Author Kazuo Ishiguro on being inspired by shoot-outs and samurai

Readers admire, even adore, the fiction of Kazuo Ishiguro for a range of reasons. Until now, it’s fair to say, gory scenes of sudden lethal force have not figured among them. “To a disturbing extent, I enjoyed writing the violent scenes,” Ishiguro says about his seventh novel, and first book for almost six years, The Buried Giant. In this mesmeric parable of remembrance, forgiveness and revenge set during a fragile truce between Britons and Saxons after the Roman departure from these shor