Oops, it’s been a hot minute since I wrote a review. I have been reading, but I also spent four months trying to do my job and also angst about whether I would still have that job in the fall, which ate up a lot of my focus. (I do! I got tenure!) Then I went traveling and continued not writing reviews, though also still reading quite a bit.
But CBR Bingo is a nice little prod to get back to it, in the back half of the year, so here we go.
CBR Bingo Square: Asia & Oceana
While traveling, I picked up Nobel laureate Kazoo Ishiguro’s 1982 debut novel, A Pale View of Hills (and in that
lovely Faber edition, too). I’ve read about half of Ishiguro’s novels, as well as his short story collection Nocturnes, but I’m overdue on reading his early work in particular. Like a couple of Ishiguro’s more famous novels, Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go, A Pale View of Hills unfolds in retrospect, as a widowed Japanese expatriate woman Etsuko, living in the UK reflects on a few brief months of her life in post-WWII Nagasaki. The recent suicide of Etsuko’s older daughter, Keiko, and a visit home from her younger daughter, Niki, seems to have prompted the reflections, in which Etsuko puzzles over her brief, tense friendship with Sachiko and her pre-teen daughter Mariko, just before the two left Nagasaki.
In the Nagasaki portion of the story, Etsuko is a young bride expecting her first child. Her marriage with her husband Jiro isn’t horrible, but it’s not happy, either, though she is clearly very fond of her visiting father-in-law, who appears to have taken her in after tragedy befell Etsuko’s own family. Sachiko is a recent arrival in an old cottage, with her daughter in tow, who clearly came from a prosperous family at one point (judging by her fine kimonos and tea set that occasionally appear) but has fallen on hard times, making her a brittle, sometimes sharp person, and curiously remote and disinterested from her daughter Mariko. Etsuko helps Sachiko find a job to make ends meet until her unreliable American suitor may finally one day bring her to America as he has long promised.
The title comes from the last happy day Etsuko remembers spending with Sachiko and Mariko, taking a cable car up to a mountain that overlooks the city: it’s a moment plucked out of time, which feels somehow timeless, against the backdrop of a city caught in the grip of rapid change: traditional Japanese education has shifted after the war, a fact which troubles Etsuko’s father-in-law but is embraced by the former student who is his bete noire; gender roles are shifting, exemplified in the story of a woman who chose to vote differently from her husband; and then there is the fact that Etsuko’s first marriage clearly ends, landing her in England courtesy of her second (and British) husband where she has her second daughter, Niki. How does she stitch these disparate pieces of her life together?
Memory, I realize, can be an unreliable thing; often it is heavily coloured by the circumstances in which one remembers, and no doubt this applies to certain of the recollections I have gathered here.
There are hallmarks of what has since become Ishiguro’s trademark style: a reflective, deceptively quiet and mundane tone that masks the deep emotions bubbling underneath, and the heartbreak that crashes in at the conclusion. (Also, Ishiguro is on that short list of male novelists who can write good female characters, and Etsuko and Sachiko show that he’s had an interest in women’s perspectives since early in his career, and that women can comment on change and struggle in a way male characters perhaps could not.) What’s different, of course, is that England is the secondary setting here (whereas it becomes central in his later novels) and that the novel employs a twist ending that, as a good twist ending should, reverberates back through your reading of what came before and (mild spoiler) recasts huge quantities of it in a different light, transforming the seemingly mild-mannered Etsuko into a startlingly unreliable narrator. This is not a trick Ishiguro employs in his later novels (understandably: if you always employ a twist ending, everyone goes looking for it), and so it caught me very much by surprise when it hit.
It is, in some ways, almost too indirect and oblique with some of its aims: the twist requires this, in part, so that you don’t suss out the trick too early, but also various motifs, such as the chess game between Etsuko’s husband and father-in-law feels like a weird obsession unless you go back and consider Otaga-san’s remarks about chess:
For the first few moves, you were planning ahead, I could see that. You actually had a strategy then. But as soon as I broke that down, you gave up, you began playing one move at a time. Don’t you remember what I always used to tell you? Chess is all about maintaining coherent strategies. It’s about not giving up when the enemy destroys one plan, but to immediately come up with the next. A game isn’t won and lost at the point when the king is finally cornered. The game’s sealed when a player gives up having any strategy at all. When his soldiers are all scattered, they have no common cause, and they move one piece at a time, that’s when you’ve lost.
Post-war Japan appears to be this strategy-less place: having been defeated, both the people and the society are moving without a plan for the future, but merely the immediate moment. But the same is true as well, clearly, of both Sachiko and Etsuko, who are struggling to cope with their own devastating losses and changing place in society as women, and has Etsuko played with strategy, one wonders, at the end, or is she reaping the consequences of playing only one move at a time?
Content note: Keiko’s suicide is discussed several times (though never in graphic detail) and there is a tough moment of animal death near the end.
