The Buried Giant

“Our son awaits us in his village. How much longer must we keep him waiting?”

This marks the opening of novel, and this is the reason for the journey of Axl and Beatrice. Notice, too, that a sense of urgency pushes the couple forward in this moment, as if fate has decreed, ‘no more waiting.’

“I don’t recall his face now at all…It must be the work of this mist. Many things I’ll happily let go to it, but it’s cruel when we can’t remember a precious thing like that.”

Axl, speaking here, laments a memory that was taken from him—a painful memory he will not get back until much later. The quote shows how even though the memory of his son may prove painful to Axl, it is more painful for him to have no memory of him at all.

“The oddly frozen stances of the tall man and the old woman seemed to cast a spell on Axl and Beatrice, for now they too remained as still and silent. It was almost as if, coming across a picture and stepping inside of it, they had been compelled to become painted figures in their turn.”

Here, Axl and Beatrice encounter the initial “dark widow” and boatman, both of whom, in different ways, signify death in the novel, with the dark widow tormented by the death of her lover and the boatman the figure who ferries the dying to the land of the dead. That Axl and Beatrice turn still and silent and come across as “painted figures” is Ishiguro’s way of foreshadowing the meaning of the widow and boatman’s respective roles before the reader is actually fully aware of those roles.