A Pale View of Hills

Etsuko’s Memory

Etsuko is a Japanese woman living in England, and the novel’s frame is her visit from her daughter Niki — an Anglicized young woman who has come to check on her mother after the suicide of Etsuko’s older daughter Keiko. Etsuko does not discuss Keiko’s death directly. She deflects, she changes the subject, she returns to a summer many years earlier in Nagasaki, when she was pregnant with Keiko, and when she befriended a woman named Sachiko.

Sachiko is a figure of uncertain history: she is a widow of vague circumstances who lives in a dilapidated cottage near the river with her young daughter Mariko, a disturbed child who claims to have seen something terrible and who refuses to engage normally with the world. Sachiko wants to go to America with an American boyfriend named Frank; she intends to take Mariko with her regardless of the girl’s evident distress. The summer Etsuko remembers is the summer of Sachiko’s waiting, and of Mariko’s increasing disturbance, and of Etsuko’s long riverside conversations with a woman who seems to have made choices Etsuko has not yet made.

The Nagasaki setting is carefully understated — the bomb is never mentioned directly, though its shadow falls across the whole. The postwar city is rebuilding; the older generation is adjusting to defeat and occupation and the dismantling of the world they had prepared for; the younger generation is preparing to inherit something new and undetermined. Into this atmosphere, Sachiko’s ambition to leave Japan for America carries a particular charge: she is going toward the country that destroyed the old world, and she believes that is where the future is.

Sachiko as Etsuko

The doubled-identity reading emerges gradually, through accumulating inconsistencies in Etsuko’s narration. There are moments when the boundary between the two women blurs — when Etsuko says “I” where the grammar requires “she,” when she attributes words to Sachiko that seem to belong to the conversation she is actually having with Mariko. Many readers conclude, on re-reading, that Sachiko is a projection: that the summer Etsuko describes was her own summer, that the conversation about leaving Japan for England (not America, but the logic is the same) was her own conversation with her own daughter about the disruption she was about to impose on Keiko’s life.

If this reading is correct — and Ishiguro has never confirmed or denied it — then the novel’s structure is an act of memory’s self-protection. Etsuko cannot face what she did, or what she failed to do, or the connection between her choices and her daughter’s eventual death. So she gives the unbearable narrative to someone else — Sachiko — and narrates it at one remove, as a thing she witnessed rather than participated in.

The guilt that Etsuko carries about Keiko is never named. It is present in every deflection, every subject change, every moment when the memory of Sachiko and Mariko seems to press against some knowledge that Etsuko will not speak. This is Ishiguro’s great technique — the repressed information that organizes the entire narrative while never appearing in it directly — present already, in his first novel, in fully realized form.

Ishiguro’s Debut

A Pale View of Hills was published in 1982, when Ishiguro was twenty-eight, and won the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize. It announced a major talent with such completeness that the subsequent career has sometimes seemed simply to be extending what was already fully present: the unreliable narrator, the repressed guilt, the gap between the told story and the true story, the Japanese-and-English duality of identity and perspective.

The novel’s relationship to The Remains of the Day (1989, Booker Prize) is instructive. Both novels are narrated by characters who are systematically not telling us the most important things about their lives. Stevens’s repression is professional and English; Etsuko’s is maternal and Japanese. Both novels are structured around a journey (Stevens driving across England, Etsuko’s journey through memory) during which what has been repressed becomes visible to the reader without ever being acknowledged by the narrator.

Reading A Pale View of Hills after the Nobel Prize (2017) and the full arc of Ishiguro’s career transforms it into something richer: a first novel that is also a key to everything that followed. For new Ishiguro readers, it is an ideal starting point — short enough to read quickly, subtle enough to reward re-reading, and foundational enough to illuminate Never Let Me Go, The Remains of the Day, and the novels between and after.

Our rating: 4.0/5 — Ishiguro’s debut is fully formed and fully haunting: a first novel in which all the mature techniques are already present, deployed with an understatement that rewards multiple readings.