Kazuo Ishiguro

Speaker 30:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For rights reasons we've had to shorten the music. The programme was originally broadcast in two thousand and two, and the presenter was Sue Lawley.

Presenter0:30

Mike Castaway this week is a writer. Born in post-war Nagasaki, he came to this country at the age of five, where he was brought up in Surrey. He tried his luck as a singer and worked for a while as a social worker, but a stint at the creative writing course at East Anglia University set him on the path to his ultimate career. The contrasting worlds of his upbringing echo in his novels. They're there in The Remains of the Day, which won the Booker Prize in 1989 and was made into a successful film starring Anthony Hopkins. His success is international. Three of his other books, he's written five altogether, have also won major prizes, and he's been awarded the OBE and decorated by the French government. Beautifully crafted, this small group of novels tells of incidents and people found at history's dramatic intersections, the heroes and victims of incomprehensible change. I'm interested in the language of self-deception, he says. What happens to a person's values if, during the course of his lifetime, things deemed honourable and great turn out to be something to be ashamed of. He is Kazuo Ishiguro.

Presenter1:36

That's the um recurring theme of your novels, really, isn't it, Caswoo? The idea that idealism might be misplaced, that you're doing something today that you might regret in later life. Is that something that that worries you personally?

Kazuo Ishiguro1:51

I think it used to. I was born nine years after the end of the Second World War, and I think if you're of a Japanese background, it's it's quite a natural thing to wonder had I been born just one generation earlier?

Kazuo Ishiguro2:05

Would I have had the perspective, the strength of character, the physical courage to stand outside that kind of militaristic, fascistic fervor?

Presenter2:16

Yes of course.

Kazuo Ishiguro2:18

Yes, of course, yes. And in fact, they they're in Nagasaki when the bom bomb fell. My my concern has generally been not so much with any single incident. I haven't been that preoccupied by the atomic bombings.

Presenter2:32

So what what is this? Because there does seem to be a projected fear of your own in this theme. I'd even wondered if it was writing, because I know that you didn't start writing until you were twenty five, and you wanted to be a singer, or you wanted to do other things. I just wonder whether

Presenter2:46

Perhaps e fear that you might have regrets about what you're doing now, which is writing.

Kazuo Ishiguro2:51

I think this this doubting about whether one is wasting one's life, this fear that applies not so much to the choice of vocation, it it applies to the actual work. It's very easy to particularly when you've had a certain amount of acceptance, you know, to start thinking you're doing something great and you steam along. But I think history has shown time and time again that we often don't have perspective when we're doing things. We we don't really know how we fit into the larger scheme of things.

Presenter3:24

I want to talk to you some more about all of that, but let's pause there. Tell me about the first record you're taking to your desert island.

Kazuo Ishiguro3:30

Well, this is Lena Cohen. Hey, that's no way to say goodbye. This for me brings back a certain point in my early twenties when I used to drift around Europe and North America, you know, with a backpack, and there were all kinds of other young people doing the same thing.

Kazuo Ishiguro3:47

We always came across a kind of a battered guitar, whichever room you happened to wander into, and people would be able to play a certain repertoire of songs. And actually a few years later, in my early twenties, when I first met my wife, Lorna, she had a battered guitar, and she could play this song, and I knew this song, and we we could sing it in harmony without any prior rehearsal. We can probably still do it now.

Speaker 44:10

I love you in the morning, our kisses deep and warm Your hair upon the pillow Like a sleepy golden star Yes Many love before us I know that we are not new in city

Speaker 44:33

And in force they smile like

Presenter4:36

Leonard Cohen and Hey, that's no way to say goodbye and memories for you because you have carefree backpacking days. I said that you came reluctantly to writing, or certainly late, having tried to be a songwriter. You you suddenly decided to go on this creative writing course at the University of East Anglia under Malcolm Bradbury. Why? Where did the idea suddenly come from?

Kazuo Ishiguro5:01

Well, I'd been working in West London working with homeless people, and it had been a very intense year. And the idea of going back to university to do another degree suddenly became very appealing to me. And in those days, this East Anglia creative writing course wasn't well known as it is today. In fact, the previous year it hadn't run at all because there hadn't been enough applications. And I just came across this, and it looked like even less work than writing a long essay.

Presenter5:30

Yeah.

