A Pale View Of Hills

is the title of (Nobel Prize winner) Kazuo Ishiguro's first novel. I'm sure I've mentioned Ishiguro in a previous post and speculated on his success as a writer being a reflection of having to try and integrate world views with some mutually exclusive values as he was born in Japan but moved to Britain as a child. Having listened to some of his interviews, a constant theme in his works includes a conscious intent to illustrate a specific (generally undesirable) trait or combination of traits (one he typically can identify in himself - or in those around him) and intensify the impact of that trait in a central character. 

In A Pale View Of Hills, the main character is an older Japanese woman named Etsuko who married a British man she met in Japan after the war. She now lives in England and is visited by her daughter Niki shortly after the suicide of her elder daughter Keiko whose father was her first husband, a Japanese man named Jiro. The visit by the daughter prompts Etsuko to reminisce about her past, specifically about one summer involving an acquaintance she made after WWII. Through her reminiscing the reader can infer that Etsuko was born into an upper class cultured family and that she was being raised to be a violinist. Some tragedy befell the family resulting in Etsuko being raised by a family friend, perhaps a mentor, who was a well regarded intellectual/instructor before WWII. She married into the family and was pregnant with Keiko. In events not recalled, she was eventually widowed, ostensibly during WWII.

Her father-in-law (and presumably her own family) had held political views now denounced by the postwar culture, resulting in a considerable loss of prestige and standing in the community. It appears that the father-in-law, depicted as being an overbearing father to Etsuko's husband, never came to grips with this. After being widowed, Etsuko, in accordance with Japanese customs and traditions of the period, moved in with an uncle on her husband's side. This is conjecture as some of these details are actually ascribed to a remembered acquaintance named Sachiko who was also widowed with a daughter. Several motifs permeate Ishiguro's works, which include unreliable memories often exhibited through the use of what Ishiguro himself described as an ironic gap. This motif in particular can be inferred in Etsuko's recollections; we can't be sure if Sachiko is in fact Etsuko and Ishiguro himself remarked that his work was in some ways too subtle in his first novel. 

Ishiguro himself has described his first three novels A Pale View Of Hills, An Artist Of The Floating World, and what might be his best known work Remains Of The Day as having main characters being people of the generation that preceded his and how their lives were changed by WWII and how they dealt with the impact of those changes.  

If we have perceived Ishiguro's subtlety astutely, Etsuko was born into a cultured Japanese family of very good standing as it would have been regarded in pre-WWII Japan. She was a gifted violinist. The loss of her entire family led to her being adopted by a peer of her own father whom she still calls Ogata-san even after she has married his son. She gives up playing the violin. We see the behavior of giving lip service publicly to those in authority modeled in how her husband deals with his overbearing father. It would have been customary to have continued to live in the father-in-law's household after marriage, but her husband Jiro elected to move out. If we interpret Sachiko's words and thoughts to be those of Etsuko, Etsuko's future was "a few empty rooms" in the home of her uncle as a member of a disgraced family. Sachiko is depicted as a snob, driven to find a rich foreigner who will marry her and take her and her daughter away from Japan.

If we correctly attribute the thoughts, words, and actions of Sachiko and her daughter Mariko to Etsuko and Keiko, the needs of Keiko were made completely subsidiary to Etsuko's need to leave Japan. This is depicted rather indelibly in the account of how Sachiko drowns Mariko's adopted kittens while Mariko watches. Sachiko herself is remembered to have asked of Etsuko if she thinks that Sachiko is not aware of how terrible of a mother she is. This, other remembrances and interaction between Etsuko and Niki suggest that Etsuko is aware at some level that her words and behavior often contradict each other.     

Keiko never adapted to life in England. She eventually just stayed in her bedroom, venturing down to the kitchen daily to get her meals which she eats in her bedroom. She eventually moved out of the house and got a room in Manchester, where her body was eventually found after committing suicide. A brief moment of insight is suggested in Etsuko's description of the obituary, mentioning how Keiko was described merely as being 'fully Japanese' and that she had committed suicide, observing that Britons naturally associated the two ideas, perhaps because how kamikaze pilots were used in later stages of WWII. Etsuko is a sojourner in a strange land.   

Niki seems to exist to be a foil for Etsuko. She's observed her mother's behavior and is fully aware of the inconsistencies in Etsuko's words and behavior. She wants to be able to love and care for Etsuko, but finds it difficult to be around her. She's struggling to reconcile the 'sacrifices' Etsuko made to bring Keiko to England while Keiko was clearly unhappy being in England while trying to reassure her mother that these sacrifices were necessary. 

As sad as the account is of someone making extreme choices to achieve a goal of changing their circumstances, it's made even more tragic when Etsuko remarks that she is considering selling the house and moving into something smaller. This suggests that while Etsuko is constantly commenting on how much she enjoys her life, the reality is that it's still not enough, despite what it cost her to achieve it. 

I reread the work recently and was compelled to compose this, and I'm trying to figure out why. I now understand myself well enough to know that when a story/incident/account affects me in this way there's an emotional resonance, the source of which is still buried somewhere in my subconscious trying to work itself to the surface. 

There are some parallels; my sister was born in Hong Kong while I was born in the U.S. It occurs to me at this moment that Etsuko is a narcissist. My mother exhibited narcissistic behavior, though she clearly was never a snob. If anything, she was acutely aware of her own humble background and carried around a lot of shame which she bequeathed to me. I suppose that I see parallels in my own behavior and in those depicted in Niki; I was unhappy and completely unsure of what kind of goals to pursue except those that I believed were expected of me. I guess I need to let this to continue to percolate a while; I actually started this post at least three months ago. While starting another topic (which will follow shortly, hopefully) I saw that I'd never published this. So here goes.