A Pale View of Hills: Kazuo Ishiguro

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The girl has obviously been traumatized by things she has seen during the war, including a crazed woman drowning a baby. Here is Etsuko Ogata (later Sheringham), the narrator of A Pale View of Hills, with an early admonishment to the reader (beginning of Chapter Three): “It is possible that my memory of these events will have grown hazy with time, that things did not happen in quite the way they come back to me today. Much of Ishiguro's novel is a gaze into the hills - the past, postwar Japan, after the bombing of Nagasaki, a time when our narrator (who is now an older woman living in England) is pregnant with her first child. Besides, while the reader may want to delve into possible interpretations of what he or she has just read, there is also the possibility that the interest will be lost half-way through. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products.

Like Sachiko, Etsuko may have also craved independence and a foreign-born lover, and now also feels guilty because her relationship with her daughter Keiko was never too good.

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.Kazuo Ishiguro's highly acclaimed debut, first published in 1982, tells the story of Etsuko, a Japanese woman now living alone in England, dwelling on the recent suicide of her daughter. This is one of many professions in which she stresses how she’s trying to tell it all as it was, but the further the story goes, the less the reader will be inclined to take her words at face value. Ogata-san has been offended by something an old school friend of Jiro’s has written about him and every time he visits, he asks Jiro to speak with his former friend.

Niki likes the idea of women plucking up courage to leave behind a miserable life rather than staying to waste away their existence. The pregnant Etsuko, who narrates, lives with her husband Jiro, in a new concrete residential building along the river. One cannot imagine the demure Etsuko, good wife and subservient housewife, having an affair, leaving her husband, getting up the gumption to take her daughter with her and flee her home country. Both this and 'an artist in a floating world' take on Japan and it's history pre-war and post war and how that affects the characters.Never have I read a book in which the characters—especially Etsuko, but also others—are described so frequently as standing or sitting idly by windows, staring out at nature. This detail may suggest the rope that Keiko later uses to hang herself in England—a rope Etsuko herself feels responsible for. 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.

This, of course, suggests her recollections of Mariko in Japan, or of Keiko, but then again, could she be dreaming of her own lost little self?

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. A duty to pass on, as best I could, these memories and lessons from our parents' generation to the one after our own? There is “an unmistakable air of transience” around the concrete block buildings, “as if all of us were waiting for the day we could move to something better.