Time & Perspective Quote by Kazuo Ishiguro

Memory is doing a sly bit of empire here: it turns suburban England into the “exotic” and demotes Nagasaki, a city Western imaginations often pre-label as foreign, bomb-scarred, and permanently Other, into something comparatively familiar. Ishiguro’s line works because it reverses the expected hierarchy of strangeness. The surprise isn’t a cheap twist; it’s an exposure of how “exotic” is less a property of a place than a mood created by distance, childhood, and narrative.

Context matters: Ishiguro grew up in England after leaving Japan as a small child, and much of his fiction is powered by that in-between condition, where identity is formed in translation and recollection is a creative act with its own agenda. “Guildford of that time” signals a vanished micro-world: not the town as it is, but the town as it was, privately mythologized. Time is the real foreign country in the sentence; geography is almost a decoy.

The subtext is a quiet critique of the tourist gaze and of nostalgia’s authority. If Guildford can become more “exotic” than Nagasaki, then exoticism is revealed as a projection, a way of styling the past to make it feel vivid, unrepeatable, worth grieving. Ishiguro isn’t just playing with contrast; he’s showing how displacement rearranges the map inside a person’s head, and how the most unfamiliar place can be the one you thought you knew.