After giving the award in two consecutive years to atypical writers such as “reporter” and “singer”, the Nobel Prize of Literature has finally returned to its “traditional” track. This year the award goes to the 62-year-old Japanese born English writer Kazuo Ishiguro. Born on the 8th November, 1954 in Japan, Ishiguro immigrated with his family to England when he was only six years old. After finishing his primary school, high school and college studies in England, he published his master's degree thesis, which was also his first novel A Pale View of Hills, and received great reviews from the public. It was after that that he decided to dedicate his life to writing.
However, it was not until his most representative works of The Remains of the Day (1989) and Never Let Me Go (2005) that he gained worldwide success and fame. The former led him to receive the renowned Man Booker Prize, establishing him in an important position on the scene of literature in England. The novel was made into a film in 1993, starring Anthony Hopkins. The latter was chosen by Time magazine as one of the best 10 novels in 2005. The Nobel Prize award committee also praised the book as consistent with the writer’s refined style, revealing the weaknesses and hope in humanity, meticulously combining reason, suspicion, science fiction and romance into one work.
For me however, I was deeply impressed by his first work A Pale View of Hills. The novel was based on the background of the writer’s childhood in Nagasaki. The story describes a Japanese widow’s memory about her life and encounters during her last days in Nagasaki before moving to a village in England. Through reading her memories, readers can get a glimpse of the social psychology and spirit of Japan after the war. What is interesting is that Ishiguro left Japan at the age of five and had not returned to his home country since then, which means that he did not known anything about Japan at that time. Even he himself has admitted that the “Japan” that he wrote about in the book was based on his childhood memories. Of course, for a writer, this situation is not uncommon and is actually quite natural – it is a world that was created by the writer and it is not only a copy of the real world, but it is through the historical facts and social background that the writer expresses his own thoughts.
Born in Japan but brought up in England, Ishiguro is deeply influenced by English culture. He actually considers himself as an “Englishman”. On the other hand, his Japanese background has plunged him into difficulties of cultural identity marginalization. And his observations and thoughts about being a “new immigrant” or a “foreigner” are worth the attention of many local Macau writers.
In his book A Pale View of Hills , Ishiguro has used a Japanese way to write an English novel, creating characters that are speaking Japanese. On the surface of the words, everything seems to be ordinary, but it is in fact a thunder appearing in silence. It is curiously inspiring for Macau writers who are using Chinese (including Cantonese, Mandarin and other dialects), Portuguese, English or other languages.
Looking back at the first novel of Kazuo Ishiguro, I found in A Pale View of Hills the elegance of western literature combined with the Japanese spirit exemplified by Yasunari Kawabata. It is as if an oriental ink painting was created with western strokes, combining despair, sadness, calmness, introversion and self-reflection into the palette of literature, based on which inspires hope from the small city of Macau.
