Hello, I'm Kirstie Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 2002, and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My causeway this week is a writer born Born in post-war Nagasaki, he came to this country at the age of five, where he was brought up in Surrey.

He tried his luck as a singer and worked for a while as a social worker, but a stint at the creative writing course at East Anglia

University set him on the path to his ultimate career.

The contrasting worlds of his upbringing echo in his novels.

They're there in the remains of the day which won the

Booker Prize in 1989 and was made into a successful film starring Anthony Hopkins.

His success is international. Three of his other books, he's written five altogether,

have also won major prizes, and he's been awarded the OBE and decorated by the French government.

Beautifully crafted, this small group of novels tells of incidents and people found at

history's dramatic intersections, the heroes and victims of incomprehensible change.

I'm interested in the language of self-deception, he says. What happens to a person's

values if during the course of his lifetime things deemed honorable and great turn out to be

something to be ashamed of? He is Kazu Ishiguro.

That's the recurring theme of your novels really, isn't it, Kazuu. The idea that idealism might be misplaced, that you're doing

something today that you might regret in later life. Is that something that

worries you personally? I think it used to. I was born nine years after the end of the Second World War and I

think if you're of a Japanese background it's quite a natural thing to wonder

had I been born just one generation earlier, would I have

had the perspective, the strength of character, the physical courage to stand outside that kind of militaristic fashistic fervor.

And your parents were there of course.

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