My friend Kazuo Ishiguro / ‘An artist without ego, with deeply held beliefs’

‘Ish’ and Robert McCrum at the Faber office in London in 1989.
Photograph: Caroline Forbes

My friend Kazuo Ishiguro: ‘an artist without ego, with deeply held beliefs’

Last week, the British novelist was awarded the Nobel prize for literature. His first editor at Faber recalls the rise to greatness

Robert McCrum
Sunday 8 October 2017 08.30 BST

ne minute, the old friend I know as “Ish” was sitting at his kitchen table, doing emails, having not yet showered or washed his hair. Half an hour later, the world’s media was snaking up the path to his house in Golders Green, north London. “How on earth did they know where I lived?” he puzzled, reviewing a day of “bizarre” events. It was, he says, not until the news was confirmed by the BBC that he began to compose himself to address the great honour bestowed upon him by the Swedes.

Last Thursday, Kazuo Ishiguro – a writer I’ve known for close on 40 years – was awarded the 2017 Nobel prize for literature. Precisely at noon, among its gilt-and-white mirrors, the Swedish Academy’s spokeswoman stepped in front of the international press with a short statement about its prize for “the English writer… Kazuo Ishiguro, whose novels of great emotional force have uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world”, followed by allusions to Austen, Kafka and Proust. Then, the usual mayhem: how, what, when, and why?

In this Brexit year, a result described by Radio 4’s Front Row as “a big win for British writers” has a special piquancy, a reminder that our literature expresses a uniquely global vision. Moreover, this citation places my friend in a canon that includes Samuel Beckett, Doris Lessing, William Golding, Seamus Heaney, VS Naipaul and Harold Pinter, the literary superegos of modern poetry and prose in English. Ish’s first reaction, he told me much later that day, as the hullaballoo began to fade, was frank disbelief. Was it a hoax? Was it fake news?

Inevitably, in private, he found the whole affair both “surreal” and richly comic, the “last thing I expected”. Never mind the abyss of the academy’s citation, there’s a persistent note of quiet enjoyment at the ironies of the human comedy present throughout Ishiguro’s work, a theme expressive of a uniquely English and Japanese sensibility.

Britain’s newest literary Nobel laureate was born in Nagasaki in 1954. His mother, who is still alive and taking immense pride in her son’s achievement, survived the atomic bomb. His father, an oceanographer, moved his family to England in 1959, settling near Guildford, Surrey. Ish has always said that his parents didn’t have the mentality of immigrants because they always thought they would go home. He was 15 and still the only non-white kid in school before a final decision was made to stay.

When I first met him in the lobby of Faber & Faber in 1979, I was a young editor looking for new talent. Hot from the new UEA creative writing course – where his tutors included Angela Carter and Malcolm Bradbury – Ish carried a guitar and a portable Olympia typewriter in a neat blue case. With ragged jeans and long hair, in thrall to Bob Dylan, he was writing songs, and it was his ambition to become a performer. (He still plays the guitar most days.) But he’d already acquired the amateur spirit of the English literary tradition. Until he became a rock star, he would write fiction, to which end he had studied at UEA. It was three of his recent short stories (A Strange and Sometimes Sadness; Waiting for J; and Getting Poisoned) that he was offering to me at Faber.

I have not looked at these in years, but I cannot forget their haunting strangeness, the unique quality of his writing to this day, a weird mix of classic English and minatory Japanese prose. Although there was inevitably some influence from Ian McEwan, they were unmistakably the work of a young writer with a new voice. I quickly signed him up, and was soon after delighted to receive, from his agent Deborah Rogers, 100 pages of his first novel, for which, without hesitation, we paid the extravagant sum of £1,000.

When A Pale View of Hills, a short, disturbing account of a Japanese family’s emigration to England, was published to much acclaim in 1982, the critics began to place Ishiguro in a then-unfamiliar genre: the English fiction of writers, such as Salman Rushdie and Timothy Mo, whose lives had exotic, non-English beginnings.

Ish, however, was always hard to pigeonhole, being neither one thing nor another. He was unfailingly attentive, watchful and reserved, a man of deep politesse, highly attuned to the nuances of any situation. He made no fuss about things, either in life or in writing. He generally seemed like that rare being, an artist without ego, though I knew that he was inwardly dedicated to deeply held beliefs and attitudes. One constant in his character and career has been his humanity, good humour and natural expression of civilised values.

In his first years as a writer, Ish’s day job was working for the Cyrenians charity in Notting Hill, where he met Lorna MacDougall, a social worker. When they married in 1986, the itinerant Irish writer Des Hogan was a witness at the wedding, improvising a bouquet by tearing a sprig of cherry blossom from a tree on the way to the register office. Many of Ish’s values were formed at this time. Identifying “more closely than perhaps I should with those social workers”, he remains part of that 70s generation whose idealism had nowhere to go.

Ish might identify with the marginal. In 1983, however, his true status was clarified when he was chosen for Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists, the youngest of a group that included Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, William Boyd, Ian McEwan and Salman Rushdie. He wasn’t a British citizen, so he took a practical decision to become one. “I couldn’t speak Japanese very well,” he has said. “But I felt British and my future was in Britain. It would also make me eligible for literary awards.” He’s still seen as Japanese in Japan, and celebrated as one of their own.

Ish’s next book, An Artist of the Floating World (1986), my favourite among his novels, is one of the titles that secured his reputation. Set in postwar Japan, it describes the agonising life of a painter confronting the secret shames of his past.

It won the Whitbread prize, and Ish became integral to the book scene. One former Faber colleague remembers his tip for surviving in literary London: “When you get together with other writers it’s fine to bash agents and publishers, etc, and never to talk about the work itself, but always to refer to one specific page, just to let them know you had in fact read it!”

Such discretion comes naturally. Ish has many theories about the creative process, though he rarely discusses his own work in depth. I have spent hundreds of hours in his company, sitting over his typescripts, but have never, so far as I recall, come close to an in-depth conversation about what he’s up to. Yes, as a songwriter, he revels in the first-person narrative; and yes, there is a quasi-gothic side to his imagination; but that’s about as far as he’ll go. I think he cherishes the mystery of his art, though that will never prevent him from deeply researching his next subject.

I knew something was up when, some time in 1987, he told me he’d been reading PG Wodehouse and began enthusing about Right Ho, Jeeves. Two years later he delivered The Remains of the Day, a novel about a butler, partly set in appeasement Britain, that only he could have written, a book described by the Nobel committee as braiding the themes of “memory, time and self-delusion”. The Remains of the Day won the Booker prize in 1989, and was followed by The Unconsoled (1995), possibly his masterpiece, a hypnotic novel about the trials of a travelling concert pianist, partly inspired by Ish’s life on the literary promotion circuit.

We have remained friends ever since, and although I no longer edit his work, Ish and I always meet to catch up, usually over a Chinese meal, a tradition in our long relationship. My friend is witty, loving and discreet, with deep reserves of wisdom and sympathy. In a frantic, fretful and unstable world, he is a voice of sanity, decorum, humanity and grace. The Swedish Academy should be proud of themselves.

THE GUARDIAN