A Pale View of Hills

Having read 4 or 5 other Ishiguro books, and with the goal of reading all his novels, I just finished reading this one last night. This story of a woman, her life, her families, and her homes is disturbing and mysterious on many levels. Unlike his later books, Ishiguro does not cleanly unveil a single story here. Rather he raises the themes of the disintegration of social fabric after the Nagasaki bombing, the transformation of Japanese culture to a more western attitude, mother-daughter relations, and social climbing through a series of incidents that combine the actual story with distortions and failures in memory of the narrator Etsuko/Sachiko. The power of the book is in the stark unfairness of Etsuko's actions, their inevitability, and that they probably happened a hundredfold in Japan in the 40s and 50s. Personally, I found the obscureness of the underlying plot a bit thick. Even reviewing 5 or 6 commentaries on the book online this morning, I didn't get to the bottom of it, and can see some and perhaps all of the commentators I found are even more confused. Probably Ishiguro knew he was leaving ambiguity and loose ends, in fact in one interview he said as much. For example, I suspect a sinister interpretation of the "rope" Mariko referred to 2 or 3 times, but found little clarity online. But the power of the book is clear, this is my favorite of Ishiguro's books.

It is impossible not to finish *Pale View of the Hills* with a sense of bewilderment. The ending is very enigmatic and inconclusive, which some readers have judged as a sign of inexperience of a first novel. Although quite surprising, it does feel like a M. Night Shyamalan's Sixth-Sense plot twist--something explicitly and almost artificially placed at the end of the story to thrill audiences as it brings a totally new light (or haze, if you will), almost a cliché that Ishiguro wisely decided not use in other novels (but Shyamalan unwisely just can't give up.) So, yes, there is something loose in the structure of <i>PVH</i> that feels inexperienced, but still, the whole novel is far from an unpleasant journey, because it already brings many of the qualities of Ishiguro's later novels. And this one is quite spooky. Japan is famous for its 'obake' ghost stories, tales about creepy ghosts of women with long, black hair (think of *The Ring*). It is interesting to research on the term right now and learn from Wiki that, literally, 'obake' means *a thing that changes*, referring to a state of transformation or shape-shifting. I guess Ishiguro didn't have this idea in mind when he wrote *PVH*. There is no explicitly supernatural element in the story and, structurally, what runs underneath the main plot of the characters is much more a detective story about a sequence of Bolaño-like misterious crimes than anything else. However, and I can't explain exactly why, this novel felt to me as creepy as one of those obake stories because of some rather disturbing scenes and details, and the fact that things change so much at the end makes it quite consistent with the concept of 'obake', in a contemporary format. Nagasaki also comes to the story with this purpose, as I read it. Of course it was quite natural that Ishiguro would choose a familiar environment of his ancestry as subject of his first novel, but being a city destroyed by a nuclear bomb and then fully reconstructed, Nagasaki seemed to me charged with a lot of symbolic value--particularly when put into the context of lives that were also, in different perspectives, destroyed and wrecked, and then rebuilt in a way to hide all scars as if nothing ever happened. That is why the image of the Nagasaki harbor, seen from the top of the Inasa Mountain in the beginning of Part 2, was a very strong image to me. Inasa's is also the pale view of the hills that Etsuko saw from the window of her apartment in Nagasaki, making constant change of perspective a central symbol of the book. Well into the novel, Etsuko the narrator, says: "Memory, I realize, can be an unreliable thing; often it is heavily coloured by the circumstances in which one remembers, and no doubt this applies to certain of the recollections I have gathered here." Ishiguro is famous for his unreliable narrators and his ability to hide and surgically reveal to his reader what he is really talking about (something he does extremely well in *Never Let Me Go*) and in *PVH* I could sense the first, still somewhat reluctant steps of his in that direction. The fact that people in Japan are known for their reticence, always not externally declaring/revealing what they are really feeling (out of a mix of introspection, decorum and a strict social code) is also very instrumental for Ishiguro to build his dualities and subtleties in this novels, something (I guess) he would then transcribe to the formalities of the English society in the 1930s in *The Remains of the Day*. I began ranking *PHV* with a 3-star to distinguish it from *Never Let Me Go*, imho, still one of his best books, but as all elements and nuances of the story settled in my mind I noticed how I liked it and how it was appealing, however spooky, and still leaving interesting ideas to think about.

