Kazuo Ishiguro looks at role of memory in history with ‘The Buried Giant’

TORONTO – Through the use of ogres, dragons and other fantastical elements in his new novel, “The Buried Giant,” acclaimed British author Kazuo Ishiguro tackles a real subject that he says has been weighing on his mind since the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s.

The Man Booker Prize winner, whose novels “The Remains of the Day” and “Never Let Me Go” have been made into star-packed films, writes of an elderly couple who go on an arduous search for their long-lost son on a war-torn landscape in sixth-century England.

The downtrodden duo also hope to retrieve their long-lost memories, which disappeared after a mist fell over the land of the Saxons and the Britons, causing everyone to forget the past.

While the story is about enduring love and the role of shared memories in relationships, it also poses a bigger question: When it comes to memories of a society, is it better to remember everything or should some darker things stay forgotten?

If a nation remembers the darker chapters of its history more clearly, is it going to spark a new round of tension, or is that the only way to heal?

“I think a trigger for this book certainly was what happened in the ’90s as Yugoslavia disintegrated,” Ishiguro said in an interview, noting Europeans such as himself would often vacation in Yugoslavia “and suddenly there were concentration camps and massacres going on.”

“Most strikingly you had a community comprising of a number of ethnic groups who seemed to have lived relatively harmoniously — in fact, they were living in the same villages, using each other as babysitters and so on — and they suddenly turned on each other,” he continued.

“At least one group very viciously turned on another, and that did seem to have something to do with some kind of societal memory of what had happened during the Second World War, that had been very deliberately awakened to achieve certain political end.

“So I would say Bosnia, Kosovo and also Rwanda, those events around the genocide of the ’90s … they certainly got me thinking about these things.”

The Japanese-born writer said he then started to think about countries that had been wrestling for decades with memories they “couldn’t quite come to terms with,” including Japan’s involvement in the Second World War and the United States’ history of slavery.

“I guess all those things made me want to write a book about collective memory, but in the end I wanted to write a simple but fable-like story that could be applied to many situations rather than to write a documentary-style novel about any one situation,” he said.

“It’s partly because those aren’t where my strengths lie. I’m not a journalistic, investigative kind of novelist who could do an authentic, well-researched novel about the disintegration of Yugoslavia or the Rwandan genocide.

“But also as a novelist, I’m more comfortable taking a step back and saying, ‘Here are certain patterns and here are certain issues that we wrestle with throughout history. They come up over and over and over again.'”

Ishiguro said he isn’t pointing at any one country with the story, which is his first novel in 10 years and has been getting much buzz (the film rights have already been acquired by producer Scott Rudin of “No Country for Old Men” and “The Social Network”).

“I don’t think any country looks very clearly at its past,” he said.

“Most nations, most communities do have buried giants.”