Kazuo Ishiguro5:32

Yes, all you had to do was after one year you had to produce thirty pages of fiction. So I thought, well I'll apply for this. But had you written anything? I'd written very little. I'd written a a rather bad radio play about a cross-eyed couple who fall in love with each other, but never acknowledge the fact that this is the reason they fell in love with each other. Probably very bad taste. But that was the radio play I sent up to East Anglia to to Malcolm Bradbury.

Presenter5:39

But had you written anything?

Presenter5:57

But people do always wonder if you can be taught to to to write. I think people are always a bit sceptical about that course. I mean, can you? Did you learn to write or did they refine you? What do you feel you got out of it?

Kazuo Ishiguro6:09

Well, Malcolm Bradbury, who was a terrific teacher, and also Angela Carter, who was my other teacher there, those two ran that course. And I think they both very much believed that you didn't run a course like that by setting exercises. What that course did was to simulate as closely as possible the conditions in which you would write as a proper writer, if you like. That's to say, you know, very few distractions, a very empty space. It's just you and the piece of paper. And I think this is the most difficult thing. I think a lot of people spend their lives telling themselves they would like to write, they would write if they weren't so busy. Sometimes you take away all the stuff that makes them busy. They discover that they've got nothing to write. They don't even want to write.

Presenter6:54

But the opposite happened to you, obviously. Yes. But did you start writing your first novel there? I did.

Kazuo Ishiguro6:55

Yes, but I think just

Kazuo Ishiguro6:58

I did, yes. During the course of that year I I had started a novel and Robert McCrun, who was then the very young editor-in-chief at Faber, came across my writing and called me in and asked me if I was writing a novel. And he gave me a contract and encouraged me to finish the novel.

Presenter7:19

Uh

Kazuo Ishiguro7:19

I could not

Presenter7:20

Uh

Kazuo Ishiguro7:20

But two.

Kazuo Ishiguro7:21

Oh, this is Chopin. To be honest, I I I have a problem with orchestras. This is something I'm planning to get right in this in the next few years, but I cannot understand music that involves orchestras. This means I have a lot of difficulty with classical music, but I love solo piano. I love Chopin because there there aren't any orchestras around. I like this quiet introspective surface, but with very strong emotions underneath.

Presenter8:44

The opening of Chopin's Nocturne opus twenty seven, number two in D flat, played by Otto Rubinstein, a piece which you say Cazur is apparently s very simple on the surface, but has great emotional depth, which is

Presenter8:58

In many ways, what you aspire to in your writing, isn't it? You do depth, not breadth.

Kazuo Ishiguro9:02

I it it is. And in fact a lot of artists in other fields that I admire, like Chekhov or Yasujuro Ozu, the Japanese filmmaker, they all have these qualities. And in some ways I do aspire to to that myself. I I like this simple still surface.

Presenter9:22

But it's interesting'cause it is again in that music is a kind of

Presenter9:26

Yearning, really, isn't it? For unattainable things. I mean, I don't know if you go along with this, but certainly if you think about Remains of the Day, Stevens the Butler is yearning for days of grandeur when he was very important. He's perhaps yearning for lost love, you know. And then your latest hero, Christopher Banks, in When We Were Orphans, is sort of yearning for his parents whom he lost. Well, it's nostalgia as well, isn't it?

Kazuo Ishiguro9:49

That probably does recur a lot a lot in my work. I think at some level, most of us, we do have a deep nostalgia for childhood, a time when the world seemed a kinder, nicer place.

Presenter10:02

But yours was strange because you came you were brought to this country when you were five years old from Nagasaki, to kind of leafy suburban Surrey.

Presenter10:11

And you always expected to be going back, didn't you?

Kazuo Ishiguro10:15

For our family it was never a kind of emigration. It was supposed to be a temporary visit. Yes, yes, he was he was a s he was a scientist working for the British government as an oceanographer. So I continue to th think of myself as somebody who would ultimately grow up in Japan.

Presenter10:22

Yeah.

Presenter10:34

Presumably you'd left family there anyway, close family.

Kazuo Ishiguro10:37

Yes, I think my grandfather particularly had been a very important figure for me in the first five years of my life. And I think there was that sense that I had never properly said goodbye to people like my grandfather, my grandmother, a lot of my favourite toys.

Presenter10:53

What you left them all there?

Kazuo Ishiguro10:54

Yes, because it was only going to be a year or two. And I think that sense that you turn your back on the whole world.