Hey, most of us enjoyed Ishiguro's first novel but found it quite perplexing. In particular, the short section near the end of chapter ten in which Etsuko finds the daughter of her friend Sachico but suddenly starts speaking to her as though she were own first daughter Keiko. This seems awfully strange and particularly so since she is still pregnant with her daughter at this time. A lot of effort has been spent by reviewers on this site trying to analyze hidden meanings in this and other strange portions of the story. Why not listen instead to Ishiguro himself in an article in the Spring, 2008 issue of The Paris Review written by the interviewer Susannah Hunnewell. In response to questions from Susannah, Ishiguro gave the following responses concerning A Pale View of Hills. I'm very fond of it, but I do think it's too baffling. The ending is almost like a puzzle. I see nothing artistically to be gained by puzzling people to that extent. That was just inexperience--misjudging what is too obvious and what is subtle. Even at the time the ending felt unsatisfactory. I thought this was an interesting way to narrate a novel: to have somebody who finds it too painful or awkward to talk about his own life appropriate someone else's story to tell his own. I'd spent a lot of time working with homeless people, listening to people's stories about how they'd got to this place, and I'd gotten very sensitive to the fact that they weren't telling those stories in a straightforward way. I hoped readers would start to realize that her story is being told through the story of her friend. But because I didn't know how to create the texture of memory, I had to resort to something quite gimmicky at the end, where a scene back in Japan blurs into a scene that obviously took place much more recently. Even now, when I do an event to talk about my latest book, somebody asks, Were those two women the same woman? What happens at the end on the bridge when "you" switches to "we"? So give it up readers. Just enjoy the book but don't try to analyze something never visualized by the author himself. As Ishiguro himself says, he resorted to "something quite gimmicky at the end".

It’s a worthwhile novel that reads very easily and can seem anticlimactic until one realizes the climax and let those shivers run down the spine for a while.

An excellent book worth every page! The writer takes you to deep Japan, where a woman tries to keep her marriage and is curious what is happening on the other side of the river.. A real travel with a smooth style that goes crescendo in emotions until the end

Si tratta di un romanzo che racconta velatamente il Giappone e il cambiamento impresso nella sua cultura dall’uso della bomba atomica nella seconda guerra mondiale, lo sprezzo dei vecchi per gli usi e i costumi americani (inconcepibile che la moglie voti un partito diverso da quello del marito), lo sradicamento dal Giappone e il radicamento in Inghilterra con la figlia che si sente inglese e chiede quasi con compassione alla madre se pensa ancora al Giappone. Scritto in modo accattivante ma molto velato nella trama e misterioso nel racconto dei fatti.

Kurgu ve hikayesi biraz zayıf bir kitap.

This is a splendid portrayal of social as well as attitudinal changes taking place in Japan post dropping of atom bomb. There was a maddening rush for everything or everyone American. The young generation did not like sentimentality towards parents, uncles, relations, children et al; not the least towards animals! Even towards own children like in case of Sachiko and her daughter Marico: whereas the latter is sentimental and extremely kind towards all the creatures, her mother is an over-ambitious if foolish lady who cannot discern the difference between a true well-wisher and a depraved person. Etsuko San indeed represents a true Japanese conventional woman who is kind, considerate, helpful and duly cautious as well; so does her father-in-law, Ogata-San. But young Jiro, the son of Ogata San and husband of Etsuko, is just the opposite: a self-centred person for whom office work and career define the success. He represents modern youth who pursue their office Career at the cost of their family life and parental bonds. New generation is over-obsessed with sensual life yet does not like to have marital bonds: they want both- freedom and sensual pleasures, forgetful of the fact that in the end, they would find themselves deserted by one and all, likewise. A clarion call for the gennext! Marvellous!