A Pale View of Hills: Kazuo Ishiguro

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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. Some major clue is left behind at the end of the novel, but it is not nearly enough or too late to interest and intrigue. 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. This is another Ishiguro story (his debut) full of mystery and questions, what’s happening and what is at the heart of the matter?

He is someone who dismisses the people closest to him and, without directly criticising him, Etsuko provides context through the household dynamic that summer for why she left Jiro. Quite likely her tale of the imaginary Sachiko and Mariko is her way of venting all the horrors of her life—things that may have happened to her as a little girl, and then, especially, what she went through and witnessed during the war, but also the horrors of her bad marriage with Jiro, the turmoil involved with having an affair, leaving Jiro for a foreigner.I wrote this review in 2018 when I still had not read that much of the Japanese literature but now that I have, I see that Ishiguro here “borrowed” much of that “narrative uncertainty” and “subtlety” from Japanese literary masters and their works (and this is not a flattering observation because he was unable to weave it in convincingly). It is a hilly area, and climbing again those steep narrow streets between the clusters of houses never failed to fill me with a deep sense of loss.

Even when Etsuko is pregnant with Keiko in the novel, other people notice that she may not be happy, but Etsuko assures them that she is. Ogata-san is stuck on an idea of the past, unable to accept the changes that have taken place since the end of the war. Even towards own children like in case of Sachiko and her daughter Marico: whereas the latter is sentimental and extremely kind towards all the creatures, her mother is an over-ambitious if foolish lady who cannot discern the difference between a true well-wisher and a depraved person. I think I liked Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day (4 stars) and Never Let Me Go (4 stars) that almost all of his other works seem to be mediocre. Another disturbing scene is when Etsuko/Sachiko drowns Keiko/Mariko’s only playmates – her beloved kittens.The pregnant Etsuko, who narrates, lives with her husband Jiro, in a new concrete residential building along the river. At the time of the present in the action of the novel, in England, Etsuko is left only with her daughter Niki. Just one question, though–I don’t remember anything about Etsuko leaving her husband or having an affair. 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. Keiko—we learn this late in the narrative—had lived with her Japanese father Jiro for the first seven years of her life, and we presume that she was attached to him.

This horrifying image is foremost in Etsuko’s imagination, and she has learned to make her peace with it, since, perversely enough, it is the last image that she has of Keiko.The reader’s problem involves deciding to what extent Sachiko and Mariko really existed, and to what extent they are figments of Etsuko’s imagination, allowing her to retell obliquely episodes from the summer of 1952, when she was pregnant with Keiko—and to revisit painfully traumatic occurrences from her past.