Sunday 21st August
A couple of years ago I attended an event at the South Bank, it was a sort of “meet the author”. And one of my very favourites was the subject, Kazuo Ishiguru. I had first got into him and his immaculately written novels with “The Remains of the Day”, the novel of which was far better than the film which followed, as is usually the case. I then read backwards his earlier works, and although he writes slowly and there are large gaps between his books I have followed him ever since. My very favourite is, of course, “Never let me go”, which again has recently been turned into a film, which I think I will pass on, unless it comes on the television at some point, but as I do not subscribe to Sky that may not happen.
Kazuo, a surprisingly young looking Kazuo, and immaculate speaker, was promoting a small volume of vignettes he had just published, “Nocturnes”; actually I found these tedious and disappointing, but that is another story. Kazuo read a couple of excerpts, and then there was a question and answer session with the audience. No, I didn’t ask a question, none actually occurred to me at the time. But I was rather struck by one of his answers. He was asked for any advice to aspiring writers. You can imagine how my ears pricked up; I was indeed aspiring, and was about a third of the way through Catherine’s Story. Kazuo’s answer, after at least two minutes of silence while he constructed his answer, was that the aspiring writer had to decide whether they wanted to write, or to be a writer.
At the time I couldn’t quite get it, surely they were synonymous, or as near as damn it. But lately I have been thinking about this. I have always, though sporadically I must admit, written, and I have always longed to be a writer. But I am not sure if that desire was more a desire to be known as a writer than to be a writer by profession, or rather needing to be a writer, regardless of the end result. And I think that that was what Kazuo meant.
Easy for him to say that now that he is famous and generally acknowledged as a great writer; far harder for me to answer, of course.