with the slide. He spent a few years in his early 20s making demos and getting 30-second meetings with record producers. “I did so much failing,” he says with a grin, “that as a writer I was allowed not to do it all again.”

This is the day’s understatement. Ishiguro, at 46, has won the Winifred Holby Prize, the Whitbread and the Booker. He got his gentle start in a writers group led by Malcolm Bradbury but, perhaps more importantly, in conversations about writing with the fantastic fiction writer Angela Carter, who died a few years ago. “She didn’t actually read any of my writing until it was published,” he says. “But we’d have these wonderful conversations about, say, how long it takes a drowned cat to die, very abstract for her--but useful for me.”

Robert McCrum, an editor at Faber and Faber, gave him his first advance, “not a huge amount, but enough to live on, enough to say to myself, ‘I’m a writer.’ ” Today, with his brown eyes, calm mind and black clothes, it’s tempting to think of him less as a famous figure than as a Zen monk.

Ishiguro’s last novel, “The Unconsoled”--about a pianist who arrives in a city to give a recital but can’t recall who he is or why he’s there--was the first to get even slightly critical reviews. Much wilder than his previous books, it was the monk unhinged. “You can lose your audience,” he says. “With music, people are more loyal. I had that relationship to Miles Davis’ music--loved ‘Kind of Blue’ and ‘Nefertiti’ and ‘Bitches Brew,’ but I struggled to get into the later stuff.” (It’s nice to talk to an author who actually cares about his audience. “I don’t want to be understood,” Will Self snickered the night before over drinks at the Groucho Club. “I want to be misunderstood.”)

“At its heart,” Ishiguro says of “Orphans,” it’s like “The Unconsoled”--a book about someone who feels the urge to fix something that got broken, a childlike impulse many of us share. The author is referring to his protagonist, an old-fashioned private detective with a magnifying glass. Banks, thoroughly Londonized, having solved some famous cases, now gratifyingly connected in society, goes back to Shanghai in the 1930s to find out what happened to his parents, who disappeared when he was 10. He finds himself in the middle of a war, thoroughly disoriented and armed only with the glass.

Ishiguro and his beautiful, laughing Scottish wife, Lorna, a social worker, have an 8-year-old daughter, Naomi. The house is wall-to-wall Pokemon, with a few Furbies thrown in. Next to the postcard of the painting of Ishiguro that hangs in the National Gallery is a portrait of Pikachu, or is it Squirtle? Crouching between toys and guitars, he’s concerned about the way adults lie to children.

“By age 10,” he says, “we start to be able and powerful enough to begin to make the journey out of the protected world the adults around us have created. It’s a conspiracy, really, to keep children in this bubble with nice things and nice people. We may not remember the transition intellectually, but this nostalgia for childhood is an important emotion. Remembering when the world was a better place is the foundation of our idealism, it can lead to the urge to make the world a better place.”

New Life in England

Ishiguro was born in 1954 in Nagasaki. His Japanese father, an oceanographer born in Shanghai, had funding to study tidal behavior in the North Sea for an oil company. He brought the family to England when Ishiguro was 6. The family expected to go back to Japan. It wasn’t until Ishiguro was 15, when his father turned down a teaching post in Japan, that he realized they were there to stay.

“We were the prototype of this kind of internationally posted family,” says Ishiguro, who now sees this all the time at his daughter’s school. People who work for multinational corporations who are posted here or there for a year or two are much more common now. “I was not disappointed,” he says. “I am not by nature rebellious, and I think I would have found it hard, in Japanese society, to be sufficiently nonconformist to be a writer. In England, in the 1970s, it was almost expected that if you were educated you’d be nonconformist.”

“Remains of the Day,” directed by James Ivory, has got to have been one of the best experiences a writer could hope to have with Hollywood, Ishiguro says, though he holds to the principle most wise writers cleave to that it is better not to get involved. Working on “Orphans” inspired him to write a screenplay for Ivory and Ismail Merchant called “The White Countess,” now in production, which is set in Shanghai but has little to do with the novel. It’s about the guilt of the Europeans in Shanghai over the way they treated the white Russians, aristocracy who fled to China and ended up as doormen and prostitutes.

“With the novels,” he says, “I control everything. It’s isolated work that takes a long time. With screenplays, you can write a draft in a few weeks, because it’s all going to be worked over by a committee anyway.”

Generously, Ishiguro likens screenplay writing to playing jazz, a group activity. “Interior worlds are the great strength of fiction. Film is not well suited to a character’s inner life. You have to rely on inference and point of view. As a novelist, you can evoke and manipulate the stock footage in the collective subconscious--which is great, someone in the 19th century would have to start from scratch--but you have to delve deeper and deeper and be conscious about going with a reader’s expectations or undermining them.”

Outside, rain darkens the rooftops, the brick chimneys and gargoyles guarding the suffocating, cozy, social configuration of this beautiful, terrible city. Upstairs, we hear the comforting sound of a carpenter making more bookshelves.

Losing Control

“Most of us can only ever hope to be part of a team that comes close to greatness,” he says of his characters Stevens, the hyper-dedicated butler in “Remains of the Day,” and Christopher and his need to be “connected.” “Sometimes, we choose the wrong team.” He is referring to Sarah, a highly moral, ambitious character from “Orphans” who fascinates him. “She didn’t really fit in this book,” he says, intimating that she will appear in some future story. He is currently thinking a great deal about 1950s America, about Dick Van Dyke and about the music of that strange era. He is trying to sort out why so many homes had fully stocked bars in them, almost part of the furniture.

Several years ago, just when the dicey reviews of “The Unconsoled” were coming in, a small circle in the ceiling of his living room fell in. It was replastered, but the writer drew a neat circle in pencil around the job to mark the spread of moisture that would herald another disaster. Sure enough, the rot has spread beyond the circle.

“Less and less,” Ishiguro says, when asked if he feels he is in control. “And in some ways, it’s a relief.” (Like losing the guitar, I think to myself.) “So much is beyond our control,” he says. “Life won’t give you a chance to control it. It’s hard enough to stumble through this thicket of obligations.” He smiles politely. “It’s hard enough,” he admonishes, lending me a fine umbrella, “to fulfill the small urgencies of each and every day.”

As part of the Writers Bloc series, Ishiguro will be interviewed by F.X. Feeney at the Writers Guild Theater on Oct. 11th at 7:30 p.m. The address is 135 S. Doheny Drive, Beverly Hills. Tickets are $15. Call (310) 335-0917 for reservations.