Imagine you’re standing in a thick fog. Imagine that what you can see around of you—just a few feet in circumference—is your perception. Everything else, all that is hidden by the fog, is the rest of reality that you can never know. Now take a step back, and recognize that this is the case for all of us.

Yes, there is much to the world that we can never know. And yet, we must live our lives and assign meaning to our actions, just hoping that we make the right decisions. Perhaps, with this in mind, we shouldn’t take ourselves so seriously.

Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel, The Buried Giant, makes this argument, in its own way. The Buried Giant tells the story of the elderly couple Axl and Beatrice, living in a medieval time of Saxons and Britons and monsters roaming the land. Axl and Beatrice set off at the novel’s opening to find their son, who they have not seen in years—and whose reasons for leaving they can’t quite remember.

That’s the thing about the land of The Buried Giant—nobody seems able to remember much at all of their past. A thick mist has enveloped the villages and hills for years, and it seems the mist has clouded over not just the mountains in the distance but the memories in everyone’s minds.

With little to guide them but a few uncertain details remembered here and there, Axl and Beatrice embark on a quest probably too strenuous for their years. Over the course of the novel’s numerous encounters with knights, monks, and monsters, a twisting thread of love, loss, conflict, and clouded motivations unravels. Through it all, the fickle nature of the characters’ memories throws uncertainty onto the very things the characters have built their lives around:

Axl and Beatrice are lifelong lovers. But are they forgetting things they’ve done to each other, and said to each other?

Axl and Beatrice loved their son, and they believe he left after some sort of argument. But where did he go, and why?

All around them, the Britons and the Saxons grit their teeth on the edge of war. But why are they fighting, for what are they fighting, and who is on whose side?

The Buried Giant dumps cold water over our notions of integrity and having a strong moral compass. Instead, Ishiguro colors the whole world with shades of grey, with everybody conflicted and nobody faultless. Meanwhile, those capable of doing so manipulate flamboyant and fragile feelings, throwing characters into doubt, anger, and war. As Ishiguro writes, “Who knows what will come when quick-tempered men make ancient grievances rhyme with their fresh desire for land and conquest?”

Such a question resonates rather deeply today.

The story of Axl and Beatrice, at the story’s core, will surely wrench your heart out by the novel’s end. Ishiguro, if you’ve never read his work, is a master of subtly unwinding a story that you only appreciate by its end. By The Buried Giant’s end, Ishiguro has broken down the fictions his characters have told themselves, and they only have each other to try to hold on to.

The Buried Giant certainly takes its time—possibly to a fault—but Ishiguro makes it worth your while. Compared to his other novels, The Buried Giant sways more definitely into a specific genre than any other—in this case, fantasy. Yet, at its core, The Buried Giant carries itself as essential Ishiguro material, filled with his signatures themes of love, loss, muddied memory, and understated profundity.