Introduction

Summary

The child of Japanese parents who moved to Great Britain in 1960, Kazuo Ishiguro identifies the migration from Nagasaki as one of the key turning points of his life, which prefigured some of the themes in his fiction. Ishiguro recalls the first five years of his life in Japan as a happy period that included living in a three-generational household. However, he also notes that the move severed powerful emotional ties he had with his grandfather, who remained for the author an emblem of Japan and Japanese identity; although he believed that his family would reunite in Japan, years passed and it became apparent that his oceanographer father, Shizuo Ishiguro, would accept a permanent position in Great Britain (see especially MJ and KO). Many years after emigration, his father was offered a university position in Japan but turned it down; that incident cemented in Ishiguro's mind that the family would never return to Japan (CW).

Meanwhile, enthusiasm for studying the Japanese language and culture faded as Ishiguro and his elder sister, Fumiko and younger sister, Yoko (who was born in England), immersed themselves in English life under the emotional tutelage of their mother, Shizuko Ishiguro. During the family 's early years in England, Ishiguro's beloved grandfather died in Japan. Not being present at this important death affected him deeply, although he was not to understand its significance until many years later. Ishiguro explains:

For me, the creative process has never been about anger or violence, as it is with some people; it's more to do with regret or melancholy. I don't feel I’ve regretted not having grown up in Japan. That would be absurd. This is the only life I’ve known. I had a happy childhood, and I’ve been very happy here. But it's to do with the strong emotional relationships I had in Japan that were suddenly severed at a formative emotional age, particularly with my grandfather. (MJ 23)

In that 1995 interview, the then 40-year-old writer also indicated that, while he does not subscribe to Freudian theory, he believes that this early period of his childhood marked his sense of ‘emotional bereavement or emotional deprivation’, a sense of ‘never having gone back [to Japan and to grandfather], and that there's a whole person [he] was supposed to become [instead]’ (MJ 23).