k a z u o i s h i g u ro

The Buried Giant is set in an
unspecified time after Roman
Britain. Was this a period you
were familiar with?
Not really. I was looking for aterritory I could retreat to thatwas slightly neutral. Almost
every country has something
in its past it’s buried, usuallyfor very good reason. Take thetreatment of African-Americans
in the US – you could argue thatperhaps the fact that people
haven’t faced up to it properly
keeps leading to all theseeruptions. But then, you could
argue that if you keep goingback over everything, and trying
to address every atrocity, it’s justgoing to make it worse, and it
might be better to just pretend
everyone got on really well. It’sa difficult one – there’s no easyanswer. So, by going into thissemi-mythical, semi-historicalperiod, I felt I’d be able to talkabout these things without
people thinking it’s specifically
about a certain country.

Did any films influence The
Buried Giant?
The important ones were western
movies, Samurai movies andSamurai manga. It feels natural
to me to think in terms of Samuraiwarriors. I particularly like westerns– John Ford’s The Searchers, andrevisionist westerns made bypeople like Sam Peckinpah. Thefigure of Gawain in the book – alonely rider caught in a vastlandscape, but oddly self-sufficient– I got that from westerns.

photographs: NEALE HAYNES/CONTOUR BY GETTY IMAGES, KOBAL , PA

“you’re sure no one
can see that i’m wearing
pyjama bottoms?”

w w w . S h o r t L i s t . c o m

Fantasy remains a hugely
popular genre – what are yourthoughts on Game Of Thrones?
I haven’t seen or read it. I’m sure
I’d like it. I’m a huge film fan, but
I haven’t quite moved over towatching these massive televisionseries. It’s partly a time problem,
but I have the first season of Game
Of Thrones on box set. And, partly
when I was writing this, I didn’t
want to be affected, so I feel I canlook at Game Of Thrones now.

The novel includes ogres anddragons. Did you enjoy writing
the fantasy side of it?
I did. I wasn’t sure if I would enjoy
that kind of thing – I was slightly
nervous as it was not territory
I’ve entered before – but I madeclear rules for myself. It wasn’t
going to be some sort ofBecause he’sa dude, finds
ShortList’s
Howard Calvert

4 4fantasyland where anything waspossible. I was going to confine thefantastic to things people of thattime could conceivably believe in.
Today we’d call them superstitious,or non-scientific. But if it wasconceivable that people could
believe in ogres or pixies, then I’dallow that. That was my guiding
principle – it wasn’t going to bewhere any strange thing might
happen. No Tardises or anything.

sidebar words: francesca earnshaw

Why didK
BookerPrizewinning
literary
heavyweight
Kazuo
Ishigurospend 10years writing
a fantasynovel?

azuo Ishiguro’s
last novel, Never
Let Me Go, waspublished when
Justin Bieber was
10 and Revenge Of The Sithhadn’t even been released. The
proceeding decade has seen thewriter take on film diversions (hewas executive producer on thefilm adaptation of his Bookerwinner), rewrites after his wife
was unimpressed with earlydrafts, a collection of shortstories (Nocturnes) and the jobof penning lyrics for jazz singer
Stacey Kent. It’s been a longroad, but The Buried Giant, oneof the year’s most anticipatednovels, has just been released,
and with it the inevitable raft ofimpending award nominations
and critical praise. The 60-yearold author reveals why it took solong, and why he’s been holding
off watching Game Of Thrones…

Did any music inspire the book?
I listen to a lot of music, but neverwhen I write, partly because I canplay music, so I can’t blot it out.
Music doesn’t directly influence
my writing, but it can trigger things.
I often hear soundtrack music
while I’m constructing a scene. And
it’s frustrating that you can’t literally
have music while you read. Maybe
with ebooks we’ll get to a point
where you have words and music.
What would The Buried Giantsoundtrack include?
I wouldn’t mind an Ennio
Morricone soundtrack behindsome of the duel scenes. I want“I confined thefantastic tothings thatpeople could
conceivably
believe in”

