A Pale View of Hills: Kazuo Ishiguro

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Another interesting sub-plot of the novel concerns Japan facing up to its recent militaristic past (a theme examined in more depth in Ishiguro’s next novel, An Artist of the Floating World). In his highly acclaimed debut, A Pale View of Hills, Kazuo Ishiguro tells the story of Etsuko, a Japanese woman now living alone in England, dwelling on the recent suicide of her daughter. The brilliant mind that concocted “Never Let Me Go” (which is, by the way, indubitably on my top ten list) first brought this masterpiece to a readership whose last brush with (this is no exaggeration:) PERFECTION was reading Mr. This is a splendid portrayal of social as well as attitudinal changes taking place in Japan post dropping of atom bomb.

Is Etsuko projecting her own story of neglect and cruelty onto the persona of Sachiko as a way of coping with her guilt? Thus, to probably redeem herself in her own mind, Etsuko openly disapproves of Sachiko’s thoughtless care of her daughter Mariko.A delicate, ironic, elliptical novel … Its characters are remarkably convincing … but what one remembers is its balance, halfway between elegy and irony.

I feel that by Etsuko unreliably remembering these instances, it indicates that she blames herself for her daughter’s suicide. All of it is contained within the constricts of social niceties - which makes for some delicately painful dialogue - but it is there all the same. Also, similar to Sachiko’s odd relationship with her daughter Mariko, who sometimes does not even acknowledge her mother’s presence, Etsuko may have also only displayed aloofness, pride and morbid curiosity in relation to Keiko. Etsuko remarks that her daughter has little understanding of what happened “those last days in Nagasaki”.This conversation triggers a memory for Etsuko of when she was pregnant with Keiko and developed a friendship with a strange, independent woman living in a run down old cottage with her young daughter. Ishiguro never lingers on the horrors of the war and its aftermath, but it's so apparent in every page. Even if the “memory” theme is more or less convincingly established in the novel, the second theme of copying with trauma by dissociation/mistaken association requires quite a big imaginary leap on the part of the readers. Both The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go have sold more than 1 million copies, and both were adapted into highly acclaimed films.

The first two pairs live near a resurgent Nagasaki sometime toward the end of the American Occupation of Japan in April 1952. The second daughter’s father was British and the woman moved to England where her visiting daughter was raised. New generation is over-obsessed with sensual life yet does not like to have marital bonds: they want both- freedom and sensual pleasures, forgetful of the fact that in the end, they would find themselves deserted by one and all, likewise. One interpretation of the story is that this is exactly what is happening to Etsuko as she narrates this story of her friendship with mysterious woman Sachiko in Nagasaki.At the time of the present in the action of the novel, in England, Etsuko is left only with her daughter Niki. She apparently is never happy in her life with Jiro, and there are indications that this cold young man never shows any affection for her.

One mother and child pair (Sachiko and Mariko), bound, apparently, for America, and another mother and child pair (Etsuko and Keiko), bound for England. A whole generation of people who had war trauma are robbed of their lives, but also their children are in a sense robbed of their parents.Instead of making the reader doubt the narrator, such qualification about the haziness of memory leads the reader to trust the narrator, after all, she has recognized that she's telling a story, and because she's telling a story, we're willing to give her the benefit of the doubt. But the fact is that even to the end of this book nothing has ever turned out well for Etsuko, and nothing probably ever will.