Kazuo Ishiguro - A Pale View of Hills

‘It is possible that my memory of these events will have grown hazy with time, that things did not happen in quite the way they come back to me today. But I remember with some distinctness that eerie spell which seemed to bind the two of us as we stood together in the coming darkness looking towards that shape further down the bank.’

Kazuo Ishiguro’s first novel is a haunting study of memory and loss set in post-war Nagasaki and 1980s England.

The author was born in Nagasaki and his mother was a survivor of the nuclear bomb. But he left Japan aged five and grew up in England, not even visiting the country of his birth until well into adult life. In his Nobel Prize speech, Ishiguro said that with hindsight, writing this novel was an attempt to get down in writing his ‘personal Japan’, a ‘Japan of the mind’, before losing it forever.

In Ishiguro’s post-war Nagasaki, still under US occupation, people feel a mix of hope for the future (Japan’s so-called ‘new dawn’), unease and dread concerning the lingering effects of the bomb, and bitter resentment towards the previous generation that led them to war. For young wife Etsuko, these feelings are concentrated into her concerns about motherhood and the future of her unborn child. But how does this play out in her memory decades later, following that child’s suicide?

Written in his mid-twenties, this astonishingly mature and accomplished first novel includes themes which would resonate throughout Ishiguro’s later work, such as the conflict between generations, regret in later life for earlier choices, self-deception and the distortions of memory.

Like Ishiguro’s other novels, A Pale View of Hills deals with how we overcome loss, how we make sense of the past through recollection, and how we construct our present selves through the way we remember our past.

Following the recent film version, which takes a very Japanese perspective and necessarily simplifies some elements, now is the perfect time to revisit Ishiguro’s original text and its enduring mysteries and ambiguities. Every return to this novel reveals further rich layers of meaning, emotion and interpretation, which we will uncover through a series of slow and careful readings.

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