A Pale View of Hills: Kazuo Ishiguro

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Etsuko and her new husband wanted for Keiko to be happy in England, but she recalls that she always isolated herself in her room, and barely communicated with anyone. The novel ends with Niki leaving to London, and Etsuko watching her leave the gate of her home. If I’m being cryptic, it’s because I don’t want to ruin the it all for you though I do really think Ishiguro learnt from this book. All the major themes he replicates across his writing are here in a very early form. He explores memory and regret in a way no other writer can. It’s the things he doesn’t say that make his writing so powerful. We can imply from it that the characters are full of regret, we can assume, but he does not state it anywhere: he doesn’t need to. And this is something he delivered with a masterful stroke in The Remains of the Day. He really grew as an artist.

Even thought A Pale View of Hills is Ishiguro's debut novel, it shows the masterfulness of his craft in full display. Ishiguro here plays with his common themes of personal and collective memories, trauma and cultural differences between Japan and England. The main character, the first-generation immigrant woman from Japan now living in England, Etsuko, is found in the aftermath of her daughter’s suicide, reminiscent of her life in after-war Nagasaki, the town from which she immigrated with her daughter in a search of a better life. The tale is located in part in Nagasaki at a time when the city is still recovering from the terrible effects of the atomic bombing and in English, a somewhat pale countryside where silence and a slower passage of time prevail. During a visit from her daughter, Niki, Etsuko reflects on her own life as a young woman in Japan, and how she left that country to live in England. As she describes it, she and her Japanese husband, Jiro, had a daughter together, and a few years later Etsuko met a British man and moved with him to England. She took her elder daughter, Keiko, to England to live with her and the new husband. When Etsuko and her new husband have a daughter, Etsuko wants to call her something "modern" and her husband wants an Eastern-sounding name, so they compromise with the name "Niki", which seems to Etsuko to be perfectly British, but sounds to her husband at least slightly Japanese. Having this information on mind, we may conclude that Sachiko and Etsuko are quite similar. We may conclude that Etsuko does not have enough strength to talk about her guilt openly. She needs another story to face the guilt more easily. Ishiguro explains, “ it’s really Etsuko talking about herself, the meanings that Etsuko imputes to the life of Sachiko are obviously the meanings that are relevant to Etsuko’s own life. Whatever the facts were about what happened to Sachiko and her daughter, they are of interest to Etsuko now because she can use them to talk about herself.” Furthermore, he adds, Kasuo Ishiguro bilindiği üzere Japon kökenli olmasına rağmen; İngilizce yazan, İngiltere'de yaşayan ve İngiliz vatandaşı olarak hayatını sürdüren bir yazar. Haliyle bu durumda aslında İngiliz Edebiyatı yapması beklenebilir. Ancak İngiltere'nin, malum tarihi politikalarından dolayı, eskiden beri sahip olduğu çok İngiliz olmayan gayrikökenli yazarları mevcut. Bu yazarlarda ilginç bir şekilde, İngiltere'de başarılı olma yolunun, farklılığını kullanmak bundan beslenmek olduğunu düşünüyor sanırım. Bu çerçevede Kasuo Ishiguro'nun eline aldığı konu ve işleme şekli bir Japon yazarınkinden çok farklı değil.This interpretation seems to work with every single character. Look at Mrs. Fujiwara, for example. She was close to Etsuko while she was pregnant, and later helped her out by hiring her as an assistant when she had already "become" Satchiko. Educated: 1966-73 Woking County Grammar School; '74-79 University of Kent; '79-80 University of East Anglia. Either way, Etsuko’s identification with Sachiko is evident because the two women and their respective daughters share many similarities. Both women decide (have decided) to leave Japan for a western country, taking their daughters with them, hoping that this decision will be best for their daughters, but, probably knowing in their hearts that it will not be. In the end, Etsuko’s daughter Keiko never managed to become happy in the UK and committed suicide. Thus, to probably redeem herself in her own mind, Etsuko openly disapproves of Sachiko’s thoughtless care of her daughter Mariko. Like her future daughter Keiko, Mariko is a very troubled child and often runs away, with Sachiko hardly being concerned about her. In fact, Etsuko seems more concerned about Mariko’s wellbeing than her own mother. Relying on the theory of dissociation, it becomes convenient for Etsuko to blame another person for what has happened, and now show compassion for the little girl of Sachiko. In real life, she may never have done that regarding her own daughter.

The second daughter’s father was British and the woman moved to England where her visiting daughter was raised. We don’t learn what happened to either husband but neither is around, so we presume… Bunun dışında diğer takıldığım bir şey samimiyet. Savaş sonrası değişimi Japon yazarlar eserlerine çok farklı ve özgün şekillerde eserlerine yedirmişken, İngiltere'de büyümüş birisi için fazla kesin hüküm verirci gibi geldi. Bu da bende samimiyet durumunu sorgulattı. O yüzden biraz soru işaretleri olduğunu söyleyebilirim bu açıdan. I found the slice of life from this era and country fascinating enough in itself but soon began to suspect something else was going on. I loved the conclusion but it is subtle and some readers didn't enjoy the lose ends or the ambiguity of what actually happened. Nu conteaza varsta unui om, conteaza doar experientele prin care a trecut. Unii oameni pot sa ajunga la 100 de ani si sa nu aiba nici un fel de experienta."

