Kazuo Ishiguro speaks to Kate Whiting about his first novel in a decade, The Buried Giant

TEN years after his last novel was published, Kazuo Ishiguro is making headlines again – and he’s one of the first to read them.

His wife Lorna has set up Google news alerts, so she sees every mention of his name online.

“For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been in a state of alert because, any moment, she’ll say without warning, ‘There’s a review appeared in Los Angeles and it says this’. I can never quite relax because she’s always about to come at you with something.”

All the buzz is around the Booker Prize-winner’s latest work, The Buried Giant, set in a murky mythical post-Arthurian Britain of ogres, pixies and knights errant.

The author, who turned 60 in November, is slightly bemused by a fixation on the fantasy aspects of the novel, with some reviewers comparing it to Game Of Thrones.

“I’ve never actually watched a single episode – I’m meaning to now because I can’t open a review without someone making a comparison,” says the writer of The Remains Of The Day and Never Let Me Go, adding that Homer’s Odyssey and old Japanese folk tales are more his thing.

“I feel like I’ve stepped into an ongoing debate about the role of fantasy tropes in literature – some think we don’t want all this in serious literature and other people say you’ve got to open the parameters, because literary fiction is being stifled otherwise.”

It was a throwaway line in the 14th century poem Sir Gawain And The Green Knight that piqued his interest in the setting.

“There’s a tiny stanza that describes Britain as a really rough place – it actually says sometimes he’ll be chased up hills by panting ogres. So I got a vision of a certain kind of Britain from that poem, it was quite comic but quite evocative.”

Ishiguro’s story opens with Axl and Beatrice, an elderly couple living in a warren of underground houses “on the edge of a vast bog”.

One day, the pair decide to make a journey to their son’s village, although they can’t remember where it is or why he’s not now with them.

This memory loss is caused by a strange mist over the country and it’s linked to a spell placed on a she-dragon called Querig.

On their journey, Axl and Beatrice encounter a Saxon warrior called Wistan, who has been given the job of slaying the dragon.

They also meet chivalrous Sir Gawain, who’s now elderly but still wears his rusted armour with pride. A fragile peace exists, but tensions are bubbling away under the surface.

“I wanted to talk about societal memory; when’s it better to remember and when’s it better to forget,” explains Ishiguro.

“To make this story work, I wanted to create a situation where memories are being artificially interfered with, which raised the question – do they want their memories back or not?

By avoiding setting the story in a contemporary, realistic world, he wasn’t “obliged to take a political stance”.

“I thought of all kinds of societies which had huge areas of their recent or distant past buried, causing some sort of tension and dysfunction in society.

“It’s a whole area I haven’t got to the bottom of yet. Where are the memory banks of a community or nation? Who controls it and how do they gain control?”

And so to the question of why it’s taken Ishiguro 10 years to write another novel...

He did publish a collection of short stories, Nocturnes, in 2009, but The Buried Giant began life long before that. It was promptly discarded when his wife told him it wasn’t good enough.

“Marriage and literary criticism don’t necessarily go together,” he says, chuckling, referring to her comments as an “intervention”.

“She said, ‘You’ve got to start again’. The very fact that I showed her about 60 pages in was a sign that I thought there was something wrong.

“She’s always been my first editor. We’ve been living together since 1980, before I actually started to write fiction in any serious sense, so her attitude [back then] was ‘You think you can write do you? Well let’s have a look at this’.

“This isn’t a unique experience, she’s put a stop to whole projects before,” he adds.

As with his previous novel, the Booker shortlisted Never Let Me Go (which told the tale of cloned children born to be organ donors), it’s impossible not to cry at the end of The Buried Giant.

“Emotion is something that shouldn’t be deployed lightly,” says Ishiguro.

“I don’t like to write scenes where little animals die just to make people cry,” he says. “There’s a temptation to do that, but I want people to be moved at exactly the right moment for exactly the right reason. It has to feel earned.”.

The Buried Giant is being published simultaneously around the world, so Ishiguro has an “intense” schedule of publicity that will see him travel to America, Canada and France.

He hopes to start work on a new novel in the autumn. He laughs when asked if there will be another 10-year gap.

• The Buried Giant (Faber & Faber, £20). Available now.