Envisioned ‘Ghosts Project’: Kazuo Ishiguro’s Imaginary Nagasaki

Megumi Kato delves into an envisioned yet unrealised project in which Ishiguro was engaged in 1987: a documentary film about Japanese ghosts. According to Kato, Ishiguro believed that his hometown Nagasaki had been the very place where the oldest picture of a female ghost, painted by Maruyama Okyo (an eighteenth-century Japanese painter), was ‘born’. However, Kato proves by her thorough research that this claim is false. Kato conjectures that this myth was created by Ishiguro because of his nostalgia for his birthplace as an exceptionally mysterious place with legends and ghost stories. Kato maintains that, despite the historical incompatibility between Ishiguro’s imaginary Nagasaki and the real Nagasaki, the former must have stimulated his imagination when writing his early works.