This is a deeply moving novel, and Ishiguro creates the nostalgic and poignant atmosphere of remorse, sorrow, and love without ever explicitly writing about feelings, which makes him a master of his craft, with a minimalist, almost restrained approach achieving maximum emotional impact, as listening to a melody that brings you up memories. With a simplistic style, Ishiguro portrays complex and layered things, which shows how great a writer he is. I am a research scholar on Ishiguro's works.Just a day before, I finished reading this novel. Lot of clarifications,I am in need.Accidentally, I came across this blog.Most of my doubts clarified from the discussion.Lines from last part of nineth chapter:"Memory, I realize, can be an unreliable thing; often it is heavily coloured by the circumstances in which one remembers"- The phrase ' heavily coloured' deliberately intimates that Etsuko coloured her past and justified her acts through the portrayal of Sachiko and Mariko.At the end of the novel, author left a note for readers through these lines-" Keiko was happy that day. We rode on the cable-cars". These lines allowed the reader to remind trip to Inasa by Etsuko,Mariko and Sachiko.So Childhood traumatic experiences of Mariko led to suicidal death of adolescent Keiko.From the hints left by the author, we can conclude that Mariko and Keiko are the same;Sachiko is the representation of alter ego of Etsuko. This is simply my interpretation of the story. I'm sure there are gaps in it as well, but it works for me and leaves me more satisfied than anything else I was able to come up with. Sachiko represents Etsuko during the darkest period of her life. I believe this is what the author had in mind when he said "people often tell their own painful stories via another character". Let’s say somebody is talking about a mutual friend, and he’s getting angry about this friend’s indecisiveness about a relationship he’s in. He’s getting absolutely furious. Then you realize that he’s appropriating the friend’s situation to talk about himself. I thought this was an interesting way to narrate a novel: to have somebody who finds it too painful or awkward to talk about his own life appropriate someone else’s story to tell his own. Then suddenly, the pronoun shift at the end introduces the possibility that not only did the narrator perhaps get some details wrong, leave some things out, change some names, be not as innocent as she seems, but maybe these omissions and alterations weren't accidental and we've been led to believe her a good person when perhaps she was lying about those details because she wasn't such a nice person after all, in fact, maybe she was a really nasty person.

Etsuko tells her daughter, Niki, that she had a friend in Japan named Sachiko. Sachiko had a daughter named Mariko, a girl whom Etsuko's memory paints as exceptionally solitary and antisocial. Sachiko, Etsuko recalls, had planned to take Mariko to America with an American soldier identified only as "Frank". Clearly, Sachiko's story bears striking similarities to Etsuko's. I remember in the last year reading a novel in which there was an unreliable narrator. And I asked my GR friends if they knew of any other examples, and at least one friend cited this book. Funny just as recent as last week I read another book with an unreliable narrator, Dr. Faraday, in ‘The Little Stranger’ by Sarah Waters. Awards: 1983 Winifred Holtby; '86 Whitbread; '89 Booker; '95 OBE; '98 Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.

This supports the theory that they are not the same person at different points in that person’s life, but that there are parallels between the two people’s stories, parallels so strong that Etsuko can use Sachikos story to tell her own. In doing so, Etsuko ends up mixing up the two stories, which is why we have some of her memories muddled or combined with others. But they are still two different women with their own lives and stories. Like mentioned above, the inconsistencies are too many and too irreconcilable for them to be the same person. For instance, Mariko was clearly born before the war, while Etsukos first pregnancy with Keiko was years after the war. Likewise Sachikos husband died during the war, but Jiro and Etsuko separated much later and Jiro did not die, but they separated due to unnamed irreconcilable differences. Of course there are still mysteries, questions that have not been clearly answered. Why is Etsuko in England instead of America, for example? I find it possible that Frank never came through and just abandoned her after he made it home. However, as desperate as Sachiko was to leave Japan, it wouldn't be unthinkable for her to have found another foreigner. Etsuko, in the present, described her late husband as someone idealistic, who believed that Keiko would be happy in England. That definitely does not sound like Frank, who Satchiko described as being afraid of the responsibility her daughter represented. So it's definitely possible that Frank deserted her, and that she simply was able to find another man, who later married her and became Niki's father. This was a very interesting discussion which became focused in part on the issue of whether, in reading a novel, one should ever take into account known authorial intention.

