by Pico Iyer
It is the foreigner’s plight, perhaps, to find himself a detective, as well as an actor, always on the lookout for signs and prompts, and Ishiguro, who is never careless with his details, actually dares to make Banks a would-be Sherlock Holmes (though we have to take much of his success in his profession on trust, since we hear much less about his job than about his advancement in society). Yet the abiding poignancy of Ishiguro’s work comes from the fact that his main characters are unsettled in both senses of the word: nervous because they don’t belong. The smallest thing (a bus ride, say) can throw them off completely.
The very notion of foreignness has changed, you could say, in the global age (this is one of Ishiguro’s implicit themes, and one that would no doubt impress itself on a Japanese writer who can’t write in Japanese). The person who looks and sounds like us may (as in Banks’s case) be a complete alien; the one who looks quite different from us, and has a funny name to boot, may (as in Ishiguro’s case) be so close to us that he sees through all our games. Foreignness has gone underground in our times— become invisible, in a sense—and yet it has never lost its age-old terrors, of being left out or left behind.
In the case of Banks, this suppressed panic comes out in the exile’s habit of consoling himself with memories of a place he tells himself is home; however much he is an outsider in England, he can take refuge in the place he lost. Thus, over and over, in his mind, he returns to haunted memories of his boyhood in the International Settlement in Shanghai. One day, seemingly out of the blue, Banks’s father (working for a British trading company here disguised as “Morganbrook and Byatt”) goes to work, and never returns; a little later, his beloved mother, often recalled laughing in a swing, also vanishes, leaving Banks, at the age of ten, alone in a very foreign country. The boy’s one playmate in Shanghai, constantly remembered, is the six-year-old next door, Akira Yamashita, with whom he seems mostly to share a sense of disconnection. “ ‘Christopher. You not enough Englishman,’ ” says the Japanese boy (in his strange—and to me implausible—English); but Akira, too, returning to Japan, is “mercilessly ostracised for his ‘foreignness.’ ”
Anyone who’s read an Ishiguro novel before—and even those who haven’t—will feel at home with the sadnesses of a pathetically self-involved character, longing to keep the truth of his loneliness at bay, and training a magnifying glass, in this case quite literally, on the alien world around him: part of Ishiguro’s skill is to bring the senses of “pathetically” together (in characters who are moving without always being likable). Yet this relatively precise, and housebound, story breaks into something much bigger when, in 1937, the woman Banks admires (from a distance)— another orphan, called Sarah Hemmings—suddenly goes off with her new husband to Shanghai. Abruptly, and more than a little belatedly, Banks decides that he must go there too—to solve the case of his parents’ disappearance, he says (though that happened twenty-five years before), and to bring order, as he somehow believes, to a disintegrating world. When he returns to the lovingly recalled place he thinks of as home, it is, of course, to find it a blacked-out chaos, with Japanese soldiers assaulting the city even as local Communists and the Kuomintang conduct a brutal civil war.
Up to this point, roughly halfway through the book, the reader could be forgiven for thinking he’s reading The Remains of the Day Revisited: a straightforward (and expert) portrait of a man possessed by truths he can’t acknowledge, and missing the boat at every turn (the metaphor becomes an actual event here). Yet as it returns to Shanghai, the narrative acquires a political fury that is not shy of trafficking in the word “evil.” Ishiguro has long turned a shrewd and attentive eye—a foreigner’s eye, really—on the British specimens he has found himself among, and in The Remains of the Day he famously exposed the blind loyalties and vanities of a single butler as a way of pointing up the naiveté of a whole society that invited Nazis to its dinner parties in the 1930s. Here, the assault on perfidious Albion and its “air of refined duplicity” becomes pitiless.
British traders like Banks’s father were, of course, deriving much of their income from smuggling Indian opium into China—an activity that had the secondary function of keeping the local populace helplessly sedated. Yet as Banks continues his investigations, he finds that the corruption goes well beyond that: British companies like his father’s (which seems to stand in for a well-known trading house still prominent in Hong Kong) were dealing with warlords and, in some cases, sending others off to their deaths in order to protect themselves. And when Banks arrives in war-ravaged Shanghai, it is to find the international elite complaining about chauffeurs and languidly comparing the shells outside to “shooting stars” as they watch Japanese warships turn the city to rubble outside their bathroom window.
