He didn’t want to wake up at the end of his life only to realize that he’d given himself to a misguided cause. Ishiguro, a mild, deliberative person, felt this pressure intensely. Britain in the 1980s was a far cry from Japan in the 1930s, and yet he recognized common denominators: tribalism, an impatience with nuance, the pressure placed on ordinary people to take political sides. His parents and grandparents had lived through the rise and fall of fascism, and he grew up listening to stories about the dangerous power of crowds. Even as he recognized their good intentions, he feared the marchers were succumbing to the disorienting lure of mass emotion. Perhaps the Kremlin would respond to a nuclear-free Europe in the way the demonstrators foresaw, but it wasn’t hard for Ishiguro to imagine a less harmonious outcome. In theory, unilateral disarmament was a nice idea in practice, it could backfire catastrophically. There was just one problem, as Ishiguro saw it: He worried that the whole thing might be a terrible mistake.
Synchronized protests were taking place all across Europe, and for a brief moment it seemed possible to believe that they would actually make a difference. As they made their way past Big Ben to Hyde Park, holding signs and waving banners, a current of euphoria spread among the crowd. Along with a group of like-minded friends, he chanted slogans demanding that the West renounce its nuclear arsenal - the hope being that the East would quickly follow suit. Ishiguro’s mother had narrowly survived the atomic bombing of Nagasaki in 1945, so his presence at the march that day felt like a matter of personal duty. Among them was a young writer named Kazuo Ishiguro, who’d recently published his first novel. On a bright, cool Saturday in late October 1983, the growing prospect of thermonuclear war between the world’s two superpowers drew a quarter million people out into the streets of central London.
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