Kazuo Ishiguro11:01

And before you know it has faded away.

Presenter11:03

So did you ever see your grandfather again?

Kazuo Ishiguro11:05

No, when I was fifteen I remember a phone call with the news that my grandfather had died.

Kazuo Ishiguro11:11

And on the surface, you know, it wasn't something that troubled me greatly. You know, he he was in his seventies. I mean, it it's what happens. But I think it was that sense that um ten years had gone by, this person had just who was so important to me had just faded away, and the whole world with it.

Presenter11:30

Record number three.

Kazuo Ishiguro11:32

For me, that this man, Dick Gocham, a Scottish folk singer, is a possessor of one of the greatest singing voices. He's probably not as well known as he might be because he he sings Scottish folk songs. I've had a long-standing relationship with Scotland, not only because I'm married to a Scottish woman, but long before I met her, I was going backwards and forwards from Scotland. Being brought up in Stockbroke about Surrey, Scotland represented something very exciting, a different culture that had different values.

Presenter11:50

Well

Speaker 412:08

But pegging dear the evenings could swift flies.

Speaker 412:16

The skimming swallow

Speaker 412:20

Sky as blue, the fields and view all fading green

Presenter12:29

And yellow.

Presenter12:31

Dick Gochan singing Now Westland Winds. So tell me, Kazu, how this family of yours was assimilated into Stockbroker Belt, Surrey, in nineteen sixty. It must have been an interesting experience all round.

Kazuo Ishiguro12:42

Looking back, it must have been very odd. This was long before England had become this multi-ethnic cosmopolitan place. My recollection was that w I didn't see anybody who looked vaguely Eastern or Japanese for about the first five years of of my stay in England. I remember once a Korean man came to visit us simply because he was in the area and it was so unusual.

Presenter13:09

Sounds like some kind of moral support.

Kazuo Ishiguro13:12

Uh

Presenter13:12

But were you regarded in the playground as a curiosity or a matter of money?

Kazuo Ishiguro13:15

Yes, I was very much so. I was very much so. I I remember when I first set foot in the school, the whole playground kind of following me around the whole time, asking me questions. But looking back now, given that this was only, say, you know, fifteen years after the end of the war, people were marvellously generous and kind to our family.

Presenter13:37

But when they heard that you came from Nagasaki, they would only think one thing, wouldn't they? They would think A bomb.

Kazuo Ishiguro13:43

Probably yes.

Presenter13:44

I mean, were you able to say to them, but it is also a very beautiful place?

Kazuo Ishiguro13:48

It took me a long time to figure out that the place I had come from was distinguished by this event. I grew up probably thinking that every town had an atomic bomb that had dropped on them. The atomic bomb kept getting mentioned almost as a marker in time. They were saying that that bridge used to be there before the bomb. And I thought every town had a bomb. And I th I distinctly recall when I was about seven looking in a school encyclopedia and realizing with a almost a kind of a pride that Nagasaki was only one of two places in history that had ever been atom bombed.

Presenter14:04

Thank you.

Speaker 414:05

Uh

Presenter14:05

Yeah.

Presenter14:26

What about your language? Presumably you hadn't spoken any English until you came here. How d how did you get on? Did you find that terribly easy? As a child probably would?

Kazuo Ishiguro14:35

Yes, I was five and because when you're five, you know, the world is changing every year. You know, well, you know, one day you can't speak at all, and then you can speak a little bit, you can't walk, then you can walk. And I think the fact that suddenly everyone was speaking English around me was just another one of these big changes. I think where I was a little confused was on T V in those days they had a lot of cowboy shows, and Laramie, Bonanza, all those things. Rawhide. Rawhide. That's what kids watched. And it was difficult for me to distinguish between the kind of English being used by those people and the kind of English that would be appropriate in Surrey in the early 1960s. So as I was learning English, I would pick up all this kind of Wild West Frontier language and go to school and say, Howdy? And instead of yes, I would say sure.

Presenter15:24

Record number four.

Kazuo Ishiguro15:26

Now, th Bob Dylan, it's it's it was very difficult for me to choose one track.

Kazuo Ishiguro15:32

No other single artist has had such an influence on me. He's somebody who managed to carry a whole audience with him, appeal to a mass audience, and yet he's always been unafraid to move on. In the end I decided to choose a relatively recent Dylan track, because when I hear Dylan's voice on a track like this, trying to get to heaven before they close the door, it's a beaten up, aging voice, but still magnificent and I can hear all the other Dylan voices from the past. He's like a big brother who's gone on ahead of me. I don't feel quite so afraid of old age now because Dylan's gone there and romanticised it.

