Customer Reviews

Pale View of Hills

5 star:		(29)
4 star:		(16)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Ishiguro achieved this incredible debut novel by holding in the reins and managing to tell only what he felt necessary. The story tells of a Japanese lady, Etsuko, now living in England. Her first daughter, Keiko, has committed suicide by hanging herself, alone, in a flat in Manchester. It is the story of Etsuko looking back through her memories, trying to make sense of what happened, trying to pull some ends together. But we, just like she, are left unsure. She finds some answers but even more questions. Ishiguro has brilliantly transported us into the world of memory, dream, illusion. In her search for answers, Etsuko looks back at her life in Nagasaki less than a decade after the devastation of the atomic bomb. Typically, Ishiguro chooses not to look at this event directly. Instead he presents us with the disturbed and confused lives of those who survived. There is Mrs Fujiwara, bravely running a noodle shop, trying to be positive even though her husband and nearly all her children were killed. There is Etsuko's father-in-law, a teacher before and during the war who is struggling to come to terms with living in a society where everything he lived for is written off as evil brainwashing. Japan is trying to wash its hands clean of his type, and yet he appears such a decent and fair person. These characters are just the background to the main story but they are so brilliantly drawn. I shall not even try to clarify Etsuko's search for reasons. Let yourself be taken into her elegaic but ultimately futile look at her life in Japan before she left. The main issue underlying this story is the question of searching for self-fulfilment or submitting oneself to the restrictions of the society in which one lives. This is a dark novel, and I felt the pain in this novel so much more on a second reading. This should however by no means deter you from reading it. The language is so beautiful and delicate that it will carry you through. It is not a novel to try to solve, instead it is one to submit yourself to, and let it work its wonders on you. Like me, you may well find yourself returning to it a second time. I'm very sure I will be returning to it again, and I'm also sure there will be yet more there for me next time.

A Pale View of Hills is a haunting and lyrical book that ends up asking more questions than it answers. And Kazuo Ishiguro is such a masterful storyteller that we can't help but wonder if this is not exactly as it should be. The story opens in modern day London, where Etsuko, a Japanese born women of middle-age is attempting to come to terms with the suicide of her elder daughter, Keiko. In doing so, she finds herself drawn to the past and a particular summer in Nagasaki when she embarked on a strange friendship with an enigmatic woman named Sachiko and Sachiko's young daughter, Mariko. Ishiguro's movements backwards and forwards in time are often abrupt and the reader can sometimes find himself slightly disoriented, but this still does not detract from the quiet beauty and lyricism of his prose. For Ishiguro is a master of lyrical prose, writing passages of unequalled beauty that authors like Anne Rice can only dream of. This is a most delicate novel, encompassing many themes, and one that ultimately becomes macabre--it may take more than one reading to absorb its full impact. It is definitely a small masterpiece, and the only reason I gave it four stars instead of five is because I believe Ishiguro should have revealed the truth of this extraordinary tale piece by piece, layer by layer, like peeling away the skin of an onion. As it is, the truth hits us in the face like a snowball out of nowhere and many readers may miss it entirely. A pity, for this is a work of extraodinary genius and beauty; one of the most moving books I have read in many years and one whose emotional impact will haunt me for many years to come. And I would not have expected less from a writer as talented as Kazuo Ishiguro.

I cannot recommend this book highly enough. The reviewers below have summarized the basic elements, so let me concentrate on style. If you enjoy books that do not have to be big on plot or action, but are instead beautifully crafted, realistic depictions of the profundities of life, with a strong atmospheric sense, then I am sure you will enjoy this subtle work. It is very short and easy to read, with the terse, clear style that made Ishiguro famous. Japanese readers will find the dialogue and characters and setting to be completely believable -- despite the fact that Ishiguro never went back to Japan before writing this novel (he grew up in England). Yet many people finish this book without really having grasped much of its essence.

The difficulty lies in drawing connections between events, characters and symbols. Some of them are interrelated within the work, others draw upon outside references (such as the symbolism of crossing the river being a metaphor for death, like the river Styx). This book is simply written enough to be enjoyed the first time, and yet complex enough to be read another two times. The remarkable thing is that when re-read (or read the first time, with an eye on grasping the symbolism and motifs) this book is actually not only a tragic tale, but a terrifying and disturbing one in its dark images of death, neglect and loss.

Readers of Ishiguro's other books may find this closest in style to "Artist of the Floating World", yet farthest from "The Unconsoled". In style, Ishiguro mastered this particular technique in "The Remains of the Day", which is also a book about loss, but with a romantic twist thrown in, and far less troubling that this earlier work. Read this book, and if it doesn't touch something in you - read it again.

A Pale View of Hills is written as a memoir from the point of view of a Japanese expatriate living in Britain, a woman named Etsuko whose oldest daughter recently has committed suicide. Ostensibly, one would think the memoir, as Etsuko thinks back on her earlier years in post-war Nagasaki, would provide an explanation for her daughter's suicide, but this explanation--and therefore the motivation for the memoir--are not readily apparent.

