Either way, Etsuko’s identification with Sachiko is evident because the two women and their respective daughters share many similarities. Both women decide (have decided) to leave Japan for a western country, taking their daughters with them, hoping that this decision will be best for their daughters, but, probably knowing in their hearts that it will not be. In the end, Etsuko’s daughter Keiko never managed to become happy in the UK and committed suicide. Thus, to probably redeem herself in her own mind, Etsuko openly disapproves of Sachiko’s thoughtless care of her daughter Mariko. Like her future daughter Keiko, Mariko is a very troubled child and often runs away, with Sachiko hardly being concerned about her. In fact, Etsuko seems more concerned about Mariko’s wellbeing than her own mother. Relying on the theory of dissociation, it becomes convenient for Etsuko to blame another person for what has happened, and now show compassion for the little girl of Sachiko. In real life, she may never have done that regarding her own daughter. Several years later, Etsuko fell in love in a man from England. She proved to have enough courage to leave both her homeland and her past behind, starting everything anew. When she gave birth to her second daughter, she persuaded her husband not to give a child a Japanese name. Niki seemed to please them both.

Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami agrees that Ishiguro is admired and widely read in Japan. "Partly it's because they are great books, but also because we find a particular kind of sincere and tender quality in his fiction, which happens to be familiar and natural to us." That said, Murakami doesn't care if Ishiguro is Japanese, English, "or even a Martian author", noting that his depiction of Japanese people and scenery is "slightly different" from the reality, while his "very English" setting of The Remains of the Day is familiar to Japanese readers. "In other words, the place could be anywhere, the character could be anybody and the time could be any time. Everything supposed to be real could be unreal, and vice versa. It is a sensation I love and I only receive it when I read his books." I'm sure if you haven't read the book, all this sounds a bit confusing, and you might be wondering what the deal is anyway, but from a narrative theory point of view, the ability of such a small thing - a few pronouns - to throw the entire preceeding narrative into doubt is pretty impressive. But you see, Niki, I always did know. I always knew that she wouldn’t be happy here. And still I decided to take her with me.” This book was so creepy and confusing that I opted to read it again. Not just because it is short, but because it is well written and it weaves a very intriguing mystery. The Pale View of Hills is a very implicit book, and the conclusions I took from it may not even be conclusions at all. It’s a story that made me think, and it even made me re-read it when I finished. And that’s the problem: the cleverness of this is not revealed until the very end. There are three paragraphs in the penultimate chapter that (perhaps) change the entire story.Kazuo Ishiguro’s debut novel is quite a puzzle. In the story, we first meet Etsuko, a middle-aged woman from Japan who is now residing in the English countryside, while her younger daughter Niki lives in London. As Niki comes from London to visit her mother, Etsuko starts to reminisce about her previous life in Nagasaki, Japan. We eventually start to guess that Etsuko’s memory of the suicide of her older daughter Keiko in England is somehow linked to Etsuko’s recollections of her friendship with a strange woman Sachiko and her daughter Mariko at the time that she lived in Nagasaki. This short novel is an easy and, at times, intriguing read, with Ishiguro sometimes making insightful points about Japanese culture and the effect of the passage of time on his characters. However, it seems that this subtle novel also asks too much from its reader. If there was a mystery somewhere in the novel’s midst, then it was not sufficiently elaborated upon or given sufficient space to breathe for the reader to really care; and, if there was no real mystery, then the point of the novel is partly lost. Ishiguro seems to have wrapped his story in too many layers of subtlety, thereby forcing his readers to make a giant leap forward in terms of imagination so that they finally decide to start unwrapping the unwrappable. It is unlikely that there will be a satisfactory meaning or explanation found by the novel’s end. Besides, while the reader may want to delve into possible interpretations of what he or she has just read, there is also the possibility that the interest will be lost half-way through. I remember in the last year reading a novel in which there was an unreliable narrator. And I asked my GR friends if they knew of any other examples, and at least one friend cited this book. Funny just as recent as last week I read another book with an unreliable narrator, Dr. Faraday, in ‘The Little Stranger’ by Sarah Waters. She took her elder daughter, Keiko, to England to live with her and the new husband. When Etsuko and her new husband have a daughter, Etsuko wants to call her something "modern" and her husband wants an Eastern-sounding name, so they compromise with the name "Niki," which seems to Etsuko to be perfectly British, but sounds to her husband at least slightly Japanese. ... But you see, Niki, I knew all along she wouldn’t be happy over here. But I decided to bring her just the same”.

