The first hit on a Google search for Kazuo Ishiguro is his Wikipedia page, which, 24 hours ago, described his writing period as 1982-present.
Ishiguro’s first novel, A Pale View of Hills, was published in 1982, but Granta 7 says he is also “the author of… a number of short stories that originally appeared in Faber’s Introduction 7,” which was published in 1981. Does this mean that his writing period is 1981-present? But the British Council describes him “writing full-time since 1982,” so are the Introduction 7 stories the result of part-time writing, and consequently not an argument for an expanded writing period?
In an orderly world there would be a style manual and a supervisor to make this decision. Absent those, I changed the date to 1981.
But substantive problems remain on the page as it presently stands: one editor suggests that “Ishiguro’s novels share certain qualities” and that “A number of his novels are set in the past.” To how many authors do these statements not apply?
The narrator of An Artist of the Floating World, Masuji Ono, is said to “find himself blamed by the new generation who accuse him of being part of Japan’s misguided foreign policy” even though (1) Ono had nothing to do with foreign policy—his propaganda sought to shape public opinion, not political policy—and (2) one of the novel’s key points is that Ono’s sense of his role in the world floats: this role cannot be understood through the language either of external influence (societal blame) nor of internal influence (psychological guilt), but instead occupies a register of meaning parallel to the aesthetic sense.
Perhaps most frustratingly of all, an editor claims that the irresolution of Ishiguro’s novels “can be seen as a literary reflection on the Japanese idea of mono no aware” even though Toni Morrison’s, J. M. Coetzee’s, Ian McEwan’s, and Salman Rushdie’s novels end in exactly the same way and yet their Wikipedia pages don’t associate their writing with 18th-century Japanese literary criticism.
(Masuji Ono briefly works for a painter invested in mono no aware, but neither Ono nor Ishiguro have patience for apolitical aestheticism.)
But what to do about this? The editor or editors who wrote these sentences weren’t defending factually incorrect information; a good critic could just as easily argue that Ishiguro is being coy about his disinterest in Japanese literature and that, in fact, we can see X and Y features distinguishing the irresolution of his novels from those of Morrison et al.
That infamous curmudgeon Nicholson Baker has a delightful essay about Wikipedia in this week’s NYRB in which he argues that there is altogether too much deletion going on. All knowledge has some validity, he implies, if only as a record of what a certain editor thought at a certain time.
Baker did not thoroughly persuade me, but I let the earlier editor’s (or editors’) remarks stand and then added alongside them an equally specious counterargument about Ishiguro’s relationship to Japanese literature and culture.