In fact, Ishiguro does not go out of his way in this book to make anything readily apparent. In some ways, this is almost assuredly his writing style, and, in others, it helps the reader to truly feel that one is residing inside Etsuko's mind, privy to her thoughts and experiences without the necessity of direct explanations, which would situate the reader firmly on the outside of Etsuko's experiences, looking in.

There is a simplicity and restraint in both narrative and in conversation, which may feel idle and boring to some perhaps, but which to me, at least (based upon what little I know on the subject), came across as evocative of Japanese culture. Ishiguro manages to capture the entire mood of post-war Japan in a series of seemingly idle conversations between Etsuko, her husband, and her father-in-law: the contrast between old ways and new ways, relations between generations and genders within families and in society at large, without coming down firmly on either side of any of these matters and conveying an overwhelmingly guideless, lost feeling as a result.

It is no coincidence that Ishiguro chooses to place perhaps the most lost character in the story, a woman named Sachiko, and her effectively motherless daughter, Mariko, in "the one wooden cottage spared the devastation of the bomb and the government's bulldozers." Sachiko does not want to cling to the past represented by her old cottage, nor is she able, despite her efforts, to establish a future in the new world represented so nearby by tall, modern, concrete flats. Again, this contrast between old and new, and people's lost, wandering paths between the two, highlights the character of Japanese culture at the time.

There is not much of scenery, particularly in Etsuko's remembrance of Japan. We are, however, talking about post-war Nagasaki, and this lack of scenery may be seen as reflective of the characters' willingness to ignore their surroundings and the pain their surroundings represented.

I find it remarkable that every family in the story lost at least one loved one in the devastation of the atomic bomb, but the people of Nagasaki blame only some aspects, at least, of the old ways of Japanese culture, and there seems to be no resentment toward the Americans. I find this remarkable to this day in the real world, in fact, and we have had a recent example of Japanese society's continuing unwillingness to pursue any course of action leaning toward the old ways in the country's heated debate over sending troops to Iraq (although much of the debate, in fairness, centered upon the logic behind the intervention in Iraq, generally). Again, I think this shows Ishiguro's success in capturing post-war Japanese culture so convincingly.

You reach the end of this portrait of post-war Japanese culture, suddenly finding that you're not sure what has happened. It leaves you trying to piece together a coherent explanation days or weeks later, mentally reconstructing bits of the story and testing them against your theories. This isn't annoying, for some reason, as you might think it would be; rather, it allows events that may not have seemed important at the time to take on relevance as you put your theories forward. It wasn't until I had begun to put my various theories forward, for example, that the entire motivation for Etsuko's memoir became apparent.

I recommend A Pale View of Hills, and I will be tracking down more of Ishiguro's works, probably The Remains of the Day next, as that would appear to be his most famous.

Kazuo Ishiguro's "A Pale View of Hills," his first novel, is a devastating, breathtaking work of structural genius. Hence, it is a story that you have to pay extremely close attention to if you want to work out the mystery at its heart, and once you finish you'll likely want to read it a second time. Ishiguro has long been considered one of the great contemporary practitioners of the "unreliable narrator" technique. His narrator here is Etsuko, an older Japanese woman who has, many years before, immigrated to Britain. Through the course of the novel she reminisces about her time as a young wife and mother-to-be in post-WWII Nagasaki. On the surface Etsuko is the ideal traditional, timid, submissive Japanese wife. But pay close attention to everything she says--she's a monstrous liar, and not until the very end do all the puzzle pieces she's been trying to keep hidden suddenly come crashing in on you.

I'm quickly discovering that Kazuo Ishiguro is an author who prefers cooking on a low flame to a rolling boil. "A Pale View of the Hills" paints a sparse portrait of post-war Nagasaki, Japan, without ever stooping to the maudlin or macabre. It doesn't pack a punch; it merely penetrates and envelopes the psyche.

The book focuses on Etsuko, a middle-aged woman who has abanoned Japan to live in England, and three sets of relationships she has: her young adult daughter, her first husband and father-in-law, and a strange women named Sachiko and her daughter Mariko. These are not gregarious people, and their scenes with Etsuko are laden with the reluctance (or refusal) to speak. As a result, the reader is left to speculate about past events which are hinted at but never fully revealed.

The result is a book which could easily have been much longer, but in choosing to withold so much, Ishiguro has kept the book at 183 pages. And it's a dense 183 pages, full of hidden meaning, without a wasted word. I can't claim to fully understand what everything signifies and how it all comes together in the end, but for my money that makes for a more interesting book. It's not all laid out for you. You can actually discuss a book like this with someone and not come to the same conclusions.

If you need all mysteries to be solved and all plotlines to be resolved, this book will frustrate you to no end. But if you're like me and look for books to "speak" to you, you should give this one a try. I haven't figured out yet what it's saying, but I can definitely hear the murmuring.

