The Buried Giant

by Kazuo Ishiguro

Overview

From the author of Never Let Me Go and the Booker Prize-winning The Remains of the Day
 
The Romans have long since departed and Britain is steadily declining into ruin. But, at least, the wars that once ravaged the country have ceased. Axl and Beatrice, a couple of elderly Britons, decide that now is the time, finally, for them to set off across this troubled land of mist and rain to find the son they have not seen for years, the son they can scarcely remember. They know they will face many hazards—some strange and otherworldly—but they cannot foresee how their journey will reveal to them the dark and forgotten corners of their love for each other. Nor can they foresee that they will be joined on their journey by a Saxon warrior, his orphan charge, and a knight—each of them, like Axl and Beatrice, lost in some way to his own past, but drawn inexorably toward the comfort, and the burden, of the fullness of a life’s memories.

Sometimes savage, sometimes mysterious, always intensely moving, Kazuo Ishiguro’s first novel in a decade tells a luminous story about the act of forgetting and the power of memory, a resonant tale of love, vengeance, and war.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780307455796
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	01/05/2016
Series:	Vintage International
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	336
Sales rank:	7,930
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

KAZUO ISHIGURO was born in Nagasaki, Japan, in 1954 and moved to Britain at the age of 5. He is the author of 6 novels: A Pale View of Hills (1982, Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize), An Artist of the Floating World (1986, Whitbread Book of the Year Award, Premio Scanno, shortlisted for the Booker Prize), The Remains of the Day (1989, winner of the Booker Prize), The Unconsoled (1995, winner of the Cheltenham Prize), When We Were Orphans (2000, shortlisted for the Booker Prize) and Never Let Me Go (2005, Corine Internationaler Buchpreis, Serono Literary Prize, Casino de Santiago European Novel Award, shortlisted for the Booker Prize). Nocturnes (2009), his connected stories collection, was awarded the Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa International Literary Prize. In 1995 Ishiguro received an OBE for Services to Literature and in 1998 the French decoration of Chevalier de L'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.

Read an Excerpt

The Buried Giant

A Novel

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By Kazuo Ishiguro

Random House LLC

Copyright © 2015 Kazuo Ishiguro
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-307-27103-7

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CHAPTER 1

You would have searched a long time for the sort of winding lane or tranquil meadow for which England later became celebrated. There were instead miles of desolate, uncultivated land; here and there rough-hewn paths over craggy hills or bleak moorland. Most of the roads left by the Romans would by then have become broken or overgrown, often fading into wilderness. Icy fogs hung over rivers and marshes, serving all too well the ogres that were then still native to this land. The people who lived nearby—one wonders what desperation led them to settle in such gloomy spots—might well have feared these creatures, whose panting breaths could be heard long before their deformed figures emerged from the mist. But such monsters were not cause for astonishment. People then would have regarded them as everyday hazards, and in those days there was so much else to worry about. How to get food out of the hard ground; how not to run out of firewood; how to stop the sickness that could kill a dozen pigs in a single day and produce green rashes on the cheeks of children.

In any case, ogres were not so bad provided one did not provoke them. One had to accept that every so often, perhaps following some obscure dispute in their ranks, a creature would come blundering into a village in a terrible rage, and despite shouts and brandishings of weapons, rampage about injuring anyone slow to move out of its path. Or that every so often, an ogre might carry off a child into the mist. The people of the day had to be philosophical about such outrages.

In one such area on the edge of a vast bog, in the shadow of some jagged hills, lived an elderly couple, Axl and Beatrice. Perhaps these were not their exact or full names, but for ease, this is how we will refer to them. I would say this couple lived an isolated life, but in those days few were "isolated" in any sense we would understand. For warmth and protection, the villagers lived in shelters, many of them dug deep into the hillside, connecting one to the other by underground passages and covered corridors. Our elderly couple lived within one such sprawling warren—"building" would be too grand a word—with roughly sixty other villagers. If you came out of their warren and walked for twenty minutes around the hill, you would have reached the next settlement, and to your eyes, this one would have seemed identical to the first. But to the inhabitants themselves, there would have been many distinguishing details of which they would have been proud or ashamed.

I have no wish to give the impression that this was all there was to the Britain of those days; that at a time when magnificent civilisations flourished elsewhere in the world, we were here not much beyond the Iron Age. Had you been able to roam the countryside at will, you might well have discovered castles containing music, fine food, athletic excellence; or monasteries with inhabitants steeped in learning. But there is no getting around it. Even on a strong horse, in good weather, you could have ridden for days without spotting any castle or monastery looming out of the greenery. Mostly you would have found communities like the one I have just described, and unless you had with you gifts of food or clothing, or were ferociously armed, you would not have been sure of a welcome. I am sorry to paint such a picture of our country at that time, but there you are.

To return to Axl and Beatrice. As I said, this elderly couple lived on the outer fringes of the warren, where their shelter was less protected from the elements and hardly benefited from the fire in the Great Chamber where everyone congregated at night. Perhaps there had been a time when they had lived closer to the fire; a time when they had lived with their children. In fact, it was just such an idea that would drift into Axl's mind as he lay in his bed during the empty hours before dawn, his wife soundly asleep beside him, and then a sense of some unnamed loss would gnaw at his heart, preventing him from returning to sleep.

Perhaps that was why, on this particular morning, Axl had abandoned his bed altogether and slipped quietly outside to sit on the old warped bench beside the entrance to the warren in wait for the first signs of daylight. It was spring, but the air still felt bitter, even with Beatrice's cloak, which he had taken on his way out and wrapped around himself. Yet he had become so absorbed in his thoughts that by the time he realised how cold he was, the stars had all but gone, a glow was spreading on the horizon, and the first notes of birdsong were emerging from the dimness.

He rose slowly to his feet, regretting having stayed out so long. He was in good health, but it had taken a while to shake off his last fever and he did not wish it to return. Now he could feel the damp in his legs, but as he turned to go back inside, he was well satisfied: for he had this morning succeeded in remembering a number of things that had eluded him for some time. Moreover, he now sensed he was about to come to some momentous decision—one that had been put off far too long—and felt an excitement within him which he was eager to share with his wife.

