BookLife Review: A Pale View of Hills, by Kazuo Ishiguro

Nobel Prize Winner for Literature, Nagasaki Japan, suicide, grief, rebuilding, ghosts, emigration

I wasn't certain what was going on in this book until the last two pages! Kazuo Ishiguro (@kazuoishiguro) is a brilliant writer and a Nobel Prize winning author. The short 183-page A Pale View of Hills foreshadows his future success and showcases his extraordinary skill. Set in Nagasaki, Japan in the years following the atomic bomb and the rebuilding of the area, the novel intertwines themes of grief, emigration, the specter of ghosts, and the unreliability of memory. It embodies a clash between the old guard nationalists and the movement toward democracy.

Etsuko, the unreliable narrator, an emigrant, revisits memories from her past after the suicide of her eldest daughter. We are never quite sure of the answers to the unanswered questions swirling around some of the ephemeral characters in her recollections. We don't know what is behind her husband's cold behavior, what prompted her friend to leave her uncle's home and decline an invitation to return. We know only that all of the characters suffered unimaginable obliteration of loved ones, sometimes entire families. This is a quick, out of the ordinary, haunting and delicious read.