Thursday, June 21, 2012

Reading group: A Pale View of Hills by Kazuo Ishiguro

Warning: plot spoiler (maybe).

Trevor suggested this book in which widowed and middle-aged Japanese narrator Etsuko, now living in England, is visited by her younger daughter Niki after the suicide of her elder daughter Keiko, and is prompted to remember a short friendship she had  in Nagasaki just after the war as a young married woman pregnant for the first time, with another young woman, Sachiko, whom the war had left single with a disturbed and sometimes sinister-seeming child, Mariko.

This was a very interesting discussion which became focused in part on the issue of whether, in reading a novel, one should ever take into account known authorial intention.

Firstly, Trevor introduced the book appreciatively by saying that he liked its portrayal of the two different women, Etsuko and Sachiko, and their radically different reactions to the aftermath of the war, Etsuko still accepting the subservient role of the traditional Japanese wife, and Sachiko rebelling against it all, leaving her uncle's traditional house to live alone with her child, and hoping to depart for America with a lover Frank. Trevor commented that the book was very oblique in its treatment of the atomic bomb: the characters never refer to it directly. The book, he said, seemed a conscious portrayal of Japanese reticence and formality - the characters constantly bow to one another and their conversation is characterised by formal repetition - but he was troubled by a sense of being unable to judge how authentic that was. He didn't know if this was just because he knew that the author, though born in Japan, was brought up in England, but he felt that there was also something very English about the book. One or two people in the group murmured that they too had felt that the tone of the book was somehow hybrid.

Jenny now said that she agreed about the characters, and that what she really liked about this book and Ishiguro's work in general is the way that he never tells you what characters are feeling but you always know exactly what they're feeling.

I said, But what did people think of the idea that Etsuko and Sachiko are in fact the same person (which rather puts paid to the notion that their, or rather her, motives and feelings at any one time are clear)? There is a passage towards the end where Etsuko, talking to the child Mariko about Mariko's imminent departure for America with Sachiko, switches from second person plural to first person plural, from 'you' to 'we', which gave me this distinct impression - and, it turned out, others in the group too. This had sent me off on the internet to the Paris Review interview with Ishiguro (Trevor made his usual cynical comment about appeals to the internet), and here Ishiguro explains that through working with homeless people he had come to realize that people often tell their own painful stories via another character. He says he had expected readers to be caught up short by the fact that Etsuko almost immediately starts talking about her involvement with someone else in the past (rather than her daughter Keiko's recent suicide, which is shrouded for the reader in mystery, or her own story that led up to it), and the implication seems to be that he expected readers to be jolted into guessing fairly soon that Etsuko is making Sachiko stand in for herself (in which case, to reveal it here is not, after all, to plot-spoil). I said that I didn't feel it worked, and others, in particular Ann, agreed. Pretending to talk about someone else, usually an invented character, when really talking about oneself, is a technique employed specifically to avoid referring to oneself, but here Etsuko inserts herself into the story as a large-as-life character minutely involved (for the short period they know each other) with Sachiko and her daughter Mariko, and very different from the more mysterious Sachiko not only in character but in concrete circumstance. There are too many internal inconsistencies to fulfil the notion that they are the same person. On the more trivial level, but nevertheless sending a strong diversionary signal, Sachiko runs off with an American to America while Etsuko has clearly come to England with an English serviceman. More problematically, it's difficult to see the parallels between Etsuko's meticulously-portrayed home situation, living with her husband and father-in-law, and the rather mysterious yet significant-seeming setup with an uncle and ancient female cousin that Sachiko has left behind; more glaringly, if Sachiko is really Etsuko, then Sachiko's daughter Mariko must be Etsuko's elder daughter Keiko (and indeed if Keiko is this disturbed child, then her suicide is explained) but at the time when the two women are friends, Etsuko, significantly for her emotional state at the time, is pregnant with her first child. These things are, clearly, enough to put many readers right off the scent. Although Ann and I had wondered at times as we read if Sachiko and Etsuko were one, the inconsistencies had made us discount the notion until we reached that final pronoun shift. Then, instead of having the desired Of course! reaction, we racked our brains to try and see how it had all fitted, and couldn't. I told the group that in the Paris Review interview Ishiguro acknowledges that the book is baffling, that he failed to handle 'the texture of memory' and resorted to 'gimmickry' at the end, leaving the ending 'like a puzzle.'

