Bookworm; Kazuo Ishiguro

Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannan Foundation. You are a human animal. You are a very special breed. Or you are the only animal who can think, who can reason, who can read. Hello and welcome to Bookworm. This is Michael Silverblatt and today my guest is Casual Isha Goro. It is the occasion of his fifth novel when we were orphans and it is with a great anticipation that I look forward to having Isha Goro as a guest because to my mind he is one of the few writers who is pioneering narrative possibilities that go beyond the ones that have previously existed in the novel while refining certain of those that have always existed.

The pleasure of these books is that while as original as they can be, they provide pleasure. They are not designed to elude one's interests but rather to incite it. So let's start. The book is called When We Were Orphans and I wanted to begin by asking you how, why the methodology of detection and the tones of Edwardian detective fiction, Edwardian, seemed useful to you? Well the detective stuff was a starting point. I'm not sure how central to the whole scheme of the novel, the detective thing ended up in the end but it was for me an important starting point.

I used to read these Agatha Christie's and Dorothy Sayers, that kind of English cosy mystery story when I was a kid and I've always had a kind of a slightly guilty affection for them long after I came to believe that they were not deep literature. But looking at them now or recently, they struck me as being rather interesting in that that the kind of escapism they offer, that kind of escapism was indulged in on a large scale immediately after the First World War, that at the very time when you would expect people to be rejecting a view of the world, a simplistic view of what evil was and how you can restore harmony in a tranquil village that's been interrupted by a series of murders. Just when you would expect people to want something that grappled with all the horrors

that they had faced, that's the first generation that had come across modern warfare with a high technology of weaponry and political will that had just gone out of control, nationalisms and racisms, arms races that have gone out of control. Isn't it interesting that that's when that golden age flourished in Europe, the golden age of the detective fiction? When I started to work on this novel, I thought it would be interesting to, well let's have somebody figure like that, a detective like that, who seems to have kind of fallen out of a genre like that, and dropped into the turmoil of the 20th century as it moves from the First World War to the Second. Let's have a guy who actually says to himself, this is how you fight evil. You investigate crimes to the magnifying glass and let's put him with the magnifying glass

in the war zone and put some kind of charred corpses in a bombed out ruin in front of him and let's see if he can still find who the murderer is. That was a kind of a starting point. Very interesting and so the remnants of that guilty vicarage, as Orden called it, remain in the novel in the form of place names like if I remember correctly, studly-grange and bubbling well-road, and then a kind of modern infection begins to grow, including the fact that this detective has suffered a kind of childhood trauma which seems to have gocated him permanently in the belief that by finding mother and father, he will be solving the problems leading to World War II.

Yes, there's a bit of a, yeah, when you put it like that, yes, he, here's a man who believes that a series of rather crazy things. By the time you're halfway through the novel, sure, you end up with this main character who believes, what does he believe? He believes he's a great detective, right? That may or may not be true, but he believes that the parents who are kidnapped on the other side of the world when he was a boy are still there, kind of held up by these kidnappers in some room. Some 30 years later. Yes, yes, in the same room somewhere, and that if only the detectives at the time had found them, you know, things wouldn't have got nearly as bad as they have, but they didn't, so he's become a detective in the meantime. He was only a boy then, now he's a detective. But he's still a boy, he's like, somehow or other, he's a boy detective. Yes, it's a classic case of arrested development, you know, there's a part of him that has frozen, been arrested.

His vision of the world has remained that the one that he had when he was a 10-year-old boy in Shanghai when his parents disappear. But he has a big trust when he's a kid in detectives, because that's what those are the people he relies upon to find his missing parents, and they never do. And so years go by, he's an adult, in other ways he can function properly, but there's a small part of him that maintains this view of the world exactly as it looked at that point, and so it's things start to look rather crazy. He literally thinks he should go back to Shanghai, even now it's not too late, he'll find where his parents are being held by these kidnappers. And if only he did does that, the world that's falling apart, and in this case literally, this is the 1930s, we're sliding into the Second World War, both in the Pacific area