Banks is hardly the most assertive of souls, but even he is moved to “a wave of revulsion” by the studied obliviousness:
During this fortnight I have been here, throughout all my dealings with these citizens, high or low, I have not witnessed—not once—anything that could pass for honest shame. Here, in other words, at the heart of the maelstrom threatening to suck in the whole of the civilised world, is a pathetic conspiracy of denial; a denial of responsibility which has turned in on itself and gone sour, manifesting itself in the sort of pompous defensiveness I have encountered so often.
The point is so alive to him that, fifty-three pages later, he delivers a version of the same tirade, even repeating (a rarity in Ishiguro’s perfectionist prose) the phrase about “honest shame.” He’s so busy haranguing the world around him that he never stops to register that what he’s saying applies largely to himself.
And as the novel takes us out of Banks’s head, and into the wider world, it also, paradoxically perhaps, rises out of domestic realism to a vivid and often daring surrealism. (At the white-tie gathering under the chandeliers, Banks is actually handed a pair of opera glasses with which to inspect the war outside. “ ‘Most interesting,’ he observes, as shells destroy the city. ‘Are there many casualties, do you suppose?’ ”) Nearly all of Ishiguro’s fiction is set just before or after war, the reverberations of a larger struggle rumbling underneath the action like a distant train; and his great political theme, of nationalism, offers us the shadow side, as it were, of his protagonists’ longing to belong. Indeed, the heart of Ishiguro’s strength is to bring the two forces into intricate collision, and to show how displaced characters like Banks, precisely because they want to be part of a larger whole, and to serve a cause, attach themselves to the very forces that are tearing the world apart.
Here, as Banks stumbles out into a derelict city of corpses, struggling to find his parents in the midst of all the fighting, it feels almost as if Ishiguro is daring himself to break out of his habitual control and move onto uncharted ground. The writing begins to feel dreamed as much as plotted, and there is an exhilarating sense of its taking on a life of its own and pulling the author into places where he hadn’t expected to find himself. (In that small moment on the London street, it’s worth noting, Banks finally does get on the bus.)
In the most remarkable scenes in the book, lit up by a sense of outrage and social compassion quite unlike anything Ishiguro has given us before (though he began his professional life working with the homeless), Banks follows a policeman up into a broom cupboard and emerges, essentially, into history. All around him is a wasteland that looks like “some vast, ruined mansion with endless rooms,” in his characteristic phrase, and the all but unimaginable suffering and poverty of the “warrens” that the British have taken pains not to see. The very inadequacy of the society detective in the face of real life becomes as harrowing as it is painful: “ ‘Look here . . . All of this’—I gestured at the carnage, of which she seemed completely oblivious—‘it’s awfully bad luck.’ ”
This abandoning of solid ground, for writer and character alike, clearly comes with risks. Ishiguro’s talk often has to me the feeling of having been as much worked up from research as everything else here (
“ ‘Look, old chap, . . . I’m going along tonight to a bash,’ ” says one character). And as Banks moves through the ruins of the city, more than ever subject to the foreigner’s inability to tell friend from foe, or to see the larger picture, some of the dialogue sounds as if it had been mugged up from some black-and-white film about stiff upper lip. “ ‘Now, look here,’ ” Banks tells a dying Japanese soldier (after attending to his wounds with his trusty magnifying glass), “ ‘I don’t want any of that nonsense. You’re going to be fit as a fiddle in no time.’ ” The soldier, whom Banks takes to be his old friend Akira, grunts and, recalling his distant son, says, “ ‘You tell him. I die for country. Tell him, be good to mother. Protect. And build good world.’ ” Sometimes, here, it is only the Japanese who don’t sound Japanese.
