Kazuo Ishiguro

A pale view of hills

Denisse Garcia Ramírez 

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.

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.

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.

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.

“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.”

Etsuko, a middle-aged Japanese woman now living alone in England, dwells on the recent suicide of her elder daughter, Keiko. Despite the efforts of her surviving daughter to distract her thoughts, Etsuko finds herself recalling a particular summer in Nagasaki after the bomb fell.

A Pale View of Hills

I first read Kazuo Ishiguro’s ‘Never Let Me Go’ when I was 17 for my English Literature A Level. I remember those days fondly. The English Literature class numbered around 8 people, of which I was the only boy attending. Many early summer days were spent in the skylit common room making shoddy annotations with a pencil in the book’s margins; many discussions were held in class regarding the role of science in society, and the connection between memory and chronology. It was a wonderful and formative experience for me. Aside from the actual themes I had to write about for my essays, however, what struck me the most about the novel was how Ishiguro effortlessly weaved multi-layered and complex stories with minimalist, simplistic and conversational first-person narration. How he built up genuine emotional impact with just a smattering of prosaic descriptions. And then a year or so later I picked up ‘The Remains of the Day’ in my own right and fell in love in the same way, and through comparing the two I found out another thing I loved about Ishiguro: his narrators’ ability to lie, suppress, regret, and capitulate.

I don’t know why I haven’t read more Ishiguro since falling in love with his books as a teenager, but I picked up A Pale View of Hills with the intention of correcting that. Written in 1982, A Pale View of Hills is Ishiguro’s first ever novel. It tells the story of Etsuko, a Japanese woman now living in England, who reflects on her life in Japan following a visit from her daughter, Niki, some years after Etsuko’s other daughter, Keiko, has committed suicide. This memory of Japan is specifically a short period in Etsuko’s hometown of Nagasaki, less than a decade after the detonation of the Atomic Bomb and sometime near the end of the American Occupation of Japan, where Etsuko is pregnant with Keiko and preparing to be a mother. During this preparation, she meets a distant, aloof woman, Sachiko, who seems to be neglecting her wayward and disturbed daughter, Mariko. At the same time, Etsuko’s father-in-law, Ogata, is visiting their house and becomes concerned when a left-wing article in a journal criticising him is published—he seeks to pressure his son Jiro to talk to the author, an old schoolmate, to take the article down.

All of this is told in the first-person narration of Etsuko, and this is obviously where Ishiguro does his best work. Very early on in the novel we are told by Etsuko directly that memories can often be incorrect, and that the objective events in the novel may not be exactly how they are remembered. We are instantly primed then to think of the ‘unreliable narrator’ and to think critically of the image of Etsuko presented in her own retelling of her story—which is, essentially, a dutiful wife to Jiro, a loving daughter-in-law to Ogata, a loyal friend to Sachiko, and a caring guardian to Mariko. And, as the story continues, you do tend to forget about this ‘unreliable’ element, until the narration is deliberately interrupted by Etsuko’s willingness to skip over certain details, or, at certain points, where subjects of the story are confused altogether.

The effect of this is to mask the trauma of both Etsuko being a survivor of the Atomic Bomb in Nagasaki and the guilt of not being there for her daughter when she committed suicide. As this is the point of the chronology where the events in Japan are recalled, it is as if this guilt and trauma is transmitted through memory onto the recollection in the text. Like trauma and many negative emotions, we have a tendency to avoid re-telling for our own mental health’s sake, and Ishiguro explores Etsuko’s touching upon this guilt through the story masterfully. Like how seeing someone hold back crying makes one want to cry, it is the suppression, not the reliving, of trauma that makes one feel in this novel. Through the use of this understatement, the trauma of other characters affected by the war, especially Mariko, is also presented very tastefully, and I was very pleased to see that Ishiguro did not reduce characters to metaphors or symbols. Indeed, Ishiguro tells the story plainly—what he presents is painfully real.

In the background of all of this recollection is the massive upheaval of society and societal norms following the American Occupation of Japan. This comes with both the tension of the reorganisation of previously existing social classes, plus the generational conflict between older characters and a more progressive, Westernised youth. It is a point of note for two characters in a conversation on how unheard of it was for a wife to be voting differently from her husband, for example. Sachiko herself is a kind of a Blanche DuBois-esque character, a formerly privileged woman now transplanted into relative poverty. Politics in the novel is not treated as a one-dimensional issue, however, and the question becomes what does each character value from the old world, and what of themselves should they bring into the new. This question is not only presented in the frame of 1950s Japan, but also the contemporary, 1980s England setting, and by considering how it applies today, the issues explored provide some longevity to the novel now more than 40 years old.

