KAZUO ISHIGURO, ‘NEVER LET ME GO”
It’s like walking past a mirror of you’ve walked past every day of your life, and suddenly it shows you something else, something troubling and strange.
When we lost something precious, and we’d looked and looked and still couldn’t find it, then we didn’t have to be completely heartbroken.
Because maybe, in a way, we didn’t leave it behind nearly as much as we might once have thought. Because somewhere underneath, a part of us stayed like that: fearful of the world around us, and — no matter how much we despised ourselves for it — unable quite to let each other go.
You said it was because your art would reveal what you were like. What you were like inside. That’s what you said, wasn’t it? Well, you weren’t far wrong about that. We took away your art because we thought it would reveal your souls. Or to put it more finely, we did it to prove you had souls at all.
You have to accept that sometimes that’s how things happen in this world. People’s opinions, their feelings, they go one way, then the other. It just so happens you grew up at a certain point in this process.”