All children have to be deceived if they are to grow up without trauma.
I couldn’t speak Japanese very well, passport regulations were changing, I felt British, and my future was in Britain. And it would also make me eligible for literary awards. But I still think I’m regarded as one of their own in Japan.
Now when I look back to the Guildford of that time, it seems far more exotic to me than Nagasaki.
If you look at my last songs and first short stories, there is a real connection between them.
When you become a parent, or a teacher, you turn into a manager of this whole system. You become the person controlling the bubble of innocence around a child, regulating it.
I think I had actually served my apprenticeship as a writer of fiction by writing all those songs. I had already been through phases of autobiographical or experimental stuff.
What is difficult is the promotion, balancing the public side of a writer’s life with the writing. I think that’s something a lot of writers are having to face. Writers have become much more public now.
I had been plunged into a different world. I found myself spending half my time answering weird questions on book tours in the Midwest. People would stand up and explain to me the situation in their office and ask me whether they should resign or not.
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