Inside, the passageways of the warren were still in complete darkness, and he was obliged to feel his way the short distance back to the door of his chamber. Many of the "doorways" within the warren were simple archways to mark the threshold to a chamber. The open nature of this arrangement would not have struck the villagers as compromising their privacy, but allowed rooms to benefit from any warmth coming down the corridors from the great fire or the smaller fires permitted within the warren. Axl and Beatrice's room, however, being too far from any fire had something we might recognise as an actual door; a large wooden frame criss-crossed with small branches, vines and thistles which someone going in and out would each time have to lift to one side, but which shut out the chilly draughts. Axl would happily have done without this door, but it had over time become an object of considerable pride to Beatrice. He had often returned to find his wife pulling off withered pieces from the construct and replacing them with fresh cuttings she had gathered during the day.

This morning, Axl moved the barrier just enough to let himself in, taking care to make as little noise as possible. Here, the early dawn light was leaking into the room through the small chinks of their outer wall. He could see his hand dimly before him, and on the turf bed, Beatrice's form still sound asleep under the thick blankets.

He was tempted to wake his wife. For a part of him felt sure that if, at this moment, she were awake and talking to him, whatever last barriers remained between him and his decision would finally crumble. But it was some time yet until the community roused itself and the day's work began, so he settled himself on the low stool in the corner of the chamber, his wife's cloak still tight around him.

He wondered how thick the mist would be that morning, and if, as the dark faded, he would see it had seeped through the cracks right into their chamber. But then his thoughts drifted away from such matters, back to what had been preoccupying him. Had they always lived like this, just the two of them, at the periphery of the community? Or had things once been quite different? Earlier, outside, some fragments of a remembrance had come back to him: a small moment when he was walking down the long central corridor of the warren, his arm around one of his own children, his gait a little crouched not on account of age as it might be now, but simply because he wished to avoid hitting his head on the beams in the murky light. Possibly the child had just been speaking to him, saying something amusing, and they were both of them laughing. But now, as earlier outside, nothing would quite settle in his mind, and the more he concentrated, the fainter the fragments seemed to grow. Perhaps these were just an elderly fool's imaginings. Perhaps it was that God had never given them children.

You may wonder why Axl did not turn to his fellow villagers for assistance in recalling the past, but this was not as easy as you might suppose. For in this community the past was rarely discussed. I do not mean that it was taboo. I mean that it had somehow faded into a mist as dense as that which hung over the marshes. It simply did not occur to these villagers to think about the past—even the recent one.

To take an instance, one that had bothered Axl for some time: He was sure that not so long ago, there had been in their midst a woman with long red hair—a woman regarded as crucial to their village. Whenever anyone injured themselves or fell sick, it had been this red-haired woman, so skilled at healing, who was immediately sent for. Yet now this same woman was no longer to be found anywhere, and no one seemed to wonder what had occurred, or even to express regret at her absence. When one morning Axl had mentioned the matter to three neighbours while working with them to break up the frosted field, their response told him that they genuinely had no idea what he was talking about. One of them had even paused in his work in an effort to remember, but had ended by shaking his head. "Must have been a long time ago," he had said.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro. Copyright © 2015 Kazuo Ishiguro. Excerpted by permission of Random House LLC, a division of Random House, Inc.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Reading Group Guide

The questions, discussion topics, and reading list that follow are intended to enhance your reading group’s discussion of The Buried Giant, the remarkable new novel from internationally acclaimed novelist Kazuo Ishiguro.

1. Discuss the idea of the hero’s quest as perpetuated in pop culture. How does Ishiguro’s story conform to the standards of this literary trope? How does it defy it?

2. The mist that permeates Axl and Beatrice’s world creates societies wherein historical and personal memory is limited. Discuss the significance of the mist throughout the novel. How does it invite fear? When is it comforting? What allegories can you draw from it? 

3. In Chapter Two, Axl and Beatrice have an uncomfortable encounter with a boatman and an old woman. Discuss the significance of this interaction. How did you interpret the woman’s odd—and brutal—behavior? How does this meeting with the boatman echo throughout the novel?

4. When Beatrice and Axl visit the Saxon village, Ivor apologizes for the fact that his community set on them like “crazed wolves” (59). At what other points in the novel is human behavior described as animalistic? 

5. How does Edwin’s memory of his mother change throughout the novel? Discuss the incident in which he is stuck in the barn in Chapter Four. How does his mother’s voice act as a protective force? How much of his recollection of his mother do you think is accurate, and how much is fabricated?

6. Discuss the themes of trust and deception throughout The Buried Giant. How does the mist cause distrust between people? At what points do we see doubt creep into Axl and Beatrice’s relationship? Their relationships with other characters?

7. Discuss Edwin’s relationship with Wistan. Why do you think Wistan took Edwin under his wing? 

8. Several characters are described as “warriors” in The Buried Giant. What values or traits are intrinsic to this label? How does honor factor into a warrior’s conduct?

9. In Chapter Seven, Gawain leads Beatrice, Axl, and Edwin through an underground tunnel from the monastery that they had believed to be a place of refuge. Why do you think each character see different things—bats, dead infants—during their trek? Do you think the brutality described in this scene is imagined?

10. On page 86, Edwin is described as a “mule.” Discuss the significance of this characterization, and how it echoes throughout the novel. 

11. In Chapter Eleven, Beatrice and Axl have a horrifying experience while trying to ford a river. Discuss this scene, and the grotesque descriptions within it. What is the significance of Axl’s interaction with the woman on the boat? Why do you think Beatrice’s memory is so greatly affected during this scene? What does this part of their journey reveal about their relationship?

12. Part III of the novel opens with Gawain’s First Reverie. Describe the contents of this section. Why do you think Ishiguro chose to write this section in such an intimate perspective?