There are a few gaps in my Ishiguro reading and his debut novel, published in 1982, was one of them. A Pale View of Hills thematically foreshadows much of the work Ishiguro will subsequently produce. His exploration of the deceptions and vagaries of memory, is a project begun in this novel and polished into a masterpiece in The Remains of the Day . The year after publication, in the last piece of journalism he wrote, Ishiguro assessed the impact of setting his book in Nagasaki. He felt the shadow of the bomb induced respectfulness in reviewers and "even gaps in my imagination of knowledge were taken for commendable restraint in the handling of potentially sensational material". But the story was never "about" the bomb or Japan and he was more concerned that the ending, where the narrator conflates her story with that of another woman from her own past, was "a little too baffling. People seem to spend too much energy working on it as if it was a crossword puzzle and that wasn't my intention. But I don't regret it as it was the best I could do at the time."

Lewis says he has doubts about some of the "mechanical plot elements" of the Whitbread and Booker-shortlisted When We Were Orphans , but sees Ishiguro's work as continuing to reveal itself in the most interesting ways. "It seems to combine features from the earlier books that have been attractive to readers while also attempting to smuggle in those more disturbing and outlandish elements. It is an area he has made entirely his own."

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The time and period the book is set in, Nagasaki just after the second world war, is very interesting. The characters, even the youngest, all struggle with memories from the war (most chillingly culminating in a recollection of how a desperate woman drowned her baby in wartime Tokyo) and the people they’ve lost. Most of the story is told through dialogue, that quite often has a strange repetition of denials in them, up to three time phrases seem to be repeated, like it is only proper to say what you really want or need from each other after someone urged you three times to speak out. For me, Kazuo Ishiguro, unfortunately, is not among them. This book, A Pale View of the Hills, in my opinion, is not at par as his more famous works. The only reason why I am not rating this with 1 star is that some of my friends (who still admire Ishiguro) will definitely find my above reason flimsy and I don't want to lose them. However, I know what I feel as a reader and I am entitled to my own opinion and they are my friends and true friendship is not measured by how many books they both liked or disliked. Instead, Sachiko reconnected with Frank, who once again made a dubious promise about taking Sachiko and Mariko to America. Sachiko decided that Mriko would not be able to take her pet kittens with them to America, so Sachiko drowned the kittens in a nearby river while Mariko watched. The narrative does not state whether or not Sachiko and Mariko ever did actually go to America. However, Etsuko and Jiro relocated to England after their child was born. The novel ends with a few more scenes between Etsuko and her younger daughter, Niki, in the days following the suicide of Etsuko’s first daughter, Keiko. Etsuko is dismayed when Niki says that she does not want to marry or have children. Es geht also um die Unzuverlässigkeit von Erinnerungen. Diese machen Etsuko zu einer unzuverlässigen Erzählerin, die ihre eigenen Erinnerungen daran, wie schlecht sie sich selbst als Mutter ihrer älteren Tochter verhalten hat, verdrängt hat. Denn Mariko ist niemand anderes als Keiko und Sachiko ist eine Figur, auf die Etsuko sich selbst und ihr Verhalten projiziert. Dies erschließt sich in der letzten in der Vergangenheit in Nagasaki spielenden Szene, als Etsuko Mariko nachläuft und sie besänftigen will: His novels An Artist of the Floating World (1986), When We Were Orphans (2000), and Never Let Me Go (2005) were all shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.

I'm sure if you haven't read the book, all this sounds a bit confusing, and you might be wondering what the deal is anyway, but from a narrative theory point of view, the ability of such a small thing - a few pronouns - to throw the entire preceeding narrative into doubt is pretty impressive. Then suddenly, the pronoun shift at the end introduces the possibility that not only did the narrator perhaps get some details wrong, leave some things out, change some names, be not as innocent as she seems, but maybe these omissions and alterations weren't accidental and we've been led to believe her a good person when perhaps she was lying about those details because she wasn't such a nice person after all, in fact, maybe she was a really nasty person. A Pale View of Hills suggests that Japan used to be centred around a patriarchal society and highlights the subservient role of a woman. This can be seen through the husband-spouse relationship between Etsuko and Jiro which could be representative of a typical husband-spouse relationship in Japan. There is a strong adherence to traditional values and also a strong sense to duty and obligation. This is evident during the visit by Jiro’s co-workers where Jiro calls out to Etsuko to “get some tea for the gentle-men”, despite the fact that “(She) was already on (her) way to the kitchen”. This line supports the gender roles women were expected to play and the duties they were obligated to perform. In addition, during this continued interaction between Jiro and his co-workers, one of his co-workers had mentioned that upon discovering his wife’s desire to vote for another political party, he had threatened her and expected her to vote for his preferred party. He mentions “My wife votes for Yoshida just because he looks like her uncle. That’s typical of women. They don’t understand politics. They think they can choose the country’s leaders the same way they choose dresses.” and also did not the deny the fact he had threatened his wife with a seven-iron. This statement elucidates the misogynistic values that were present in Japanese society and possibly its attitudes towards women. Furthermore, Jiro and Ogata-San had both agreed later that “husband and wife voting for different public parties is a sad state of affairs” which suggests that Etsuko is expected to mirror Jiro’s views in public. This representation of Etsuko could be a parallel to the roles undertaken by Japanese women leading up to post-war Japan. Sir Kazuo Ishiguro (カズオ・イシグロ or 石黒 一雄), OBE, FRSA, FRSL is a British novelist of Japanese origin and Nobel Laureate in Literature (2017). His family moved to England in 1960. Ishiguro obtained his Bachelor's degree from the University of Kent in 1978 and his Master's from the University of East Anglia's creative writing course in 1980. He became a British citizen in 1982. He now lives in London.

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I think I liked Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day (4 stars) and Never Let Me Go (4 stars) that almost all of his other works seem to be mediocre. It's like that I've fallen in love with a beautiful woman and all of the other girls around are incomparable if not downright ugly. I know I should have stopped after reading his collection of short stories, Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall (3 stars) but his other 3 books are also 1001 and many of my friends in my book club are raving about Remains as it is our book for this month, July 2012, so I resumed reading his other works.