Literature and music in harmony in Kazuo Ishiguro’s new book (2024)

MUSIC
The Summer We Crossed Europe in the Rain: Lyrics for Stacey Kent
Kazuo Ishiguro, Faber $39

It must have been the ’90s. It was certainly Adelaide. Had he just written Remains of the Day? Was the film with Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson on its way? The conversation was like the story by Thea Astley where two characters on a train have no common language except their love of opera: “La Traviata,” she says brightly, and he replies, “Götterdämmerung”. So we communicated, or feigned to. “The Searchers,” he would say, laying down his cards. “8½” was the reply that came unprompted.

Kazuo Ishiguro, that strange Englishman with a Japanese background, was certainly master of the litany of the list, and if memory serves, he was all for the Americans. He talks in a strange and handsome little hardback about the songs he used to write, Leonard Cohen-style. He says,“I look back now on this songwriting era of my life as an apprenticeship for the career I came to have.”

At one stage, he gives a list of treasured popular songs from Me and Bobbie McGee to Moon River, Rodgers and Hammerstein, My Funny Valentine. Of course, a list that includes Dylan, Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell will be an encapsulated history of the folk culture of the world.

He adds, with care, “If you’re reading this and you’re someone starting out as a novelist, please understand I’m not necessarily recommending you take a crash course in the history of the popular song. And certainly not at the expense of great works of literature.” He says he was open through his songs and all songs to “that placing of emotions ‘between the lines’.” A song lives because it invades the emotions and memory of the listener. It clarifies because it creates its own context out of the consciousness that goes along with it and comes to be constituted by it.

Ishiguro also, in the book, writes appreciatively of the songs of the jazz singer Stacey Kent. Then, to his surprise and delight, he is asked to write songs for her. She is nominated for the Grammy Awards and Ishiguro’s appreciation of her work fuses with his desire to do justice to both her talent and his own sense of the musical panorama of the world.

The Summer We Crossed Europe in the Rain is a beautiful book and is best enjoyed armed with downloads of the songs which are lucid and intermittently moving, though there’s a sense in which this pre-packed journey into the world of an accomplished jazz singer linked thematically to Ishiguro’s recurrent and standalone epiphanies is a somewhat artificially constructed, very dressy, book of song lyrics which can’t quite stand up on their own unless you give yourself to them, heart and soul.

There are songs about lavish breakfasts on Amsterdam trams, about watching Casablanca as the rain pours down. And one song, decidedly Euro in its connotations, Gabin, about the French actor and singer.
‘Gabin / Hooded eyes / A slow Gitanes / Weary deserter on the run / Gabin / You came up to my room / And we passed the afternoon / Remembering Gabin / Jean Gabin.’

Gabin’s most famous film is The Grand Illusion, though he belongs to a popular sense of French culture that has its compatibility with the round of cultural apartheid we played that night in Adelaide, selecting our troops, our coded gambits, with great deliberation.

Loading

This book of is beautifully and dynamically illustrated by Bianca Bagnarelli who wins awards for her graphic endeavours and is an adornment to the New Yorker and everyone else in sight. They are lustrous, dynamised images, brilliantly and sinuously co-ordinated with the text.

This is a gorgeous volume whichever way you want to look at it. How then do we look at the distinguished novelist Kazuo Ishiguro? Is it true that with a novel like The Unconsoled he constructed a staircase of novelistic expectation a bit like Kafka that led you up and up, but then there was a sheer gap, a fall into oblivion that made you wonder where you had been climbing and to what purpose? It could seem so.

He certainly bloomed early and brilliantly. The Remains of the Day became a classic when he was such a young man with so many haunting tunes in his head and so many songs, so much Wild Mountain Thyme, and so many mighty movies from his soul’s dreaming.

A recent glance at Robert Altman’s McCabe and Mrs. Miller with all the interminable sorrow, the muddled melancholy of its opening (pre-Julie Christie) confirmed like a gospel or a hymn book the wonderful lyrical authority of Leonard Cohen, as he then was ‘And then sweeping up the jokers that he left behind / You find he did not leave you very much, not even laughter / Like any dealer he was watching for the card that is so high and wild / He’ll never need to deal another / He was just some Joseph looking for a manger’.

Ishiguro, like many people of roughly his age heard the magic and the sheer lustre tilting towards wisdom of those lines. Kazuo Ishiguro’s song lyrics come out of a memory of that magic, but they can’t really compete with it, and to his credit, their author would not claim they do.

The Booklist is a weekly newsletter for book lovers from books editor Jason Steger. Get it delivered every Friday.