A Pale View of Hills

Rating:
Summary: transitional esthetics
Review: "A Pale View of Hills" is the first novel of Kazuo Ishiguro, who is a Japanese transplant into modern Britain. It is a story of an elderly Japanese woman, reflecting back on 40 years of her life in post-war Japan prompted by the devastation in her immediate family. The style is elliptic, but precise and economical.

The tone of the novel is somber, simple, minimalist and sad, properly inheriting from the long traditional of Japanese literature of 20th century. The rhythm is Japanese as well - slow reflections on little details thrown together into the canvas of simple everyday life. There is however, an almost unnoticeable bridge to Ishiguro personal experience as an expatriate, and link to his future novels, like "Remains of the Day". Character of Etsuko is a character in transition and the end is left open and haunting. Great novel!!!

Rating:
Summary: Life's changing views
Review: A Pale View of Hills is a book you won't be able to put down. On the surface it is a story of a woman looking back at places, people and moments in her life and how they reflect the world in which she now lives. By the end of the novel, with its surprise twist, you realize that much more is being said. The war changed people forever in Japan, a whole culture was altered. Some were forced to change their lifestyles while others, our heroine, could not emotionally live in the same manner anymore. These changes affected not only her, but her eldest daughter as well. Now she must try and relate with another daughter who never experienced this other life. Melancholy and thought-provoking, this novel is one you will want your friends to read so that you may discuss various interpretations. While a sad story, it also affirms the importance of a supportive and sharing family. A Pale View of Hills is a true piece of literature, far and above the mediocre fare found on most best-seller lists today.

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Summary: A beautiful, haunting novel
Review: A Pale View of Hills is a gripping, powerful novel. It held me from the beginning, and I couldn't put it down. The story puts the reader right in postwar Nagasaki, and the twists and turns of the plot accurately portray what life was like at the time. The novel is haunting and fascinating.

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Summary: ÄSKS MORE QUESTIONS THAN IT ANSWERS
Review: A Pale View of Hills is a haunting and lyrical book that ends up asking more questions than it answers. And Kazuo Ishiguro is such a masterful storyteller that we can't help but wonder if this is not exactly as it should be. The story opens in modern day London, where Etsuko, a Japanese born women of middle-age is attempting to come to terms with the suicide of her elder daughter, Keiko. In doing so, she finds herself drawn to the past and a particular summer in Nagasaki when she embarked on a strange friendship with an enigmatic woman named Sachiko and Sachiko's young daughter, Mariko. Ishiguro's movements backwards and forwards in time are often abrupt and the reader can sometimes find himself slightly disoriented, but this still does not detract from the quiet beauty and lyricism of his prose. For Ishiguro is a master of lyrical prose, writing passages of unequalled beauty that authors like Anne Rice can only dream of. This is a most delicate novel, encompassing many themes, and one that ultimately becomes macabre--it may take more than one reading to absorb its full impact. It is definitely a small masterpiece, and the only reason I gave it four stars instead of five is because I believe Ishiguro should have revealed the truth of this extraordinary tale piece by piece, layer by layer, like peeling away the skin of an onion. As it is, the truth hits us in the face like a snowball out of nowhere and many readers may miss it entirely. A pity, for this is a work of extraodinary genius and beauty; one of the most moving books I have read in many years and one whose emotional impact will haunt me for many years to come. And I would not have expected less from a writer as talented as Kazuo Ishiguro.

Rating:
Summary: It's Okay...
Review: A Pale View of Hills is definitely written well. The figurative language, narrative technique, etc. all add up to a flawless structure in which a mother struggles to deal with her daughter's suicide. The memory blurs are subtle and surprising. However, I thought the plot was lacking in some areas. Many of the Sachiko-Mariko scenes were repetitive, and the plot seemed to drag in some areas. Furthermore, I found it annoying that Etsuko never gave the immediate cause for her immigration to Britain and never thoroughly described her English husband. More details on Keiko's life in Britain would have been appreciated also. If you want study the structure of the English language, than I suggest this book, but if you like a plot with a bit more action, this is not the book for you.

Rating:
Summary: Will leave you thinking for weeks afterward
Review: A Pale View of Hills is written as a memoir from the point of view of a Japanese expatriate living in Britain, a woman named Etsuko whose oldest daughter recently has committed suicide. Ostensibly, one would think the memoir, as Etsuko thinks back on her earlier years in post-war Nagasaki, would provide an explanation for her daughter's suicide, but this explanation--and therefore the motivation for the memoir--are not readily apparent.

In fact, Ishiguro does not go out of his way in this book to make anything readily apparent. In some ways, this is almost assuredly his writing style, and, in others, it helps the reader to truly feel that one is residing inside Etsuko's mind, privy to her thoughts and experiences without the necessity of direct explanations, which would situate the reader firmly on the outside of Etsuko's experiences, looking in.