Like many readers of this book, Jenny and Trevor hadn't picked up on the intended conflation of the two characters, and Jenny now said that this proved the mistake of reading about authors' intentions, as it was a better book if you saw the two characters more simply as separate. John endorsed this by putting in that some writers, such as Beckett, famously refused to explain their work. I said that I agreed absolutely that an author's intentions are irrelevant in any critical appreciation of a book: authors can fail to achieve what they intend, and they can also achieve things they didn't intend or envisage, and what matters is the words on the page, and everyone in the group strongly agreed.

However, we were somewhat at odds about the effect of the words on the page. Clare now said that she didn't read things as pinned down in such a concrete way, ie that Etsuko and Sachiko were actually the same person: she saw the parallel as looser, Sachiko and Mariko being characters in their own right but their experiences and desires and fears echoing those of Etsuko and Keiko at another time in their lives. Disregarding Jenny's injunction and looking now more closely at Ishiguro's remarks about this book in The Paris Review, I see that this is closer to his aims: he says, (erroneously, I think) that people often use the experience of a friend (rather than an invented character) to talk about about their own. Nevertheless, Clare's was a seductive argument, which seemed to make sense of the book and its inconsistencies. Its inconsistencies and conflations, she suggested, echoed the fragmentation and fusions of the bomb and its aftermath in Nagasaki society and the psychology of its citizens. What, someone had asked earlier, was the puzzling business about the mysterious (possibly threatening) woman that Mariko kept seeing, and her connection with the woman Mariko had seen drowning her baby? And Sachiko drowning Mariko's kittens, and Etsuko keeping dragging a rope on her foot when she looks for Mariko in the dark by the river? Seen in the light of Clare's interpretation, these are dreamlike connections rooted in Etsuko's concerns during her first pregnancy for her competence as a mother, and illuminating the hints at the start of the novel that she might blame herself for Keiko's death. In addition, this reading accommodates the differences in the attitudes and psychology of the two women as the opposing aspects of one woman's psychology, suppressed or released by circumstances.

Jenny said that she felt that that was the clever interpretation of the novel, but it didn't satisfy her, it left her with too many things unresolved, and she likes to have things resolved in novels and ultimately to know what really happened when. I felt (though didn't say) that, attractive as Clare's take was, it didn't play out on the page: there simply weren't enough pointers while reading to make me read in this highly non-naturalistic way. Trevor said that he still preferred to read the book on the more simplistic, realistic level, ie that Etsuko and Sachiko were simply two contrasted characters. Clare's interpretation, and Ishiguro's stated intention, however still posit separate identities for Etsuko and Sachiko, and this poses a problem that Doug now homed in on, and which creates, in both Clare's and Trevor's interpretations, a huge gap in the novel: mysterious as Sachiko is, we know much about how she came to leave Japan, especially the flavour of her leaving, yet we know nothing about how Etsuko, our very different narrator whom we feel we know much better, negotiated her similar situation. I said, Yes, it is only if we take Etsuko as Sachiko that we can know this about Etsuko (and then of course we come up against the inconsistencies). Then Mark, focusing on the words on the page in the way that we had agreed was the only useful way to approach a novel, drew our attention to another passage near the end. A key section in the novel is the outing taken by Sachiko, Etsuko and Mariko to the hills outside Nagasaki that Etsuko can see from her window, the pale hills referred to (and thus made significant) in the title. (It's also interesting that the title is A Pale View of Hills, rather than A View of Pale Hills, implying distortion in perception.) In the passage pinpointed by Mark, Etsuko, talking in the present time to her second adult daughter Niki, seems to refer to that outing and says, 'Keiko was happy that day.' This may be, in Ishiguro's view, a mere 'gimmick', cutting across his subtler intentions, but the fact remains that the words are there on the page, and it's very hard not to interpret them as meaning that Keiko and Mariko, Sachiko's daughter, are the same, and that therefore Etsuko and Sachiko too are one and the same.


