A Pale View of Hills - Kazuo Ishiguro [Review]

It is the case with a lot of literary fiction that, if you are not entirely focused on the words on the page, you can find yourself reading but absorbing very little. You run the risk of finishing the book having read none of it. 

Kazuo Ishiguro’s books are interesting in this respect. If you’re not entirely focused, Ishiguro still gives you a small token of appreciation instead of leaving you with absolutely nothing. You may not be amazed by what you’ve just read, it may feel like nothing at all really happened, but you will understand the story on some level. If you do give it the respect it deserves, however, you will be rewarded with a piece of literature that will make you think for weeks after you’ve finished it. 

When I noticed the former was happening to me (either when I was nodding off on the commute back from work or lying in bed desperately trying to finish a chapter by cranking up the speed on the audiobook), I took a step back, re-engaged with the book when I was totally focused, and allowed myself to really absorb the book. I’m glad that I did. 

On the surface of it this is a story of a mother’s grief in the aftermath of her young daughter’s suicide, but how Ishiguro tells this story is much more interesting than that. 

It is told from the perspective of Etsuko, a Japanese woman now living in England. The chosen structure is a dual timeline; in the first we are with Etsuko and her youngest daughter Niki in England while she is visiting her mother for a few days, and the second timeline is harking back to when Etsuko was living in Nagasaki and pregnant with her first daughter Keiko.

Much of the book is concerned with Etsuko's time in Japan, and throughout she recounts the story of her friend Sachiko and her mousy daughter Mariko. It’s clear that Sachiko's story resembles her own; she is selfish, naive, maybe even a little gullible. Sachiko has been promised a future in the US that she thinks will solve all her problems, despite her daughter’s protests. We know this mirrors Etsuko’s story, who admits that she knew her daughter was unhappy with their eventual emigration to England. It's also entirely plausible that Ishiguro’s story shares some similarities too since he left Japan for UK at a young age.

Toward the end of the book there is a moment where Etsuko is talking to Mariko and her story merges somewhat with Sachiko’s, the pronouns used in the passage of text change, and you're unsure of who is speaking. If you're not careful you'll miss this. In the same scene Mariko sees some rope around Etsuko’s leg and is frightened and runs away. Earlier in the book Etsuko mentions a child who had been hanged from a tree in their village.

These are not mistakes, irrelevant pieces of information, or plot points that haven't been utilised. Ishiguro is demonstrating that Etsuko’s memory is unreliable and fragmented, and these flashbacks are a demonstration of her guilt. Her mind is receptive to things like the rope around her ankle and the story of the child hanged from the tree. When she says that Niki can’t know what happened in those last days in Japan, she is referring to her decision to leave Japan for the UK knowing it would not make Keiko happy, and quite possibly leading to her suicide. 

Ishiguro has a gift for writing intensely human characters, and this is evident in this debut novel. You may well finish this book feeling a little underwhelmed, but I am sure you will be thinking back to it long after you've put it down.