13. Discuss the duel between Wistan and Gawain in Chapter Fifteen. Do you believe they respect each other, despite their opposing loyalties? How did you interpret Wistan’s emotional state after slaying both Gawain and Querig?

14. Axl and Beatrice’s relationship is marked by tenderness and mutual affection throughout the novel. Were you surprised, then, by the revelation of Beatrice’s unfaithfulness? How did you interpret their final interactions in the last chapter of the novel?

15. Why do you think Ishiguro chose to have the final chapter of the book come from the perspective of the boatman? 

Interviews

Barnes & Noble Review Interview with Kazuo Ishiguro

Some novels are magic. They seep into your consciousness and seem to change not only the way you view the world around you, but the incidents that happen within that world. Kazuo Ishiguro's new book, The Buried Giant, is such a novel. Reading my advance copy, I found strange things happening. While reading a book about reconnecting with the past I found fragments of my own past all about me.

Reading the book in a coffee shop, I met my old English professor, someone I had not seen for many years but remembered fondly. Later, as I read the novel on the Megabus to London, the coach veered off its usual course along the East Coast, and I looked up to find myself being driven past Kirkby Lonsdale, the small Lancashire town where I had grown up.

The Buried Giant, set in what Ishiguro calls a never-never land resembling an ancient Britain of knights and dragons, is about things we forget, a past we have left behind which is about to reawaken. Remembering the forgotten thing will profoundly alter the world but remembering is also personal, and the book, like so much of Ishiguro's work, is imbued with a tantalizing, unsettling sense of something missing.

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Kazuo Ishiguro opened the door to his London home and welcomed me in from the dreary January afternoon, expressing concern over whether I had been rained on.

I was led through to a living room, where the shelves were stacked with DVDs including a shelf of postwar French movies, which Ishiguro and his wife, Lorna, are interested in, he told me, not only because they're enjoyable just as films but also for what they reveal about France after the war.

The chairs were the color of orange juice, and he invited me to take one, asking if I was OK with a chair with a hard back. Lorna offered me cushions, which I declined, before telling me to "have as many biscuits as you like, because otherwise he'll eat them all."

Then she left the room, and Ishiguro and I were facing one another. The following is an edited transcript of our conversation. —Hope Whitmore

The Barnes & Noble Review: The Buried Giant is very much about an old England, an England in the distant past, with knights and ogres and slaying a dragon. Why this setting?

Kazuo Ishiguro: I find that my themes remain very similar, but I like to change the periods in which they are set, and the genre, and I think that's because I like to start out with the sort of issues or questions that my novel is going to address — it's almost like location hunting for filmmakers.

I wanted this story to be about a world where people had lost their memories in patches, how whole societies remember or forget and how individuals suppress memory and struggle with remembering or forgetting, but every time I thought about somewhere I wanted the novel to be set I started thinking about Yugoslavia as it broke up and descended into civil war in the 1990s, or France immediately after the Second World War. They (the French) spent most of the war collaborating with the Nazis and being occupied, and in every small village someone did betray someone, and afterward they had to forget and pretend they were all brave resistance fighters. There was a kind of unspoken agreement. "Let's not go there. Let's suppress our memory so we don't fall apart and fall into fighting and disintegration or communism."

But I wanted it to be more like a historical never-never land, so that it could be applied to all kinds of settings.

BNR: Why medieval England in particular?

KI: Well, what it was, there's a poem. You know that poem, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, it's an anonymous poem?

BNR: Where the Green Knight cuts his head off?

KI: That's right. There's a bit in Camelot at the beginning where a strange Green Knight turns up in the middle of the Christmas festivities and sets a challenge to Gawain, "We'll take turns to take a swing with swords at one another's heads and you can have the first swing, and you can try and chop my head off and if you chop my head off you've won, but if for some reason you fail then I get to chop your head off."

Gawain has first go, and he manages to cut the Green Knight's head off, so he thinks he's won, but unfortunately the Green Knight is supernatural, so the head starts to talk and says, "OK, now it's my turn, I get to take a swing at your head, but as you're having a Christmas festival right now. I'll give you a special concession, you come and find me in a year's time at my castle and I can take a swing at you."

But what inspired me was just a tiny passage about what England was like at that time. Most of the story takes place in these castles; luxurious, palatial castles, but there's a tiny bit about — well, I shouldn't say England, I should say Britain, because it wasn't England yet — there was a bit about what Britain was like at that point, and its just eight lines or thereabouts, but it says he had a terrible time because there were no inns in those days, because obviously the poet is projecting back centuries as well, he says there were no inns or anything and he had to sleep on rocks in the storm, and sometimes he'd try to get food at a village and he'd be chased away by ogres, and you know, he'll be woken up by wolves attacking him when he was sleeping on a snowy bit of ground, and it was awful; then he finds this castle and the journey continues.

What struck me was this little description, and I thought actually that might be a really good setting, that might be what I've been looking for. I really liked the matter-of-fact way that ogres were mentioned, it was like farm bulls or something like that, or street dogs might bite you, it's at that kind of level.

BNR: It's a superstitious world as well.

KI: In this world [the world of the book] people naturally believe in God, they're not quite sure what kind of God it is, but they don't doubt there's a God and that's second nature. Some of that we still have. So we don't call that superstition. You know, if it was what people believed I respected it and allowed it to be real in the world.

I thought, if a person of that time believed in something, in my fictional world I'd let it exist for real. Now that was my kind of rule, but I wouldn't create something weird that people wouldn't normally believe in. So a flying saucer wouldn't land in that world, because that's not in the imaginary limits of the people. But a belief in spirits - - or ogres or dragons or pixies out there in the wild — most people would have half believed or really believed things like that, so I thought in my fictional world I'd let it literally exist. So it is sort of a fantastical world, but it's not a free-for-all. It's not a world where anything could exist. It's superstitious if you like but it's the superstitions that you know, have existed, that's how I did it.