Our archive discussions can be found here and a list of the books we have discussed, with links to the discussions, here

35 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi,
I just finished reading A Pale View of Hills and i'd like to add something to the discussion if you don't mind.
I agree on the interpretation that Etsuko and Sachiko were the same person, mainly because it's clearer that Mariko and Keiko are the same. And on that account one thing that really makes sense to me is what you mentioned about the title, how the way it's phrased gives you the impression that what you are reading is a very clouded recollection of events, as if faded by time. So it's almost natural that these memories are not only unaccurate (i think Etsuko herself mentions it somewhere) but also out of order in time.
I thought about this while reading the last part when Mariko asks Etsuko why she is carrying something and she says it was caught in her sandal. I thought "hey, didn't I read this before?" and it's very simmilar to other part earlier in the story. So, could it be that the memories are also disorganised? (like what Julio Cortázar does in "Hopscotch", where one story, when re-arranged makes two different readings).

Elizabeth Baines said...

Thanks for your comment, Anais. Yes, the business of the rope caught in the sandal is important, I think. It also has a hint of threat about it (as if she is contemplating murdering the child with it, or in danger of doing so) and this links with the earlier reported incident when Mariko sees a woman drowning her baby. This also links of course with the drowning of the kittens, so you could see the whole book as an illustration in displacement (ie Etsuko attributing to Sachiko her own destructive feelings towards her own daughter.)

wendi719 said...

I am so glad other people felt the same way about Sachiko and Etsuko. I thought this book was much more complex and subtle than Ishiguro's other books. I couldn't explain why but this post has given me such an in-depth and interesting discussion of Sachiko, Etsuko and my favourite character, Mariko. Yes, the scenes where the rope is stuck to Etsuko's foot are very eery. Thank you for this review/post of such an amazing book.

Elizabeth Baines said...

Thank you for that Wendi.

View this site for Land For Sale in Alaska information said...

I recommend A Pale View of Hills, and I will be tracking down more of Ishiguro's works, probably The Remains of the Day next, as that would appear to be his most famous.

Sofia said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Sofia said...

I know you wrote about this book a very long time ago, but I couldn't help but pitch in even five years later. I just finished the book myself a few hours ago, and was equally quite confused about the ending. Reading the opinions of your book club made things a lot clearer for me, but not in an expected way.

I just realized that what we don't know about Etsuko is what we know about Sachiko, and that what we don't know about Sachiko is what we know about Etsuko.

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?

Another example: we know a little bit about Sachiko's family, that her father was an important business man with international connections, for instance... but we don't know anything about Etsuko's real family, which all died during the war. We only know that Etsuko was taken in by a man that later became her father-in-law. We also know that Sachiko has an uncle living in Nagasaki, someone not related to her by blood, someone who belonged to her husband's family. Couldn't this uncle, perhaps, be Ogata-san? Etsuko describes him as a very healthy man, but makes an allusion to a time when he grew old and sickly, just like Sachiko's uncle.

What I mean to say is that Etsuko and Sachiko can be the same person, just in very different moments of their life. Etsuko while pregnant, with all her hopes and expectations about motherhood. Sachiko after the child is born, and after the war. (We don't know what has happened that has turned Etsuko from such a subservient wife into a rebelled Sachiko. In my opinion, that was the result of the war.) The description of the scenes where Etsuko and Satchiko talk to one another can additionally be perceived as Satchiko's memories of how she had been in the past, when she was younger and more hopeful about the future.

This interpretation seems to work with every single character. Look at Mrs. Fujiwara, for example. She was close to Etsuko while she was pregnant, and later helped her out by hiring her as an assistant when she had already "become" Satchiko.

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.

This is simply my interpretation of the story. I'm sure there are gaps in it as well, but it works for me and leaves me more satisfied than anything else I was able to come up with. Sachiko represents Etsuko during the darkest period of her life. I believe this is what the author had in mind when he said "people often tell their own painful stories via another character".

Elizabeth Baines said...

Sofia, thank you so much for adding so much to our discussion, with such an in- depth analysis!

Susan Serafin said...

Sofia's analysis makes sense to me,and allows me settle the question of identity. With five pages left in the novel, Etsuko gives a calendar to Niki, whose friend has requested an image of Nagasaki to illustrate the poem she is writing about Etsuko/Sachiko. "The calendar I was holding had originally offered a photograph for each month, but all but the last had been torn away." The one remaining image is of the harbor, and she remembers how happy Keiko, not Mariko, was riding in the cable cars that day. This is the image the author leaves us with as the lasting memory.

Elizabeth Baines said...

Good point.

Julia said...

I have finished reading the book today and, like you, was quite puzzled in the end. I have read all of Kazuo Ishiguro's books, somehow this first one was the last for me.

