The Deceptive Voice of Remorse: Kazuo Ishiguro’s “A Pale View of Hills” (Part 1)

Make no mistake about Kazuo Ishiguro, the author of uniquely restrained works such as The Remains of the Day and When We Were Orphans. His Japanese background suggests we should see him in the same light as the other Japanese literary colossus: Haruki Murakami. But Ishiguro, whose family emigrated to the UK when he was only five, is oceans away from Murakami. He does not deal with time warps, ghostly apparitions or talking cats. His fictional world is (on the surface) realistically rendered, populated by characters with emotions and motives that largely resemble our own.

Ishiguro’s award-winning debut A Pale View of Hills (1982) introduces to us an author whose chief concern is the inner landscape – that twilight region of the human mind where shadows threaten to erase reality. The novel’s protagonist Etsuko, a middle-aged Japanese woman residing in England, is having to cope with the aftermath of her elder daughter Keiko’s suicide. Her English-born second daughter, Niki, is spending time with her. It is during these sensitive hours that she begins to recount to the reader a peculiar personal experience in post-atomic Nagasaki. In these flashbacks the reader meets the mysterious Sachiko and Mariko, mother and daughter who were neighbours to Etsuko. Sachiko and Mariko were averse to socialising, but through chance, Etsuko managed to become their confidant, to her gratification. Mariko was in many ways an odd child, anti-social and uninvolved. Her mother was not a better example, keeping mostly to herself, unconcerned with her child’s whereabouts – even when it transpired that there was a child killer on the loose. Etsuko assumed the maternal role in time, but the child never quite opened herself up to her, remaining an enigma until the end.

Throughout the retelling of the Nagasaki episode, the reader’s suspicion is constantly tickled (and then fully aroused in the last quarter) by a host of incongruous, ambiguous facts. At the start of the novel, Etsuko makes the reader believe that the experience is one of significance, and yet as the story progresses, there is very little in it that can be classified as exceptional. Etsuko befriended a lonely widow with a strange child – that is the long and short of it. The water, however, is deeper than it appears. Questions begin to surface in the reader’s mind: Why was Sachiko so important to Etsuko (when their friendship had seemed superficial)? Why was Etsuko particularly concerned with Mariko, a wayward child who lived in a fantasy world (she claimed a woman was coming to get her) and did not seem to care much for her? When Sachiko announced that she was to leave for another country (America) with her child with the help of an American “friend,” the reader is struck by its similarity to Etsuko’s life. (At this point, Etsuko was supposedly pregnant with Keiko and living with her husband Jiro, who is often one-dimensionally described. It is also telling that Estuko never reveals how and why she eventually emigrated.) All this makes for a compelling Sherlock Holmes case, but the poor detective-reader is working with selective subjective facts that have been laid out in plain, shadow-less language, and the purely intuitive conclusion that Sachiko and Mariko’s story parallels that of Etsuko and Keiko’s. He would not be wrong to think that the truth must be in what has been left out.

This has a highly disturbing effect on the reader, who has been conditioned throughout his reading life to place his trust in the narrator. The narrator is the master of his tale. In this case, the narrator might just be an illusionist manipulating the reader’s emotional response as her (selected) version of the story plays out.

Things become a few shades more confusing in the last few pages, when Etsuko tells Niki that as a family they once visited the hills overlooking the harbour of Nagasaki (the hills in the novel’s title). When asked why it was a special day, she answers offhandedly:

“Oh, there was nothing special about it. I was just remembering it, that’s all. Keiko was happy that day. We rode on the cable-cars … No, there was nothing special about it. It’s just a happy memory, that’s all” (182).

This recollection startles the reader in many ways as he has already been told, in considerable detail, about a similar trip up the hills with Sachiko and Mariko. In that version of the story, there was no Keiko. There was also little indication that it was a “happy memory,” since it was an afternoon fraught with tension and secrecy – the result of their encounter with an American woman and her not so scrupulous Japanese friend. Mariko even misbehaved on that occasion.

“Memory can be an unreliable thing,” Etsuko often reiterates. “Often it is heavily coloured by the circumstances in which one remembers” (156). This becomes the leitmotif of the novel. The journey into Etsuko’s past is also a journey through her mind – a mind that, without the reader catching on, invents and confuses facts. When the reader does catch on, he is then taxed with the task of sifting the truths from the untruths. But where does he start?

Link to Part 2: http://ed-is-a-stranger-on-earth.blogspot.com/2013/01/the-deceptive-voice-of-remorse-kazuo.html

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