A Pale View of Hills: Kazuo Ishiguro

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Although Sachiko’s American friend has betrayed her many times before, she tries once again to leave Japan and go to America with him. Her selfishness begins to surface when the reader discovers that Mariko does not go to school and that Sachiko leaves Mariko wandering in the woods at dark. Mariko has undergone traumatic experiences in Tokyo and because of that she imagines seeing a woman wanting her to take her to the woods. Even though Mariko has serious mental problems, Sachiko has no qualms about it saying that Mariko has made it up. All in all, we create an image of a selfish and egocentric mother. I just finished reading A Pale View of Hills and i'd like to add something to the discussion if you don't mind. The most poignant part for me was this generational gap, but seen through the lens of the repetition of cycles by youngsters and elders alike. Elders draw closer, youngsters draw further away. Quite often, I had a sad and understanding smile on my face, seeing the attempts of Etsuko to connect with Niki, her younger daughter, or seeing the attempts of Ogata-san to connect with his son Jiro, Etsuko’s first husband. Both attempts were at least partly unsuccessful, but showed that a certain level of good will is required for the interaction to go smoothly. Towards the beginning of the novel, Etsuko states that the suicide of her daughter prompted the newspaper to draw a parallel to the fact that she was Japanese and committed suicide, as if the two were linked. Through all of her attempts to rationalize these memories, it becomes clear by the end of the novel that Etsuko cannot dissolve her guilt of her past, her heritage, being the reason her daughter died.

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." But putting subsequent works to one side, this stands on its own as a very impressive debut novel. Sliding dreamily between England and Nagasaki after the war, we are placed entirely at the deposal of Etsuko's reminiscent day dreams. Which leaves the reader plenty of room for interpretation as to "what really happened". I am not sure it is possible to reach a conclusive answer. I think, much like memory itself, the "truth" is often lost to time and shifting perspective, but it IS fun to read some of the theories.Etsuko is an unreliable narrator, that is questioning the choices she made in the past, that were deeply reflected in the life of her daughter. The theme of memory is one of the recurrent motifs connecting the first three novels by Kazuo Ishiguro. In An Artist of the Floating World, the main character, Masuji Ono uses memory as a powerful device for dissociating himself from the past activities during the World War II. The Remains of the Day concerns Stevens whose memory is a just a screen for his numerous regrets.

Will the American Sailor really move me to America? Sachiko felt that he would but Etsuko doubted it. I am a research scholar on Ishiguro's works.Just a day before, I finished reading this novel. Lot of clarifications,I am in need.Accidentally, I came across this blog.Most of my doubts clarified from the discussion.Lines from last part of nineth chapter:"Memory, I realize, can be an unreliable thing; often it is heavily coloured by the circumstances in which one remembers"- The phrase ' heavily coloured' deliberately intimates that Etsuko coloured her past and justified her acts through the portrayal of Sachiko and Mariko.At the end of the novel, author left a note for readers through these lines-" Keiko was happy that day. We rode on the cable-cars". These lines allowed the reader to remind trip to Inasa by Etsuko,Mariko and Sachiko.So Childhood traumatic experiences of Mariko led to suicidal death of adolescent Keiko.From the hints left by the author, we can conclude that Mariko and Keiko are the same;Sachiko is the representation of alter ego of Etsuko. Her first matrimony could hardly be described as bliss. Nevertheless, it was not a complete disaster either. Even if Jiro was neither attentive nor caring, they did have pleasant moments. A little flat and a soon-to-be-born child helped her to recover from horror of a war and start enjoying that peaceful life. However, almost as soon as the critical storm broke, it abated. Anita Brookner, an early critic, asked to re-review the book and declared: "I can't see how he could have got it more right." And Wood, in reviewing Ishiguro's next book, When We Were Orphans (2000), about a British private detective in 1930s Shanghai, returned to his dismissal of The Unconsoled to note that if Ishiguro hadn't written it he might have been condemned to become a novelist whose work was "as similar as postage stamps". Wood then praised Orphans, claiming it "invents its own category of goodness". Ishiguro likes fantasy. It’s in almost all his novels that I’ve read. So what’s going on with all this symmetry of the main character and her Japanese neighbor? And the symmetry of the little neighbor girl in Japan and of her first-born daughter? Maybe a reincarnation thing? Or something more practical? Same father?

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I know you wrote about this book a very long time ago, but I couldn't help but pitch in even five years later. I just finished the book myself a few hours ago, and was equally quite confused about the ending. Reading the opinions of your book club made things a lot clearer for me, but not in an expected way. That neighboring mother was neglectful, not sending her daughter to school, letting her wander by herself near a river, and even letting her stay out after dark in the woods. Several times the main character helped the neighbor search the woods for her daughter at night. A Pale View of Hills is the story of Etsuko, a middle-aged Japanese woman living alone in England, and opens with discussion between Etsuko and her younger daughter, Niki, about the recent suicide of Etsuko's older daughter, Keiko. Ishiguro’s first novel is an intriguing read. If anything, it shows how much promise he had as an author and how much he could offer the literary world as he honed his skills.

