“My mother had told me the whole story of Ikiru before I saw it – I remember once, at lunchtime, she enacted different parts. It was a movie that meant a lot to her. So I was primed for it, and it had a huge impact on me.”

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The Japanese film reminded Ishiguro, then living in the commuter belt of Guildford in Surrey in London’s surrounding home counties, of the British businessmen he would see in the 1960s making their way to Waterloo station, wearing the uniform of briefcase and bowler hat.

“I used to travel into school every morning with those guys,” he recalls. “I’d wait on the platform with them. I thought at a certain age I would just turn into one of those people.”

Ikiru, however, imparted a message that such ordinary lives can also be quietly heroic, an influential philosophy detectable in Ishiguro’s novels.

Adapting Kurosawa’s screenplay was no easy feat, however. In the original film, for instance, Mr Watanabe becomes infatuated with a young female co-worker, even buying her stockings.

In Living, the shallow sexual infatuation is removed, and the relationship clearly defined as a chaste inter-generational friendship central to the plot, as Mr Williams begs his co-worker Miss Harris (Aimee Lou Wood) to teach him “to be alive for one day”.

“I’d seen too many films in the last 20 years about older men getting a bit ‘lechy’, obsessed about some younger girl who’s effectively within his power range,” says Ishiguro, who wanted the role of the young woman to have more agency.

“It’s not an area you can go into innocently, particularly after the whole Weinstein thing and MeToo.”

In Ikiru, Kurosawa’s humour was brutal: Mr Watanabe sits in the doctor’s surgery, wide-eyed as another patient imparts florid descriptions of bowel movements, translating the doctor’s assurance there is no need to operate as “practically a death sentence”.

Ishiguro says that, at that time in Japan, it was common for doctors to falsely reassure patients with cancer they were fine. “My mother told me this: a lot of people in Japan of her generation would spend their time wondering if they had cancer.”

Was a desire for civility and conformity a response to the sheer chaos of World War II in both Japan and Britain, perhaps suppressing emotional expression and the ability to say, “I love you” or “I have cancer”?

“If you read the literature even pre-World War I or you watch the movies, you’ll still see these traits in British and Japanese people,” Ishiguro says.

“It’s more to do with militaristic societies … the reality of a lot of nations’ existences relied upon being able to defend yourself militarily. That sort of society places enormous value on being able to bottle up your emotions.”

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Filtered through a dry, wry English sensibility, Living becomes a masterclass in understatement while retaining clarity.

“It’s never easy, this,” says the doctor delivering Mr Williams’ terminal diagnosis, to which Bill Nighy simply answers: “Quite.”

Living opens in cinemas on March 16.

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