What will stay with me from this slim book is the genuine moments of chilling, ghostly narrative inserted, quite cleverly, into an otherwise subdued and subtle story. In his own way Ishiguro manages to convey the ongoing generational trauma of war better than many novels that expressly set out to do so. This disconcerted feeling was inextricably linked to every scene Mariko was in. She is the most unnerving child character I have come across in some time and a cipher for post-war Japan in some ways. I love an unreliable narrator. The second time I read the book, I did find some clues. In telling her story, Etsuko remarks that her memory is “hazy” regarding her time in Japan. She also says toward the end of the book that “Memory can be unreliable…heavily coloured by circumstances…no doubt this applies…here.” The main character of the novel A Pale View of Hills, Etsuko is middle-aged woman from Japan, now living in the English countryside. The novel concerns her daughter Niki (the child of Etsuko’s marriage with Englishman) and her late daughter Keiko (the child of Etsuko’s first marriage with Japanese businessman), who committed suicide. The story of a young woman named Sachiko and her daughter Mariko plays a crucial role in the novel. The present events and memory of the past (while Etsuko lived in Japan) create a tangled web of regret and guilt.Kasuo Ishiguro bilindiği üzere Japon kökenli olmasına rağmen; İngilizce yazan, İngiltere'de yaşayan ve İngiliz vatandaşı olarak hayatını sürdüren bir yazar. Haliyle bu durumda aslında İngiliz Edebiyatı yapması beklenebilir. Ancak İngiltere'nin, malum tarihi politikalarından dolayı, eskiden beri sahip olduğu çok İngiliz olmayan gayrikökenli yazarları mevcut. Bu yazarlarda ilginç bir şekilde, İngiltere'de başarılı olma yolunun, farklılığını kullanmak bundan beslenmek olduğunu düşünüyor sanırım. Bu çerçevede Kasuo Ishiguro'nun eline aldığı konu ve işleme şekli bir Japon yazarınkinden çok farklı değil. Niki’s visit to Etsuko is intertwined with Etsuko’s reminiscence of her life in Japan. While in Nagasaki, Etsuko meets Sachiko and her daughter, who live in the unelectrified cottage near the Etsuko’s apartment. The reader learns that Sachiko’s husband has died in the World War II. Sachiko is proud that she comes from a distinguished family, even though the distinguishedness can be only seen in her old and delicate teapot. Much of Ishiguro's novel is a gaze into the hills - the past, postwar Japan, after the bombing of Nagasaki, a time when our narrator (who is now an older woman living in England) is pregnant with her first child. The time is pivotal for the narrator. She's married to her first husband, and her father in law is visiting. She befriends a strange woman, Sachiko, and her equally strange and disturbed daughter, Mariko. Sachiko, a single mother, is in difficult circumstances financially, and is trying to find a way out of Japan, through a relationship with an American soldier who her daughter hates. This supports the theory that they are not the same person at different points in that person’s life, but that there are parallels between the two people’s stories, parallels so strong that Etsuko can use Sachikos story to tell her own. In doing so, Etsuko ends up mixing up the two stories, which is why we have some of her memories muddled or combined with others. But they are still two different women with their own lives and stories. Like mentioned above, the inconsistencies are too many and too irreconcilable for them to be the same person. For instance, Mariko was clearly born before the war, while Etsukos first pregnancy with Keiko was years after the war. Likewise Sachikos husband died during the war, but Jiro and Etsuko separated much later and Jiro did not die, but they separated due to unnamed irreconcilable differences. Nu conteaza varsta unui om, conteaza doar experientele prin care a trecut. Unii oameni pot sa ajunga la 100 de ani si sa nu aiba nici un fel de experienta."

