The Novelist in Today's World: A Conversation

Abstract

Kazuo Ishiguro was born in 1954 in Japan. He went to England at the age of five when his oceanographer father was invited to participate in a British government research project. He attended British schools and graduated from the University of Kent, where he majored in English literature. He later studied creative writing at the University of East Anglia graduate school. His first novel, A Pale View of Hills (London: Faber & Faber, 1982) was awarded the Royal Society of Literature Prize, and his second, An Artist of the Floating World (1986), received the Whitbread Book of the Year Award. His latest book, The Remains of the Day, won the 1989 Booker Prize, Britain's most prestigious literary award. Oe Kenzaburo, born in 1935 in Shikoku, is a leading contemporary novelist in Japan. Among his best known works are Man'ei gannen no futtoboru [A Football Game in the First Year of Man'ei] (Tokyo: Shinchosha, 1973; translated as The Silent Cry by John Bester, Kodansha International, 1974), Do jidai gemu [Contemporary Games] (Tokyo: Shinchosha, 1979) and Atarashii hito yo mezameyo [Wake Up to a New Life] (Tokyo: Kodansha, 1983). This conversation was held in November 1989 during Mr. Ishiguro's first return visit to Japan in thirty years on the Japan Foundation Short-Term Visitors Program and was originally published in the Japan Foundation Newsletter, vol. 17, no. 4.