The novel even does a very good job of replicating the varying syntax between English and Japanese - in the reminiscences, the dialogue does not flow as it would in English, and the translation is in some cases very literal, which makes the dialogue reflect the difference in thought patterns that speaking (and thinking) in another language requires. Ishiguro eventually gave up his day job late in 1982 when he was approached to write a screenplay for the BBC, The Gourmet, and A Profile of J Arthur Mason for Channel 4, which prefigured The Remains of the Day in featuring a butler. Later this year, The White Countess , which he scripted for the Merchant Ivory team that produced the Oscar-winning film version of The Remains of the Day , will be released. Its pre-war Shanghai setting is the same as that of When We Were Orphans but it features a family of White Russian exiles. This is a deeply moving novel, and Ishiguro creates the nostalgic and poignant atmosphere of remorse, sorrow, and love without ever explicitly writing about feelings, which makes him a master of his craft, with a minimalist, almost restrained approach achieving maximum emotional impact, as listening to a melody that brings you up memories. With a simplistic style, Ishiguro portrays complex and layered things, which shows how great a writer he is. A book is skillfully done in a philosophical exploration of our unreliable creation of past memories - the way we craft our own personal mythology, the mythology of intimacy with disturbing things of our past. In private mythology we almost lose a sense of truth in overwhelming feelings of guilt, remorse, punishment, sacrifices. Ishiguro masterfully accomplished that sense of being removed from your memories, as the person who you were when you created them, is not the person you are today - having a nuanced painful understanding of your own mistakes, things that you would do differently if you had another chance for redemption, questioning all of your life choices in the dawn of tragedy. But talking about the story of your life as is is never easy, and that is the way Etsuko has to distance herself from her own memories, making herself a righteous observer, because she was not an archetypical hero, the good persona in light of which everybody likes to think about your self, but a flawed, sometimes even cruel human being. Maybe the only way we can be objective about the story of our lives is by removing parts of ourselves from it, making ourselves observers of our past, and accepting the painful and the ugly. After a while it becomes clear the story isn’t as simple as it seemed at first sight. The daughter of Etsuko appears to have committed suicide, and her other daughter is only the half-sister of the deceased one, from a later marriage of Etsuko with an Englishman. In the Japanese scenes Etsuko has an uncouth husband and a brilliant father-in-law who represents pre-war Japan and is at war with the far-reaching changes in his country. But especially the relation with the woman at the river is remarkable, because she lives a very unconventional life, neglecting her daughter.Finally, Etsuko’s memory was openly referred to multiple times, and we were led to believe that while she thought she had sturdy reconstructions of the past, this view was not necessarily shared by others. In light of that understanding, it’s curious to see her seeming sneer and judgment when recalling past characters in her life, when she may not have been much better herself.

I remember in the last year reading a novel in which there was an unreliable narrator. And I asked my GR friends if they knew of any other examples, and at least one friend cited this book. Funny just as recent as last week I read another book with an unreliable narrator, Dr. Faraday, in ‘The Little Stranger’ by Sarah Waters. I just realized that what we don't know about Etsuko is what we know about Sachiko, and that what we don't know about Sachiko is what we know about Etsuko. Did the burden of remembering fall to my own generation? We hadn't experienced the war years, but we'd at least been brought up by parents whose lives had been indelibly shaped by them. Did I, now, as a public teller of stories, have a duty I'd hitherto been unaware of? A duty to pass on, as best I could, these memories and lessons from our parents' generation to the one after our own?”

STORIES

An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale. The plot is constructed in the way that the reader can notice a parallel between Etsuko and Sachiko. They are both constantly making excuses for their actions. They are both constantly reminding themselves that they have made right decisions. When Sachiko decides that she wants to leave Japan, she repeatedly tries to convince Etsuko that she has been planning her and her daughter’s future wisely. Etsuko rarely comments on Sachiko’s personal affairs. However, Sachiko constantly repeats : “But why can’t you understand that I’ve nothing to hide, I’ve nothing to be ashamed of”? Also, after talking about Keiko with Niki, Etsuko says: But you see, Niki, I knew all along she wouldn’t be happy over here. But I decided to bring her just the same”. This supports the theory that they are not the same person at different points in that person’s life, but that there are parallels between the two people’s stories, parallels so strong that Etsuko can use Sachikos story to tell her own. In doing so, Etsuko ends up mixing up the two stories, which is why we have some of her memories muddled or combined with others. But they are still two different women with their own lives and stories. Like mentioned above, the inconsistencies are too many and too irreconcilable for them to be the same person. For instance, Mariko was clearly born before the war, while Etsukos first pregnancy with Keiko was years after the war. Likewise Sachikos husband died during the war, but Jiro and Etsuko separated much later and Jiro did not die, but they separated due to unnamed irreconcilable differences.