A Pale View of Hills by Kazuo Ishiguro

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 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 is a multi-layered paradox of surface-level conversation and sinister undertones. The story alternates between Etsuko’s present-day life in England and her memories of post-war Japan rebuilding itself after the Second World War, all against the backdrop of her daughter’s recent suicide.

On the surface, the characters are all very polite. They engage in awkward laughter and inconsequential niceties, and they provide tea during tense moments. However, there is always an undercurrent of uneasiness. Sachiko is light-hearted in her conversation but she reveals only vague details about her past, leaving us speculating as to what has happened and why she wishes to conceal it. Sachiko’s daughter Mariko is also a mystery – she is disobedient, independent and strangely old for her age, but the things she says out loud are often typical of a child of her age.

Ishiguro is a master of the unreliable narrator and this story blurs the lines between memory and reality, causing us to question the true course of events and the veracity of Etsuko’s memories of Japan.

This is Ishiguro’s debut novel but it reminded me of his style in The Remains of the Day. It’s very measured and no detail is too small. Conversations are set out in full in the way they would be spoken, complete with pleasantries and silence-fillers. Ordinarily I would find this pace too slow but Ishiguro fills the conversations with anticipation about all the things that remain unsaid.

Thank you to C for lending me this book!