Kazuo Ishiguro: “The Buried Giant,” Memory, Lies and Forgetting

Kazuo Ishiguro returns to the show to talk about his first novel in 10 years. The Buried Giant may sound like fantasy fiction, with its ogres, dragon and nod to Arthurian legend, but if so it's fantasy in the same sense that Ishiguro's previous novel, Never Let Me Go was sci-fi: an exotic premise used to accentuate some stark realities of the human condition. Ish and I talked about memory and forgetting in the lives of couples and societies, the comforting lies we tell ourselves, decency as a small victory, samurai films and the right way to stage a sword fight.