Kazuo Ishiguro: Recalling the past, reshaping the future

NHK

11-07-2025

Nobel Prize-winning author Kazuo Ishiguro attended the Cannes Film Festival in May for the premiere of the film adaptation of his debut novel, A Pale View of Hills. After the screening, the British author spoke with NHK about the fragility of memory and the power of art to build connections.
Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki in 1954 and moved to England with his family when he was 5. Two decades later, when he wrote his debut novel, A Pale View of Hills, it was his fading memories of Nagasaki that served as the inspiration. The book is loosely based not just on his own recollections, but also the experiences of his mother, Shizuko, who was in Nagasaki when the US detonated an atomic bomb over the city in 1945.
It tells the story of Etsuko, who survived the bombing and later moved to England. At the bidding of one of her daughters, she confronts the painful memories of her time in postwar Nagasaki. Japanese actor Hirose Suzu played Etsuko.
At the Cannes screening, which he attended with Japanese director Ishikawa Kei and members of the cast, Ishiguro joked that the movie "is based on a book I wrote when was 25 years old. It's a very bad book. First book I ever wrote. But there is a long history in cinema of bad books making wonderful movies." Kazuo Ishiguro, right, with director Ishikawa Kei and cast members
The following comments, taken from a conversation with Ishiguro, have been edited for brevity and clarity. Kazuo Ishiguro
The novel is now 45 years old and it was also my very first novel. At that stage, I didn't know how to write a novel. At one level, I think of it as a slight embarrassment now. So you mustn't look at this as the work of a distinguished, experienced novelist. This is a novel by a 25-year-old person. But perhaps for this reason it has a special relationship to me, but the other reason I think is that it was the book I wrote to try and preserve my feelings and memories of Nagasaki. Mother city Kazuo Ishiguro with his family
In 2017, when judges awarded Ishiguro the Nobel Prize in Literature, they commended his writing for uncovering "the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world." This fragile connection, which the author typically explores through themes of memory and forgetting, lies at the heart of his first book.
As I got into my mid-20s, these memories were fading. And I thought if I created that world in a novel, they would be safe. I didn't use any of (my mother's) stories directly in the novel. But she had said to me not long before I started to write this book that she thought it was important that she passed on her direct personal memories of those years to me because I was of a younger generation, but also because I was starting to write stories.
I wrote down all her memories in short stories and that was quite an important point in my writing life. But then I made a decision that I would not use any of her personal memories in my novel. I just felt it was somehow too personal, too intimate, but my mother knew and I knew that that first novel had at its foundation the conversations that we had for the two years before. Small things
Ishiguro learned from his mother that war is not just about big, violent conflict. It's also about small, everyday lives.
My writing career in many ways has got a lot to do with what my mother told me. It was an uncomfortable thing. It was like over a period of maybe two years. And often I could see she didn't particularly want to tell me, and sometimes I didn't want to hear. But somehow we thought we had to talk. It wasn't always traumatic memories. These are also stories about friends and very old lives that suddenly got interrupted by something in the world. It was a very important lesson for me that war isn't just this big thing that you see sometimes in the movie or in newsreel footage. I learned to think about the war in terms of my mother's very ordinary experiences of everyday life — the small things, terrible things.
In the film adaptation of A Pale View of Hills, a young Etsuko asks her husband if he would still have married her if she had been exposed to the atomic bomb. The exchange is a reminder of the discrimination suffered by A-bomb survivors, who were widely shunned by the Japanese public — a subject that isn't explicitly explored in Ishiguro's book.
The director, Ishikawa Kei, told NHK that he and his team "decided to add the scene so people today could look at that time and understand the problems that existed back then." Director Ishikawa Kei
Ishiguro agrees the scene is an important addition.
When I wrote the story, you only had to make a reference to these things and people understood. It was a time when in Great Britain people were very afraid of another nuclear war with the Soviet Union. They were very aware of things like radiation. So it was only necessary to make a few illusions. Of course, for today's generation, more things need to be made explicit about what a nuclear explosion can do.
This is very much a retelling of the story for today's generation. I think on this 80th anniversary of the atomic bomb and the Second World War, it's very important for us to consider how to make these memories relevant to the younger generation. We have to almost repackage the memories of my parents' generation. How do you convince children that this is a very important story that is relevant to their lives and the world that they are going to build? 80 years on
Equally important, Ishiguro says, is chronicling how humanity rises from the ashes of war to build peace, albeit imperfectly.
Miraculously we figured out how to maintain some kind of peace for 80 years. I think people had to work very hard to achieve this. And so I do fear this is a dangerous moment right now in 2025 because many of the great institutions created at the end of the Second World War to maintain peace — mainly the United Nations, but also the economic arrangements created through the IMF and World Bank and the enshrining of human rights — today the value of these institutions is being questioned and the United Nations is being undermined.
We are forgetting why these institutions were created. People realized that the world could not survive another world war. The human race would be destroyed. And I think this is a very dangerous moment because we have had peace for so long that many people believe it's a permanent condition. Art as meeting place
Ishiguro says that with important global institutions increasingly under attack, his hope is that literature, film and other art forms can become "meeting places" for people who wish to build and preserve peace. Kazuo Ishiguro, center, after the official screening of A Pale View of Hills in Cannes, France.
Can art, such as cinema or literature, preserve peace? I would like to say it can, but once again I'm aware of the fact that in the 1930s possibly the most developed cinema country was Germany. The greatest film makers were in Germany, and that did not stop Hitler coming to power. In fiction, great novelists like Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, Turgenev, didn't stop the slide from the Russian Revolution into Stalin's rule and years and years of terrible suffering. So it would be naive to suggest that great writers or great cinema, great musicians can by themselves preserve peace or stop a slide into fascism. However, I do think at the individual level, literature and cinema are very good at crossing cultural barriers. I first came to Cannes 31 years ago to be on the jury of the festival here. And it was the first time I saw a movie by an Iranian director, Abbas Kiarostami. I had no idea what life in Iran was really like. There were just these bad guys who took hostages and did terrible things. And I realized all these human beings live here, and they have many different opinions, and in the years since then I've become a big fan of Iranian cinema. Once that happens it becomes much more difficult to demonize an entire nation or to go to war.
I think literature and cinema have become very internationalized now, and this is a very good thing because…we're at least having the same conversation. And we might disagree or have different views but it's very important that we're all participants in the same conversation. And I think art, culture and literature are a wonderful place for people to meet. Even if we're going to disagree and argue.