I was saying, it should be called Britain rather than England because in the book, the Anglo-Saxons, who've been landing in and settling in this country, will become the English, but it's not England yet. England hasn't really been invented. So, it's right at the point where what used to be Roman Britain is falling to pieces after the Romans have left, the point where it turns "English." Anglo-Saxon invaders are about to sweep across the country, probably wiping out the Britons, and you know, their language is the language we're speaking now.

It's a big blank in history, but there's been a sort of consensus long held that there probably was some kind of genocide at that point, because it's called the Anglo-Saxon settlement, and that's when the foundations of England are laid, at the end of the fifth century.

BNR: And this slaughter is unleashed by the memories released when the mist that causes forgetfulness disappears. So the idea of genocide is really important to the book?

KI: I was very disturbed by what happened in the '90s in the old Yugoslavia. We'd grown up in the Cold War, always afraid of a nuclear shootout with the Soviet Union, and there was a real sense of relief when the Cold War ended and the Berlin Wall came down, and it felt we're going to enter this really nice period and there was a really optimistic feeling for a while, and the Yugoslavia thing was horrible, because just within a few years of the end of the Cold War we had concentration camps, we had a massacre, right in the middle of Europe, in a country where some of us had been on holiday, or hitchhiking or backpacking holidays. We had the Srebrenica massacre, the worst massacre since the Second World War, and it was all to do with one ethnic community wanting to wipe out another, so it was a very disturbing thing to see happening in the heart of Europe. Then that was very closely followed by the Rwanda massacres.

These episodes had quite an impact on me, and ever since, I've wondered how can a country suddenly explode like that? How can it turn into such a bloodbath? And it was particularly disturbing because it was these people who had been living in these villages and towns together, people who'd been babysitting one another's children went next door and burned their neighbors' house and hanged the inhabitants.

And one of the things that stood out is the role that suppressed memory has in all this. People have agreed to just forget things that happened in the past, but when somebody deliberately stirs these memories in order to stir awake war or stir awake hatred, people suddenly think "Oh, those people across the road, I thought they were OK, but way back when their lot did horrible things to my lot, and unless we do something now they're going to do it again."

Northern Ireland was like that as well. Protestants and Catholics both dragged out these ritualistic things, the marching season, ancient battles, ancient atrocities, in order to fuel the modern-day hatred.

So, that's partly why I've created this old-fashioned mythical story about memories being suppressed by something magical. Today, memories are controlled by media propaganda. In a country like ours, how do we actually go about looking at the past? And its something to do with popular entertainment, books, museums, the royal days we have, and all these things have a huge impact on what one age group of people thinks happened in the past.

BNR: But can't remembering awful things make them less likely to happen again? Yesterday was Holocaust Memorial Day — I read an article about how a writer's grandparents were killed in the Holocaust., and I thought at the time how important it was not to forget these things.

KI: I don't come down on one side or the other about remembering or forgetting. It's kind of a parallel to an argument about mental illness. Is it best to go to a therapist and stir awake memories about trauma and childhood, or is it better to leave it alone and move on and all that?

Take somewhere like America. One of their forgotten things, or things they don't like to think about, is the way they've treated African Americans. Just in the past year there were so much protest around a white policeman shooting a black man. Obviously America isn't at ease as a society over this — someone might say it's because America never really owned up to how badly it treated African Americans. Until it goes back into its past and really looks at it and tries to address all these grievances it will never be at peace with itself. There will always be these eruptions of violence.

On the other hand someone else might say, you go back through all that, you're just going to make it worse. You're just going to make all these people angry that this stuff was done to their ancestors, so we should pretend we all got on, we all got on really well.

I think this country — Britain — has chosen to remember the whole history of the Empire in a very sanitized way. And Japan has decided to forget that the Japanese army invaded China and most of South Asia and committed atrocities. They've completely blocked it out, literally out of their school textbooks, which causes tremendous friction with China now.

I think France is a really interesting case of a country that's had to work very, very hard to forget something. Like the mist in the story, you know. France is still under some kind of strange mist.

I wouldn't want to imply that there was something peculiarly wrong with the French, that the French have something wrong with them and the rest of us are far more civilized that the French. I have a problem with that, because I think that's what all people are like. Whether its about America and Native Americans or America and the African Americans — it's the human condition, and it will continue.

I think that almost everybody's got something like this, and its an interesting subject, but I don't think that there's an easy answer to when is it best to make something like this up, when's it better to just forget it, when should you really confront the past? Because sometimes confronting the past can lead to mayhem.

Like South Africa after apartheid, I think it's a really, really delicate balance. So many people were so furious about all those years when they were treated badly by minority whites, but I think Mandela and Co., when they came to power, were determined to avoid civil war or violence of any sort — they were really careful. They set up the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, so people were allowed to come up and express their bitterness and anger, and they got some sense of justice being done in some sort of way. But they tried to not go too far down the road of arresting many people — doing a purge. Too much remembering about what had happened would just lead to civil war and violence, and the country just couldn't cope.

It's much the same with a marriage. For Axl and Beatrice [the couple at the center of The Buried Giant], is it better to remember the bad parts of their marriage or is it better to just forget it? Could it destroy their love if they remember too much? I had no answers to this — the story isn't trying to come don on one side or another, it's just saying, this is how we lived. We live with these dilemmas.

BNR: So would you consider setting a story like this in a real place, like France or Yugoslavia, say?

KI: I guess the answer is probably not. For a start I think I would have to really become quite expert on that situation. I don't think it would be fair if I just skirted over those details — I'd have to really know my stuff to talk about one place, what had happened historically. And I'm not sure why would I want to single out one particular place, you know, there's a kind of like an unfairness to that, I don't want to make that an example. I don't want to suggest that that any one kind of place is, you know, different, and this is why I think I often find myself creating worlds which are unrealistic, like in Never Let Me Go or in this book. I'm a novelist as opposed to a journalist, or a reporter or an essayist, I feel my territory is to talk about universal human experiences, its not to report on what happened at a particular place at a particular time.

I think if that was what I was doing I would have to do it in a disciplined way. I should research it, I should claim my sources, I should plan my research — like reportage, you know? When you're making things up in fiction it's a different kind of thing. You're appealing to people's experiences as human beings, and you're saying, is this something that strikes you as true about human behavior?

