My recent reread of When We Were Orphans reminded me that my Kazuo Ishiguro collection wasn’t quite complete as I was missing his first novel, but while I was planning to get myself a copy at some point, ‘some point’ arrived rather sooner than expected. Was Etsuko strongly attached to her British husband, with whom she lived in England for some twenty years? She is very black and white about things, in the way people are while young and still experiencing life as a challenge to be conquered, rather than as an existence to make peace with. Certain telling details (easy to miss) suggest that Etsuko is lending Sachiko some of her own experiences and emotions, and by the end of the novel that seems obvious. I have Remains of the Day waiting on my shelf for me to pick up soon, but your review has me interested in A Pale View of the Hills, too!

Archives Archives Tags Art Biography Book List Book Review Books Book Tag Classical Music Classics Debut Novel Detective Fiction Fantasy Fiction French Literature Historical Fiction History Horror Italian Literature Japan Japanese Books Japanese Literature Literary Fiction Music Mystery Non-Fiction Novella Paintings Philip K. This pair is comprised of an older Etsuko and Niki, a daughter Etsuko has had by a second English-born husband. Firstly, the novel contrasts western and eastern mentalities as Etsuko and Sachiko, Etsuko’s strange woman neighbour, converse with American guests in Japan.Mariko was also unhappy at the thought of moving to America with her mother's American boyfriend yet we never find out if they actually make it to the States. Hanging is a theme throughout the book and on two occasions Etsuko claims that she had rope caught around her ankle.

A Pale View of Hills concerns Etsuko, a Japanese woman living in England, and the story of her past in Nagasaki. Most likely, the scene sums up for her in her own mind all the hideous reality of what she did to her own daughter thirty years ago.

She has nothing in common with her half sister, never gets along with her, does not even come to her funeral. The reader’s problem involves deciding to what extent Sachiko and Mariko really existed, and to what extent they are figments of Etsuko’s imagination, allowing her to retell obliquely episodes from the summer of 1952, when she was pregnant with Keiko—and to revisit painfully traumatic occurrences from her past. Even though A Pale View of Hills may be considered as this thought-provoking piece whose character, riddled with guilt, is unable to make peace with the past and subconsciously struggles, readers of the novel still have to impute too much meaning to the story, which is not there on the face of it.