books do move around, so it’s
important to keep my name as astaple factor, otherwise, it’s difficultfor people to see the sequence.
What do you think about Mark
Zuckerberg’s Reading Club?
Well, there’s probably some‘pro-Facebook’ reason for doing it,
it’s probably a shrewd move, but it
is a good thing. Reading is a goodthing in that it allows people to go
to an inner point in their heads, andit’s good to do that. You lose yourability to do that. But what I want toprotect is the story as it’s presented
in any particular form. I won’t
necessarily be thanked by people
in the book world for saying that,
but as long as people are able
to communicate to each otherthrough storytelling in some kindof way, whether it’s through films
or games, TV series, graphic novels
or something new that will turn up
on our devices, because there’s
bound to be new ways of tellingstories on these machines.

carey mulligan, keiraknightley and andrew
garfield in never letme go

the fight scenes to be stately andformal, not undignified skirmishes.
But if I had to invent an ideal
background music to the book, it
wouldn’t be folksy and old, it would
be avant-garde and modern, andslightly jagged. I wouldn’t wantpenny whistles and Irish bodhráns.
You scrapped your first draft
after your wife said it “justwouldn’t do”. How did you feel?
Not very good [laughs]. But I’veoften scrapped things. Never Let
Me Go I scrapped twice, so I neverthink it’s scrapped forever. [WithThe Buried Giant] I’d written about
40 pages, and my wife said, “A lotof this is very interesting, but thelanguage is terrible. Particularly, theway the characters speak to eachother is just laughable. So you can’t
just change little bits here andthere – you’re going to have to go
back and start from scratch.” It’s
not the greatest thing to hear, andI didn’t have the energy to startagain, so I put it aside for a while.
Would you ever consider writinga different genre under apseudonym, JK Rowling-style?
I can’t think of a book I’d write towhich I wouldn’t want to put myname. I don’t quite get it. I knowthat a lot of writers do this – JohnBanville uses a pseudonym whenhe writes his crime novels. I don’tknow why he doesn’t just use hisreal name, as more people would
probably pick up the books. You
could argue that some ofmy books have beenpromiscuous with genre– Never Let Me Go was
sci-fi, and The Buried
Giant is, well, I’m
not sure it’s quite
fantasy… but thethe 1993 film of ishiguro’s
The Remains of the day was
nominated for eight oscars

Back to thedrawing
board
more first drafts
best forgotten

Robert Louis Stevenson
In 1886, Stevenson’s DrJekyll And Mr Hyde wasbranded “utter nonsense”,
and burned by his wife,Fanny. He redrafted the30,000 words in the next
three days, by hand.
Oscar Wilde
Wilde unknowingly had
500 words deleted fromThe Picture Of Dorian Gray
(1891) after editors feared
the story “indecent”. But,
despite their best efforts,
it still caused an outrage.
Evelyn Waugh
In 1925, Waugh burned
unpublished novel The
Temple At Thatch andtried to drown himself
after a friend gave ita bad review. The text wasnever rewritten.

“i love a mad men
dress code”

What’s the worst piece of writing
advice you’ve received?
‘Write about what you know’ isthe most stupid thing I’ve heard.
It encourages people to write
a dull autobiography. It’s thereverse of firing the imaginationand potential of writers. But noone’s ever said that to me, oddly.
The one piece of publishing advice
I ignored, and I’m glad I did, wasafter my first novel. People told me
I must get my second novel out
within two years. But I just couldn’t
get my second novel finished intime, and there was a four-year
gap. It was much better, anda breakthrough book for me – itestablished my career. So sincethen I’ve happily ignored thisbusiness about gaps between
novels, and they are getting bigger
and bigger [laughs].
What are you working on next?
There are two genres I’ve been
researching: one is the thriller, but
not like a police procedural. I preferthrillers without any professional
people in: no professional cops,
no professional gangsters, noprofessional detectives. I preferstories where ordinary people
get sucked into dark things. AndI’ve been looking at screwballcomedies of the Thirties.
The Buried Giant is out now, priced£20 (Faber)w w w . S h o r t L i s t . c o m

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