This is an amazing first novel and it is a good introduction to Ishiguro for readers who haven't read his books before. It is so delicately told from the point of view of a woman who has survived WWII. You are given only brief personal glimpses of her life, yet those glimpses spark an enormous amount of questions revealing her to be a woman of deep complexity. You would expect her to be pondering the life of her daughter Keiko, but she spends most of her time remembering the mysterious woman Sachiko who she knew briefly in Nagasaki. Over the course of reading the novel you begin to understand that this is a way for her to process her emotions over her daughter's death. Pondering the mysteries of a woman she can never understand is preferable to admitting the responsibility for her daughter's suicide. Perhaps she contributed in some way to her death? From her obsession with Sachiko and Sachiko's daughter Mariko we understand that she is possibly drawing parallels between the girls. While this mystery looms in the background you are brought deeply into her observations of Sachiko and her story of a single woman trying to survive independently. Through the entire time Ishiguro is very careful about what is and is not given away. He is a master at telling and not telling. The selection that goes into telling has an impact on the way we interpret what is told. In this way he explores human complexities that few other writers are able to dig into. Our view of Etsuko, like our view of Nagasaki, is blurred and from this not quite clear view we understand that this Japanese woman still has a lot more to tell.

A quote from The New York Times book Review on the back cover characterizes this book as elliptical, and it certainly is that, maybe a bit overly so. At the end, I began to wonder if Sachiko and Mariko were actually imaginary characters that allowed Etsuko to think about the past, but that doesn't really work. Where would Mrs. Fujiwara fit in? It seems that Etsuko has the events that took place during her friendship with Sachiko mixed up in her memory with events that occurred later when she was deciding to leave Nagasaki. When she tells the child on the bridge that if she doesn't like it over there, they can always come back, she is remembering a conversation she had with Keiko, even though she had been thinking about Mariko up until that point. Memory does work like that sometimes.

Since Etsuko doesn't like to dwell on the events that preceded her arrival in London, thinking about Sachiko gives her a way of seeing them from a safe distance. I would have liked a few more clues, however, about how a woman like Etsuko ever extricated herself from a marriage to a man like Jiro. I thought Niki's assumption that Etsuko would not have wanted Ogata-San in the household nicely demonstrated the impossibility of explaining the way things were supposed to have been before the war, and how terrible it was for Etsuko to find herself alone with Jiro.

The point is that memory only provides a pale view. The past is always going to be a fiction. It is a worthwhile examination of this problem

Etsuko's older daughter has recently committed suicide. Living alone in England, Etsuko recalls her encounter with an unusual woman, Sachiko, and her young daughter, Mariko, in Nagasaki a few years after Japan's defeat. Her memories of this summer long ago appeared to have little significance to the present, but gradually the story unravels into two strands, a concrete retelling of distant events and a more oblique revelation about Etusko herself. Ishiguro tantalizes the reader with hints and intimations and vague indications.

I realized that Ishiguro is a master of subtlety as I have read some of his other novels, but nonetheless I was unprepared for the obscure ending. What had I just learned? Was this a confused memory or had I glimpsed something macabre? Some rereading helped me resolve my confusion, but I leave the ending for your speculations.

In "A Pale View of Hills" Kazuo Ishiguro tells a story, develops convincing characters, and paints a portrait of post-war Japan. Ogata-San, Etsuko's amicable father-in-law, is publicly criticized for teaching patriotism during his long career as a school master. He quietly struggles with the seeming injustice around him. Etsuko's husband, Jiro, is a traditionalist, but has rapidly adapted to the emerging corporate Japan, and simply ignores the recent past. Etsuko's somewhat unbalanced friend, Sachiko, knows that her optimism is unrealistic and that she is jeopardizing her daughter's future, but she continues along a path almost ensured to end in disaster. As for Etsuko herself, her memories only speak obliquely to her views on the American imposition of dmocracy and women's rights. Ishiguro does not moralize, but lets us see post-war Japan through the eyes of his complex characters.

Ishiguro could easily have been a writer with only one great book. This haunting story, Ishiguro's first novel, was awarded a literary prize by the Royal Society of Literature. Ishiguro's life had some parallels with "A Pale View of Hills" as he himself was born in Nagasaki in 1954 and immigrated to England in 1960 and it is natural to expect that Ishiguro might have difficulty expanding beyond this "autobiographical" novel. And yet, his second book, "An Artist of the Floating World", was short listed for the prestigious Booker Prize. His third book, the highly successful "The Remains of the Day", captured the Booker Prize for its compelling portrait of an English butler.

Ishiguro is a remarkable writer. "A Pale View of Hills" is an extraordinary work of complexity, subtlety, and beauty.

While all the accolades from the other reviewers are the absolute truth, I'd like to add a personal note as to why I loved this novel.

I lived a number of years in Japan. I'm often asked what are Japanese people like (ie, their behaviour in society). From now on I'll simply advise people to read A Pale View of Hills. It beautifully (and economically) portrays Japanese people as they deal with social issues. As an added bonus, Ishiguro is very descriptive of post-war Nagasaki - one can almost feel the humidity and smell the odors.

If I might sin and compare this book to the popular Memoirs of a Geisha, A Pale View of Hills is much more understated and less fanciful.