BNR: You were born in Nagasaki nine years after it was bombed, and I wondered, did this cast a shadow over your writing in any way?

KI: Well, actually, the odd thing was, I didn't really understand that Nagasaki was so distinct in having been atom- bombed. It took me some time to realize that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the only places in history to have suffered nuclear attacks.

When I was growing up there people didn't tend to tell us, a four-year- old, a five-year old, "Did you know what happened?"

But I remember people mentioning it and there was no secret about it.

So I never associated Nagasaki with the atomic bomb. For me Nagasaki is all kinds of other things. I have all these colorful memories of our house, my toys, my kindergarten. I remember all this stuff, but I still don't think of it emotionally as connected with the atomic bomb.

BNR: I wonder what it will be that overshadows our generation.

KI: Sometimes you don't see that until you look back. I don't know. The world is still very volatile.

BNR: Yes — the Twin Towers happened when our generation were children and triggered the Iraq war.

KI: I'm not sure how to say it, but I want to point out that when you say it "triggered the Iraq war" — the war wasn't inevitable by any means. Saddam Hussein had nothing at all to do with 9/11. There was no link between the two. It was something that a handful of world leaders made happen in the general hysteria and mental chaos after 9/11. They just took the opportunity to attack Iraq. And instead of addressing who had committed this atrocity it was a step backwards, almost certainly because of the amount of effort that went into fighting in Iraq. They weren't able to pursue Al Qaeda properly in Afghanistan or wherever else they were. I think we'll look back on that episode in history and it will seem baffling why those people were allowed to take a huge hunk of the west into a war in Iraq.

And that's coming close to what we were talking about before. This is an example of very recent history and perhaps people aren't willing to go back there, perhaps because — to put it coldly — it's an absolute disaster what the British and Americans did, and we don't even know the extent of the disaster yet.

BNR: And now it's horrendous.

KI: Yes — and now, they say, "OK, we did a good job, we're going to pull out." And within a few days we have ISIS or IS — those guys emerged within about three minutes of the allies pulling out, just committing atrocities on fellow Muslims, you know, all the way across Syria and Iraq. I mean the whole place is destabilized with groups that even Al Qaeda describe as too extreme, I mean, what a result, hey?

BNR: You did creative writing at the University of East Anglia. Creative writing courses have been criticized lately, by Hanif Kureishi among others.

KI: Ah, that's Hanif, yes. He said something like, if I was one of those students, I'd be better off finding a mentor. Well, that's just typical Hanif, he often says things that other people are too polite to say, but I think there's some element of truth in it. My feeling is that the creative writing industry, which is what it's become, has to get regulated better. There has to be something equivalent to AA ratings for hotels, or stars or something.

The creative writing thing is a Wild West at the moment, and I think there are people actually saving up money and spending it on fees to be taught by someone who's never published a novel, or published poetry. I know a very reputable one at one of the main universities in London right now where there's a guy teaching fiction. He's never published a novel, for all I know he's never even written a novel.

You certainly can't teach writing because you've read a lot or you're a distinguished scholar in English literature, any more than a music critic can teach someone to play piano, or someone who can't swim being a coach for the Olympic swimming team, you know? It's just absurd.

I have a feeling creative writing schools are more mature in America, and some of the best names in contemporary literature teach at U.S. universities. People like Toni Morrison until she retired was teaching at Princeton, and there's always been a different attitude in America about teaching writing — a lot of writers feel that if they do it even a little bit, they should do it, sort of like classical musicians, they'll take on a few pupils, you know? So it is sort of a different scene — and its much more mature.

*

After the interview, Ishiguro went in search of Lorna. They called me a Halo, a kind of taxi they have prepaid credit for, to take me to the Tube.

I chatted with my taxi driver on the way to the station. He wants to be a writer, but he never shows his work to anyone. It felt like another piece of residual magic, seeping into life from The Buried Giant, now tatty and dog-eared — but nevertheless signed by Kazuo Ishiguro, resting in my bag.

—March 3, 2015

Editorial Reviews

Kazuo Ishiguro is a remarkable novelist, both for the quality of his work…and because he does not ever write the same novel, or even the same type of novel, twice. In The Buried Giant…he begins with clear, unhurried, unfussy language to describe the England of some 1,500 years ago, in a novel as well crafted as it is odd…Fantasy and historical fiction and myth here run together with the Matter of Britain, in a novel that's easy to admire, to respect and to enjoy…The Buried Giant does what important books do: It remains in the mind long after it has been read, refusing to leave, forcing one to turn it over and over…Ishiguro is not afraid to tackle huge, personal themes, nor to use myths, history and the fantastic as the tools to do it. The Buried Giant is an exceptional novel…

