Kazuo Ishiguro on Life, Death, and the Movies

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Kazuo Ishiguro has had a busy few months. The acclaimed novelist has been attending film festivals and walking red carpets to promote the film Living, for which he wrote the screenplay. Living—a remake of the 1952 Japanese film Ikiru, directed by Akira Kurosawa, which was inspired by Leo Tolstoy’s 1886 novella The Death of Ivan IIyich—is set in 1950s London and stars Bill Nighy as Rodney Williams, a senior bureaucrat in the Public Works department who is dying of cancer. The film has been an awards season darling, and this January Ishiguro was nominated for an Academy Award, his first, for best adapted screenplay. No stranger to big awards, Ishiguro has won the Booker Prize, the Nobel Prize for Literature, and in 2019 received a knighthood for his contribution to literature. His novels include 1989’s The Remains of the Day, a slim tour de force about a loyal English butler, which was made into an Academy Award-winning movie with Anthony Hopkins, and 2021’s Klara and the Sun, about a solar-powered Artificial Friend that’s given as a companion to a lonely child (think of the AF as a more benevolent version of the robot in M3GAN). Ishiguro joined me via Zoom from his home in London to talk about living to the fullest, making art out of office bureaucracy, and preparing an Oscars speech. Elaine Szewczyk: Living is an adaptation of Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru. Why did you want to write it? Kazuo Ishiguro: I’ve been wanting somebody to remake Ikiru for a long time. I always thought it would work really well if you transferred that material into an English postwar setting. That English postwar setting was kind of the last generation of English gentlemen. I’m not saying English gentlemen have died out completely, but that era was the last time when males of a certain age all thought they had to conform to a certain kind of behavior, uniform, and manner, and certain people of that class, they were like Mr. Williams in Living. I saw the tail end of that when I was growing up in England, and I’ve always been fascinated by that kind of England, and what drove people to be the way they were. ES: Have you always been a Kurosawa fan? KI: Yes, and Ikiru had a profound impact on me. I grew up as a teenager and a student thinking about that film, it’s message. It meant a lot to me at that age, when you’re trying to figure out what’s the meaning of life. How do you lead a meaningful life? Especially if it doesn’t seem realistic as it didn’t at that point in my existence, that I’d have anything other than a fairly straightforward humble middle class life, working in some office somewhere. ES: The film is a meditation on life, death, and mortality. What about these themes interests you? KI: For me, that diagnosis of terminal illness in Living is like a MacGuffin. It’s a device for triggering this question: When you know you’re life is short, when you really have to think about your life, what matters to you? Are you happy to say that you just existed? You hung around and you died, or do you want it to be something more? Although Living is ostensibly a story about a guy who’s dying of cancer, the focus is somewhere else. It’s about, How do you live? What does it mean to live to the full? ES: The protagonist of Living works in a government office marred in bureaucracy. He’s a paper pusher surrounded by paper pushers. The office scenes are slyly witty. How does bureaucracy illuminate the human condition?  KI: Bureaucracy is not usually seen as a commercial selling point in a movie. This movie we’re making, it’s going to be set in an office, with lots of piles of paper! Office work is a kind of metaphor. Offices easily lend themselves to metaphor because you’re seeing in some sort of concrete form the way life is compartmentalized and people are squashed into these existences where they’re given this overwhelming routine of work. And it’s difficult for them to see from cubical to cubical how they relate to each other, never mind how their contribution relates to the outside world and to the human enterprise in general. ES: In those office scenes, the stacks of papers, the unprocessed documents that sit on workers’ desks, seem to always be precariously teetering and getting higher and higher. It makes for a powerful visual. KI: It’s interesting, today, to look at a pre-digital workplace, so you can see the physical stacks of papers that are overwhelming people. In a way, digitization has allowed us to disguise a lot of that, the futility of a lot of the stuff that’s going on. More than ever we’re in workplaces that are hard for us to identify in terms of their meaningfulness. Even if we think we’re part of some larger corporation that’s doing something useful in the world, it’s difficult to figure out how your particular little contribution is important. ES: How is writing scripts and books different? KI: Over the decades I’ve learned a huge amount about writing novels. I feel like I’m just learning on the job about screenplays. One key difference is that a screenplay is a contribution to something that a team is going to work on, so it’s necessarily a collaborative document. If the screenplay is working then everything harmonizes. If the screenplay is weak it doesn’t matter how brilliantly other people do their work, the screenplay will always