A Pale View of Hills

A Pale View of Hills is Kazuo Ishiguro’s debut novel, published in 1982. I had never read his first two books before, so it was interesting to discover that he began his career by writing about Japanese people and postwar Japan.

The story is set in Nagasaki around 1950, when people were still living with the wounds of the war and the atomic bombing, yet also sensing the coming changes of a new era. It is, in fact, the period when I was born.

Etsuko, now living in England, has recently lost her elder daughter to suicide. In the wake of this tragedy, she looks back on her life in Nagasaki thirty years earlier, especially on her memories of her friend Sachiko and Sachiko’s daughter, Mariko.

At that time, Etsuko was a virtuous, pregnant housewife, and her husband Jiro was a capable office worker. Jiro’s father, Ogata‑san, had come from Fukuoka to stay with them. Nearby lived Sachiko and Mariko in a small, run‑down house. Mariko, a quiet and withdrawn girl, often sees disturbing phantoms—visions rooted in a traumatic experience she suffered in the chaotic postwar years in Tokyo. She refuses to attend school and is strangely attached to a group of stray kittens.

Sachiko, meanwhile, pins her hopes on a precarious relationship with Frank, a young American. The conversations between Etsuko and Sachiko form the backbone of the novel.

Another important thread is the tension between generations—the hopes and disappointments of the young and the old. This is reflected in the strained relationship between Jiro and his father, and in the history between Ogata‑san and Matsuda, Jiro’s former friend, who likely criticized Ogata‑san as one of the wartime loyalists.

The novel also contains the kind of uncomfortable, insistent conversations that often appear in Ishiguro’s work. Many exchanges—between Etsuko and Sachiko, Jiro and Ogata‑san, or the women on Mt. Inasa—are filled with subtle irritation and emotional evasiveness.

Etsuko eventually gives birth to Keiko, but later remarries an Englishman and moves to England, where she has her second daughter, Niki. As I mentioned, Keiko later commits suicide in Manchester, but Etsuko never speaks about the details.

Ishiguro also leaves the fate of Sachiko and Mariko unresolved. Did Sachiko follow Frank to America, or did she remain in Japan after being abandoned? Sachiko and Mariko seem to foreshadow Etsuko and Keiko in later years.

It is often said that the scenes between Etsuko and Ogata‑san evoke the films of Yasujiro Ozu, especially Tokyo Story.

In any case, Ishiguro portrays with great delicacy the hopes and anxieties of people—especially women—living through the shifting landscape of postwar Japan.

 

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