The Deceptive Voice of Remorse: Kazuo Ishiguro’s “A Pale View of Hills” (Part 2)

Link to Part 1: http://ed-is-a-stranger-on-earth.blogspot.nl/2013/01/the-deceptive-voice-of-remorse-kazuos.html 

In the climax of the novel when Sachiko drowned Mariko’s kittens in a river, Etsuko tried to comfort the child on the riverbank. Mariko was reluctant to move to America with her mother and “Frank” (whom the reader never met). During her attempt to console Mariko, she utters the following puzzling words: “If you don’t like it over there, we can always come back” (173, italics mine). This may not sound out of the ordinary at first, but she goes on when Mariko looks at her “questioningly”: “If you don’t like it over there, we’ll come straight back. But we have to try it and see if we like it there. I’m sure we will” (173). Her language here indicates she has assumed Sachiko’s role, speaking and acting as the child’s mother. In the following chapter, Etsuko “confesses” to Niki that perhaps Keiko’s suicide by hanging was her fault: “But you see, Niki, I knew all along. I knew all along she wouldn’t be happy over here. But I decided to bring her just the same” (176). Substitute Mariko for Keiko, Sachiko for Etsuko, America for England, you have (more or less) a complete puzzle.

But what of the piece of rope that is mentioned twice in a deliberately ambiguous context? In Chapter 6, it is introduced for the first time when Mariko speaks to Etsuko on a riverbank about the possibility of her mother drowning her kittens:

“Why have you got that?”

“I told you, it’s nothing. It just caught on to my foot.” I took step closer. “Why are you doing that, Mariko?”

“Doing what?”

“You were making a strange face just now.”

“I wasn’t making a strange face. Why have you got the rope?”

“You were making a strange face. It was a very strange face.”

“Why have you got the rope?”

I watched her for a moment. Signs of fear were appearing on face. (84)

Mariko is evidently afraid of something (or someone) here, but the reader presumes at this early stage that the fear is related to the “strange woman” who comes for her now and then. When the piece of rope is mentioned for the second time, in the denouement of the novel, the reader is suddenly alerted to something a little more sinister. The setting the second time around is exactly the same, except now Sachiko has drowned the kittens, and there is no mention of Etsuko holding a piece of rope until the child again comments on it – after Etsuko’s promise that “they” will return to Japan if “they” do not like America.

Etsuko’s memories are unstable; the reader has been “duped” into believing that they are straightforward flashbacks. The piece of rope, however, is not a randomly chosen object. In one of the present-day England episodes, Etsuko mentions a dream she has had about a girl on a swing (Niki suggests the girl is Keiko), but towards the end of the conversation, she says, “The little girl isn’t on a swing at all. It seemed like that at first. But it’s not a swing she’s on” (96). The girl is not “on a swing” because she is most probably hanging by the neck – the way Keiko died. The idea of Etsuko being greatly troubled by her daughter’s suicide is introduced early on:

I have found myself continually bringing to mind that picture – of my daughter hanging in her room for days on end. The horror of that image has never diminished, but it has long since ceased to be a morbid matter; as with a wound on one’s own body, it is possible to develop an intimacy with the most disturbing of things. (54)

Unbeknownst to the reader, this is exactly what Etsuko has done: she has “developed an intimacy” with the memory of her daughter’s death. The piece of rope that keeps appearing in the flashbacks, then, has the function of tying Mariko and Keiko together. They are both withdrawn, psychologically unstable characters who have had to emigrate to an alien culture against their will. If the reader chose to interpret the characters this way, he would then have to face the very possible fact that Etsuko has mentally “divorced” herself from her story, de-personalising it through another character (Sachiko) in another setting (post-war Nagasaki).

A Pale View of Hills is a flawed debut due to some rough patches in its plotting, but this is not to say it is not an effective dissection of grief, guilt, and remorse. The human psyche is capable of anything in its attempt to eliminate pain.

Ishiguro, Kazuo. A Pale View of Hills. 1982. Reprint. London: Faber & Faber, 2009. Print.