betray the final product. ES: Where were you when you heard you’d been nominated for an Oscar? KI: My wife and I were in the kitchen. I completely blew it actually. I had arranged a three-hour script meeting for the same day. I’d just managed to get the announcement, I was looking over my wife’s shoulder as she was watching on her iPad, then I had to leave the house. But it was fantastic, a terrific honor. There are some very talented people who’ve worked decades in the film industry and have done far more than I have and have never received a nomination. So a part of me feels some imposter syndrome. ES: What was the script meeting about? KI: I was meeting with Guillermo del Toro to discuss a future project of ours. We were with a couple of other people. We booked a room in a hotel and were having a fairly intense discussion and that’s what we were doing instead of celebrating. ES: What’s the project you’re working on with del Toro? KI: It’s an adaptation of my novel The Buried Giant. The success Guillermo has had with his film Pinocchio has encouraged him in his conviction that this is a really interesting moment for stop-motion animated films. We’ve been thinking about an animated version of The Buried Giant for years. I haven’t been speaking about it but I’ve noticed that Guillermo has so I guess I’m allowed to talk to you about it. He’s got a live-action film he’s about to shoot here in Britain, but he said The Buried Giant will be his next animated film. ES: The Buried Giant is a fantastical novel about memory loss, set in a post-Arthurian England. It seems like a perfect del Toro project. Will you write the script?  KI: No, Dennis Kelly will. He wrote Matilda the Musical. I prefer to stay away from adaptations of my own books. After a certain point I don’t think it’s healthy if I’m lurking about like some kind of weird ghost from the past. ES: What are your feelings about adaptations?   KI: I’m developing fairly strong views about adaption, especially now that I’ve adapted the Kurosawa movie myself. I believe in adaptation. It’s part of that great tradition that we’ve always had as human beings, telling stories then passing them on. Stories gain a mythic fairy-tale status when they start getting changed a little bit. Different generations bring something different to it. Today part of that process has become accelerated. Books get turned into films, films get turned into TV series. It’s a fascinating process and some authors of books resist that instinctively and I’m sympathetic to that. You’ve written a book and you don’t want it changed, but, personally, I feel it’s an honor. ES: You’re headed to the Oscars in March. Will you prepare a speech?  KI: Ever since I’ve been about 30 I’ve been dragged along to awards ceremonies, where I didn’t know whether I’d won or not. A lot of the ceremonies have this feature where the nominated people, the shortlisted people, don’t know if they’ve won. You just sit there. And I’ve become used to the psychology of this and I think I’ve kind of gotten used to having some sort of speech ready without emotionally investing in it very much. I would prefer it that authors and filmmakers weren’t put through this kind of emotional device for the sake of publicity or impact. I think it’s not a nice thing to do to people. I think it’s a disrespectful thing to do to artists, but that’s the way the machine works. As far as the Oscars is concerned, it’s easier than most because we’ve all been told that should we win, our speeches must not last more than 45 seconds. Some orchestra will start driving you out if you go beyond that. It’s not like you have to come up with some epic thing. It’s just enough time to thank three or four people. The Oscars themselves don’t present much of a problem, but with the Nobel Prize, I had to speak for 45 minutes, and I had about 10 days to write it, so that was a bit more of a challenge. Photo credit: Andrew Testa [millions_email]

Aleksandar Hemon on His Musical Alter Ego

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Sophia M. Stewart: The World and All That It Holds is your fourth novel and your eighth book. Does writing get easier with each publication, or is each new book a unique experience? Aleksandar Hemon: For me, writing and publishing are congruent, but not directly related. I wrote this book over a period of twelve years, in the course of which I published four other books, worked on a number of scripts (produced and unproduced), wrote dozens of articles and opinion pieces etc. Each writing project has its own demands and challenges and rewards. While I believe in my ability to sustain and complete the writing process, since I’ve been doing it for decades, there is no way of telling whether any of it will work before it’s all done. It is always on the verge of catastrophe until it isn’t. Or, as I tell my students: It’s all shit until it isn’t. SMS: English is your second language; you started writing in English less than a decade after you learned it. After all these years, is there anything about writing in English that still surprises or challenges you? AH: I had taken English classes when I was a kid, but had never been in an English speaking country before I found myself in the States. I could communicate, but I couldn’t write in English, as that requires access to an entirely different register. English is large and has always changed by the exposure to all the