and in Europe. And he thinks, well, if only I do that, then the world we put together again. Now, some of his investigation will reveal mysteries, quote-unquote, having to do with the opium tray, the travel of Indian opium into China, and its distribution by British companies. This has a certain romantic aura around it having to do with opium dens, yellow peril, the atmosphere of detective stories. There is some pocket of this detective narrator, Christopher Banks, some part of his brain that he has no access to, that begins to attain the quality of his own opium dream. He says, for instance, that he doesn't know how his schoolmates know that he wanted

to be a detective, and yet he seems almost adivistically to go to parks and mounds and perform detective games unawares, or something of that sort, do I have this, do I have this right sort of? Well, yeah, I mean, he performs the detective games when he's a kid or an adolescent, because that's what he did when he was a child, and his first, his father disappeared. He has a friend who lives next door in the international settlement to Shanghai. This little kid happens to be Japanese, and they would play these drama games like all kids do. But after the kidnapping, they find themselves actually playing this slightly more serious fantasy game, where they pretend that they're rescuing his missing father from kidnappers.

And he wants there to have been rules when his friend Akira suggests to him that the father is being tortured and kept in very vile surroundings. He says no, that in his fantasy, his fiction world, there is to be no pain. And this seems to, in turn, relate to that idea of the British fiction, or the necessary fiction, or even the difficulty, I would say, that a whole generation of writers had in relaying a set of truths. It took a very long time for the events in the concentration camps, or in prisoner of war camps, or in gulags, to even enter the factual realm, letting alone being represented in the fictional realm.

Almost as if the mind manages almost successfully to resist the horrors of our own time, and we're presented instead, or have been, with consoling fictions. And then the terror of photographs that tell us, no, no, you know, these things happened, you're going to have to struggle to make available to yourself the possibility that we live in a human madhouse, we barely have the language to speak of such events. And that seems to be part of the condition that your narrator suffers from, even more than most. Yes, I mean, he can't, as a child, of course, he doesn't want to contemplate what horrible things are happening to his parents. And that perhaps is why he continues to live in this fantasy about where his parents are, how he'll rescue them.

And of course, he's the biggest fantasy that he continues to live in, is that he clings onto this notion of what evil and suffering in the world, what that really means. I mean, he continues to believe that all the bad things in life emanate from some master criminal somewhere. And that's what you have to do, you have to keep unmasking the baddies. And so by the end of the book, yes, he is going through the most glaring evidence of the horrors of war, all around him, families, children, killed, you know, and so on. And he's, yes, he still seems to have this kind of tunnel vision. His attitude is to a large extent, like there's a war going on, I don't want to see it. The people around him, particularly Sarah, it seems like a network of interlocking, although different, fictions about the world.

Their belief is that there will be a famous man, whether a musician, a diplomat, a detective who will arise and she will stand beside him and she will encourage him to save the world, a kind of messy, not a messionic complex, but the wife of the Messiah complex. The fictions in the book extend to the loose of states of mind about how the world could be solved if you could put it between the covers of a book. Well, they do seem often crazy to do visions, but the reason for that is because I'm not actually trying to portray deranged characters in a more or less realistic world. This isn't a kind of novel where you can easily measure the distance between the sanity or otherwise of a particular character and the sanity of the society around him.

I am actually trying to orchestrate, to paint up as though in a picture what the world would look like if it ran according to some emotional, illogical vision. And I think many of us go around somewhere within us, having these kind of irrational version of things. Of course, it's a kind of cliché in everyday life, you often hear people saying things like her father was an alcoholic and died when she was a small girl and she's spending the rest of her life trying to save her father by attaching herself to a series of drunken men who she thinks she'll save. Now most of us, okay, that's a kind of a cliché, but of course there are many people for whom that applies in a very serious and real way.

