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Kazuo Ishiguro
British novelist (born 1954)
The numbers
2 + 9 = 11
1 + 1 = 2
Lo Shu grid
Missing: 3, 6, 7. Present digits repeat to show how many times they occur.
Life path 2 (master 11) — The Illuminator
Eleven is a master number in Western practice: reduced it is 2, but the tradition holds it unreduced because a doubled 1 is read as intensified rather than merely summed. It is associated with sudden insight, unusual perception, and a nervous system that runs hot. The reading is consistent that master numbers are a burden before they are a gift — the perception arrives whether or not there is anywhere to put it.
Complete lines
Line of Feeling
A complete line in the grid.
Line of Resolve
The 1-5-9 diagonal complete. Read as determination that survives the middle of a project, when the initial energy has gone and the result is not yet visible.
Cooperation
A complete line in the grid.
Organisation
A complete line in the grid.
Repeated numbers
1 appears 4 times
Concentrated self-direction. Read as conviction that does not need external agreement — and does not always seek it.
What is missing
Missing 3
Read as difficulty getting the inner picture out — the thought is complete, the expression lags. Often described in people whose written voice is far stronger than their spoken one.
Missing 6
Read as a complicated relationship with obligation — either avoiding it or over-shouldering it, rarely a settled middle.
Missing 7
Read as reluctance to sit with an unresolved question. Associated with wanting the working answer rather than the true one.
Vedic — Ank Jyotish
Moolank 8 comes from the day of the month alone; Bhagyank 2 from the whole date. They differ, which is the ordinary case — the two numbers answer different questions.
Shani
Saturn. Labour, delay, consequence. Feared in popular practice more than any other, and read as the graha that makes people earn things.
Bhagyank uses the same arithmetic as the Western life path, so the two will always agree. That is not two traditions confirming each other — it is one calculation under two names.
In their words
More fundamentally, I'm interested in memory because it's a filter through which we see our lives, and because it's foggy and obscure, the opportunities for self-deception are there. In the end, as a writer, I'm more interested in what people tell themselves happened rather than what actually happened.
I have a sense of having just left without saying goodbye, and of this whole other world just kind of fading away. … I have the feeling of this completely alternative person I should have become. There was another life that I might have had, but I am having this one.
If you go to Tokyo, I think it becomes very obvious that there's this almost seamless mixture of popular culture and Japanese traditional culture.
I don't really like to work with literary allusions very much. I never want to be in a position where I'm saying, "You've got to read a lot of other stuff" or "You've got to have had a good education in literature to fully appreciate what I'm doing." ... I actually dislike, more than many people, working through literary allusion. I just feel that there's something a bit snobbish or elitist about that. I don't like it as a reader, when I'm reading something. It's not just the elitism of it; it jolts me out of the mode in which I'm reading. I've immersed myself in the world and then when the light goes on I'm supposed to be making some kind of literary comparison to another text. I find I'm pulled out of my kind of fictional world, I'm asked to use my brain in a different kind of way. I don't like that.
After all, there's no turning back the clock now. One can't be forever dwelling on what might have been. One should realize one has as good as most, perhaps better, and be grateful.
Perhaps it is indeed time I began to look at this whole matter of bantering more enthusiastically. After all, when one thinks about it, it is not such a foolish thing to indulge in – particularly if it is the case that in bantering lies the key to human warmth.
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