Kazuo Ishiguro’s Design for ‘Living’

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Kazuo Ishiguro’s Design for Living

Having moved from Japan to England when he was five years old, novelist Kazuo Ishiguro was perhaps naturally drawn to the films of Akira Kurosawa and Yasujiro Ozu when he was growing up in the 1960s and ’70s. “They were the only things that seemed to percolate through,” he tells David Canfield on this week’s Little Gold Men podcast. “They were shown late at night on an arty channel on the BBC, and I watched those. I think I was as young as 11.”

And there was always a special place in his heart for Ikiru, Kurosawa’s 1952 film about a Tokyo bureaucrat facing a terminal diagnosis. “Although the movie was about an old guy dying of cancer, it made a big, big impact on me,” Ishiguro says. “I would say that it had a big impact on my books.” Although it would take him this long to adapt Ikiru as the now Oscar-nominated screenplay Living, the author says the film’s influence can be seen in his books like The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go. In some ways, Living has been with him all along.

But it took the inspiration of star Bill Nighy, as he explains, to actually bring the film to life. Hear all about that, and much more, on this week’s Little Gold Men. 

Kazuo Ishiguro on Battling Impostor Syndrome Over First Oscar Nom

He’s a Nobel Prize winner and icon of the literary world. But the Living screenwriter is still coming to terms with his long-awaited Hollywood embrace.

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