Kazuo Ishiguro's Literary Archives Go to UT Austin's Harry Ransom Center

Posted on August 25, 2015

The Harry Ransom Center, the humanities research library and museum at The University of Texas at Austin, has done it again. The state of the art library has successfully purchased the archive of award winning author Kazuo Ishiguro, whose books include The Remains of the Day, which won the Booker Prize for Fiction, An Artist of the Floating World, which was the Whitbread Book of the Year and Never Let Me Go.

The archive has some fascinating items in it. The archive contains all the notes, inspiration and drafts of his seven published novels. Ishiguro said that a friend told him years ago to be sure to keep all of his notes for each novel, which had never occurred to him. So he began to keep a large cardboard box under his desk while he writes each book. Everything that has to do with the book gets thrown into the box.

He explains, "I throw, more or less indiscriminately, all papers produced during my writing that I don't want to file neatly and take into the next stage of composition: earlier drafts of chapters, rejected pages, scraps of paper with scribbled thoughts, repeated attempts at the same paragraph, etc." He says he was worried he'd need his notes later and might accidentally throw them out, so he came up with this system. He had no idea they would be useful for an archive of his work.

The archive will be a scholar's dream. There will be no need for an archivist to sort through every scrap of paper trying to figure out what note went with what novel or trying to come up with an organizational plan. Ishiguro himself took on the task of organizing the archive which took him months to complete. He added many, lengthy explanatory comments including a document called "How I Write." This essay discusses his drafting process in detail. He also included a section called "Archive Notes" which details material in the archive with explanations of various items. He has a great fondness for Post It notes: they are everywhere giving detailed annotations and personal commentary.

Scholars may be surprised to discover that the author wanted to be a songwriter at one point: his original compositions are included in the archive. He also included two unpublished novels, including a pulp Western tale that was his first effort at writing fiction. There are also short stories and several screenplays, including The Saddest Music in the World which he wrote with George Toles and Guy Maddin, as well as The White Countess and others.

Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki, Japan, in 1954, and has lived in Great Britain since 1960. His latest novel is The Buried Giant.