Yet for all the occasional awkwardness, the mixing of effects—the poignancy and absurdity of country-house manners brought to people fighting with meat cleavers and spades—turns Ishiguro’s gift for blending tones to rending advantage. “Most annoyingly,” Banks says, recalling stumbling through the debris with the dying soldier, “my right shoe had split apart, and my foot was badly gashed, causing a searing pain to rise with each step.” That mix of “annoyingly” and “searing” says everything that needs be said about Banks: the farce that can break one’s heart.
The denouement of Banks’s private drama is effected rather too tidily—Ishiguro always has to fight the foreigner’s temptation to be overpolite—and the creaking of the stage intensifies when a character we’ve seen described as an “admirable beacon of rectitude” suddenly tears off his mask to reveal a “haunted old man, consumed with self-hatred.” It is everything that is unresolved, mysterious, and in the shadows that gives Ishiguro’s writing its power, everything that comes to him strangely, you could say, because he is an outsider. When the bewilderment is cleared up—when the character begins to settle down—the spell begins to fade.
Although The Remains of the Day won the Booker Prize and became a huge commercial hit worldwide, Ishiguro himself, always alert with his magnifying glass, referred to the novel as a “wind-up toy”; and as if in response to a book that could be read in only one way, he followed it up with an allegory of estrangement, The Unconsoled, so abstract as to be indecipherable even upon rereading. In When We Were Orphans, there is a feeling of his having broken through his self-consciousness to activate a passion that was previously submerged; and even as Banks’s attempts to keep up appearances—like his wilful blindness— nicely reflect those of the society around him, the book records unsparingly how the larger world’s machinations put all his innocence to shame.
The venturing onto foreign terrain leads to occasional melodrama here (“ ‘What you just saw in Chapei,’ ” a Japanese colonel says, with unlikely fluency, “ ‘it is but a small speck of dust compared to what the world must soon witness!’ ”); and the tendency to be overpunctilious is not entirely transcended: in the middle of the book, Banks suddenly adopts a ten-year-old Canadian girl, who is so peripheral to what follows that she feels like a narrative device—another orphan, another foreigner, a symbol of the responsibilities Banks neglects and a way of tying pieces of the plot together. Yet this very unevenness can sometimes feel refreshing—and even mark an advance—after the occasionally overworked perfection of books like The Remains of the Day.
More important, Ishiguro uses the precedent of the International Settlement as a way of highlighting—and questioning— the very mingling of races that represents the main challenge (and possibility) of our universal Otherness. Salman Rushdie, in his celebrations of the new deracination, looks back to Moorish Spain to show how different cultures can live together in relative harmony; Michael Ondaatje, in his English Patient, imagines a desert in which individuals spin around one another like separate planets, no national divisions visible in the sand. Ishiguro, however, on this theme as on most is notably less sanguine than his contemporaries (his father, it’s interesting to note, grew up in the International Settlement). National identity is the language and the currency we use, he suggests, and even his Akira and Banks, at the age of six, refer all their triumphs at games to being Japanese or being English (even as they vie to say “old chap” more accurately than one another). In one of the most reverberant moments in the book—as well as the strangest and most typical—the small Banks asks a friend of his parents’, “ ‘Uncle Philip, I was just wondering. How do you suppose one might become more English?’ ” The older man, sounding like many people around us today, replies that “mongrels” like Banks, growing up amidst many cultures, may be lucky enough to exist outside traditional affiliations, and may even bring an end to war. Then, stopping, he corrects himself. “ ‘People need to feel they belong. To a nation, to a race. Otherwise, who knows what might happen? This civilisation of ours, perhaps it’ll just collapse. And everything scatter, as you put it.’ ”
When We Were Orphans traces the collapse of a civilization, and the scattering of just about everything, revealing how the very wish to belong is complicit in that unraveling (and watching the only home Banks has turn into a broken maze of refugees). And in its sadness, as in its willingness to stretch and experiment with realism, it reminds us that Ishiguro is as much a European as an English writer, alien in the deepest way. In many respects, in fact, the novelist he most resembles is that other disciple of Kafka’s, living in England for thirty years without ever becoming English, W. G. Sebald. Other than in The Unconsoled (the perfect title for all of Sebald’s work), Ishiguro has always been concerned with how war affects those not directly involved in it—the theme that Sebald has made his obsession—and how we try to get around all the things we do not want to say (or know). It is a curious coincidence, perhaps, that both writers have been conducting their enquiries into the end of Empire in an England where anti-Japanese and anti-German sentiment run high sixty years after the last war.