Speaker 416:13

That Lots of Valley

Speaker 416:17

Trying to get to him, before they close the door.

Speaker 416:24

Uh

Speaker 416:25

They belong the platforms.

Speaker 416:30

Waiting for the trains

Speaker 416:34

I can hear their hearts beating

Speaker 416:40

Leg pendulum swinging on a channel

Presenter16:43

Bob Dylan and trying to get to heaven. You say that you admire him because he's been unafraid to move on.

Presenter16:51

It's interesting that after your booker prize winner, Remains of the Day, in 1989, we had to wait kind of six years for the next one, and it had moved on to somewhere completely different, the unconsoled. I mean, so much so that there was a kind of howl of anguish from the critics, wasn't there then? I mean, not to put too fine a point on it, I think they thought you'd gone bonkers.

Kazuo Ishiguro17:12

Yes, in fact, w one newspaper had that as a headline. I think, you know, Has He Gone Mad?

Presenter17:17

But this was you quite deliberately doing something completely different. It was a much more where where Remains of the Day had been a very accessible novel, and we could understand this old butler going on his journey to the West Country looking back. Suddenly we uh arrive at the unconsoled and and and I think as one critic put it, this was very queasy terrain, pianist arriving in some strange town and

Presenter17:38

It had all the illogicality and kind of menace of a nightmare.

Kazuo Ishiguro17:43

Well, I think there's a great danger in being trapped by the things that once worked for you. It's rather like insisting on wearing the same clothes you wore twenty years ago. There comes a time when it's inappropriate. You see, a book like The Remains of the Day, there is this notion that you can look back over your life at a certain point and you can see a clear path down which you have come. You made a few key decisions and you came down the road. I think I used to write out of that kind of vision of what a person's life was like. By the time I got to my late thirties, it seemed to me that you didn't really set a course and follow it through life. You did try and set a course, but it was more like a kind of a wind that picked you up and dumped you in some place. I think things like chance, you know, what life allows you to do, doesn't allow you to do, the obligations society and people close to you put on you, these are often the things that make you go in a certain direction. And of course you stop every now and again, take stock and say, you know, I'm glad things have worked out this way. But often you've been dumped there and there is something almost comical sometimes and sad and in some ways touching about people's ability to dignify the spot that the the wind has dumped them down on.

Presenter19:13

Record number five.

Kazuo Ishiguro19:15

Well this is Hickory Wind sung by Emilou Harris. This is a song about homesickness. And I love these homesick songs where you're not quite sure whether the singer is missing the place or a particular person that they left behind there or is it a particular era in their lives. I love these songs where you can't figure out what it is they're they're missing.

Speaker 419:46

I always pretend.

Kazuo Ishiguro19:47

Uh

Speaker 419:50

How

Speaker 419:54

That I'm getting

Speaker 419:57

Mafia

Presenter20:08

Hickory Wynn, sung by Emilou Harris. I don't want to overstate Kazua the importance of Nagasaki and the bomb in your life, because, as you say, you were born nine years after it, and so on.

Presenter20:19

Nevertheless, as I understand it, your your mother

Presenter20:22

After you first began to be published, decided that she should tell you her version of it, didn't she?

Kazuo Ishiguro20:29

That was in the mid-1980s, when the Cold War probably reached the last very tense point. And it was just around that time that I had started to become published. And I had written a couple of things that touched on the atomic bomb. My first novel did. And perhaps because my mother had looked at these things and thought, well, this is ridiculous. He's getting it all wrong. It wasn't because.

Presenter20:55

It wasn't because she didn't she felt, as people do feel in these situations, that certain memories shouldn't die with her one day.

Kazuo Ishiguro21:00

Yes, I I think I think that there was there was this deeper thing too. I remember her actually saying, you know, you have actually have some you've now got some power, you know, in in the world. I mean you you you write things. And so yes, indeed, she she she told me

Presenter21:15

But you were invited, I think, a couple of years ago to visit Auschwitz, weren't you? And I wondered if there was a kind of similar motive at work there. You know, were they too, if you like, asking you from your position of power in inverted commas to help sustain the memories, lest in the profound sense we forget?