There is a simplicity and restraint in both narrative and in conversation, which may feel idle and boring to some perhaps, but which to me, at least (based upon what little I know on the subject), came across as evocative of Japanese culture. Ishiguro manages to capture the entire mood of post-war Japan in a series of seemingly idle conversations between Etsuko, her husband, and her father-in-law: the contrast between old ways and new ways, relations between generations and genders within families and in society at large, without coming down firmly on either side of any of these matters and conveying an overwhelmingly guideless, lost feeling as a result.

It is no coincidence that Ishiguro chooses to place perhaps the most lost character in the story, a woman named Sachiko, and her effectively motherless daughter, Mariko, in "the one wooden cottage spared the devastation of the bomb and the government's bulldozers." Sachiko does not want to cling to the past represented by her old cottage, nor is she able, despite her efforts, to establish a future in the new world represented so nearby by tall, modern, concrete flats. Again, this contrast between old and new, and people's lost, wandering paths between the two, highlights the character of Japanese culture at the time.

There is not much of scenery, particularly in Etsuko's remembrance of Japan. We are, however, talking about post-war Nagasaki, and this lack of scenery may be seen as reflective of the characters' willingness to ignore their surroundings and the pain their surroundings represented.

I find it remarkable that every family in the story lost at least one loved one in the devastation of the atomic bomb, but the people of Nagasaki blame only some aspects, at least, of the old ways of Japanese culture, and there seems to be no resentment toward the Americans. I find this remarkable to this day in the real world, in fact, and we have had a recent example of Japanese society's continuing unwillingness to pursue any course of action leaning toward the old ways in the country's heated debate over sending troops to Iraq (although much of the debate, in fairness, centered upon the logic behind the intervention in Iraq, generally). Again, I think this shows Ishiguro's success in capturing post-war Japanese culture so convincingly.

You reach the end of this portrait of post-war Japanese culture, suddenly finding that you're not sure what has happened. It leaves you trying to piece together a coherent explanation days or weeks later, mentally reconstructing bits of the story and testing them against your theories. This isn't annoying, for some reason, as you might think it would be; rather, it allows events that may not have seemed important at the time to take on relevance as you put your theories forward. It wasn't until I had begun to put my various theories forward, for example, that the entire motivation for Etsuko's memoir became apparent.

I recommend A Pale View of Hills, and I will be tracking down more of Ishiguro's works, probably The Remains of the Day next, as that would appear to be his most famous.

Rating:
Summary: View of memory's tricks
Review: A quote from The New York Times book Review on the back cover characterizes this book as elliptical, and it certainly is that, maybe a bit overly so. At the end, I began to wonder if Sachiko and Mariko were actually imaginary characters that allowed Etsuko to think about the past, but that doesn't really work. Where would Mrs. Fujiwara fit in? It seems that Etsuko has the events that took place during her friendship with Sachiko mixed up in her memory with events that occurred later when she was deciding to leave Nagasaki. When she tells the child on the bridge that if she doesn't like it over there, they can always come back, she is remembering a conversation she had with Keiko, even though she had been thinking about Mariko up until that point. Memory does work like that sometimes.

Since Etsuko doesn't like to dwell on the events that preceded her arrival in London, thinking about Sachiko gives her a way of seeing them from a safe distance. I would have liked a few more clues, however, about how a woman like Etsuko ever extricated herself from a marriage to a man like Jiro. I thought Niki's assumption that Etsuko would not have wanted Ogata-San in the household nicely demonstrated the impossibility of explaining the way things were supposed to have been before the war, and how terrible it was for Etsuko to find herself alone with Jiro.

The point is that memory only provides a pale view. The past is always going to be a fiction. It is a worthwhile examination of this problem

Rating:
Summary: A Subtle Portrait Painted by Genius. Extraordinary.
Review: Etsuko's older daughter has recently committed suicide. Living alone in England, Etsuko recalls her encounter with an unusual woman, Sachiko, and her young daughter, Mariko, in Nagasaki a few years after Japan's defeat. Her memories of this summer long ago appeared to have little significance to the present, but gradually the story unravels into two strands, a concrete retelling of distant events and a more oblique revelation about Etusko herself. Ishiguro tantalizes the reader with hints and intimations and vague indications.

I realized that Ishiguro is a master of subtlety as I have read some of his other novels, but nonetheless I was unprepared for the obscure ending. What had I just learned? Was this a confused memory or had I glimpsed something macabre? Some rereading helped me resolve my confusion, but I leave the ending for your speculations.

In "A Pale View of Hills" Kazuo Ishiguro tells a story, develops convincing characters, and paints a portrait of post-war Japan. Ogata-San, Etsuko's amicable father-in-law, is publicly criticized for teaching patriotism during his long career as a school master. He quietly struggles with the seeming injustice around him. Etsuko's husband, Jiro, is a traditionalist, but has rapidly adapted to the emerging corporate Japan, and simply ignores the recent past. Etsuko's somewhat unbalanced friend, Sachiko, knows that her optimism is unrealistic and that she is jeopardizing her daughter's future, but she continues along a path almost ensured to end in disaster. As for Etsuko herself, her memories only speak obliquely to her views on the American imposition of dmocracy and women's rights. Ishiguro does not moralize, but lets us see post-war Japan through the eyes of his complex characters.

