Kazuo Ishiguro—Ish—was among the first novelists of my generation I met, though I forget exactly when. We’d certainly bumped into each other by the time we were both included among the ‘Twenty Best Young British Novelists’ in 1982 and group-photographed, all of us looking ill at ease, in a Chelsea loft by Lord Snowdon for the Sunday Times. The following interview with him—again for Bomb magazine—was made in 1989 after Ish had published The Remains of the Day. The work in prospect he tentatively refers to evolved into The Unconsoled, published in 1995.

We’ve been friends now for over twenty-five years and he’s my only Japanese friend. That last statement needs immediate qualification, since I don’t really think of him as Japanese and I don’t think that, most of the time, Ish thinks of himself as Japanese either. The facts are that he was born in Japan in 1954, was brought to this country when he was five and grew up to be one of several novelists emerging in the 1980s who effectively challenged, by having their actual origin or their familial or cultural roots outside Britain, the meaning of ‘British’ or ‘English’ fiction.

Ish is in many ways as English as they come. Since I’ve known him, he’s lived in such oriental locations as Goldhawk Road and Sydenham (very near, as it happens, to where my father and mother grew up). The facts of his birth and his earliest years must of course go very deep, and Ish’s first two novels were set in Japan, but then his next novel, The Remains of the Day, went to the very quick of Englishness—or to its fossilized, emblematic shell—in the form of the fastidiously spoken, emotionally hampered butler, Stevens.

All of this has caused some confusion which I think Ish partly relishes, partly finds tiresome. There are those who were persuaded that he had latched on to some fundamental affinity between the English and Japanese temperament—both nations with a leaning towards reserve and formality (both nations also with imperial ghosts). Ish himself, while being one of the most easy-going of people, has a habit of not giving too much away, of being a little hard to ‘read’. Given his origins and the quietness of his literary style, this has sometimes led by clichéd association to his being deemed ‘inscrutable’.

I think Ish enjoys playing up to this notional enigmaticness. There’s a mischievous gravity about him, or a grave mischief, which can be delightfully teasing. I think he even plays up sometimes to his Japaneseness. He once told me—mischievously but perhaps a little disingenuously—that he’d set his first two novels in Japan, not because his own knowledge of the country was so deep, but because for most British readers it was unfamiliar and remote enough to become a ‘pure’ zone, immune to close scrutiny, where his fictional purposes could work themselves out untroubled by issues of authenticity. It was like setting a novel in a made-up country.

But Ish’s Japaneseness can’t always be a matter for playful irony, and I suspect that one of the chief burdens of his life has in fact been in confronting the marked contrasts between England and Japan, rather than in grasping the similarities. When he now visits Japan—there was a long gap before he ever went back—he does so as a celebrated author, but there can be moments when he finds himself, just as an individual, ‘unmasked’. He looks Japanese, after all, and knows enough vestigial Japanese to order a meal in the language, but as soon as the waiter makes some off-the-menu remark, Ish becomes lost, a man apparently bewildered by his own country. And such moments of incidental confusion must surely reawaken the much deeper confusions of being a boy of, say, six or seven in England, when his first five years were spent in Japan. He once told me how he’d been horrified by the image he kept seeing of a tortured, bleeding man on a cross. This was how the English saw their god.

Ish’s actual early memories of Japan must indeed be precious. It would be natural to guard them in a lasting habit of reticence. One such memory that he shared with me I’ve always found particularly affecting. He said he could remember lying in bed as a child in Nagasaki and hearing his father in another room, at the piano, ‘practising the same phrase over and over again’. What strikes a chord, almost literally, about this memory is that there’s nothing specifically Japanese about it. It might be a memory of England, or anywhere. Though for me what strikes the foreign note—and touches a rather jealous nerve—is that it’s a memory of coming from a musical home.

It’s perhaps not much known that Ish has a musical side. I was only dimly aware of it, if at all, when I made this interview with him, though I’d known him by then for several years—a good example of how he doesn’t give much away. Ish plays the piano and the guitar, both well. I’m not sure how many different guitars he now actually possesses, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s in double figures. His wife, Lorna, sings and plays; so does his daughter. Evenings of musical entertainment in the Ishiguro household can’t be at all uncommon.

One of the few regrets of my life is that I have no formal grounding in music. I never had a musical education or came from the sort of ‘musical home’ that would have made this possible or probable, though I was born at a time when an upright piano was still a common piece of living-room furniture. I need to be a little careful about what I’m saying. I never came from a ‘writerly’ home either: I didn’t feel that was a barrier, and if I’d got involved in music at an early age, might it only have thwarted my stirrings as a writer? Or just left me with bad memories of piano lessons?

The fact is, I grew up very appreciative of music, but with no ability to make it, no knowledge of it from the inside, and always rather readily assuming that music was what those other, ‘musical’ people did. I’ve never felt, on the other hand, though a great many people who’ve grown up and read books have perhaps felt it, that writing is what those other, ‘writerly’ people do.