Kazuo Ishiguro21:35

There is a parallel there. I think there is a big question now about what we do with the memories from the last war. It's quite difficult for a young person today to think of the Second World War being any more recent than, say, the Napoleonic Wars. It seems very far away from their lives. And so I think there is this difficult question. Should these memories of places like Auschwitz and the war, should they be repackaged in some kind of way to make it relevant?

Kazuo Ishiguro22:05

to young people.

Presenter22:06

And is that something you feel? Is that why you went? You accepted the invitation.

Kazuo Ishiguro22:08

Yes I'm not sure.

Kazuo Ishiguro22:11

When I was younger, I found people talking about the war rather tiresome, like a lot of people of my generation. But as I have got older, I feel that my generation has a new kind of responsibility, because of course we didn't go through it, but we grew up in the shadow of the war. We had been brought up by parents who had gone through it. And now we live in a time of relative peace and harmony. And I think sometimes I think there is a great danger of complacency. There's that Buster Keaton movie, Steamboat Bill Jr., where there's that famous scene where there's a cyclone and he's standing there and a whole barn door falls on top of him. But because he's standing just where there is an open doorway,

Kazuo Ishiguro22:56

He he's completely unharmed and he doesn't even realize what has happened. Um and he he walks off, you know, so nothing has happened. And I sometimes think we are like that now. When you look through the whole of history, it is scarred with terrible events and wars. But we've got this idea, because we've kept going in relative prosperity here in the West, that we're we're always going to be like that. But I think we're in danger of becoming rather like that Buster Keaton character.

Presenter23:23

We call number six.

Kazuo Ishiguro23:26

I'm a big lover of pre-rock and roll American popular songs, and I would definitely have to have on this desert island, you know, um some rendition of one of those great American songs. This is one of my favorite um late night slinky jazz singers, Stacey Kent, and sh here she is doing a version of Gershman's They Can't Take That Away From Me.

Speaker 423:47

The way you hold your knife

Speaker 423:55

The way we dance still three

Speaker 424:03

The way you've changed my life.

Speaker 424:10

No, no, they can't take that away from

Presenter24:16

Stacey Kent singing Gershwin's They Can't Take That Away from Me. Just let me ask you briefly about your latest book, When We Were Orphans. It's it's again very moving about a childhood experience and its effect on the adult life of the main character, Christopher Banks. He again, like the characters i i in your other books we've talked about, Ed Succo in A Pale View of Hills and of course Stevens the Butler in The Remains of the Day. He's a very solitary and unloved character, sort of dislocated from the world around him, which is how you describe yourself as an artist, but certainly are not as an individual, as a human being.

Kazuo Ishiguro24:54

Well, I think people are quite often surprised when they get to know me. I suppose they do expect me to be living by myself in a bed situation somewhere. But it it's to do with my relationship to my characters. How I work, I think, is I tend to look in myself for some tendency, a trait that m might not even be noticeable necessarily, but that fascinates me, that perhaps I fear, and I kind of create a character around it. I'm not probably a a naturalistic writer. You know, I don't go around observing people and then putting them into my books. And so these are slightly strange, grotesque creations.

Presenter25:01

Jersey

Presenter25:35

Record number seven.

Kazuo Ishiguro25:37

This is Keith Jarrett. When we were talking about American popular songs earlier, one of the things I love about American popular songs is that they often have marvellous titles. And if you keep coming across them in jazz instrumental forms, you often don't know what on earth the titles are referring to. You get these marvellous titles like Someone to Watch Over Me or Every Time We Say Goodbye. And then there's a lot of instrumental music. And you can go years loving a particular song, never knowing what the title refers to. And this Keith Jarrett is playing here a song called Blame It on My Youth. I've never heard the actual lyric to the actual song. Of course, it could mean Blame It on My Youth in the sense of like a teenage joyrider. That's what he's saying when a cop pulls him up. I'm only young.

Kazuo Ishiguro26:27

But the way Jarrett plays it here, it's like someone quite advanced in life who recognizes that a lot of things that have happened to him, a lot of the patterns that have emerged in his life, somehow derive from things that happened in his youth. And of course he he he might be regretful, but maybe he's not that regretful either.

Presenter27:46

The Keith Jarrard trio and Blame It on My Youth and that reminds you of your daughter, you say.