The New York Times Book Review - Neil Gaiman

★ 01/19/2015
Reviewed by Lydia MilletIshiguro's new novel is set in Arthurian England—not the mythic land of knights, castles, and pageants most of us are familiar with, but a primitive and rural country likely far closer to historical reality. This is a gray and superstitious place, rather than a battlefield alive with the color and movement of steeds and fluttering banners; it's sparsely inhabited and scarcely advanced. Candles are preciously hoarded, and simple folk cluster together for safety amid vast stretches of untamed and fear-inspiring wilderness.The grim-textured, circa-sixth-century landscape is also a country haunted by magic, where ogres loom in the dark and steal children, and dragons are hunted by faded warriors like Sir Gawain. But its magic remains in the background, an earthy fact of life rather than a dazzle of sparkling make believe. Here British peasants eke out a hardscrabble existence from caves dug into hillsides, while the recent Saxon invaders live in more-advanced villages of rudimentary huts. A strange fog hovers over the dreary countryside—where an uneasy peace has balanced on a knife edge since the end of the most recent wars—robbing the populace of its memories. Into this countryside our protagonists—an elderly, ailing British couple named Axl and Beatrice—embark on a pilgrimage to the village of their half-forgotten son. It's a sad, elegiac story, one that has a tone and texture suited to its subject matter: a dreamy journey, repetitive and searching as lost memory. Conversations are formal and stilted, but their carefully crafted formality lends an austere rigor to the proceedings—Axl and Beatrice are following a gentle old-people's quest, not a dashing young knight's. Although they do cover literal ground and encounter figures of myth and legend along the way, their real search is clearly interior, a painstaking effort to know themselves and each other by piecing together the vestiges of their past. Memory is inseparable from personhood, in Beatrice's view, and personhood must be known for love to be authentic. Though she and Axl seem devoted to each other ("Princess," he calls her insistently, though she's manifestly anything but), she believes that their devotion, in the absence of memory, may prove insufficient to keep them together when they die. Her guiding fear is that the couple will be separated in the afterlife—on the "island," as the world of the dead is represented here—if they can't show the Charon-like boatman tasked with rowing them over that they know each other, and love each other, well enough to be granted the rare privilege of crossing that last water together rather than alone.The gift of remembering, as it turns out, will come at a steep price, not for the two aging and kindhearted Britons but for their country.The Buried Giant is a slow, patient novel, decidedly unshowy but deliberate and precise—easy to read but difficult to forget. (Mar.)Lydia Millet's most recent novel is Mermaids in Paradise.

Publishers Weekly

If forced at knife-point to choose my favourite Ishiguro novel, I’d opt for The Buried Giant. It uses the tropes of fantasy to set up a smoke-screen which the book then, by twists and turns, dispels. This reveal gives the book a shadow-plot, and layers of mystery . . . An ideas-enabler, a metaphor-animator.”
—David Mitchell, author of Cloud Atlas and The Bone Clocks
 
“Completely astonishing. I can't think of another writer who keeps finding such new and radically unexpected ways of exploring—and deepening—his lifelong concerns. Which is a way of saying that I can't think of another writer who's so unswervingly serious, as well as impeccable, stripping away every distraction to get to the core of things, as a Beckett might, and attaining in the end an almost unbearable intensity of emotional directness.”
 —Pico Iyer, author of The Art of Stillness and The Lady and the Monk
 
“The Buried Giant does what important books do: It remains in the mind long after it has been read, refusing to leave, forcing one to turn it over and over . . . Ishiguro is not afraid to tackle huge, personal themes, nor to use myths, history and the fantastic as the tools to do it. The Buried Giant is an exceptional novel.”
—Neil Gaiman, The New York Times Book Review 
 
“Ishiguro is a brilliant novelist, a born novelist. . . . Inside his work, you feel it, that thrilling thing: a writer doing something actually different, something actually new. . . . [The Buried Giant] creates an entire field of unspoken meaning, illuminating the kind of elusive truths about love, time, death and memory that other novelists have to strain even to brush. . . . That’s the magic of true art. . . . When one day we send some unmanned capsule into the nameless depths of space to give and account of ourselves, it’s [Ishiguro’s] books I would include on our behalf.”
—Charles Finch, Chicago Tribune

“Ishiguro is one of Britain’s best living novelists . . . Magnificent and heartbreaking . . . Of all writers working in the early 21st century, he will turn out to be the one who persisted—who went on asking questions about what binds people to one another; who said something profound about history, and something unsentimental about love.”
—Gaby Wood, The Telegraph (London)

“The weirdest, riskiest and most ambitious thing he’s published in his celebrated 33-year career.”
—Alexandra Alter, The New York Times
  
“Ishiguro works this fantastical material with the tools of a master realist. . . . [He] makes us feel its sheer grotesque monstrosity with a force and freshness that have been leached away by legions of computer-generated orcs. . . . He keeps a straight face, but Ishiguro has fun with the swords and sorcery: he’s a lifelong fan of samurai manga and westerns, and some of the action has the feel of a classic showdown scored by Ennio Morricone.”
 —Lev Grossman, Time magazine

“Ishiguro is in full genre-occupying mode here, settling an imaginative region, capturing its tropes and conditions, and establishing within it his own peculiar sovereignty. . . . For all that The Buried Giant clothes itself in the armor of chivalric romance and fantasy, it is also subtly using these formal structures to subvert from within the kinds of national mythologies that are so often built around them. . . . Devastating . . . as emotionally ruinous an ending as any I’ve read in a very long time, and it made me circle back to the opening pages, to re-enter the strange mist of this sad and remarkable book.”
—Mark O’Connell, Slate

“[The Buried Giant is] a profound examination of memory and guilt, of the way we recall past trauma en masse. It is also an extraordinarily atmospheric and compulsively readable tale, to be devoured in a single gulp. The Buried Giant is Game of Thrones with a conscience, The Sword in the Stone for the age of the trauma industry, a beautiful, heartbreaking book about the duty to remember and the urge to forget.”
—Alex Preston, The Guardian (London)

“Lifetimes of myth, allegory, and epic discoveries are contained within . . . In this as with Ishiguro’s previous fiction, the mesmerizing prose ensures that the pages will turn swiftly. Without a doubt, Giant is Ishiguro’s most complex book thus far, managing to combine elements of Edenic epic, Roman myth, Arthurian quest, Tolkien fantasy, philosophical ruminations, religious dialectics, literary experimentation, and more to create an exquisitely rendered, albeit disturbing love story set against the unresolved threat of war—past and future both. . . . Ishiguro’s 10-year investment comes to eloquent fruition here. The result is a provocative, multilayered mosaic.”
—Terry Hong, The Christian Science Monitor
 
“Ishiguro is a master of the uncanny. . . . Few write about the mysteries of the human experience with such grace as Ishiguro, and his prodigious gifts are evident throughout the novel. . . . The Buried Giant transcends the boundaries of a conventional fantasy novel. At its core, it is a tender story about marriage, memory and forgiveness, the tale of an elderly couple who set off to find a half-remembered son. And the questions that emerge in the course of their journey—as they contend with pixies and Saxon warriors, devious boatmen and duplicitous monks, as they begin to recall a past they might be better off forgetting—cut to the heart of the life’s mystery.”
—Michael David Lukas, San Francisco Chronicle
 
