Kazuo Ishiguro interview: Reframing war memoriesーNHK WORLD-JAPAN NEWS
The movie adaptation of Kazo Ishiguro’s 1982 novel, A Pale View of Hills, premiered at this year’s Khan. It’s set in postwar Nagasaki, where Ishiguro was born 7 years after the atomic bombing. The British author, who went on to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, acted as executive producer on the film. We sat down with Ishiguro and Khan to ask what this story and Nagasaki mean to him. [Music] This is based on a book I wrote when I was 25 years old and it’s a very bad book. First book I ever wrote. But there is a long history in the in cinema of backwards making wonderful movies. A pale view of hills is the story of Etsco who lived through the atomic bombing in Nagasaki. Years later and long settled in Britain, her daughter, an aspiring writer, interviews her. Betskco is forced to face her haunted hidden past buried in Japan. Ishiguro was born to Japanese parents in Nagasaki, but when he was five, he and his family moved to the UK. A pale view of Hills is his debut novel written in his 20s. His mother was a major inspiration. I didn’t use any of her stories directly in the novel. not long before I started to write this book, she she said um I that she thought it was important that she passed on her memories, her direct personal memories of of those years. And it wasn’t always and these weren’t always traumatic memories. These were also stories about friends and just all sometimes very ordinary lives that that that suddenly got interrupted by something in the war. I learned to think about the war in terms of my mother’s very ordinary experiences of everyday life, the small things, terrible things. He also wrote the work to remember the city where he was born and understand his relationship with Japan. I think it it it was the book I wrote to try and preserve a lot of my feelings and memories of Nagasaki. Um I was as I got older into my mid20ies these memories were fading away and I think I I felt if I put them if I re if I created that world in a novel um they would be safe. When I think of Nagasaki I I think of sunshine and and people being so pleased that that things are going forward and something is better this year than it was last year. Um and so I had this image of Nagasaki in my mind and and yet in the west when I said Nagasaki people just thought of this kind of devastated city with with terrible injuries. Um so I I I did actually feel Nagasaki was a very powerful symbol when you put these two images of Nagasaki together. The film, while basically faithful to the novel, is more overt in its depiction of the emotional scars of the people who experienced the war and bombing. Ishiguro agreed with this approach. At the time when I wrote the uh story, you only had to to to make a reference to to these things and people people understood, you know, um when I wrote this story, it was only 35 years after the the the atomic bombing. today’s generation um per perhaps more things need to be made explicit about what a what what what a nuclear what a nuclear explosion can do in bringing his story to the screen Ishiguro was committed to one thing for me it’s very important that the um the the film was made by this generation of of of and and and Japanese filmmakers this is very much a retelling of the story for today’s generation. He was happy to entrust the monumental work to director Ishiawa K. Until this movie, I always felt I had no right to talk about the war. But it’s actually the only way to pass down its history. Rather than trying to do it by casting a wide net, I believe it is very important for me to try to make sense of something that I do understand, even if it’s a small element. Hiro Suzu, one of her generation’s most exciting actors, portrays as a young housewife in Nagasaki. We ask her how she sees the importance of this story. As time goes on, I’m afraid more people may come to feel as if that war never happened. In this sense, I think it is significant that we are performing this story now. As we approach the 80th anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Ishiguroto hopes this film’s reframing of memories will inspire young audiences to reflect on the past. And I think this is a very dangerous moment when because we have had peace for so long. I think um many people believe that it’s a natural permanent condition. How do you keep the the new generation, the children, how do you make them interested? How do you convince them that this is a very important story that is relevant to their lives and the world that they would go on to build? And I think with each generation, we have to rethink h how we how we package these memories, what we do. We can’t just keep remembering in the same way. His humorous comment at con about bad books making great movies, I’m sure, has already inspired many of us to not just see the movie, but also to pick up the novel. Reframing scenes from history to capture a new generation and help them see the fragility of the piece we have today is definitely a theme for all of us involved in the media seeking a better
Interview with Kazuo Ishiguro in Cannes, where a film adaptation of his novel premiered, on how historic stories should be repackaged to reach younger generations. #japan #kazuoishiguro #ww2 #art #film #culture #nobelprize #hiroshima #nagasaki
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