Kazuo Ishiguro27:52

Yes, when my daughter was a small baby, whenever we put this on, she would go very still and listen very carefully. And I used to think, oh, you know, she's going to be really musical and she's very sophisticated, listening to jazz. But of course now it occurs to me, what's fascinating her is is the rather bizarre cymbal work played by Jacques Du Jeunnette there. As as you heard he he sounds like he's taking the rubbish out, you know, um well in a very elegant way he's taking the rubbish.

Presenter28:20

How will you ever know if that's what appealed and not chance itself?

Kazuo Ishiguro28:20

Uh

Presenter28:24

It strikes me that because, as you've just described, you don't go around observing people for inspiration, you don't go researching, you didn't go to Shanghai before you wrote when we were orphans.

Presenter28:35

You you'll be fine on this desert island, won't you? Because your inspiration is entirely from within.

Kazuo Ishiguro28:41

Well, i in that sense I'll be fine, but I I think I'm going to be pretty pretty much a disaster and the survival stakes.

Presenter28:46

Hiya.

Presenter28:49

You're no good at all of that.

Kazuo Ishiguro28:50

Well, I I've been worried about how I'm gonna eat, you know. I mean, are are are there animals that I'm supposed to kill or something? I mean probably.

Presenter28:57

Probably is.

Kazuo Ishiguro28:57

Well, see, I mean, I I think they're more likely to come and eat me uh when I'm halfway through listening to Emilou Harris or something. You'd have to supply me with um kind of serious d defense stuff, you know, like automatic weapons or something. None of that.

Presenter29:11

But but do you imagine yourself surviving the experience other than practically? I mean, could you are you okay on your own? You could cope with all of that.

Kazuo Ishiguro29:22

Well, in in a sense, yes, I have this because I'm a writer, I've been a writer for a long time, I have a highly developed sort of i inner world.

Presenter29:31

Last record.

Kazuo Ishiguro29:33

Well, um I would want somebody I have discovered recently. And in the last few years the the one artist above all that I think is a is an enormous talent uh i is an American singer called Gideon Welch. She sounds a little like she's stepped out of the Depression years from the Appalachian Mountains, but actually in a funny kind of way she's she's also quite kind of modernist and is part of a very interesting kind of movement in in America of young people who are rediscovering America's roots and its history.

Speaker 430:06

Nobody knows what waits a hand.

Speaker 430:15

Beyon the earthen sky.

Speaker 430:23

Lo, love, love.

Speaker 430:31

I'm not free.

Presenter30:35

Gillian Welch singing I'm Not Afraid to Die. Um has the title got anything to do with your state of mind on this desert island?

Kazuo Ishiguro30:43

And guess what? As I say, on this desert island, I think I will be afraid that some strange beast will come and devour me. So maybe I will play that to keep my spirits up.

Presenter30:52

If you could only take one of them, though, out of all of the eight, which one would you choose?

Kazuo Ishiguro30:56

I would I would take the Dylan, I think. Um, you know,

Presenter31:00

Your role model, your big brother.

Kazuo Ishiguro31:01

Yes, yes. And I think after unless someone comes and rescues me pretty soon, I think that's that's the way I'll be sounding. I my voice will sound parched and uh which will I suppose be a fulfilment of a lifelong ambition to sound like Dylan.

Presenter31:16

What about your book?

Kazuo Ishiguro31:17

I would take the uh collected short stories of Anton Chekhov. I think short stories would would be the thing. It it would give me a a large variety of worlds. And what about your luxury?

Kazuo Ishiguro31:28

But I don't know if you're going to accept this, but I wanted like um a kind of a a gigantic roll. I don't mean like a bread roll, I mean like a bit something a bit like a fax roll, or maybe a a scroll, which which could just sit there on the on the dunes. Yeah, I'll probably sleep on the dunes, and when I wake up, I would I would write a little bit, and as I continue to write this story, you know, this the the bit that I had written will start to kind of scroll up and there would be this big thing in front of me. And I'll be able to spend my time sort of writing something a long yarn, something like the Count of Monte Cristo or something, you know, something very enjoyable and very loose. The fact that I can't go back and check, you know, I think is is quite important. Whenever I've written something, this roll will kind of roll up behind me. And I could sometimes just just go to sleep next to the roll.

Presenter32:21

Kazuo Ishigoru, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your desert island issues.

Kazuo Ishiguro32:25

Thank you. It's been terrific fun.

Speaker 332:33

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co.uk slash radio four.