“A spectacular, rousing departure from anything Ishiguro has ever written, and yet a classic Ishiguro story . . . The Buried Giant has the clear ring of legend, as graceful, original and humane as anything Ishiguro has written. . . . All the same, I’ll wager you won’t soon forget this book after turning its last pages. The close, in particular, will haunt.”
—Marie Arana, The Washington Post

“Yet for all its flights of fantasy and supernatural happenings . . . The Buried Giant is absolutely characteristic, moving and unsettling, in the way of all Ishiguro’s fiction. . . . A novel of imaginative daring that, in its subtleties of tone, mood and reflection, could be the work of no other writer. . . . In the manner of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, Ishiguro has created a fantastical alternate reality in which, in spite of the extremity of its setting and because of its integrity and emotional truth, you believe unhesitatingly. . . . Even after you have finished the book, many days later, you find you can’t stop thinking about it.”
—Jason Cowley, Financial Times
 
 “Mr. Ishiguro’s work is never simple. He has always been a trickster, a shape-changer, courageously exploring the novel’s form, and this new book is no exception. His language is plain and clear. But the stories he tells with his clean words are powerful and disturbing. . . . No doubt this book will divide opinion powerfully: but it provokes strong emotions—and lingers long in the mind.”
—The Economist
 
“The story sweeps us in not through the imagination of its monsters and magic mists, but by a prose style so distinctive that everything it touches, however airy . . . becomes earthly, solid, with an emotional purchase usually reserved for the ‘real.’ . . . This is a novel that does not answer every question it raises about war, love, memory; but it doesn’t have to. It takes us on a journey that is as deep as it is mesmerizing, ogres an’ all.”
—Arifa Akbar, The Independent (London)

“Hallucinatory . . . subtle and complex . . . At the heart of The Buried Giant, luminous amid all the dragons and warring knights, is a deeply affecting portrait of marital love. . . . A power and a strangeness that are, in the Shakespearean sense of the word, weird . . . For all the deconstruction The Buried Giant performs on its manifold sources and inspirations, the ultimate measure of Ishiguro’s achievement is that his novel is more than worthy to take its place alongside them. The quest undertaken by Axl and Beatrice is not merely a search for their son, but one that follows in the footsteps of Sir Gawain, and Tennyson’s King Arthur, and Frodo.”
—Tom Holland, The Guardian (London)
 
“The prose, as in many of Ishiguro’s novels, is lapidary and beguiling, suggestive of secrets to be disclosed. . . . For Ishiguro, our poet laureate of loss, the mercies of forgetfulness hold the greater fascination . . . The Buried Giant is ultimately a story about long love and making terms with oblivion. It is an eerie hybrid: a children’s fable about old age. In Ishiguro’s novel, as in life, love conquers all—all, that is, but death.”
—Nathaniel Rich, The Atlantic
 
“Ishiguro is, as ever, very readable . . . the novel is moving and strangely resonant. I suspect him of being wise, of having a vision that subtly and politely exceeds that of ordinary people . . . Ultimately the novel achieves a tragic synthesis between its various parts that . . . that reverberates powerfully in the mind.”
—Theo Tait, Sunday Times (London)
 
“What Ishiguro has delivered, after much labour, is a beautiful fable with a hard message at its core . . . there won’t, I suspect, be a more important work of fiction published this year than The Buried Giant. And take note, Peter Jackson. Ishiguro’s fiction makes wonderful films.”
—John Sutherland, The Times (London)
 
“Kazuo Ishiguro has written his riskiest novel yet. . . . The Buried Giant actually feels very modern—despite all its talk of ogres, warriors, and dragons. It reprises the same themes Ishiguro has dealt with his entire career: deeply flawed people grappling with dueling impulses and loyalties—to their ideals, identities, and nations. . . . These questions of identity and conflict lie at the heart of The Buried Giant, and they are gripping, tangled, and well worth the attention of so talented a novelist. . . . Lush and thrilling, rolling the gothic, fantastical, political, and philosophical into one. In its best moments, the fantasy elements blend with the exploration of memory, identity, and power to significant effect. The Buried Giant may feel very different from Ishiguro’s previous works, but the concerns that lie at its heart have preoccupied him his entire career.”
—Elaine Teng, The New Republic

“Ishiguro is a deft gut-renovator of genres, bringing fresh life and feeling to hollowed-out conventions. . . . It’s a bold departure: highly stylized, alternately stiff and swashbuckling. But the love story at its center shimmers with a mythic and melancholy grace.”
—Boris Kachka, Vulture

“A literary event . . . A story that’s both one couple’s on-the-road tale, and a mystery for a great civilization.”
—NPR

“Ishiguro may be a master of his craft, but, more than that, he’s a master of quiet subversion. . . . What you see is rarely, if ever, what you get: the writer expects you to dig deeper for the truth.”
—Caroline Goldstein, Bustle
 
“Just as in Never Let Me Go, Ishiguro takes us into a disconcertingly different world without ever making that world the main focus of attention . . . The Buried Giant tells us that for nations, just as for individuals, there may be some memories so painful and damaging that they are dangerous to face, that some forgetfulness may be necessary . . . He has located this novel so dreamily far away. The storytelling is formal and subtly archaic, the dialogue elaborate and courteous, clearly paying homage to Malory and Le Morte d’Arthur. Yet it is a far more sophisticated narrative than it at first appears, progressively switching its point of view away from Axl with whom we began, to give us two ‘reveries of Gawain’, for example, and then, in a sorrowful final chapter, reaching into the heart of the pair’s own story, revealing their own failings, showing us Axl and Beatrice from the perspective of the failed boatman . . . The Buried Giant . . .  reveal itself as a work not just of great originality but peculiar, even hypnotic, beauty: such a late, great extension to Arthurian literature.”
—David Sexton, Evening Standard

