Kazuo Ishiguro

*Kazuo Ishiguro's new novel Klara and the Sun is now available to preorder* From the Nobel Prize-winning author of The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go In his highly acclaimed debut, Kazuo Ishiguro tells the story of Etsuko, a Japanese woman now living alone in England, dwelling on the recent suicide of her daughter. Retreating into the past, she finds herself reliving one particular hot summer night in Nagasaki, when she and her friends struggled to rebuild their lives after the war. But then as she recalls her strange friendship with Sachiko - a wealthy woman reduced to vagrancy - the memories take on a disturbing cast.

A Pale View of Hills

Denisse Garcia Ramírez 

“People didn’t know what was wrong with me,” she said. “I didn’t tell anybody. I suppose I was embarrassed. They wouldn’t understand really, they wouldn’t understand how I felt about it. Sisters are supposed to be people you’re close to, aren’t they. You may not like them much, but you’re still close to them. That’s just not how it was though. I don’t even remember what she looked like now.”

And yet I remember an unmistakable air of transience there, as if we were all of us waiting for the day we could move to something better.

It was never my intention to appear unfriendly, but it was probably true that I made no special effort to seem otherwise. For at that point in my life, I was still wishing to be left alone.

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.

The horror of that image has never diminished, but it has long ceased to be a morbid matter; as with a wound on one’s own body, it is possible to develop an intimacy with the most disturbing of things.

A Pale View of Hills quotes

Join the club