Concerning the question of Etsuko and Sachiko, I think it is similar to those passages in Ishiguro's other books where he the narrator (always quite unreliable in Ishiguro) tells a story, then suddenly rethinks it and changes something about it: "Now that I think about it, I'm not sure if this happended on that occasion. It might have happended in another year" or "it might have been him who said it, not me". These would be typical phrases in Ishiguro. When Etsuko mixes up Keiko and Mariko, I'm sure she mixes up different situations which happened at different times. Certainly she sees many parallels in her own story and Sachiko's story, but I believe that Sachiko and Mariko really did exist. It seems as if Etsuko left her husband Jiro to go to England, whereas Sachiko was a widow. Nevertheless Etsuko tells Sachiko's story to tell something about her own story, too.

What puzzles me even more is the narration about the string which has caught in her sandal, which in the repetition really made me feel uncomfortable, as if she wanted to harm Mariko. There is something noone has mentioned so far – why does she keep telling about the child murders which occured in that summer? Only to show how careless Sachiko was leaving Mariko wandering about freely? Before Etsuko tells the last story about Sachiko, she mentions a child which has been strangled, and only a few pages further on, she tells us about that curious string (of which Mariko is very afraid). This appeared very strange to me and I wondered what she wanted to say with this.

Anonymous said...

I may be wrong, but I think the children that were being murdered in the summer and the significance of the rope in the sandal refer to Keiko's (Mariko's) death by hanging. Mariko is fearful of Etsuko at the middle and end when she was asking what Etsuko meant to do with rope stuck in the sandal. Etsuko said that it was nothing and that she would never hurt Mariko (Keiko). She did, in fact, hurt her by moving her away from a home and culture she idntified with and the rope that inadvertently is dragged by Etsuko is the literal and figurative circumstance that led to Keiko's death.

pratyush padhee said...

well,i am glad reading all these writeups on the beautiful novel by ishiguro on which i am pursuing my doctorate.You see like many have said sachiko and etsuko as the same woman,it still leaves me jaw opened attimes that etsuko really existed or not.Of course there could be many analysis that proves they are one.I think etsuko is a war survivor suffering from pstd.post traumatic stress disorder where the patients suffers from an acute sense of nostalgia creating narratives of another story as a consolatory mechanism.Etsuko is doing the same consolatory narrative bildup just to console her wounded past.As we dont have any clues regarding the suicide of kieko or the death of jiro and ogata san.Ishiguro plays quite well with the mind of well let me say the readers as his way of arranging his narrative is so dilusional and it can provoke many subtle layers of the unconscious.

j O R d i V a L B u E n A said...

For me Etsuko and Sachiko are the same character at different moments in time

KEH said...

I'm so glad I found this discussion. I finished the book last night and the mystery of Mariko/ Keiko had really puzzled me. I was coming to the conclusion they were one and the same person, but I hadn't quite thought that Sachiko/Etsuko were also one. That explanation does make a lot of sense to me and puts my mind at rest. Frank never fulfilled his promise of America, but an English man provided an escape route from a marriage that was proving smothering and frustrating with her passively neglectful husband giving so little attention to either his wife or his own father, just totally engrossed in his work. And the title works too, a hazy somewhat vague view of past memories.

Elizabeth Baines said...

Thank you all for your thoughts and for contributing to this most interesting discussion!

Deepa said...

Dear Elizabeth Baines,

I am a research scholar on Ishiguro's works.Just a day before, I finished reading this novel. Lot of clarifications,I am in need.Accidentally, I came across this blog.Most of my doubts clarified from the discussion.Lines from last part of nineth chapter:"Memory, I realize, can be an unreliable thing; often it is heavily coloured by the circumstances in which one remembers"- The phrase ' heavily coloured' deliberately intimates that Etsuko coloured her past and justified her acts through the portrayal of Sachiko and Mariko.At the end of the novel, author left a note for readers through these lines-" Keiko was happy that day. We rode on the cable-cars". These lines allowed the reader to remind trip to Inasa by Etsuko,Mariko and Sachiko.So Childhood traumatic experiences of Mariko led to suicidal death of adolescent Keiko.From the hints left by the author, we can conclude that Mariko and Keiko are the same;Sachiko is the representation of alter ego of Etsuko.

Thanks a lot for all those who have contributed in this discussion .

picassocat14 said...

Great analysis. Thanks for sharing your ideas.

Unknown said...