And through all of this, both in historical Japan and present England, almost no characters mention the war or the bomb. Instead, you’re given the effects of the war, short-term and long-term—missing husbands, ex-lovers, destroyed households, and lost children. This deliberate choice by Ishiguro was a perfect portrayal of a collective trauma—continuously sidelined in memory and seldom revisited. 

Many of the issues explored and techniques utilised by Ishiguro in A Pale View of Hills are fully realised in his later masterpieces, such as the confused and misplaced sense of loyalty in The Remains of the Day and the selectiveness of memory in Never Let Me Go, so it was very interesting seeing them so expertly deployed early on in his literary career. I will definitely be reading more of his intermediate works in the future. 

shain

I first read Kazuo Ishiguro’s ‘Never Let Me Go’ when I was 17 for my English Literature A Level. I remember those days fondly. The English Literature class numbered around 8 people, of which I was the only boy attending. Many early summer days were spent in the skylit common room making shoddy annotations with a pencil in the book’s margins; many discussions were held in class regarding the role of science in society, and the connection between memory and chronology. It was a wonderful and formative experience for me. Aside from the actual themes I had to write about for my essays, however, what struck me the most about the novel was how Ishiguro effortlessly weaved multi-layered and complex stories with minimalist, simplistic and conversational first-person narration. How he built up genuine emotional impact with just a smattering of prosaic descriptions. And then a year or so later I picked up ‘The Remains of the Day’ in my own right and fell in love in the same way, and through comparing the two I found out another thing I loved about Ishiguro: his narrators’ ability to lie, suppress, regret, and capitulate.

I don’t know why I haven’t read more Ishiguro since falling in love with his books as a teenager, but I picked up A Pale View of Hills with the intention of correcting that. Written in 1982, A Pale View of Hills is Ishiguro’s first ever novel. It tells the story of Etsuko, a Japanese woman now living in England, who reflects on her life in Japan following a visit from her daughter, Niki, some years after Etsuko’s other daughter, Keiko, has committed suicide. This memory of Japan is specifically a short period in Etsuko’s hometown of Nagasaki, less than a decade after the detonation of the Atomic Bomb and sometime near the end of the American Occupation of Japan, where Etsuko is pregnant with Keiko and preparing to be a mother. During this preparation, she meets a distant, aloof woman, Sachiko, who seems to be neglecting her wayward and disturbed daughter, Mariko. At the same time, Etsuko’s father-in-law, Ogata, is visiting their house and becomes concerned when a left-wing article in a journal criticising him is published—he seeks to pressure his son Jiro to talk to the author, an old schoolmate, to take the article down.

All of this is told in the first-person narration of Etsuko, and this is obviously where Ishiguro does his best work. Very early on in the novel we are told by Etsuko directly that memories can often be incorrect, and that the objective events in the novel may not be exactly how they are remembered. We are instantly primed then to think of the ‘unreliable narrator’ and to think critically of the image of Etsuko presented in her own retelling of her story—which is, essentially, a dutiful wife to Jiro, a loving daughter-in-law to Ogata, a loyal friend to Sachiko, and a caring guardian to Mariko. And, as the story continues, you do tend to forget about this ‘unreliable’ element, until the narration is deliberately interrupted by Etsuko’s willingness to skip over certain details, or, at certain points, where subjects of the story are confused altogether.

The effect of this is to mask the trauma of both Etsuko being a survivor of the Atomic Bomb in Nagasaki and the guilt of not being there for her daughter when she committed suicide. As this is the point of the chronology where the events in Japan are recalled, it is as if this guilt and trauma is transmitted through memory onto the recollection in the text. Like trauma and many negative emotions, we have a tendency to avoid re-telling for our own mental health’s sake, and Ishiguro explores Etsuko’s touching upon this guilt through the story masterfully. Like how seeing someone hold back crying makes one want to cry, it is the suppression, not the reliving, of trauma that makes one feel in this novel. Through the use of this understatement, the trauma of other characters affected by the war, especially Mariko, is also presented very tastefully, and I was very pleased to see that Ishiguro did not reduce characters to metaphors or symbols. Indeed, Ishiguro tells the story plainly—what he presents is painfully real.

