Ishiguro's Private Japan

Kazuo Ishiguro’s new novel The Buried Giant—his first in ten years—initially seems to be his most atypical: it’s a fantasy novel set in a decadent post-Arthurian Britain, teeming with knights, magical spells, and ogres. And yet the giant in the title refers not to a gargantuan creature of myth, but to barely repressed ethnic tensions. As in past Ishiguro novels, the characters seek to heal past traumas while still entangled by their past links to wartime ideologies. That the novel maintains the classic Ishiguro themes, while supplanting them in a surprising and aesthetically risky milieu, speaks to one of Ishiguro’s central talents as a novelist: his world-building. Each Ishiguro title has jumped settings: Japanese-British contemporary England (A Pale View of the Hills), post-WWII post-imperial Japan (An Artist of the Floating World), the upstairs-downstairs English manor (Remains of the Day), a stream of consciousness mind of a pianist in Central European (The Unconsoled), colonial Shanghai (When We Were Orphans), and a dystopian world where clones are culled for organs (Never Let Me Go, which Ishiguro has called his happiest book).