“Axl and Beatrice’s adventures . . . grow in urgency yet never sacrifice the mood of quiet, elegiac pessimism that has always characterized Mr. Ishiguro’s writing—and that makes his novels strangely both melancholic and soothing. . . . For all its fantastical trappings, The Buried Giant is a simple and powerful tale of love, aging and loss—no radical departure for this splendid writer but another excellent novel all the same.”
—Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal
 
 “A lyrical, allusive (and elusive) voyage into the mists of British folklore by renowned novelist Ishiguro. . . . The premise of a nation made up of amnesiac people longing for meaning is beguiling . . . Ishiguro is a master of subtlety; as with Never Let Me Go he allows a detail to slip out here, another there, until we are finally aware of the facts of the matter, horrible though they may be. . . . Lovely: a fairy tale for grown-ups, both partaking in and departing from a rich literary tradition.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
 
“It’s a sad, elegiac story . . . A dreamy journey . . . Easy to read but difficult to forget.”
—Lydia Millet, Publishers Weekly (starred review)
 
“Ishiguro was described as ‘a master craftsman’ by Margaret Atwood, and he is every inch that throughout this book, from the self-confidence and certainty of the slow start, through to the final, profound and very moving, pages’.
—Emily Hourican, Irish Independent
 
“Ishiguro’s story is a deceptively simple one, for enfolded within its elemental structure are many profound truths, including its beautiful and memorable portrait of a long-term marriage and its subtle commentary on the eternity of war, all conveyed in the author’s mesmerizing prose.”
—Joanne Wilkinson, Booklist
 
“Tangled and satisfying . . . [Ishiguro’s] novels have for the last two decades frustrated expectations, and his decision to venture into the realm of legend this time is of a piece with the risks he’s been taking all along. . . . Ishiguro’s novels dramatize quests for self-knowledge, and though The Buried Giant  . . . may be his most exotic work . . . it may also be his most direct assault on the question.”
—Christian Lorentzen, Bookforum
 
“Part of the brilliance of this novel is that it can be read at face value and enjoyed . . . or it can be read deep, deeper, and deeper still, until the reader begins scrutinizing the words not on the pages as intensely as each description and every scrap of dialog.”
—Betty Scott, Books & Whatnot
 
“The world’s greatest living novelist, Kazuo Ishiguro, has a new book out. It is a masterpiece.”
—David Walliams
 
“A novelist of unparalleled distinction. The style is elegant, sparse, non-archaic and, as with Ishiguro’s other works, it accumulates as you progress, until you are mesmerised by the agony of his characters. It is a bold, sorrowful, brilliant and unyielding book. The journey might be imaginary, yet it is existentially real, and that is its great beauty and strength.”
—Joanna Kavenna, Prospect
 
“A new novel from Ishiguro, his first in 10 years, is quite possibly the literary event of 2015. . . . The Buried Giant is another thought-provoking literary masterpiece.”
—Alice O’Keeffe, The Bookseller

“This book is a love story, an adventure story, a mystery tale and an allegory. It’s also an unforgettable book about forgetting. . . . Once you have read this book you will want to read it again.”
—Erich Mayer, Publishing ArtsHub (Australia)

From the Publisher

02/01/2015
Imagine an existence without memory. Lacking context, would war become obsolete? Or family strife? This is the concept introduced in Ishiguro's latest, which appears ten years after his acclaimed Never Let Me Go. Set in first-century England, this parable revolves around Axl and Beatrice, an elderly couple tired of living in the dark. Fleeting memories haunt them but disappear with the morning mist. Did they once have a son? When did he leave? Why? They set out on a journey looking for answers but, as befitting a quest novel, obstacles abound. Axl and Beatrice are plagued by ogres and pixies, joined by a Saxon warrior and an errant knight from Arthur's court, and have their lifelong devotion to each other tested in disturbing ways. Though the book is wildly different in setting and style from the author's previous fiction, fans will recognize familiar themes, including the elusiveness of memory and the slow fading of love. Alas, Ishiguro's reliance on a tedious, repetitive back-and-forth conversation between the couple detracts from the story. VERDICT Ishiguro's career spans over 30 years, highlighted by Booker winner The Remains of the Day and Whitbread winner An Artist of the Floating World, yet this quasifantasy falls short as the medium to deliver the author's lofty message. [See Prepub Alert, 9/8/14.]—Sally Bissell, Lee Cty. Lib. Syst., Fort Myers, FL

Library Journal

★ 2014-12-22
A lyrical, allusive (and elusive) voyage into the mists of British folklore by renowned novelist Ishiguro (Never Let Me Go, 2005, etc.).There be giants buried beneath the earth—and also the ancient kings of Britain, Arthur among them. Ishiguro's tale opens not on such a declaration but instead on a hushed tone; an old man has been remembering days gone by, and the images he conjures, punctuated by visions of a woman with flowing red hair, may be truthful or a troubling dream. Axl dare not ask his neighbors, fellow residents of a hillside and bogside burrow, for help remembering, "[f]or in this community, the past was rarely discussed." With his wife, who bears the suggestive if un-Arthurian name Beatrice, the old man sets off on a quest in search of the past and of people forgotten. As it unfolds, Axl finds himself in the company of such stalwarts as a warrior named Wistan, who is himself given to saying such things as "[t]he trees and moorland here, the sky itself seem to tug at some lost memory," and eventually Sir Gawain himself. The premise of a nation made up of amnesiac people longing for meaning is beguiling, and while it opens itself to heavy-handed treatment, Ishiguro is a master of subtlety; as with Never Let Me Go, he allows a detail to slip out here, another there, until we are finally aware of the facts of the matter, horrible though they may be. By the time the she-dragon named Querig enters the picture, the reader will already well know that we're in Tolkien-ish territory—but Tolkien by way of P.D. James, with deep studies in character and allegory layered onto the narrative. And heaps of poetry, too, even as forgetfulness resolves as a species of PTSD: "I was but a young knight then….Did you not all grow old in a time of peace? So leave us to go our way without insults at our back." Lovely: a fairy tale for grown-ups, both partaking in and departing from a rich literary tradition.

Kirkus Reviews