In the background of all of this recollection is the massive upheaval of society and societal norms following the American Occupation of Japan. This comes with both the tension of the reorganisation of previously existing social classes, plus the generational conflict between older characters and a more progressive, Westernised youth. It is a point of note for two characters in a conversation on how unheard of it was for a wife to be voting differently from her husband, for example. Sachiko herself is a kind of a Blanche DuBois-esque character, a formerly privileged woman now transplanted into relative poverty. Politics in the novel is not treated as a one-dimensional issue, however, and the question becomes what does each character value from the old world, and what of themselves should they bring into the new. This question is not only presented in the frame of 1950s Japan, but also the contemporary, 1980s England setting, and by considering how it applies today, the issues explored provide some longevity to the novel now more than 40 years old.

And through all of this, both in historical Japan and present England, almost no characters mention the war or the bomb. Instead, you’re given the effects of the war, short-term and long-term—missing husbands, ex-lovers, destroyed households, and lost children. This deliberate choice by Ishiguro was a perfect portrayal of a collective trauma—continuously sidelined in memory and seldom revisited. 

Many of the issues explored and techniques utilised by Ishiguro in A Pale View of Hills are fully realised in his later masterpieces, such as the confused and misplaced sense of loyalty in The Remains of the Day and the selectiveness of memory in Never Let Me Go, so it was very interesting seeing them so expertly deployed early on in his literary career. I will definitely be reading more of his intermediate works in the future. 

*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.

ishiguro doesn’t fail to impress me, this being the third book i’ve read by him (while it being his debut). his attention to detail, beautiful prose and his peculiar voice in all of his works keeps me hooked until the very last page; and often for much longer - because i can’t stop thinking about any of the novels i’ve read by him.

i really like the switches between past ‘memories’ and the present day events, and i liked the mystery around sachiko and mariko and how at one point the narrator’s (etsuko’s) use of the third person for sachiko switches to the first person: “In any case," I went on, "if you don't like it over there, we can always come back." (…) "Yes, I promise," I said. "If you don't like it over there, we'll come straight back. But we have to try it and see if we like it there. I'm sure we will."

oh, and also this quote: “Memory, I realize, can be an unreliable thing; often it is heavily coloured by the circumstances in which one remembers, and no doubt this applies to certain of the recollections I have gathered here.” it really paints the picture of etsuko being an unreliable narrator and i love that it was done like that! 

i really liked that throughout the story you’re left wondering do sachiko and mariko really exist or if they don’t who do they represent and why.

where to even begin with this one…

ishiguro doesn’t fail to impress me, this being the third book i’ve read by him (while it being his debut). his attention to detail, beautiful prose and his peculiar voice in all of his works keeps me hooked until the very last page; and often for much longer - because i can’t stop thinking about any of the novels i’ve read by him.

i really like the switches between past ‘memories’ and the present day events, and i liked the mystery around sachiko and mariko and how at one point the narrator’s (etsuko’s) use of the third person for sachiko switches to the first person: “In any case," I went on, "if you don't like it over there, we can always come back." (…) "Yes, I promise," I said. "If you don't like it over there, we'll come straight back. But we have to try it and see if we like it there. I'm sure we will."

oh, and also this quote: “Memory, I realize, can be an unreliable thing; often it is heavily coloured by the circumstances in which one remembers, and no doubt this applies to certain of the recollections I have gathered here.” it really paints the picture of etsuko being an unreliable narrator and i love that it was done like that! 

i really liked that throughout the story you’re left wondering do sachiko and mariko really exist or if they don’t who do they represent and why.

Dream-like/nightmarish, tradition, painful, yearning

Gabe Cortez

Sarah Sammis

It seems that every review I've read of A Pale View of Hills has a story behind how the reviewer came to read the book. My story begins at work sometime between 2004 and 2006 when I was working onsite in San Carlos. While I worked I listed to the stream of Radio 4. They presented A Pale View of Hills and their reading of it enthralled me.

The novel is framed with a present day visit between Etsuko and her youngest daughter, Niki after the suicide of her oldest daughter. Her suicide prompts Etsuko to remember her life in Japan, recently widowed and pregnant. She befriends a mother who is emotionally distant from her daughter and wants to emigrate to the United States.

