Nobel literature winner Kazuo Ishiguro: An artist of the disconnected world

A living example that literary art has no national landscapes or limitations, Japanese-born British writer Kazuo Ishiguro, the 2017 Nobel Literature laureate, is possibly its first recipient whose range of evocative works is not in his mother tongue and deals with situations and settings from far beyond his old and new homelands and times.

Spanning reminiscences of high life in the turbulent 1930s through the eyes of an English country house butler in the acclaimed Booker-winning "The Remains of the Day" (1989), the question of personal guilt a painter-turned-propagandist confronts in post-war Japan in "Artist of the Floating World" (1986), or other works set in Europe, colonised China, Arthurian Britain or in a dystopian future, Ishiguro's small corpus is distinguished by its variety as well as some customary motifs and style.

The narration in all but one of his seven books is in first person, and the works usually deal with the past of the protagonists. As he noted in an interview, he was more "interested in memory because it's a filter through which we see our lives, and because it's foggy and obscure, the opportunities for self-deception are there. In the end, as a writer, I'm more interested in what people tell themselves happened rather than what actually happened".
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How World War I changed the weather for good

Culture has rarely tired of speaking about the weather. Pastoral poems detail the seasonal variations in weather ad nauseam, while the term “pathetic fallacy” is often taken to refer to a Romantic poet’s wilful translation of external phenomena – sun, rain, snow – into aspects of his own mind. Victorian novels, too, use weather as a device to convey a sense of time, place and mood: the fog in Dickens’s Bleak House (1853), for example, or the wind that sweeps through Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights (1847).

And yet the same old conversations fundamentally changed tense during World War I. Because during the war, weather forecasting turned from a practice based on looking for repeated patterns in the past, to a mathematical model that looked towards an open future.

Needless to say, a lot relied on accurate weather forecasting in wartime: aeronautics, ballistics, the drift of poison gas. But forecasts at this time were in no way reliable. Although meteorology had developed throughout the Victorian era to produce same-day weather maps and daily weather warnings (based on a telegram service that could literally move faster than the wind), the practice of forecasting the weather as it evolved and changed over time remained notoriously inadequate.

Changing the weather

English mathematician Lewis Fry Richardson saw that the pre-War practice of weather forecasting was much too archival in nature, merely matching observable weather phenomena in the present to historical records of previous weather phenomena.

This, he deemed, was a fundamentally unscientific method, as it presupposed that past evolutions of the atmosphere would repeat in the future. For the sake of more accurate prediction, he claimed, it was essential that forecasters felt free to disregard the index of the past.
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