A Pale View of Hills is the first novel

Novel

A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....

 by author Kazuo Ishiguro

Kazuo Ishiguro

Kazuo Ishiguro OBE or ; born 8 November 1954) is a Japanese–English novelist. He was born in Nagasaki, Japan, and his family moved to England in 1960. Ishiguro obtained his Bachelor's degree from University of Kent in 1978 and his Master's from the University of East Anglia's creative writing...

. It won the 1982 Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize. He received a £1000 advance from publishers Faber and Faber

Faber and Faber

Faber and Faber Limited, often abbreviated to Faber, is an independent publishing house in the UK, notable in particular for publishing a great deal of poetry and for its former editor T. S. Eliot. Faber has a rich tradition of publishing a wide range of fiction, non fiction, drama, film and music...

 for the novel after a meeting with Robert McCrum

Robert McCrum

Robert McCrum , is an English writer and editor. He served as literary editor of The Observer for more than ten years. In May 2008 he was appointed Associate Editor of the Observer and was succeeded as literary editor by William Skidelsky...

, the fiction editor.

Plot introduction

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. Etsuko's thoughts, however, dwell not on either of her daughters so much as on the more distant past and the mysterious relationship she formed with a woman named Sachiko and with the woman's young daughter, Mariko, some years before in post-war Nagasaki

Nagasaki

is the capital and the largest city of Nagasaki Prefecture on the island of Kyushu in Japan. Nagasaki was founded by the Portuguese in the second half of the 16th century on the site of a small fishing village, formerly part of Nishisonogi District...

.

Plot summary

During a visit from her daughter, Niki, Etsuko reflects back on her own life as a young woman in Japan, and how she left that country to live in Britain. 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 Britain. She took her elder daughter, Keiko, to Britain 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.

In Britain, Keiko becomes increasingly solitary and antisocial. Etsuko recalls how, as Keiko grew older, she would lock herself in her room and emerge only to pick up the dinner-plate that her mother would leave for her in the kitchen. This disturbing behavior ends, as the reader already has learned, in Keiko's suicide. "Your father," Etsuko tells Niki, "was rather idealistic at times...[H]e really believed we could give her a happy life over here... But you see, Niki, I knew all along. I knew all along she wouldn't be happy over here."

Etsuko tells her daughter, Niki, that she had a friend in Japan named Sachiko. Sachiko had a daughter named Mariko, a girl whom Etsuko's memory paints as exceptionally solitary and antisocial. Sachiko, Etsuko recalls, had planned to take Mariko to America with an American soldier identified only as "Frank." Clearly, Sachiko's story bears striking similarities to Etsuko's.

Characters

• Etsuko – main protagonist; middle-aged Japanese woman
• Keiko – Etsuko's elder daughter who commits suicide
• Niki – Etsuko's second daughter, by her English husband
• Sachiko – woman known to Etsuko, and, possibly, a third person on whom Etsuko projects bad memories, thoughts, and events
• Mariko – Sachiko's daughter, and, possibly, a representation of Etsuko's daughter, Keiko
• Jiro – Etsuko's first husband
• Ogata-san – Jiro's father
• Frank – man that Sachiko was going to America with
• Mrs. Fujiwara – the owner of noodle shop who gave Sachiko a job
• Hanada – Jiro's friend who threatened his wife with a golf club
• Shigeo Matsuda – a student in Ogata-san's class

Approaches to the novel

Interpretations of this enigmatic novel vary. One interpretation claims that the story of Sachiko is, in fact, Etsuko's own story, from which she distances herself by presenting it as the story of another person altogether. The most significant evidence in favor of this interpretation includes the similarities in Etsuko's descriptions of Mariko and Keiko; Etsuko's reference to Keiko's presence at her visit to Inasa, which, according to what she had described earlier, had included only Sachiko and Mariko; and the passage in which what had been Etsuko's first-person narrative becomes—with no more to signal the change than a bit of white space between one sentence and the next—the first-person narrative of Mariko's mother, who is about to take Mariko to America. In this passage, Etsuko takes the lantern from Sachiko and goes looking for Mariko. There is then a line of whitespace, and the first-person narrative resumes (with the speaker still carrying the lantern); but when this post-whitespace narrator finds the girl, she speaks to her as though she herself is Sachiko, telling the girl that they must leave tomorrow but that they can return to Japan if she does not like America (which, further, would shed some light onto Etsuko's aforementioned statement to Niki that she knew Keiko would not like their new country).

Further, though the narrative makes it clear that Etsuko leaves her first husband and leaves Japan, there is no description whatsoever of how any of this happens unless one reads "Sachiko's" story as actually being Etsuko's story.

Arguments against this interpretation point out that these passages, while multi-layered, can be read in other ways as well, and suggest that Etsuko is merely reflecting on the similarities between her experiences and Sachiko's. Etsuko may, for example, have gone with her own daughter to Inasa at a later date than the time she visited there with Sachiko and Mariko, just as the post-whitespace passage in which the narrator speaks to the daughter she plans to take to America may be Etsuko's memory of an episode with Keiko that merely mirrors what she knows occurred much earlier between Sachiko and Mariko.

Ogata and Jiro

Etsuko's husband Jiro has a somewhat strained relationship with his father, Ogata. Jiro is a busy worker, and every time his father wants to chat or play chess with him, he refuses shortly, usually in favor of work. Ogata senses that this apparently rude behavior is an expression of a generational shift in values, and does not complain. Jiro communicates his priorities with little grace, and his interactions with his father are uneasy. Etsuko, by contrast, seems to respect politeness and has no difficulty expressing her empathy in a sharp manner which Ogata enjoys.

Main themes

The story is a suggestive and disturbing one, dwelling on themes of loss, guilt and responsibility. It examines what we know, what we tell, and what we deny about the truth of our own history.

Japanese psyche

A possible interpretation of the novel is that author wants to bring the transforming Japanese psyche into the spotlight, including Japanese patriotism and the role of women. The former aspect is narrated by allowing Ogata's, a former teacher, views on the role of the school system to clash with the opposing views of a former student of his. Ogata insists it was most important that the youngsters were taught to love their country and feel grateful towards it, whereas his former student supposedly argues this led to blindness and failure to question authority, which he implies was an important factor in Japan's war activities before and during the Second World War. Ogata expresses sadness over the fact that people seem to pursue their own interests instead of being mindful of the collective's best, blaming the mind transition on the rising role of democracy.

Role of women

The role of the women is discussed by letting, ironically, the old Ogata reflect on the changing roles of women during the time scope of the novel, whereas the younger characters, read Etsuko and Jiro, most of the time passively accept Ogata's arguments. Etsuko is repeatedly ordered by her husband Jiro to carry out mundane tasks such as providing him with breakfast and tea, and does so without questioning.

Further reading

• Faber and Faber, Faber Book Club: A Pale View of Hills by Kazuo Ishiguro. Retrieved 27 June 2010.