Ishiguro could easily have been a writer with only one great book. This haunting story, Ishiguro's first novel, was awarded a literary prize by the Royal Society of Literature. Ishiguro's life had some parallels with "A Pale View of Hills" as he himself was born in Nagasaki in 1954 and immigrated to England in 1960 and it is natural to expect that Ishiguro might have difficulty expanding beyond this "autobiographical" novel. And yet, his second book, "An Artist of the Floating World", was short listed for the prestigious Booker Prize. His third book, the highly successful "The Remains of the Day", captured the Booker Prize for its compelling portrait of an English butler.

Ishiguro is a remarkable writer. "A Pale View of Hills" is an extraordinary work of complexity, subtlety, and beauty.

Rating:
Summary: oversubtle
Review: Etsuko, the narrator of A Pale View of Hills, is a native of Nagasaki, who left her Japanese husband and Japan for England and an English husband. In the story she must come to grips with the suicide of her daughter, Keiko, by the first marriage. She does so by recalling the Summer in Nagasaki when she was pregnant with Keiko, and her own friendship there with Sachiko, who, having lost her husband and a son (in the bombing ?), insists on moving forward optimistically, deluding herself into believing that an American named Frank will take her away to a new life in the States.

The tension that emerges from the narrative comes from the several different strategies that characters adopt : there's Sachiko's almost absurd forward-looking optimism; there's the backward-looking nostalgia of Etsuko's father-in-law, which excuses much of the cultural pathology which led to Japan's annihilation in WWII; and there's the stasis of her husband, who seems unable to move forward or to deal with the past. From Etsuko's life choices it is obvious that she eventually chose Sachiko's path, but Keiko's suicide suggests the problematic nature of Etsuko's decision to choose a Western life. Etsuko's reminiscences of life in Japan are generally favorable, in particular the visual portrait of Japan is all done in dreamy pastels, the "pale view" of the title. And in the novel's closing pages, as Etsuko's younger daughter disparages the submissive role of women in Japan, Etsuko responds that :

It's not a bad thing at all, the old Japanese way.

This suggests that she may regret the decisions that she has made, but the story ends with a surprising revelation about the relationships of the various characters and with Etsuko, despite her own regrets, seeming to at least accept the enthusiasm with which her daughter Nicki embraces the West's cultural freedom.

Ishiguro's first novel is similar in narrative style to the much better known Remains of the Day. Both stories are told by somewhat unreliable narrators, who are certainly giving us an incomplete version of events, though we don't know whether they are lying to themselves at the same time. Remains of the Day benefits greatly from two elements that give it a dramatic tension which is sadly lacking here. First, there's the rise of Nazi Germany in the background, which we know will eventually make Lord Darlington's efforts to keep England out of the War seem somehow tainted. Second, there's the almost unbearable non-courtship/courtship between Mr. Stevens and Miss Kenton. In Pale View, we'd sort of like to understand the suicide, but it's never an imperative.

In light of the fact that Kazuo Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki in 1954, and that his family emigrated to England when he was six, it is impossible to avoid viewing this book as at least something of a self-portrait. It is certainly easy to understand that he would feel himself to be an outsider to both his native and his adopted cultures, and as a conservative, I'd be the last one to dismiss either someone's feelings of nostalgia for a lost past or their intuition that the freedom to be found in the West often comes at the price of a kind of cultural atomization, but the Japan that he describes here doesn't seem to bear much relation to the real nation. The "pale view" is perhaps too filtered to take into account exactly the kind of racist, militarist, static society that Japan had developed into by the time of WWII, and how little it has done in the ensuing years to reinvigorate itself.

Ishiguro himself has said :

In some ways I think that nostalgia can be quite a positive emotion. It does allow us to picture a better world. It's kind of an emotional sister of idealism.

That's quite true, but a nostalgia which is uninformed by reality is just as dangerous as idealism, which by definition is always a stranger to reality. For all the faults of modern Britain, and they are legion, it has to be better than the Japan of the 1940's.

The novel is interesting chiefly for the clues it reveals about Ishiguro's psychology and for the patterns it establishes for his subsequent writing. But it is entirely too subtle and languidly paced to hold the reader's interest (this unsubtle reader's anyway), and the past it longs for is too imperfect for us to easily share in the longing.

GRADE : C

Rating:
Summary: Mean, moody, magnificent
Review: I actually loved this book more than Remains of the Day, even though the latter is obviously a "better" book...from the image of the trolly car hill on the day trip to Etsuko's relationship with her father-in-law, this book reads like the Earth's plates moving slowly, like shadowy stingrays, beneath your feet.