When Banks finally comes upon his much-missed family home in Shanghai, it is to find it made over by its new Chinese owners. When Sebald’s narrator, in the recently translated Vertigo, returns to his hometown in Germany, he can revisit his family’s old living room only by checking into a local inn. For both these writers, thrown into motion by the turns of history, foreignness in the modern floating world can only begin at home.
2000
A FAR-OFF AFFAIR
“But that was in another country; and besides, the wench is dead.”
—Barabas, in Marlowe’s Jew of Malta
The assault began, really, as soon as I set foot in my parents’ India last year. IF AGGRIEVED, said the sign in the Bombay customs hall, PLEASE CONSULT ASSTT. COMMISSIONER CUSTOMS. I wasn’t sure that Asstt. Commissioner Customs was very keen to see me, and, besides, I was mostly aggrieved by that extra “t” in “Asstt.,” but still I proceeded, head held high, into the merry mayhem. On one side of me was a sign offering a “Liquor Permit,” on the other, whatever a “Car Hailer” might be when he’s at home. On the far end of the hall, where I went to change my dollars, a sign informed me gravely, PLEASE ENSURE THAT YOUR DRAWERS ARE LOCKED PROPERLY. Looking down to make sure that all was as it should be with my underwear, I stepped out into the gloom, and found myself inside a wheezing knockoff of an ancient Morris Oxford. A “Free Left Turn” was to the right of us, and a “Passenger Alighting Point” to the left. On every other side, the ceaseless Indian anarchy was in full and vocal swing: buses saying SILENCE PLEASE on their sides, the mudguards of trucks responding HORN OK PLEASE, and my own little car making its own small contribution to democracy with a sticker on the back window: “Blow Your Horn/Pay a Fine.”
India is the most chattery country in the world, it often seems, and it comes at you in almost two hundred languages, one thousand six hundred and fifty-two dialects, and a million signs that scream from every hoarding, car hailer, and passing shop. But the strangest effect of all, for many a visitor from abroad, is that the signs are just familiar enough to seem completely strange. We passed a “Textor
ium” as we jangled into town, and a Toilet Complex. We passed the Clip Joint Beauty Clinic, the Tinker Bell Primary School, and Nota Bene “Cleaners of Distinction.” One apartment block advised all passersby, NO PARKING FOR OUT SIDERS. IF FOUND GUILTY, ALL TYRES WILL BE DEFLATED WITH EXTREME PREJUDICE.
Feeling more than a little prejudiced myself, I looked around in search of more useful guidance. YOGIC LAUGHTER IS MULTI-DIMENSIONAL, a sign in front of a decaying Dickensian manse announced. Beside it, between some pictures of chunky Technicolor movie stars, a board advised, DARK GLASSES MAKE YOU ATTRACTIVE TO THE POLICE. I could only imagine that they, like most of the notices around me, had been fashioned by some proud graduate of the course I had seen advertised in the national paper, flying in: “We make you big boss in English conversation. Hypnotize people by your highly impressive talks. Exclusive courses for exporters, business tycoons.”
In any other country in the world, duly hypnotized and impressed, I would have stopped there: taking note of English misplaced in translation, or imperfectly learned, is not a very useful exercise, especially if you cannot speak any of the almost two hundred local languages yourself. My Hindi, nonexistent, would have provoked more than multi-dimensional yogic laughter. Yet all the miscegenated signs in India speak for something more than just linguistic mangling, and something more poignant: they clutch at you a little with the plaintiveness of a child of a secret union that neither of its parents will acknowledge. A little, in fact, like that sad-eyed man who comes up to you outside your hotel in once British-Indian Aden, and asks you if you’d like to see the English cemetery.
