Published: 1982 (Faber and Faber)
Summary: A Pale View of Hills is a haunting novel about the lengths at which our subconscious will go to unburden ourselves from the miseries of life. Set in Nagasaki, author Kazuo Ishiguro’s birthplace, the author explores the emotional craters which line the city after the atomic bombing of August 9, 1945. Blurring the line between memory and reality, a middle-aged woman, Etsuko, recalls her life in Nagasaki before moving to England during a short visit from her daughter, Niki.
Etsuko and Niki spend about a week together, where they sometimes cherish a moment of honesty while at other times merely coexist. Throughout the visit, the mother and daughter dance around the subject of Niki’s sister, Keiko, who died by suicide not so long before the meeting. Niki tells her mother to not blame herself, while acknowledging that her and Keiko were very different people, perhaps owing to the fact that they were half-sisters. Keiko, full Japanese and born in Nagasaki, was quiet and withdrawn while Niki, half-Japanese and half-British, is a typical 20-something living a socially active life in London. Keiko’s room haunts the both of them throughout the visit, especially Etsuko who hears remnants of the past emanating from inside. However upset and distant the two might be regarding Keiko and her death, by the end of the novel, they share a warm smile as Niki goes back, having accomplished her duty to check in on her mom.
The bulk of the novel lies in Etsuko’s recollections during the visit, which brings us back to post-war Nagasaki, where she and her first husband and Keiko’s father, Jiro, are visited by her father-in-law Ogata-san. The historical function of the novel lies in the interactions between Ogata-san, Jiro, and Jiro’s childhood friend Shigeo, who trashes Ogata-san’s past as a pro-nationalist educator during the 1930s and 1940s in an article Shigeo wrote in support of post-occupation ideas about the virtues of Western-style democracy. Jiro dismisses his father’s misgivings about his son’s generation and their lack of duty, honor, and pride in uniquely Japanese ways of living and thinking, prompting Ogata-san to try and settle the score towards the end of the novel when he confronts Shigeo at his front door about the article. Ishiguro tackles his personal history by weaving this subplot into Etsuko’s story with a larger narrative about how Japan grapples, still, with its past.
More important to the themes of the novel, Etsuko recalls in detail the relationship between her and a woman named Sachiko. Etsuko stumbles across Sachiko, recently arrived from Tokyo, who is using this stop in Nagasaki as a way station towards a better place. Etsuko gathers information bit by bit about this new friend and her daughter, learning that Sachiko is having a tryst with an American man named Frank, who promises to take her and her precocious and unnerving daughter, Mariko, to America with him. Sachiko feigns confidence in her rearing of Mariko and her marital prospects, while simultaneously living a fairly destitute life and working a meager job at a noodle shop. Etsuko superimposes her views on child-rearing, as she is expecting the birth of Keiko, onto Sachiko. Sachiko and Etsuko get close, while Mariko opens up slowly throughout the novel.
At the end of the novel, the lines between reality and Etsuko’s recollections blur when the perspective of the narrator changes after a horrific scene where, upon deciding that it is best for her and Mariko to go to Kobe to await money from Frank to join him in America, Sachiko attempts to drown Mariko’s kittens in a vegetable box she won at a festival. This grim recollection is preceded by a vision Etsuko has of a girl murdered and hung from a tree, and followed up by the narrative shift where Etsuko is now “Sachiko” as she consoles Mariko about their leaving Nagasaki. Ishiguro is no M Night Shymalan, Etsuko and Sachiko are different people as the visit from Ogata-san coincides with her recollection of her brief friendship, but reading back through the novel a second time lends the reader to reassess which exact details are reality and which are related to Etsuko’s own relationship with Keiko.
The crux of the novel lies within the ambiguity in Etsuko’s story, is she fabricating her own memories to mask the pain and guilt of her daughter’s suicide? How much of Sachiko is reality, and how much is a projection? Or, is the coincidence of Mariko’s similarities to Keiko and Etsuko’s similarities to Sachiko becoming clear to her all these years later? Only Ishiguro knows what he intended, and I wouldn’t care to ask him, because what I received was an engaging read that made me seriously question my own relationship to the past.
Rating: 4.5/5
Will Reviews Things 