“As readers, we writers seem to especially cherish what I call ‘permission-giving’ works, the kind we read and react to with momentary outrage, ‘You can’t do that!’
followed by dawning delight, ‘Oh, you can?’ (which, of course, is to say, ‘Perhaps I can’). I’ve seen students over the years respond in this fashion to varieties of meta-fiction, or the use of the second person, or the first person plural, and I suspect those works beloved by writers—whether Sebald’s, or Knausgard’s, or Marilyn Robinson’s Housekeeping—are similarly thrilling for the possibilities they open up for us. In my own case, Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day is a work of this ilk. When he first came to prominence in the 1980s, Ishiguro, himself as a then young Asian writer in Britain, gave me a kind of permission to imagine myself—half Welsh, half Chinese—as a writer, but The Remains of the Day has continued to offer me a model of how to reconcile the poles of my existence, not least during the writing of my latest novel, The Fortunes. Stevens, the butler, the central character of the book is quintessentially British—of course, a descendant of Jeeves and the Admirable Crichton—and yet also in his restraint, his loyalty to his house, somehow ineffably traditionally Japanese. The link becomes more explicit if one reads The Remains of the Day alongside the novel that precedes it, An Artist of the Floating World, set in Japan. The narrators of both, Stevens and Masuji Ono, sound uncannily alike. The result in Stevens is a character who is both overtly British and subtly Japanese, a ‘bothness’ that has subsequently served as a touchstone whenever I’ve felt a choice between identities, and which moreover feels like a way for a writer to inhabit the ‘other’—by finding in him or her the familiar.”
—Peter Ho Davies, author of The Fortunes (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016)
Photo credit: Dane Hillard