Her dad won the Nobel in Literature – but he hasn’t read her book yet

When she was a child, Naomi Ishiguro was often given small gifts from Japan by adults who thought that, being half-Japanese, she would be interested. “I only went to Japan once as a child. But you’d get things like DVDs of My Neighbour Totoro, there was the Pokémon craze and you try the food. You get these bits and you form a picture of what it looks like, but they’re obviously filtered through the cultural lens of Britain.” She would never have imagined that she would grow up to write a fantasy trilogy full of Shinto spirits, Japanese dragons and black-clad gangs fighting with samurai swords.

Naomi Ishiguro is the daughter of Lorna MacDougall, a Scottish former social worker, and the eminent novelist Sir Kazuo Ishiguro, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2017 and whose most famous novel, The Remains of the Day, is not merely set in England of the 1930s but is probably the definitive literary text on repressed Englishness. Kazuo Ishiguro had lived in Britain since he was five. When Naomi studied literature at university, she chose to focus on pre-Norman Anglo-Saxon poetry. Only a hardcore fan of the Anglosphere would dip her toe in those ancient waters.

“I was very lucky. Growing up in London, everyone was multicultural,” she says. “But I still definitely felt quite self-conscious about it.” Only the night before we meet in London, she was in a pub where men at a nearby table asked her to settle their bet on her origins; one had bet on Singapore. “There is still always that element of being told you’re foreign. So as a child, I think I was always wary of getting too engaged in Japanese culture. I felt that might challenge my place in Britain.”

Her first book of short stories, Escape Routes, combines elements of magic with crises in everyday life that draw on elements of European folktales: the longest story is about a town ratcatcher summoned by a reclusive king. Her first novel, Common Ground, observes the awkward friendship between a middle-class boy at a grammar school and a Romany boy he meets on the common where the travelling people camp. She often references Ken Loach, whose empathetic social realism has clearly seeped into the book’s pages.

In recent years, however, there has been a surge of interest in Europe in all things Japanese, while Ishiguro herself has become a devotee of fantasy trilogies – of many origins – as well as Japanese animation and Comicon. Her new book The Rainshadow Orphans is the first book in a trilogy, a favoured format in fantasy literature. It is a formidable undertaking. “I read a lot of trilogies and I love fantasy myself,” she says. “And I love animated series that are very long form; I think you can get a real richness of the world that way. And I think I just wanted to commit to something, so it didn’t feel daunting.”

The Rainshadow Orphans revolves around a family cobbled together by circumstance – and all the more devoted as a result. Sprightly martial arts queen Toshiko, gentle healer Jun and obsessive hacker Mei are the adopted children of Reiko, who was murdered in front of them by gangland terrorists called the Lucky Crows. Now teenagers, they live in a hidden bunker on a strip of land called Rainshadow City. This shanty town is set on the edge of the island capital of a mythical archipelago; refugees from poorer islands are confined there and exploited as a casual labour pool. Grim as it sounds, there is a strong spirit of community among these waifs and strays. “I was thinking about the refugee camps in France, these liminal spaces where you don’t belong, when you also can’t belong anywhere else,” says Ishiguro. “Where people are saying ‘go home’, but there’s no home to go to.”

Beyond the fence, the empress lives and governs with her small son being raised to succeed her. Her troops, the Imperial Guard, are unmistakably samurai; a shadier group of enforcers, who have the empress’s ear but are ultimately controlled by a surprisingly powerful elderly woman in a cardigan, resemble yakuza. An adventure revolves around the search for a powerful pearl, stolen from the throat of a pink-furred dragon; the world itself is a steampunk hybrid where people fight with swords or bows and travel on sailing ships, but also have advanced computer technology.

“I think I was interested in a world that hadn’t really done industrialisation, but had skipped straight to a technological revolution,” says Ishiguro. “Maybe I’ve read too much English romantic poetry, but I always see industrialisation as the enemy.” Otherwise, she just went with world-building elements that captured her imagination. “I was sort of like ‘if I feel wondrous about the idea, then I hope readers will too’. What’s so lovely about the genre, I think, is that it’s like a gift to readers. You give them the world and be like ‘now you can imagine things in this world, almost like a writer yourself’. This world is almost a collage of Asian diaspora elements.”

