Blithe Spirit: Young Ishiguro’s Contact with Japanese Children’s Culture through Shogakukan’s Graded Educational Magazines

This chapter investigates Japan’s cultural influences on Ishiguro’s childhood and his fiction. In-depth research on the influences of Japanese novels and films on Ishiguro’s fiction has been conducted, as Motoko Sugano notes in this chapter. However, Sugano widens this cultural scope by surveying Ishiguro’s exposure to Japanese children’s culture in the 1960s. Since Ishiguro read Shogakukan’s graded educational magazine, copies of which were sent to young Kazuo every month by his grandparents in Japan, Sugano examines its issues published from 1961 to 1967, and particularly Obake no Q-taro, a comic series on a blithe ghost character serialised in it from 1965 to 1967. Sugano argues that Ishiguro is a writer ‘born translated’, not necessarily in the sense of Rebecca L. Walkowitz’s term (writing in the second language) but in the sense that while being immersed in English outside the home, Ishiguro as a boy was engrossed in Japanese comics, as well as stories translated from many different languages into Japanese in the magazine for children.