We Forget Stories in Order to Live

The Buried Giant. Kazuo Ishiguro. 2015.

This might be the saddest novel I’ve ever read, excluding of course the other novels by Kazuo Ishiguro. They’re all sad. I wonder about him, sometimes. Is he a sad person? What does his family think?

It doesn’t really matter what Ishiguro is like temperamentally, of course. His work though - he seems fascinated, as an artist, by people who waste their lives. And waste them fully, tragically, with only the faintest glimmer of recognition at the end of their lives. And he makes you think, hard, about what it means to live a meaningful life in a world where so much is obscured; where we can’t know what’s coming or even what’s behind us. Is it possible? Hard to say.

In Never Let Me Go, and in The Buried Giant, Ishiguro writes about people who are convinced that if their love for each other is devoted enough, if it burns brightly and warmly enough, they will be saved from disaster and misery. In both books they’re wrong; not necessarily because the love wasn’t true but because the world didn’t care. Does that make the love itself, and all of the devotion and sacrifice that went with it, not matter? Hard to say. I would say it does matter, still, despite everything; that making meaning (even making it up) is the best we can hope for in this life even if there’s no reward at the end of it. But I am, despite everything, a hopeful sort.

I’ve been thinking about memory, lately. I find that so much of my son’s first year, and of my pregnancy before that, is a complete blur. I have to ask myself - do I remember how to swaddle a newborn? Do I remember when it’s safe for them to drink water, to wear sunscreen, to go to a party with a lot of people? I remarked to somebody that this forgetting probably serves an evolutionary function - if we could remember how hard pregnancy is, none of us would ever do it a second time.

Yet so many of us do. We fall in love, and stay in love, and have children, and build nations, and then we die. We do it despite knowing that those things often fail, and they lead to pain even if they don’t fail. Every nation will fall, every great venture will end, and so will every life. And what then? Hard to say.

Throughout this novel I kept thinking of the second world war, which I suspect Ishiguro would not want. I believe he set this story of a great social forgetting (and what both that forgetting, and the eventual remembering, cost) in a mythical time and place specifically to avoid specific historical comparisons. But I can’t help but think, not only of Hiroshima but of the crimes of Imperial Japan, and of the forgetting that was necessary to move forward. How could there be peace, without forgetting everything that happened? But how could more war be avoided forever, without reckoning with everything that happened?

How can two people stay married to each other for decades without forgetting, at least a little, much of what exists between them? Isn’t that what makes love possible? But without remembering the truth, the good and bad, how can the love be true? Maybe forgetting brings peace, but is it a true peace? Does it count? I don’t know. I hope the wondering, the asking, is enough.