other languages, because it’s been the language of global expansion, which is to say it is the second language to a lot of people. I believe that every language, other than those geographically isolated, is inherently macaronic—never pure, always containing and overlapping with other languages, always a combination of several linguistic and cultural experiences. Because of that, the English language is malleable, perpetually transformed. I am invested in that transformation. SMS: You also make music under the name Cielo Hemon. What was your journey to music-making? Did it happen alongside your becoming a writer? AH: I’ve never written anything in my life without listening to music. Even when I don’t write, music is on nonstop. I listen to music eight to 12 hours a day, sometimes while I sleep. When I was young, back in Sarajevo, I was in a band, wrote songs, performed. But then I sold my guitar and amp to have money while traveling in America. I spent it all here, and then had no money or time to get back into it, so I only listened to music. Once I had children, I would play Beatles songs for my kids ("Yellow Submarine," Ob-la-di, Ob-la-da etc.) And then, within a week of the pandemic being declared in March 2020, I acquired a guitar, amp, and Distortion, Loop, and Delay pedals. I abused the guitar in my bedroom for a while. Eventually, I started toying with Garage Band, graduated to Logic Pro, learning, with help from a Bosnian friend, to produce music from scratch. I spent much of the pandemic making loops and dancing in my office, in a totally vacant building, before the students returned to the university. Early on in the Cielo project, I talked Goran Markovic into joining the Cielo project. We’ve been friends since first grade. He is a phenomenal guitar player and musician (incidentally also incredible with languages), and lives in California. Then I recruited some other people, including a few video artists, and started producing videos. Some of it I finance with academic research fund—as I’ve been writing a book about the project from its beginning—while also throwing my own money into it. It is phenomenally unprofitable, but it is really all I want to do. One learns so much about music by making it. I hear everything better now, and I love music more than ever. And I created a communal space—featuring mainly Bosnians—across the world in which we make joyous things together. SMS: What moves you to make music? Is it the same impulse that moves you to write, or does it come from someplace else? AH: Here’s my little theory: if the aliens are actually observing us, they obviously have no reason to be particularly impressed. If they appreciate or find anything interesting about humans, it’s three things: language, math, and music. While it is easy to see the evolutional value of language (social bonding, transmission of knowledge) and math (science), it is not all that clear what the music is for Yet every culture and group of people in the world and history had music. I think there are at least two reasons why: rhythm is inscribed in the body (heartbeat, breathing etc); music is essential to human ability to share joy (and other emotions). SMS: Who are your musical influences? Who are some of your favorite musical artists right now? AH: I’ve been obsessed with music for decades so I am pathologically eclectic. Everything interests me, except patriotic country and any kind of music that identifies itself as "smooth" or "lite." Some of my favorite musical artists have always been my favorite musical artists (The Beatles, David Bowie, Ella Fitzgerald, Miles Davis). My all-time favorite is Fela Kuti. D’Angelo is a genius. Róisín Murphy is my queen, and I love Dua Lipa and Lizzo very much too. Presently, I listen to a lot of dance music. There are a few DJs-cum-producers I love: Floorplan (Robert Hood), Marcel Dettmann, DJ 3000, John Summit, Viken Arman, Duke Boara, etc. But there are days, and not a few, when I just listen to Mozart sonatas and/or piano concertos (preferably played by Mitsuko Uchida), French film music (Michel Legrand, Georges Delerue), Italian pop (Adrian Celentano), Nina Simone, Dusty Springfield, etc. Music is endless. I am also very devoted to sevdah, the traditional Bosnian music. So much so in fact, that my friend Damir Imamovic, one of sevdah’s greatest singers has recorded and album with the same title as my novel, featuring sevdah and Sephardic songs that my characters sing to each other as they cross the world. SMS: You’ve previously said that if you weren’t a writer, you’d be doing music full time, either as a producer or a DJ. As of this writing, you’ve yet to permanently trade in Microsoft Word for Ableton. Do you think you’ll ever make the leap for good? What do you think keeps you coming back to the page?  AH: I’ve been writing and publishing for several decades now, but I am still a novice at making music, so I have a lot to learn. I can tell you that in the next year or so I plan to work primarily on music: wrangle Ableton Live and Logic Pro, prepare to perform live, expand the network of collaborators, and build my DJ mixes and somewhere, sometime, bring joy (I hope) to friends and/or strangers. But I’m also writing a book about Cielo’s musical journey. SMS: In three words, how would you describe Cielo's music? AH: ExDM—experimental dance music (with guitars). That’s five words, but fuck it, I got nothing to lose.

