Unlike many future novelists, Ishiguro didn’t spend his teenage years inhaling the canon. He spent them listening to music and making music of his own. In 1968, he bought his first Bob Dylan album, “John Wesley Harding,” and worked backward from there. He and his friends would sit around for hours nodding along to Dylan’s obscure lyrics as though they understood every word. It was like a microcosm of adolescence, he told me, pretending to know while knowing nothing. Ishiguro wasn’t just bluffing, though. From Dylan, as well as Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell, he learned about the possibilities of the first-person: how a character could be summoned into being with just a few words.
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