Introduction to A Pale View of Hills by Kazuo Ishiguro

In 1982, A Pale View of the Hills, Kazuo Ishiguro's first novel, won the prestigious Winifred Holtby Prize of the Royal Society of Literature, and the [London] Times Literary Supplement hailed it as "a first novel of uncommon delicacy . . . , an extremely quiet study of extreme emotional turbulence" (qtd. in "Kazuo Ishiguro, 1954 -"; emphasis added).  Contemporary Authors Online introduces A Pale View of Hills this way:

Ishiguro's highly acclaimed first novel, A Pale View of Hills, is narrated by Etsuko, a middle-aged Japanese woman living in England. The suicide of her daughter, Keiko, awakens somber memories of the summer in the [early] 1950s in war-ravaged Nagasaki [before Keiko is born] . . . . Etsuko's thoughts and dreams turn particularly to Sachiko, a war widow whose unfortunate relationship with an American lover [FRANK] traumatizes her already troubled daughter, Mariko. ("Kazuo Ishiguro, 1954 -"; emphasis added).

In a brief review, Mary J. Mayer astutely captures distinctive elements of the novel's narrative structure, narrator, characters, and themes:

Skillfully interweaving past with present, this first novel unfolds a poignant haunting tale that moves the reader as much by what is left unsaid as by what is told.  The narrator, a middle-aged Japanese woman [ETSUKO] living in England, has recently lost through suicide the daughter [KEIKO] of her first marriage.  Looking back at the long-ago summer in Japan when she was awaiting the birth of this child, she recalls her brief, strange friendship with another young woman [SACHIKO] who, with her young daughter [MARIKO], takes up residence in the Nagasaki suburb under somewhat mysterious circumstances.  On one level the book is the story of this relationship.  On another, in its portrayal of people struggling to extricate themselves from the nightmares and dislocations of war and to establish new lives, it affectingly and [subtly] examines the making of choices in life.  On both levels, this spare and sensitive novel achieves success. (825; emphasis added)

Most critics agree that common themes developed in Ishiguro's novels, including A Pale View of Hills, "deal with issues of memory, self-deception, and codes of etiquette, leading his characters to a re-evaluation or realization about the relative success or failure of their lives" ("Kazuo Ishiguro, 1954 -"; emphasis added). 

In the themes and narrative techniques at work in A Pale View of Hills, students may see the influence of literary modernism.  For example, in the Los Angeles Times Book Review, Rosemary Roberts observed that Ishiguro develops his themes using "controlled prose that more often hints than explains or tells. The effect evokes mystery and an aura of menace" (qtd. in "Kazuo Ishiguro, 1954 -"; emphasis added).  Ishiguro suggests rather than explains significant meaning in A Pale View of Hills through striking settings, images, motifs and symbols: for example, the wasteground, the series of child murders, the river, the kittens, the rope, the girl hanging from a tree, the mysterious woman from the other side of the river (real or imagined by Mariko), capture the ominous setting and frightening atmosphere of post-atomic bombed Nagasaki.  Parallels between the past and present are also used to comment on each other and develop the themes of A Pale View of Hills. 

ETSUKO is the first-person NARRATOR and main CHARACTER of A Pale View of Hills, and the entire novel is narrated by only Etsuko from only her POINT OF VIEW.  The SETTING and time of the novel shift back and forth between Narrative Present and Narrative Past:  both present and past stories are told by Etsuko, based entirely on her perceptions and memories, and what she is--and is not--willing and able to tell:

1. Etsuko's NARRATIVE PRESENT is set in England of the late 1970s, during the time after Etsuko learns of her older daughter Keiko's suicide, and Etsuko?s younger daughter NIKI (by Etsuko's deceased second British husband) comes to visit on a "mission" to assure Etsuko that she is not to blame for Keiko's death (Pale 10-11; ch. 1).  The Narrative Present situation functions like a kind of NARRATIVE FRAME in that it prompts Etsuko's memory and telling of her Narrative Past story--but little of this past story is told to Niki.  There is only one narrator in A Pale View of Hills, and Etsuko's audience is not specified (she may be addressing only herself).  Within Etsuko's present distressed situation--coping with her loss and guilt caused by the suicide of her daughter Keiko--lie strong psychological motivations and thematic connections (though unacknowledged even to herself) that turn Etsuko from the narrative present to telling her dreams and recounting memories of a specific time in her past life. 
2. Etsuko's NARRATIVE PAST is set in post-World War II Nagasaki, Japan, of the early 1950s, when Etsuko is pregnant with Keiko by her first Japanese husband, JIRO.  Nagasaki was one of the two Japanese cities devastated by atomic bombs dropped by the U.S. in 1945 to end the war in the Pacific, after which the U.S. occupied Japan for a few years, into the early 1950s, before withdrawing.  As James Campbell asserts, "In Etsuko's present life as much as in her past, she is circled by a chain of death which has its beginning in war? (qtd. in ("Kazuo Ishiguro, 1954 -").  Etsuko's past story gradually reveals significant aspects of her past life in Japan: the madness she experienced during the war, her first marriage to Jiro, her relationship with her father-in-law OGATA-san, but especially the strange relationship she developed with Sachiko and her daughter Mariko. 