And if I say something like that to you, you know perfectly well what I'm talking about. You don't take that literally, you don't say what you mean, but the father is dead, how can she say that? You don't say that, we know what that means, we know from our pop psychology books and just from personal experience that this is what a lot of people do and to a greater or lesser extent, we all have some thing from the past, some mission that we've set ourselves, and if we examined it in a perfectly logical, rational, adult way, we would have to give up, we would have to say, look, can be some things are broken forever, this is stupid. But we can't. I'm speaking to Casuale, Shiguro, you're listening to Bookworm, I'm Michael Silverblatt, the book is when we were orphans. I thought that it would be interesting to take a representative passage from toward the beginning of the book and talk about its ramifications as it goes along, so I'm going to ask Mr. Shiguro to read a section in which he describes what happens apparently when

the narrator's childhood friend Akira ventures outside the international settlement in Shanghai. Neither child is allowed to go outside the perimeters of the international settlement to Kira's Japanese, Christopher is English, and this is the description in childhood of their play. It is slightly surprising to me, looking back today, to think how as young boys we were allowed to come and go unsupervised to the extent that we were. But this was, of course, all within the relative safety of the international settlement. I, for one, was absolutely forbidden to enter the Chinese areas of the city, and as far as I know, Akira's parents were no less strict on the matter. Out there we were told, lay all manner of ghastly diseases, filth, and evil men.

The closest I had ever come to going out of the settlement was once when a carriage carrying my mother and me took an unexpected route along that part of the Su-chao Creek bordering the Chape district. I could see the huddled low rooftops across the canal, and had held my breath for as long as I could for fear the pestilence would come airborne across the narrow strip of water. No wonder then that my friends claimed to have undertaken a number of secret forays into such areas made an impression on me. I remember quizzing Akira repeatedly about these exploits. The truth concerning the Chinese districts he taught me was far worse even than the rumors. There were no proper buildings just shack upon shack, building great proximity to one another. It all looked, he claimed, much like the marketplace in Boon Road, except that whole families were to be found living in each stall. There were more over dead bodies powered up everywhere, flies buzzing all over them, and

no one there thought anything of it. On one occasion Akira had been strolling down a crowded alley and had seen a man, some powerful warlord he supposed, being transported on a sedan chair, accompanied by a giant carrying a sword. The warlord was pointing to whomever he pleased, and the giant would then proceed to lock his or her head off. Naturally people were trying to hide themselves the best they could. Akira though had simply stood there, staring defiantly back at the warlord. The latter had spent a moment considering whether to have Akira beheaded, but then obviously struck by my friend's courage, had finally laughed, and reaching down patting him on the head. Then the warlord's party had continued on its way, leaving many more severed heads in its wake. I cannot remember ever attempting to challenge Akira on any of these claims. Once I mentioned casually to my mother, something about my friend's adventures beyond the settlement,

and I remember her smiling and saying something to cast doubt on the matter. I was furious at her, and thereafter I believe I carefully avoided revealing to her anything at all intimate concerning Akira. Casuala Shaguro reading from when we were orphans. Now it seems, at least for a moment, that Akira is giving, in fact, an accurate portrayal the bodies, the flies, followed by his childhood fears, a giant, a sword, locked heads, that somehow or other, the jump between truth and fictional projection is minute and is immediately followed upon by the child's desire to disbelief his friend because of inherent aggressiveness, and to disbelieve his mother when his mother tells him that his friend's stories are untrue,

and so what we keep getting is a kind of relativizing of truth and fiction which leaves no truth and no fiction in a certain way, or no distinguishing between them, which is what I find such a thrilling and terrifying quality in this novel. Of course, that moment I just read out there, it captures these boys, that kind of stage where they're just about moving out of a childhood world and starting to demand some of the criteria of the adult world in ascertaining what's real and what's not, but they're kind of not quite there yet, and so throughout those childhood passages, those boys are very confused about to what extent to indulge in fantasies, and to what extent they demand that things are convincing in an adult sense, and here this description of what life might