Thank you so much for this analysis! I just finished the books a couple of days ago and couldn't decide if I thought Mariko/Keiko or Sachiko/Etsuko are the same person. Reading this discussion helped a lot. I think I'm with Sofia with this one. Yes, there would be quite a few inconsistencies with that theory, but I agree with what Julia said and assume a lot of it probably has to do with the unreliability of Etsuko as a narrator.

Elizabeth Baines said...

Thanks for your contribution, Anonymous.

Zhaklin said...

Thank you so much for sharing this. From this point of view everything fits. Even the fact that Sachiko husband was having a good career before his dearh because of the war. He may be Jiro. Wonderful plot, everything’s so well written. I love it.

Zhaklin said...

Such a good point of view. Add up the fact that Sachiko was well educated and her husband had a great future before he died because of the war. So she leaves Japan years after her husband’s death. Thank you so much for sharing this.

Elizabeth Baines said...

Thanks, Zhaklin.

Steven Garza said...

Thank you all for this great discussion. I think Ishiguros Paris Review interview is very helpful in understanding A Pale View of Hills, particularly how Sachiko and Etsuko relate to one another. He says there:
Let’s say somebody is talking about a mutual friend, and he’s getting angry about this friend’s indecisiveness about a relationship he’s in. He’s getting absolutely furious. Then you realize that he’s appropriating the friend’s situation to talk about himself. I thought this was an interesting way to narrate a novel: to have somebody who finds it too painful or awkward to talk about his own life appropriate someone else’s story to tell his own.

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.

In short, Clare’s reading above makes the most sense and as mentioned above, it is consistent with Ishiguro’s intention. I thought including here the actual words from the interview and pointing out irreconcilable inconsistencies (unlike the America/England inconsistency, which can be explained in a way as you all have done) would help this discussion.

Elizabeth Baines said...

Stephen, thank you so much for this illuminating comment.

Anonymous said...

Just to add something to support the theory that Etsuko-san is the same person as Sachiko-san, it is written that Osaga-san, her step-father, has a very devoted daughter, Kikuko-san. And later on, we learn that Sachiko-san's uncle is being cared for by his daughter, Yasuko-san. I think that the homonymy of the names of the old man's daughters and the situation itself may let us think that indeed, all along Etsuko-san was Sachiko-san. A beautiful novel all in all.

Elizabeth Baines said...

An interesting comment, thank you.

Anonymous said...

I finished reading the book just now and came across this very interesting discussion quite by chance. I am very taken with the idea that Keiko and Mariko are one and the same seen at different times. I've just finished reading Ishiguro's book The Unconsoled which seems to me a masterpiece. There are so many threads which run through all these works; dream-like sequences, shifts in time, and the unreliable narrator. Thankyou all for this very enlightening and interesting discussion.

Anonymous said...

I recommend reading The Unconsoled which is cryptic, dream-like, and drove this reader into a state of confusion at times with its contradictions and magical transitions of time, place and fact.

Elizabeth Baines said...

Recommendation noted, thanks!

Anonymous said...

Great points but I have to add to what you said about Frank, you said that he probably didn’t come through and abandoned them but Etsuko mentions that she left Japan and came to England with an English man, who you find out is Niki father as her most recent husband was English, a man with whom she had Niki with. This gives me the impression that when she was talking about how Sachiko had an American lover, she was in fact talking about how her herself had and English lover. And like many other parts in the book, Etsuko says gets things muddled up when I comes to these memories and she’s changed names in the story as she refers to herself as Sachiko and her daughter as Mariko. So I believe that she’s changed the mans origin from British to American when reliving the events. She did this, as you mentioned before, because “people often tell their own painful stories via another character.”

(Sorry if I made any errors while typing this, I didn’t have much time!!)

Elizabeth Baines said...

Thanks for this, Anonymous.

Anonymous said...

I just finished this book and immediately started looking online for an interpretation. I found your post and think you are spot on with this analysis. Even if we are both incorrect it works well for me!

Elizabeth Baines said...

Anonymous:::, interesting that you agreed!

Anonymous said...

I’m still hung up on the repeated rope/sandal dialogue . It unsettled me and stuck out to me quite a bit but I couldn’t figure out the meaning. The way i’ve interpreted it is how Etsuko feels about what she’s done to Keiko and a reference to her suicide and the hanging. But I don’t understand why it would be repeated like that ?