The detached way in which Etsuko remembers her past and the dispassionate way the people act in her memories implies that her memory is either faulty, having creating things from scratch or that the mother and daughter are reflections of her own unhappy time before leaving for England.

It's been four to six years since I listened to the book. I started the book with expectations of hair standing on end but I ended up having to read it while being rushed with work and other deadlines. My first experience with A Pale View of Hills was far superior than my most recent.

From the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature and author of the Booker Prize–winning novel The Remains of the Day Here is the story of Etsuko, a Japanese woman now living alone in England, dwelling on the recent suicide of her daughter. In a novel where past and present confuse, she relives scenes of Japan's devastation in the wake of World War II.

The compact nature of this 180-page book left me reflecting on whether the author had hidden deeper messages within its brevity. At times, I struggled to grasp the full extent, unsure if the answers I sought were right there, in plain sight, waiting for me to notice.

🏹

Julie Rubens

Honestly, I feel like I’m too dumb for this book or something, because to me it was just a bit boring :/

Cody Degen

** spoiler alert **
           3 or 3+ I think? (Spoilers for When We Were Orphans)


Despite being different books in some ways I think a lot of the same themes and the unreliability of the narrator are the same between this and WWWO. I don’t know which one I like more, I think the “true” story is kinda more overtly implied in this one whereas I think WWWO is more ambiguous (or just straight up doesn’t have a second, truer interpretation). Overall I liked it about as much as WWWO and less than all his other books I’ve read. Has a similar vibe to Trust Exercise by Susan Choi which sits in the same intersection of “maybe a little slow/subtle but the implied/unreliability of the narration adds”

tbh I did think “wtf is going on” for most of the book, but after you finish it all makes sense

Exploration of the unreliable narrator is amazing, makes me wonder if sachiko is just etsuko. Reflective of the effects of war in individuals, and how they have to just move on forward, no matter the cost, and how these events may even alter their perspective on reali life. Additionally, the guilt that etsuko feels about her life in Japan and her blaming herself for keikos suicide, two event that he relates to each other with the use of the rope tangled in her feet twice when she goes out to look for mariko in the river. 

tbh I did think “wtf is going on” for most of the book, but after you finish it all makes sense

Exploration of the unreliable narrator is amazing, makes me wonder if sachiko is just etsuko. Reflective of the effects of war in individuals, and how they have to just move on forward, no matter the cost, and how these events may even alter their perspective on reali life. Additionally, the guilt that etsuko feels about her life in Japan and her blaming herself for keikos suicide, two event that he relates to each other with the use of the rope tangled in her feet twice when she goes out to look for mariko in the river. 



I didn't really enjoy this as much as I expected to. I felt like the narrative tripped over itself a lot and ducked and weaved leaving seemingly important elements forgotten

Revna

Anna Berg

** spoiler alert **
           Spoiler alert below.

So this is my first Ishiguro novel and it is certainly not my last. My immediate thought after reading this book was: what did I just read?! The book leaves you with so many unanswered questions... Actually, make that only unanswered questions. At least it took me a while to try and put the pieces together...

Etsuko, now living in England, looks back on her life in Japan while her daughter Niki visits. While Niki is visiting her, Etsuko starts to look back on her life in Japan and this one particular friendship she had to a woman called Sachiko. At this moment Etsuko is coping with the loss of her other daughter who just recently committed suicide. This novel is partly set in the years after WW2 and describes how the characters are coping with the devastations of war and the trauma that follows.

** spoiler alert **
"But you see, Niki, I knew all along. I knew all along she wouldn't be happy over here. But I decided to bring her just the same."

(!!!!) This made me think so much... And I didn't get the plot-twist before right up until the end which made this an unquestionable 5 star read for me. Right up to this point I found the story interesting and Ishiguro makes you want to read more and more as to really get the hang of these interesting characters and their history. 

The relationship between Etsuko and Sechiko also made me question a lot of things as it didn’t seem like a very natural friendship to me. And, I guess that was the point all along….. Ishiguro made me question so many things! I love how he’s actively making you figure out these characters for yourself….!!

Ishiguro's writing in this debut novel was both fascinating and confusing, in the way that the narrator is telling a story about her friend that seems very similar to her own. I admire how Ishiguro subtly starts to blend the two different time point stories together and you begin wondering about the accuracy of the narrator's own personal story. Very well written for such a short book.