This world also swarms with spirit beings that only a few people can see; the Empress’s lonely little son Haru is comforted, for example, by a Pokemon-adjacent squirrel that scampers around his princely quarters. “That’s loosely inspired by Shintoism, where gods are physically present in something like a tree or a boulder,” says Ishiguro. “These are gods that are not divine, but are manifestations of spiritual and natural energy. I’m very interested in things that reframe our relationship as humans with the more-than-human world, I guess.” Not that these beings are always benign; they can be as spiteful and capricious as Greek gods or the fairy folk of Celtic myth. Who knows what they might do next?

Naomi Ishiguro was born in 1992. Growing up with one of the foremost living writers in the English language meant that a writing career felt like an available possibility, but it certainly wasn’t inevitable. At school, she threw herself into theatre. In her late teens, she toyed with being a dancer. A few years later, working in a bookshop in Bath Spa, she busked in the touristy central city as a singer-songwriter and worked the open-mic nights around town; still later, when COVID-19 hit, she trained as a teacher.

“I think you just do what you can do,” she says. “I was always terrible at dancing, even though I love contemporary dance. But I see it all as sort of part of the same thing, honestly. It’s all storytelling. All creativity.” Her drama teacher was her most important mentor – “a huge, huge influence in my life” – but she didn’t want to spend years writing plays in the vain hope that someone would put them on. Eventually, she did the same master’s degree in creative writing – at the University of East Anglia – as her father had done in 1979.

She had always written stories. In an interview a few years ago, she said her parents would read and dismiss them. That sounds brutal. “It’s a long time ago. I just remember them saying that this wasn’t up to scratch. You can do better, that kind of thing.” She was a great reader of 19th-century novels and was inclined, as a grand teenage authoress, to similar levels of melodrama. “We’re so susceptible to the narrative voice we’re reading; it gets under your skin. I think they were a bit like ‘you need to stop with this overwrought, pseudo-Victorian voice and find your own’.”

That process always takes time. Before she took her sharp swerve into fantasy, Ishiguro had all but decided to give up writing. Common Ground was published in 2021, to respectful reviews but, given culture was in the COVID-19 lull, little fanfare. At that point, she trained as a teacher. “I just needed to train in a different career and gain some life stability.” More than that, her writing had stalled.

“I just kept writing the same book again, but a worse version. I had a whole draft of something that I just threw away in between.” Then The Rainshadow Orphans emerged, seemingly from nowhere. “But I think the project was sort of brewing in my mind while I was making lesson plans, thinking of fun things for the kids to do.”

I mean, he’s won the Nobel Prize. But I think it’s nice to be able to connect through doing something similar but different.

As that idea grew to encompass war, pestilence and dragons, she decided to stop teaching and give herself until the next school year to get it done. She thought she had enough money saved to last that time. If it didn’t find a publisher, she would return to teaching. With that deadline, she set herself targets: two hours’ work before the first coffee; two hours after that; lunch; several hours in the afternoon. She is very disciplined. “I think most novelists are. You have to be because it’s like you’re writing these huge things completely by yourself.”

Her mother, who has an eagle eye for grammar, has always been her father’s first reader. Naomi Ishiguro has a circle of writers of her age and inclinations who read each other’s work; her parents read a very early draft of The Rainshadow Orphans, but are yet to receive finished books. “I think they just think ‘leave the younger generation to themselves’. I think we want to give each other space.”

She laughs at the suggestion that she is now her father’s peer. “Definitely not. I mean, he’s won the Nobel Prize. But I think it’s nice to be able to connect through doing something similar but different.” She hasn’t set out to be a literary author. “I write about young people. It’s a bit more joyous and magical; I don’t aspire to say anything huge about the human condition. I’m not looking at the language. I’m looking more at politics – not party politics, but like how humans relate to each other. I think we have different purposes when we write and we use the tools differently.” She just shares the name and, lurking somewhere, a memory of all things Japanese.

The Rainshadow Orphans by Naomi Ishiguro is published by Atria Australia on May 26 ($35).

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