A Pale View of Hills | Kazuo Ishiguro | It doesn't matter how old someone is, it's what they've...

A Pale View of Hills | Kazuo Ishiguro | Change, at the Personal Level, in Post War Japan

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A Pale View of Hills

	A Pale View of Hills Kazuo Ishiguro Vintage, 1990 - 192 pages average customer review:based on 44 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

The story of Etsuko, a Japanese woman now living alone in England, dwelling on the recent suicide of her daughter. In a story where past and present confuse, she relives scenes of Japan's devastation in the wake of World War II.

It doesn't matter how old someone is, it's what they've experienced that counts

Under the surface of apparently harmless conversations, the author uncovers Japan's `very strict and very patriotic' old world of `discipline, loyalty, such things held Japan together once. People were bound by a sense of duty. Towards one's family, towards superiors, towards the country.'

But, in fact, it was a rigid, cold world without pity (symbolized by the merciless drowning of the kittens), where `children were taught terrible things. They were taught lies of the most damaging kind. Worst of all, they were taught not to see, not to question'. It was a world without democracy, where women could not study.

It all ended in disaster: `And that's why the country was plunged into the most evil disaster in her entire history.' A general disaster of war ('Towards the end we were all living in tunnels and derelict buildings and there was nothing but rubble') and atom bombs (`I know it was a terrible thing that happened here in Nagasaki'), and painful personal and familial disasters (suicides, even of a child).

In his brilliant indirect, but nevertheless highly emotional, suggestive style Kazuo Ishiguro wrote a masterpiece.

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Change, at the Personal Level, in Post War Japan

Writing in the first person, Etsuko, now living in England, tells the story of her life in post war Japan. Ogata, her father-in-law, mourns the passing of the old ways, specifically the chauvenistic educational system and the subservient role of women. His son, Jiro, does not enjoy family life and willingly gives his being to his company. Jiro is not ready to embrace a new role for women and Etsuko, fulfilling her role as Jiro's dutiful wife, sees and accepts this.

Etsuko's new friend, Sachiko, who could flee to the ease and safety of her aristocratic in-laws, washes floors, serves noodles and risks everything to flee the stultifying old ways.

There is symmetry in the lives of Etsuko and Sachiko. While it's interesting to speculate on whether one is a metaphor for the other, I fastened on the theme of change.

The writing is spare, every word works. This is very well crafted prose.

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Exceptional!

Highly Recommended.

Kazuo Ishiguro illuminates a microcosm of Hiroshima from the atomic shadows of the post-WWII era, as he delves into the interpersonal relationships of a Japanese mother and her two daughters. Despite their move across the world to England, those shadows will always haunt as patriotism and loyalty clashes with the younger generation's psyche to move on, and how the equilibrium of life could be disturbed and turn people into shadows, memories into ghosts, the past into an obscure pale, yet powerful, view of Hills.

reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9

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