Book Review : A Pale View of Hills by Kazuo Ishiguro

This book was Kazuo Ishiguro’s debut novel.

The main character of this book is a Japanese woman called Etsuko who is living alone in England. At the beginning of the book Etsuko is being visited by her younger daughter, Niki. Etsuko is dwelling on the recent suicide of her older daughter Keiko.

Etsuko first married a fellow Japanese, Jiro, and had a daughter, Keiko. A few years later Etsuko met a British man and moved with him to England. She took Keiko to England to live with them and then she had another daughter called Niki.

At the start, Etsuko is remembering a time in Nagasaki, just after World War II, when she met another woman called Sachiko who had a young daughter called Mariko. Sachiko seemed to have a very lax approach towards Mariko who got into plenty of scrapes when playing in and around her home. Sachiko had met an American man and he’d promised her that they’d leave Japan and return to America. However, this move never came to fruition.

Towards the end of the book, I began to wonder if Sachiko and Mariko really existed and whether they weren’t projections of Etsuko’s imagination, offering her an alternative view of what would have happened to her if she’d stayed in Nagasaki. Would things have been any better?