Most literary critical commentary on A Pale View of Hills to date has focused on the character and (un)reliability of Etsuko as narrator.  As Mesher observes, Ishiguro takes "narrative unreliability . . . considerably beyond the familiar techniques of writers such as Joseph Conrad . . ., where the narrators' account of events can be trusted, if not their interpretations or explanations of those events. In his first novel, A Pale View of Hills, for example, Ishiguro's narrator fabricates not only motives but also actions and even characters."

UNRELIABLE NARRATOR: "A narrator who, for some reason, cannot or does not fully comprehend the world about him or her and whose conclusions and judgments the reader thus mistrusts.  An author who uses an unreliable narrator generally provides clues indicating the narrator's fallibility and expects the reader to be wary of anything that the narrator reports" (Murfin and Ray 492).

"The fallible or unreliable narrator is one whose perception, interpretation, and evaluation of the matters he or she relates do not coincide with the implicit opinions and norms manifested by the author, which the author expects the reader to share" (Abrams 168).  The fallibility or unreliability of such narrators can be due to "excessive innocence, or oversophistication, or moral obtuseness," and creates dramatic "ironies" (Abrams 168)--that is, discrepancies between what the narrator says happened and what it meant VS. what readers suspect or understand "really" happened and it "really" meant through clues embedded in the narrative.

HOWEVER, the above generalized literary definitions do NOT quite capture the uniquely later 20^th century form of "unreliable" narrator that Ishiguro has presented to us in Etsuko, the narrator of A Pale View of Hills. 

What Etsuko Does and Does Not Tell

Etsuko's "unreliability" as a narrator does not seem to be a matter of "excessive innocence, or oversophistication, or moral obtuseness"; nor of an inability to "fully comprehend the world" about her.  What Etsuko does and does not tell, is a complex mix of conscious motives and unconscious associations of dream and memory, that reflects the author Ishiguro's more complex psychological understandings of the late 20^th century.  A prominent dramatic question raised early in the novel but never explicitly asked or directly answered in Etsuko's narration is why Keiko committed suicide.  Yet her second daughter Niki, as well as most literary critics, assume that the reticent, repressed Etsuko is tortured, however unconsciously, by the question, or its denial, and cannot confront directly her guilt-ridden feelings of responsibility.  Etsuko herself points out the unreliability of memory and its dependence on circumstance, and moves her narration back and forth between the present and the past.  But neither past or present, nor movement between the two, provide Etsuko with self-protective escape and distance in time or mental space from her feelings for long: like the ebb and flow of an incoming high tide, both move Etsuko closer and closer to an inevitable climax, when she must confront her feelings about her daughter's death.

However, what may still confound many novel readers' expectations is the fact that  Etsuko's story telling will not finally yield explicit and definitive "answers" to what "really" happened with Keiko and to what extent Etsuko is "really" responsible for Keiko?s suicide.  Kazuo Ishiguo has stated: "What I'm interested in is not the actual fact that my characters have done things they later regret.  I'm interested in how they come to terms with it" (qtd. in Jaggi 45).  Many literary critics and readers have rephrased the question in Ishiguro's terms, and focused on Etsuko's journey, impelled by conscious motives and unconscious needs, back through real and invented memories and uncertain dreams associating past and present, the path she had to travel in bringing herself to confront and learn to cope with the tragedy of her daughter's suicide. 

However reticent, fallible, evasive, and indirect her narration may be; what Etsuko does tell is rich with suggestive parallels, connections, projections to help critics and readers try to fill the gaps left by what Etsuko does not tell. Among the most significant narrative gaps is Etsuko and Keiko's relationship, and much critical speculation has focused on what is indirectly revealed by the intriguing parallels and projections suggested by Etsuko's memories of Sachiko and Mariko.  "Etsuko's memories, though they focus on her neighbor's sorrows and follies, clearly refer to herself as well," wrote Edith Milton in the New York Times Book Review (qtd. in "Kazuo Ishiguro, 1954 -"; emphasis added).  "The lives of the two women run parallel": "Etsuko, like Sachiko, has raised a deeply disturbed daughter; like her, she has turned away from the strangling role of traditional Japanese housewife toward the West, where she has discovered freedom of a sort . . . . Surrounded that summer by a new order that has shattered ancient ways, the two women chose the Western path of self-interest, compromising--to varying degrees--their delicate daughters" ("Kazuo Ishiguro, 1954 -").  "In the story of Sachiko and her deeply disturbed daughter, Etsuko finds a reflection of her own pivotal choices, not least the choice to leave Japan" (Howard 402).  Other "memories" also embody Etsuko's projections on her present situation: for example, in Etsuko's story of MRS. FUJIWARA, "reduced from her former social position to running a noodle shop, Etsuko finds an image of her present and perhaps her future life" and a means to confront "her sense of loss and her fear of the future," according to Howard (402). "These projections are largely unconscious [to Etsuko], though readily apparent to the reader, as is the movement of approach and withdrawal, recognition and denial" (Howard 402).

Abrams, M. H.  A Glossary of Literary Terms.  6th ed. Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace College Publishers- Holt, Rinehart, & Winston, 1993.