# Read the first page of My Twentieth Century Evening and Other Small Breakthroughs by Kazuo Ishiguro Read the opening of My Twentieth Century Evening and Other Small Breakthroughs by Kazuo Ishiguro free, no signup. A novelist's Nobel lecture on the turning points that shaped his writing. - Page: https://uncovered.ink/read/my-twentieth-century-evening-and-other-small-breakthroughs-kazuo-ishiguro - Genre: Literary fiction - Year: 2017 - ISBN: 9780525654957 - Read it blind (cover and title hidden): https://uncovered.ink/?b=9780735276147&s=read-page - Buy: https://bookshop.org/a/125786/9780525654957 - Borrow: https://search.worldcat.org/search?q=9780525654957 ## The opening If you'd come across me in the autumn of 1979, you might have had some difficulty placing me, socially or even racially. I was then twenty-four years old. My features would have looked Japanese, but unlike most Japanese men seen in Britain in those days, I had hair down to my shoulders, and a drooping bandit-style moustache. The only accent discernible in my speech was that of someone brought up in the southern counties of England, inflected at times by the languid, already dated vernacular of the hippie era. If we'd got talking, we might have discussed the Total Footballers of Holland, or Bob Dylan's latest album, or perhaps the year I'd just spent working with homeless people in London. Had you mentioned Japan, asked me about its culture, you might even have detected a trace of impatience enter my manner as I declared my ignorance on the grounds that I hadn’t set foot in that country—not even for a holiday—since leaving it at the age of five. That autumn I’d arrived with a rucksack, a guitar and a portable typewriter in Buxton, Norfolk—a small English village with an old water mill and flat farm fields all around it. I’d come to this place because I’d been accepted on a one-year postgraduate Creative Writing course at the University of East Anglia. The university was ten miles away, in the cathedral town of Norwich, but I had no car and my only way of getting there was by means of a bus service that operated just once in the morning, once at lunchtime and once in the evening. But this, I was soon to discover, was no great hardship: I was rarely required at the university more than twice a week. I’d rented a room in a small house owned by a man in his thirties whose wife had just left him. No doubt, for him, the house was filled with the ghosts of his wrecked dreams—or perhaps he just wanted to avoid me; in any case, I didn’t set eyes on him for days on end. In other words, after the frenetic life I’d been leading in London, here I was, faced with an unusual amount of quiet and solitude in which to transform myself into a writer. In fact, my little room was not unlike the classic writer’s garret. The ceilings sloped claustrophobically—though if I stood on tip-toes I had a view, from my one window, of ploughed fields stretching away into the distance. There was a small table, the surface of which my typewriter and a desk lamp took up almost entirely. On the floor, instead of a bed, there was a large rectangular piece of industrial foam that would cause me to sweat in my sleep, even during the bitterly cold Norfolk nights. It was in this room that I carefully examined the two short stories I’d written over the summer, wondering if they were good enough to submit to my new classmates. (We were, I knew, a class of six, meeting once every two weeks.) At that point in my life, I’d written little else of note in the way of prose fiction, having earned my place on the course with a radio play rejected by the BBC. In fact, having previously made firm plans to become a rock star by the time I was twenty, my literary ambitions had only recently made themselves known to me. The two stories I was now scrutinising had been written in something of a panic, in response to the news that I’d been accepted on the university course. One was about a macabre suicide pact, the other about street fights in Scotland, where I’d spent some time as a community worker. They were not so good. I started another story, about an adolescent who poisons his cat, set like the others in present-day Britain. Then one night, during my third or fourth week in that little room, I found myself writing, with a new and urgent intensity, about Japan—about Nagasaki, the city of my birth, during the last days of the Second World War. ## Books with a similar feel - [Erasure by Percival Everett](https://uncovered.ink/read/erasure-percival-everett.md) - [Here and Now by J.M. Coetzee](https://uncovered.ink/read/here-and-now-j-m-coetzee.md) - [Gilead by Marilynne Robinson](https://uncovered.ink/read/gilead-marilynne-robinson.md) - [The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2014 by Deborah Blum](https://uncovered.ink/read/the-best-american-science-and-nature-writing-2014-deborah-blum.md) - [The Mark and the Void by Paul Murray](https://uncovered.ink/read/the-mark-and-the-void-paul-murray.md) - [Departure by Julian Barnes](https://uncovered.ink/read/departure-julian-barnes.md) --- Source: Uncovered (https://uncovered.ink). A short sample shown for reading and discovery. Rights holders can request removal at https://uncovered.ink/takedown.