In the end Etsuko becomes Sachiko, and Keiko becomes Mariko. The reader is startled by fate's cruelty and mischief.Choosing to Tell This is an amazing first novel and it is a good introduction to Ishiguro for readers who haven't read his books before. It is so delicately told from the point of view of a woman who has survived WWII. You are given only brief personal glimpses of her life, yet those glimpses spark an enormous amount of questions revealing her to be a woman of deep complexity. You would expect her to be pondering the life of her daughter Keiko, but she spends most of her time remembering the mysterious woman Sachiko who she knew briefly in Nagasaki. Over the course of reading the novel you begin to understand that this is a way for her to process her emotions over her daughter's death. Pondering the mysteries of a woman she can never understand is preferable to admitting the responsibility for her daughter's suicide. Perhaps she contributed in some way to her death? From her obsession with Sachiko and Sachiko's daughter Mariko we understand that she is possibly drawing parallels between the girls. While this mystery looms in the background you are brought deeply into her observations of Sachiko and her story of a single woman trying to survive independently. Through the entire time Ishiguro is very careful about what is and is not given away. He is a master at telling and not telling. The selection that goes into telling has an impact on the way we interpret what is told. In this way he explores human complexities that few other writers are able to dig into. Our view of Etsuko, like our view of Nagasaki, is blurred and from this not quite clear view we understand that this Japanese woman still has a lot more to tell.
That said, I think Ishiguro meant to leave room for speculation. He meant for it to be a haunting read. And, he was able to write this book without once mentioning the atomic bomb. Not once.
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
