Work Text:
Why Ishiguro Kazuo?
Ishiguro Kazuo is a Nobel Prize Laureate in Literature. Remains of the Day, a Booker Prize-winning novel about life as an English butler, and more deeply, about living with the life you have chosen, is widely considered his masterpiece. While in no way doubting Sir Ishiguro’s writing skills, I wonder if perhaps there was some advantage of his that partly explains his crowding out other skilled writers. In 2017, the year of his Nobel Prize, the pool included Murakami Haruki and Margaret Atwood. The former was already considered a titan of Asian postmodernism, and the latter was often cited as an icon of feminist literature.
Ishiguro’s Nobel Prize was accompanied by a quote explaining that he, “in novels of great emotional force, has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world.” While he’s mostly known for literary works such as Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go, his science fiction is considered exemplary as well, and Klara and the Sun is even referenced in popular video games, with the Honkai: Star Rail character Clara having an achievement named after it.
Is this gap moe?
In Japanese animation, gap moe refers to the creation of one set of expectations, and then the reveal that the person actually has important characteristics that contradict what might be expected based on visual cues. While this can be done with standoffish actions or a hostile personality, such as in the tsundere or kuudere archetypes, it can also be done purely with visual design. Bleach is a work that relies heavily on gap moe; the protagonist looks like a stereotypical punk with bleached hair due to being half-Japanese, and gets into many fights as a result. However, he’s actually a responsible young man who helps the family business and takes his academic studies seriously. The villains are like this as well: Captain Aizen appears to be a gentle bookworm who cares deeply about calligraphy, but turns out to be a villainous mastermind with aspirations to godhood; the espada Zommari looks bulky and muscular but turns out to be one of the fastest sonido users, and so on.
So how does this relate to literature? Well, by skillfully pointing out how expectations can lean one way and then not be fulfilled — such as how one expects a promotion or birthday party, only to be bitterly disappointed — Ishiguro captures the fundamental conditions of human life. We are often betrayed by our expectations. Reality itself, in a sense, exhibits the features of gap moe, and to put it in anime otaku terms, Remains of the Day is on some level about making reality your waifu. (The butler, Stevens, certainly makes duty to Lord Darlington his waifu after missing every opportunity to make Miss Kenton his literal wife.) In this, Ishiguro echoes Nietzsche’s concept of amor fati.
Fundamentally, modern living is accompanied by a sense of loss. One doesn’t have to go very far on the Internet now to hear traditionalists complaining that in 1200 a peasant got far more feast days and holidays than a modern worker has days off, or that the social fabric has been horribly damaged by any number of things that throw chaos into the traditional gender dichotomy: men and women both working outside the home, birth control, universal suffrage, and gender transition. The reason why these critiques of modern society persist, despite their distasteful implications to many, is that on some level we do agree that something has been lost. Whether comparing the economic conditions of pre-1970 workers to modern ones, or the social conditions, it is an inescapable conclusion. The main points of dissension are whether this loss was preventable or worth it, and what if anything can be done about it.
I should point out that Atwood and Murakami, while undoubtedly skilled writers, are both unavoidably seen as political choices. In the West, Murakami is not known for being political, but in Japan, he is often criticised as being “un-Japanese” for his heavy use of Western influences and for his willingness to explore delicate national topics, such as war crimes in WWII. China, meanwhile, had included him on a banned list of Japanese authors, which is terribly ironic given that their stance has been one of irritation that Japan won’t talk about its war crimes (though to be fair, they specifically fixate on the Rape of Nanking, which is not the war crime Murakami writes about.) Sweden choosing Murakami would be seen as a subtle rebuke towards the Chinese. Meanwhile, Atwood is known politically for The Handmaid’s Tale, portraying a dystopian future where women have virtually no rights and are prized mainly for their ability to reproduce. This has been derided as “fetish material disguised as literature” for its themes of dominance and forced impregnation, but such themes have been considered deeply relevant with the rise of reactionary politics worldwide. Her other works, such as Cat’s Eye, deal with themes such as how women bully other women and how expectations of fidelity can be incoherent in an era of serial monogamy. Choosing her would be seen as another rebuff towards the Trump Administration and the global right. Ask anyone who has ever been in the running for any Nobel Prize, whether science or literature, and they’ll tell you: there is no year the Nobel Prize isn’t political.
In an interview, Ishiguro stated that “the meaning must not be self-sufficient on the page. It has to be oblique, sometimes you have to read between the lines.” This is identifiably the touch of a master; less literary works or those written by experts who are not yet masters tend to hammer home the reveal, so that the reader cannot miss it. It takes great discipline to do things this way, and indeed numerous reviewers praise his restraint and subtlety.
Perhaps Ishiguro’s advantage is simply that. Perhaps he is a master who has honed his craft and published his works, and they were ready and waiting in a year where the Nobel Prize Committee struggled to find a less political choice who was nonetheless a master of the literary arts. If so, it is fitting that he was awarded a victory for simply doing what he has always been doing. Hone the craft, quietly publish works, and wait — isn’t that what every writer should be doing? We expect that a loud, fiery activist writer who receives death threats like Salman Rushdie or a counterculture icon like Bob Dylan would be a Nobel Prize winner, and here comes a quiet, workmanlike master of the craft who puts in the hours and does solid work. And he, too, gets a Nobel Prize.
Is that gap moe?
If so, it’s delightful.