Time & Perspective Quote by Kazuo Ishiguro

Identity here is treated less like bloodline and more like paperwork, accent, and the slow drift of ambition. Ishiguro, the consummate novelist of belonging and dislocation, rattles off his reasons for becoming British with a deliberately unromantic cadence: bad Japanese, shifting passport rules, a gut-level sense of where his life would be lived. Then he drops the line that sharpens everything into a quiet provocation: “It would also make me eligible for literary awards.” It’s funny, yes, but it’s also the kind of joke that exposes the machinery behind cultural prestige. Nationality isn’t just who “claims” you; it’s a set of gates that determine where your work can be seen, categorized, and rewarded.

The subtext is a critique of how literature gets nationalized. Writers are marketed as representatives, proof-texts for a country’s sophistication, while their actual biographies are far messier. Ishiguro’s career sits right in that tension: a Japanese-born British writer whose early novels were filtered through an imagined Japan, then later through the genteel dread of England, and finally through genres that refuse neat borders. His admission acknowledges the strategic choices any serious artist makes inside institutional systems, without pretending those choices are pure.

The final line lands as both reassurance and irony: Japan still regards him as “one of their own.” Cultural belonging can be stubbornly generous, or opportunistically retroactive. Either way, Ishiguro shows how nations want the glow of their emigrants’ success, and how the artist learns to live in the slipstream between genuine feeling and administrative fact.