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At 60, Kazuo Ishiguro finds himself thinking increasingly about mortality, and it’s reflected in his characters in The Buried Giant, including that of Sir Gawain, an aging knight on one last quest.Kevin Van Paassen/The Globe and Mail

In 2004, as he awaited the publication of Never Let Me Go, a novel that would go on to sell more than two million copies and spawn an award-winning film, Kazuo Ishiguro began contemplating his next project. If there's a living novelist who embodies the credo "if at first you don't succeed," it may be Ishiguro. He'd abandoned Never Let Me Go twice in the 1990s before getting it right on his third attempt, and as he worked on his new project, about an elderly couple in a medieval Britain replete with ogres and dragons and pixies, he found himself thinking of abandoning this one, too. He showed his wife the 50-odd pages he'd written, and she said it was a "good project" but "a bit weird." He put it aside.

Still, "I was always going to go back to this book," he says. "I never quite abandon things. If I'm interested in something, I always think, well, the last few pieces of the jigsaw aren't there at the moment. I'm going to come back to it later."

Over the next six years he wrote a screenplay (The White Countess), served as executive producer of the film adaptation of Never Let Me Go and published his first collection of short fiction, Nocturnes. He worked on other novels. ("One of them, actually, was some sort of vampire novel," he says, laughing. "In the Twilight climate" – Stephenie Meyer's YA series had debuted in late 2005 – "I just thought this was the wrong moment to be writing that.") Then, as was inevitable, he returned to the book he'd started years ago.

Published earlier this month, The Buried Giant is, like Never Let Me Go, a work that explores issues of mortality and love, and how the former inevitably threatens the latter. Instead of Tommy and Kathy, the star-crossed teens at the heart of his Booker-shortlisted novel, The Buried Giant introduces readers to Axl and Beatrice, a long-married couple coming to terms with the fact that one day they'll be forced apart.

"When I finish a book, I always want to stay more or less thematically where I was," he explains, sitting in his publisher's Toronto office during a recent visit to the city. "I don't feel uncomfortable about this. At the end of a book, I always feel I haven't quite covered it properly, or I've discovered all kinds of new elements … that interest me, but because I was writing the book I was, it wouldn't have been appropriate. It was too late to shove these things in. So that's for the next book." Thus, while the "outer surface" changes from novel to novel – whether postwar Japan (An Artist of the Floating World) or end-of-empire England (The Remains of the Day) – it's simply, in a way, an attempt to "disguise the fact that I'm writing the same stuff over and over again."

Still, The Buried Giant is remarkably different from anything he's written before, a "western-cum-samurai-cum-fantasy novel," as he puts it, that is at once an exploration of memory and the way it deceives, a comment on religion and the way it divides, and a study of how personal and societal resentment is passed down from one generation to the next – a topic with modern-day resonance.

The novel takes place in Britain some time in the second half of the fifth century. "No one really knows what the hell happened in that time," he says. Roman rule had ended around 410, and the novel is set a generation or two later during an uneasy peace between Britons and Saxons. In the novel's opening pages, Axl and Beatrice decide to visit their son, whom they haven't seen in some time. How long is unclear – a mysterious fog has enveloped the countryside, causing memories to falter. Their journey becomes a quest to find the source of the fog, a mission aided by a knight named Wistan and a boy named Edwin, who may hold the secret to dispersing the fog.

"A lot of my inspiration behind this came from Japanese folk tales," says Ishiguro, who was born in Japan and moved to England as a boy. He was especially influenced by stories blending the fantastic with the ordinary, "samurai encountering these supernatural creatures, or demons, in quite an everyday way. They're kind of just there."

In time, the fellowship grows to include Sir Gawain, one of King Arthur's most heralded warriors, who in Ishiguro's novel appears as a curmudgeonly knight on one last quest. He's in essence a ronin – a samurai without a master – though Ishiguro prefers to compare him to a cowboy, having been inspired by the cinematic gunslingers in the films of Sam Peckinpah and others. He's a leftover from the reign of Arthur, a relic from another era, and, like Axl and Beatrice, grappling with his own mortality.

Ishiguro, who turned 60 in November, found kinship with his aging knight.

"When you're 60, and you're a novelist, you have to really start thinking in terms of the late period," he says. "And I think a lot about what's an appropriate way to go about things. In fact, I do look at other writers and artists to see what they do in the latter part of their career, because I want to learn by example and avoid certain pitfalls."

As an example, he turns the conversation to a pair of Canadian songwriters. There's the Neil Young model, he explains, where you can just keep doing what you've always done – the danger being, for most people, that one's skill erodes as time passes.

"I take my cue not so much from Neil Young but Leonard Cohen – if we're just staying on great Canadian artists – where there's a kind of embracing, actually, of the aging process," he says. "You put yourself, as an aging person, and the emotions of aging, right at the heart. And I think Cohen's been magnificent, particularly his latest album [2014's Popular Problems]. There are songs like Did I Ever Love You. It could only be written and sung by an old guy."

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