Jai Chakrabarti Wants to Know His Characters Intimately

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I had the good fortune to be introduced to Jai Chakrabarti by my writer friend Amy Gottlieb, who correctly suspected that I’d love Jai’s work. His debut novel, A Play for the End of the World, got under my skin and stayed there, in the best way. His new story collection, A Small Sacrifice for an Enormous Happiness, out today, is set in India and America, exploring themes of deracination, family, and language. Together, the stories fill out a sparkling constellation. I talked with Jai about his writing practice, South Asian literature, and the immigrant experience. Martha Anne Toll: How did these short stories come to be, and how did you decide how to order them in the collection? Jai Chakrabarti: The overarching theme for the collection is how we grow with our birth families but also how we adopt new ones. As I was writing these stories, I was at first struggling to become a new parent; my partner and I suffered through several miscarriages until finally our son was born. Then, as all parents know, our reality shifted: I wanted to speak to both the yearning as well as the sacrifices and joys of being a parent. So, I looked for stories that spoke to these themes and experiences. I also wanted the stories to be diverse in terms of narrative voice as well as length. My thoughts on ordering story collections likely come from reading and, once upon a time, ordering my own poetry collections. I enjoy when one story transitions to another by illuminating another part of the conversation that the previous story alluded to but didn’t explore in depth. There are thematic connections between the stories but also moments where we are jolted into new geographies, ideas, and styles. MAT: Do you have a daily writing practice, and if so, what is it? JC: While my schedule is erratic at the moment, I’ve often had a daily morning practice that begins with a short meditation, followed by journaling, after which I sink into whatever creative project I’m working on. If I’m lucky enough to be writing for a few hours, I’ll take breaks and walk or read. I like stopping my writing practice in the middle of a scene or a paragraph so that there’s something there I can transition back into when I start writing again. I should say this is the ideal practice, and there are many days or even weeks when I’ve been far away from it. Those are the times when I try to do whatever I can, whether it’s moving a few commas, adding a hundred new words, or simply allowing myself to read and to walk with the unwritten words. MAT: This collection references the beauty of the Bengali language and how it transmits eloquence. Can you talk about your accretion of language? Are you ever tempted to write in Bengali? JC: I’m fortunate to have had a bilingual education. Even after my family emigrated to the states, I would go to a school in Kolkata for the summer. This meant I was able to enjoy classical and eventually, contemporary Bengali literature. There are still certain sonic patterns that I can hear in my English sentences that I know are borrowed from Bengali, as well as structural forms that I’ve inherited from South Asian literature. While I doubt that I will try to publish fiction in Bengali, I’d love to translate for American readers lesser-known Bengali short stories writers like Ashapurna Devi. MAT: Many of your stories look at America from an outsider’s point of view, and touch on what seem to be irreconcilable differences between your characters' homelands and America. Can you talk a bit more about that? JC: I was interested in interrogating the idea of home, of what we carry in our bodies that tells us this land is safe. For those who have crossed borders and oceans to make a new home, I think there’s always at least some lingering sense of sacrifice, that despite the profits and opportunities of the newfound country there is something left behind. Families, traditions, the specific look of a street at sunset, the way the body feels in a different air. Through these stories, I want to acknowledge the longing that persists despite the accumulation of new joys. MAT: Is there any difference in your process for writing a short story collection versus a novel? JC: Both story-writing and novel-writing are immersive processes for me. In order to feel that I’m inside of a cozy room with my characters, I can work only a single story or a single novel-in-progress at a time. This intimacy with the characters is important for me because I want to be attuned to subtle shifts in their emotional registers. That said, the novel is a longer relationship. Instead of being in a warmly lit room, sometimes I’ve felt that my novel characters and I are stranded together on a desert island (sometimes with lots of fresh fruit and water, sometimes not!). So, between the forms it’s a question of air, I suppose, and distance. What books are you excited about now? I had a chance to blurb Jennifer Rosner’s beautiful new novel Once We Were Home, and I recommend everyone read it. I’m also excited about Ada Zhang’s forthcoming collection of short stories from A Public Space, The Sorrows of Others. Both are out later this year. What’s next for you? I’m at work on a new novel. It’s entirely different from anything else I’ve written, and I’m having a ton of fun.