Of course there are still mysteries, questions that have not been clearly answered. Why is Etsuko in England instead of America, for example? I find it possible that Frank never came through and just abandoned her after he made it home. However, as desperate as Sachiko was to leave Japan, it wouldn't be unthinkable for her to have found another foreigner. Etsuko, in the present, described her late husband as someone idealistic, who believed that Keiko would be happy in England. That definitely does not sound like Frank, who Satchiko described as being afraid of the responsibility her daughter represented. So it's definitely possible that Frank deserted her, and that she simply was able to find another man, who later married her and became Niki's father. When you look out and can't see clearly, it's disorienting. By day, the sun burns red through the haze. Nighttime doesn't settle into darkness. It's eerie. The world isn't as it should be. Mysterious. Whatever is beautiful is hidden. Almost forgotten.

For instance: we don't know anything about Sachiko's pregnancy with Mariko, nor do we know anything about the man she married other than that he was from a prominent family, and that he forbade her to study English. However, we have a very detailed account of Etsuko's home life at the time of her pregnancy. Wouldn't Jiro be the type of man who would certainly forbid his wife to partake in such an activity? Holy shit what an ending and what a shift in perspective is implied by only a few paragraphs! I really needed to wrap my head around this and felt quite uncomfortable in my bed after finishing this book. While at the Cyrenians, Ishiguro met Lorna MacDougall, a social worker who later trained foster parents. They married in 1986 and have a daughter, Naomi, who is 13 this year. Ishiguro says a lot of his values were formed in those years. "I still have a suspicion of charity and think the state has a role to play in many areas. And although for most of the years since I have been a rather privileged writer, I identify more closely than perhaps I should with those social workers. Had I not become a writer that would have been me. Lots of our friends are still in that world and I do feel part of that generation of people who were rather idealistic in the 70s and became disillusioned in the 80s. Not just about social services issues, but the world." He says the fact that great writers are often revered and rewarded with prizes in old age only masks the reality that time is running out. "There was this idea, which felt almost like a conspiracy, that a writer in his 30s was early in a writing life. But I realised you should think more in terms of the length and timing of a footballer's career. Your best chance of producing a decent book comes somewhere between 30 and 45 and I suddenly saw my life as a finite number of books." The story starts with Etsuko, a Japanese woman living in England, remembering her life in Japan before and during the pregnancy of her first child. A small part of the book is set in present day England when her younger daughter is around 20yrs old, the rest of the story remembers a different life in Japan, during the 1950s, when life was still very much affected by the bombing of Nagasaki.

But such things are long in the past now and I have no wish to ponder them yet again. My motives for leaving Japan were justifiable, and I know I always kept Keiko’s interest very much at heart. Another disturbing scene is when Etsuko/Sachiko drowns Keiko/Mariko’s only playmates – her beloved kittens. I believe that this is another metaphor for the damage done to Keiko/Mariko by her mother moving them away from Japan – solving a problem in a selfish, lazy way under the guise of doing what’s best for Keiko/Mariko. Etsuko later tells Niki, “nothing you learn at that age is totally lost”.

Summary

I found the slice of life from this era and country fascinating enough in itself but soon began to suspect something else was going on. I loved the conclusion but it is subtle and some readers didn't enjoy the lose ends or the ambiguity of what actually happened. There is also a key scene at the end of the book when the narrator shifts from neighbor to mother of Mariko mid-paragraph. Did the burden of remembering fall to my own generation? We hadn't experienced the war years, but we'd at least been brought up by parents whose lives had been indelibly shaped by them. Did I, now, as a public teller of stories, have a duty I'd hitherto been unaware of? A duty to pass on, as best I could, these memories and lessons from our parents' generation to the one after our own?”