This dichotomy is strange, since increasingly I feel that a lot of my instincts and intuitions about writing are in fact musical, and I don’t think that writing and music are fundamentally so far apart. The basic elements of narrative—timing, pacing, flow, recapitulation, tension and release—are musical ones too. And where would writing be without rhythm, the large rhythms that shape a story, or the small ones that shape a paragraph? I increasingly feel too that writing isn’t about words in themselves, but about getting words to register and vibrate to things that might lie beyond them or just at their edge. Thus the spaces between and around words can have their unspoken resonances. And what else is music but a communication without words, in which the silences count as much as the notes?

As for that memory of Ish’s, of the piano phrase being repeated over and over again, that will surely chime with any writer who’s ever doggedly worked and worked over the same passage—trying, indeed, to get the phrasing right.

But that shared memory of Ish’s also had its practical, stimulating effect. It’s not quite true that I’ve had no dealings with music from the inside. When I was a student I bought a cracked Spanish guitar from a friend for five pounds and subsequently, with the aid of a guitar book but in a very on-and-off way, tried to teach myself classical guitar (not the easiest of instrumental choices, as I discovered). Sadly, I finally reached a point which seemed only to prove my ingrained belief that music-making was for those other, musical people. Like many lost causes, the guitar went up into the attic to gather dust.

Decades later, Ish’s recollection about his piano-playing father made me get it down again. There were other factors, I’m sure. I was going through a bad patch with writing, I needed a diversion. But Ish’s memory was a definite trigger. And, of course, I fully knew by now that Ish was one of those other, musical people. In awe of this fact, I didn’t tell him for a long time about my cracked but reactivated guitar.

I’d been surprised, this time, by how my attitudes to learning, or to teaching myself, had changed, by how I persisted and even passed significantly beyond my previous point of abandonment. I’m not speaking of anything amazing, but there came a time when even I could recognize that the inadequate sounds I was producing were not just the result of my lack of expertise, but because I was trying to play on this old, cracked instrument.

I needed a decent guitar. The snag was that, such was my musical inferiority complex, I was terrified of having to go into a guitar shop and try out what they had, thus exposing my complete and lifelong lack of any real musicianship.

Ish came to the rescue. One of the best days I’ve had with a writer friend—though one of those delightful days when you value a writer friend for something that has nothing to do with writing—was when I met Ish one morning in Denmark Street, off Charing Cross Road, to shop for a guitar. I needed his trained ear, but I also needed his fingers: a direct and specific case of the author’s personal touch. I was quite prepared not to find what I wanted (whatever that was exactly), though I was anxiously aware that I could hardly impose on Ish a second time to go so far out of his way for me.

But all went well. Denmark Street, with it several outlets, didn’t come good, but in the basement of a shop in Rathbone Street, off Oxford Street, I found what I was looking for. ‘Looking’, of course, isn’t the point with guitars, any more than a cover is a good guide to a book, but it did look very beautiful and I had Ish to demonstrate that it sounded very beautiful too. Only a few purchases in life seem to have been waiting expressly for you to buy them, but I knew, even before I nodded to Ish’s nod, that I was looking at and hearing what had to be mine.

It was made by Amalio Burguet in Valencia and now it lives in my house. I know my ability with it is still elementary and that I shall never extract from it what it’s truly capable of, but it goes with me, I go with it, we have our moments together, it’s a friend. And it came by way of a friend.

While they put new strings on it in the shop and found a case for it, Ish and I went round the corner for a cup of tea and celebratory cake. This should have been the time to forget for a while the day’s purpose and to ask after what was happening in Ish’s life, but I confess I couldn’t stop thinking about my new possession. A little later, my guitar and I travelled home together in a taxi, like some just-met couple, all the way from Oxford Street.

Though it was a present to myself, I put it on a par with just a few other, special presents, including the fishing rod my father gave me one Christmas when I was a boy. My father never played the piano—it would have been as likely as his speaking Japanese—though nor, in fact, did he fish. Fishing has its links and parallels with writing and in the mid 1980s I co-edited a whole book, The Magic Wheel, on the subject, but the links and parallels with music go deeper, to the very heart of why you have the unaccountable urge to make things up at all. Even a fumbling acquaintance with playing a musical instrument tells you quite a lot about the mysterious process of discovering what you have inside.

But there’s also a simple matter of antithesis. Writers sometimes need to get away from writing, but since it’s a thing in your head, this can be very hard to do. The trick, I think, is not to try to switch off or to empty the mind, but to do something else so engrossingly concentrating that all other thoughts, including those of writing, are suddenly gone. Fishing can certainly do this, but you can’t fish in the next room.

In my very modest way I share a recourse that Ish has too. I have no delusions of performance-level mastery, but now and then, just now and then, I can make that sweet, clear, richly nuanced sound that only a guitar can make. I can make a kind of music. At the very least, after a hard or a bad day’s writing, it can be a good and refreshing thing to go into that other room and, with the best and most devoted of intentions, murder Bach.