Rebekah Holland

Caroline Mao

4.5, because honestly the fact it’s a first book is evident in many ways and tbh the concept lacks originality. Brilliant execution which is far more important tho, but never let me go and the remains of the day are more original

however, HOLY FUCK this was amazing and disturbing and wonderful in so many ways. I absolutely adored it, wow!!!

Trevor Berrett

This is Ishiguro's first book, but it is still better than most first novels, especially since Ishiguro does not fall into that trap of trying to sound too talented--his prose is very clean even at this early age, and like later books, much of the power of the novel comes from what is not said.
 Here, Ishiguro shows simultaneously three phases of a woman's life and relationship with her daughter. He manages to do this without the reader even suspecting. Alongside this is a portrait of not just the physical destruction of Japan after World War II (the bulk of the story takes place around Nagasaki) but also the breakdown of Japanese culture and tradition. Ishiguro's skill at weaving together all of these themes, without the reader being able to see the seams, is awe striking.
 However, I had a difficult time getting through the middle third of the book. It is short, so it should take only an hour to read the middle third, but it took me several days. Other things took my attention. I was worried I'd have to rate one of my favorite authors low. The end, though, makes up for it. I don't think it makes the middle third better, but the end definitely makes novel worth the short time it takes to read. It is haunting as the plot line and the character's memory floats along the present but makes frequent dips into the past. The past is not reliable. I still don't know what was real and what was not real, but this uncertainty makes the character's present situation even more poignant.
 I think this novel is better than both When We Were Orphans and Never Let Me Go, though his writing skill is not quite as strong as these later novels.

Josephine Lemonade 

Andrada D

Well, I didn't see that coming. And I am still not sure what to make of this ending.

I think it shows this was Ishiguro's first book. If in the Remains of the Day the theme of memory is perfectly tuned to the subject of the book, this creepy little book seems to stumble over itself more than a couple of times.

After being somewhat baffled by that final revelation, which somehow I was still waiting for, I did a bit of research and found no less than five different ways in which that particular moment could be read. I did not pay enough attention to the book for my line of interpretation to reach such lengths but I must admit I was confused more than once and, in the end, left craving something more.

I was quite bothered of this being no less than Ishiguro's third book in which he handles in a quite oblique, obscure manner the issue of Nazism and the manner of thinking it implied. I know it was BAD, but aren't there any deeply important topic to be handled? (And they say it is Murakami who only writes about the same thing over and over again)

The ending gave me nothing, nothing at all. I had over a dozen questions left but I know Ishiguro and I knew I was bound to be left with only the right to tie whatever strings were loose, but it was still not unsatisfying, as the book signals multiple times that it has no desire to answer any questions. Instead, it uses the trope of Japanese politeness to tackle some major themes -memory, motherhood, suicide, guilt- in such a refined yet puzzling manner it will make its readers want to read it again and again and again....

A middle-aged Japanese woman, now living in England, relives her horrifying childhood memories of the bombing of Nagasaki

Christine Liu

I've only read one of Kazuo Ishiguro's other works - Never Let Me Go. This was his first novel, and both have a similar feel in tone even though the two stories are completely different. But I immediately recognized the same unsettling sense that things are not what they appear to be on the surface, that there's something going on that we can't quite get at because the lens through which we're seeing the story unfold isn't perfectly clear.

In A Pale View of Hills, a Japanese woman named Etsuko is living in England and grieving her oldest daughter's recent suicide. The narrative alternates between Etsuko's interactions with her younger daughter in the present day and her memories of an earlier time in her life when she lived in Nagasaki after World War II. We see her recollections of a woman named Sachiko and Sachiko's daughter, Mariko.

There's always a quiet and subdued beauty to Ishiguro's prose, and he has an incredible way of painting haunting pictures that stay with you using very few words. Although the book never mentions the bombing or destruction specifically, you see the devastating effects on the people who survived. In this book as well as in Never Let Me Go, there's a moment where you realize what's going on that the narrator isn't saying. I found the narrative structure leading up to the moment of reveal perhaps a little more puzzling than Ishiguro probably intended, and there are some inconsistencies that I can't quite reconcile, but this is still an amazing feat of a first novel.

A pale view of hills

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