The novel has an eerie atmosphere, ghostly presence is implied, even though never directly presented. The main theme explored is the theme of familial relationships, accent being on the mother-daughter relationship. Update this section! This interpretation seems to work with every single character. Look at Mrs. Fujiwara, for example. She was close to Etsuko while she was pregnant, and later helped her out by hiring her as an assistant when she had already "become" Satchiko. Jenny now said that she agreed about the characters, and that what she really liked about this book and Ishiguro's work in general is the way that he never tells you what characters are feeling but you always know exactly what they're feeling. Nu conteaza varsta unui om, conteaza doar experientele prin care a trecut. Unii oameni pot sa ajunga la 100 de ani si sa nu aiba nici un fel de experienta."Sir Kazuo Ishiguro (カズオ・イシグロ or 石黒 一雄), OBE, FRSA, FRSL is a British novelist of Japanese origin and Nobel Laureate in Literature (2017). His family moved to England in 1960. Ishiguro obtained his Bachelor's degree from the University of Kent in 1978 and his Master's from the University of East Anglia's creative writing course in 1980. He became a British citizen in 1982. He now lives in London. Even when the characters are Japanese and have never been to Britain, they talk like British. I have been to Japan thrice and as part of my work for so many years, I have been communicating with Japanese. In this book, the characters say "certainly", "lovely", "wonderful" or " Why, of course, Etsuko." That "Why" that starts a response caught my attention while reading. Japanese do not use that. They normally just say "Yes" (like when they snappily say "Hai!"). They normally don't use flowery words. Think about Haruki Murakami's novels, and you know what I mean.

The second daughter’s father was British and the woman moved to England where her visiting daughter was raised. We don’t learn what happened to either husband but neither is around, so we presume… I just finished reading A Pale View of Hills and i'd like to add something to the discussion if you don't mind.Etsuko remembers a woman she met at that time called Sachiko who had a little daughter called Mariko. The most of her recollection of the past involves her time with Sachiko. Sachiko was in a relationship with an American man who kept promising her to take her with him to America, but never actually keeping the promise. Etsuko remembers that Mariko was a strange girl, who talked very little and hated Frank. Mariko also kept mentioning a woman she keeps seeing and who wants to take her away. Sachiko explains to Etsuko that they knew a woman who died from the Nagasaki bombing, and alludes to that being the cause. Etsuko also remembers her father-in-law whom she was very fond of, and her husband who was very strict and cold. Some books you really just have to read (at least) twice. Never before have I read a work of literary fiction more carefully than I would read an Agatha Christie novel. What can I say? I was determined to figure it out the second time around, reading for details instead of for an explanation, and as it turns out these characters actually have a special place on my heart, especially Etsuko and Ogata-san and their teasing relationship. What was I smoking the first time around? I just wanted answers, instant gratification was my crime, and having finished the second read I believe I have found (some of) them, and made peace with the fact that I will likely be reteading it again at some point in the future. Is Mercury still in retrograde? Firstly, Trevor introduced the book appreciatively by saying that he liked its portrayal of the two different women, Etsuko and Sachiko, and their radically different reactions to the aftermath of the war, Etsuko still accepting the subservient role of the traditional Japanese wife, and Sachiko rebelling against it all, leaving her uncle's traditional house to live alone with her child, and hoping to depart for America with a lover Frank. Trevor commented that the book was very oblique in its treatment of the atomic bomb: the characters never refer to it directly. The book, he said, seemed a conscious portrayal of Japanese reticence and formality - the characters constantly bow to one another and their conversation is characterised by formal repetition - but he was troubled by a sense of being unable to judge how authentic that was. He didn't know if this was just because he knew that the author, though born in Japan, was brought up in England, but he felt that there was also something very English about the book. One or two people in the group murmured that they too had felt that the tone of the book was somehow hybrid. Books: 1982 A Pale View of Hills; '86 An Artist of the Floating World; '89 The Remains of the Day; '95 The Unconsoled; 2000 When We Were Orphans; 2005 Never Let Me Go. In short, Clare’s reading above makes the most sense and as mentioned above, it is consistent with Ishiguro’s intention. I thought including here the actual words from the interview and pointing out irreconcilable inconsistencies (unlike the America/England inconsistency, which can be explained in a way as you all have done) would help this discussion.

If I’m being cryptic, it’s because I don’t want to ruin the it all for you though I do really think Ishiguro learnt from this book. All the major themes he replicates across his writing are here in a very early form. He explores memory and regret in a way no other writer can. It’s the things he doesn’t say that make his writing so powerful. We can imply from it that the characters are full of regret, we can assume, but he does not state it anywhere: he doesn’t need to. And this is something he delivered with a masterful stroke in The Remains of the Day. He really grew as an artist.The time and period the book is set in, Nagasaki just after the second world war, is very interesting. The characters, even the youngest, all struggle with memories from the war (most chillingly culminating in a recollection of how a desperate woman drowned her baby in wartime Tokyo) and the people they’ve lost. Most of the story is told through dialogue, that quite often has a strange repetition of denials in them, up to three time phrases seem to be repeated, like it is only proper to say what you really want or need from each other after someone urged you three times to speak out. Towards the beginning of the novel, Etsuko states that the suicide of her daughter prompted the newspaper to draw a parallel to the fact that she was Japanese and committed suicide, as if the two were linked. Through all of her attempts to rationalize these memories, it becomes clear by the end of the novel that Etsuko cannot dissolve her guilt of her past, her heritage, being the reason her daughter died. the whole narrative strategy of the book was about how someone ends up talking about things they cannot face directly through other people’s stories. I was trying to explore . . . how people use the language of self-deception and self-protection.”