A Pale View of Hills

'A Pale View of Hills' is Kazuo Ishiguro's first novel, published in 1982. I've never read his first two novels. It was interesting for me that he wrote about Japanese people in his first two novels.

The situation is in postwar Nagasaki around 1950. People were living with wounds of war and the atomic bomb and feeling changes of the times for the future. And also it was the period when I was born.

Etsuko who is living in England now lost her elder daughter by suicide recently, and Etsuko recalls things in Nagasaki of 30 years ago. Etsuko recalls, especially, her friend Sachiko and the daughter Mariko.

Etsuko is a virtuous and pregnant housewife now and her husband Jiro is a capable office-worker. Ogata-san, her father-in-law living in Fukuoka, is staying at their home. She gets to know Sachiko and Mariko who are living at a small house nearby. Mariko is a taciturn girl and often sees creepy phantom because of a grim experience in postwar mess in Tokyo. And also she doesn't go to school and is obsessed some stray kittens.

Sachiko puts her hopes in the shaky relationship with Frank, a young American. The conversation between Etsuko and Sachiko is the keystone of this story.

The other theme is hope and disappointment of the younger generation and the older generation, jiro and his father, Ogata-san and Matsuda who was Jiro's friend.(Matsuda would have criticised Ogata-san as one of the followers of the war.)

Uncomfortable conversation that you can often see in Ishiguro's works is also an important factor in this story. There are many insistent and irritating conversations, for example, between Etsuko and Sachiko, Jiro and his father, the women at Mt. Inasa, and so on.

Etsuko gives birth to Keiko, but gets married again to an English man and goes to England. She gives birth to the second daughter, Niki. I said before, Keiko commits suicide in Manchester. Etsuko doesn't mention about those details at all.

Ishiguro also doesn't mention about the rest of Sachiko and Mariko's story. Did Sachiko go to America, or eventually stayed in Japan because of getting dumped by Frank? Sachiko and Mariko overlap with later Etsuko and Keiko.

It is often said that the conversation between Etsuko and Ogata-san reminds us the films by Yasujiro Ozu, especially 'Tokyo Story'.

Anyway, Ishiguro depicted delicately the hope and anxiety of people, especially women, living in the changing times of the postwar Japan in this book.