be like outside of the safe boundaries of the settlement, of course, yes, it embodies the fears of what the outside adult world might be like, but of course there's also that sense of adventure of wanting to go out there and thinking when I get out there, I'll be able to cope with it, it's enticing as well, and here there's a safety of knowing for these boys, they think they don't really have to go out there, there won't come a time when they're thrown out there outside of these boundaries, and to a large extent, this is, for me, is at the heart of this book, it's about the painful journey that we all had to make, I guess, in what, some of us, less painful than others, perhaps, but we all had to make some kind of journey out of that protected, sheltered, bubble of childhood into the world that we live in now. When your child, adults go to great lengths to make you believe that the world is a beautiful, sunlit place without horrible things, but

of course at some point we come out of that little charmed world, and to some people, for some people they make that journey in a traumatic way, as Christopher does, his parents disappear, his bank, his thrown out of that world, and a part of him is forever trying to go back to that charmed world again. Some others of us may have made that transition in a less violent manner, but maybe we all of us, to some extent, carry at least a sense of disappointment at finding the world to be not quite the beautiful, harmonious place, adults, our parents, whoever wanted us to believe, they're mere small. A final question. You've always, from the very first two novels revealed to my mind, extraordinary sensitivity to the nature of children in childhood, do the adults who are living in the broken world, in the case of this novel, a world that includes

enforced prostitution and parents who desert and, you know, drugs and deceptions, are the parents, therefore, less degraded than the children, or are they opting for the fictional choices of an adult world? Do you know what I mean? That there, when one grows up, there's the thrilling option of adultery, of sadism, of this or that, but they are equally in their way clichés of what it means to be an adult. I guess, yeah, so it's possible to look at it like that, but I'm quite interested in this notion that, even while we participate in this, what you call the broken, horrible world, with that little catalogue of horrors, and you can add war onto that as well.

That, you know, there remains, at least an emotional memory of our time in a more innocent place. And of course, this is well recorded throughout history, you know, like hardened soldiers, suddenly breaking down in battle and weeping simply because there's some snatch of a song or something almost surreal in the battlefield that reminds them of a different world, a childhood, long disappeared, suddenly comes back to them and suddenly humanitis them. And I think that emotion of pure nostalgia, by this I don't mean the kind of nostalgia peddled by tourist industries about, you know, the past eras of a country's history or anything like this. I mean, a pure personal nostalgia. That emotion that we all know very well, I think it's a very important emotion. It's that emotional memory

of our childhood, when we did before we found out, you know, it's that emotion. And in some ways, I think it's a kind of emotional equivalent. It's a kind of equivalent to idealism. What idealism is to the intellect, that kind of nostalgia might be for the emotions. And it can have a humanizing positive effect. And of course, you know, when it has a lot of power, it can become a very destructive thing. Help painful. The idea that what there is to console is the misassumptions and misrepresentations of childhood. Yes, it is painful, but in a way, we would all agree that it's correct that we keep children in these incubators. And we all know this. People know this instinctively. You walk through the street with a young child, a four-year-old or five-year-old. It's amazing

how, you know, strangers you pass, people you see in the store or whatever. They, how quickly, how almost by instinct, perhaps atavistically, they go into this other mode. They put on a smile. They put on a different voice. They desperately want that child to see it, to see it a better world. And we all think it's important that we, yes, that children allow to grow up just for a few years in that little bubble. And as you say, yes, it is sad in a way that, yes, we have to end up consoling ourselves the fact that we made that disappointing discovery. But nevertheless, I think that it's an important emotion, because, as I say, it is a vision of a better world. Even as we know that it's childish, it's naive, it's unattainable.

I've been speaking to Casuala Shaguro on the occasion of the publication of when we were orphans. It is recently published by Knapp. And it's a pleasure to talk to you again. Thank you very much. Thanks. It's terrific to be here. My associate producer is Melinda Single. The engineer is Mario Diaz, special production assistance from Alan Howard with JC Swadek. I'm Michael Silverblatt. Join me again next week on Bookworm. Fans for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannan Foundation. This program is made available to the public radio system by SAS, a satellite service of KCRW Santa Monica. Cassette copies of this and other Bookworm programs are available. For ordering information, call KCRW at 310-450-5183. Books make you laugh and say, books tell you everything. They're your treasure, friends and adults.