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A Pale View of Hills: Kazuo Ishiguro

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It could be argued that, even the novel itself is written in a Japanese style since most of its dialogue feels artificial and awkward, with characters not feeling completely at ease with one another, being keenly aware of the social hierarchy. In the retelling you are still much concerned with protecting your fragile psyche, so you retell selectively. Etsuko and her husband Jiro live east of Nagasaki, in newly-built concrete block apartments adjoining “an expanse of wasteground, several acres of dried mud and ditches.

The characters are interesting and tell us a lot of the Japanese world and its changes in recent times. Also, similar to Sachiko’s odd relationship with her daughter Mariko, who sometimes does not even acknowledge her mother’s presence, Etsuko may have also only displayed aloofness, pride and morbid curiosity in relation to Keiko. From Nobel Laureates Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter to theatre greats Tom Stoppard and Alan Bennett to rising stars Polly Stenham and Florian Zeller, Faber Drama presents the very best theatre has to offer.

After all, the narrator of the story tells us more than once that perhaps her memory is faulty, perhaps she is mixing things up. Artist was just beautiful I agree, and felt so Japanese for an author who left Japan, if I remember correctly, when he was 5.

I kept hoping it would develope into something, that I would learn more about the tragedies that befell each individual in the narrative, but I was left feeling somewhere between flat and bewildered by the end. On many occasions, we’re presented with gentle probing, the characters polite on the surface, yet persistent and unyielding. I could see far beyond the trees on the opposite bank of the river, a pale outline of hills visible against the clouds. Ishiguro seems to have wrapped his story in too many layers of subtlety, thereby forcing his readers to make a giant leap forward in terms of imagination so that they finally decide to start unwrapping the unwrappable.Quite likely her tale of the imaginary Sachiko and Mariko is her way of venting all the horrors of her life—things that may have happened to her as a little girl, and then, especially, what she went through and witnessed during the war, but also the horrors of her bad marriage with Jiro, the turmoil involved with having an affair, leaving Jiro for a foreigner. Most likely, the scene sums up for her in her own mind all the hideous reality of what she did to her own daughter thirty years ago. We can imply from it that the characters are full of regret, we can assume, but he does not state it anywhere: he doesn’t need to.

After reading The Remains of the Day I read with pleasure this book, which brings the author to his Japanese origins and recent history.

My feelings about The Remains of the Day are mixed up with my feelings about the film, which I saw before I read the book and have seen a couple of times since I read the book, making my memory of the novel unreliable!

She also says toward the end of the book that “Memory can be unreliable…heavily coloured by circumstances…no doubt this applies…here. I'm sure if you haven't read the book, all this sounds a bit confusing, and you might be wondering what the deal is anyway, but from a narrative theory point of view, the ability of such a small thing - a few pronouns - to throw the entire preceeding narrative into doubt is pretty impressive.

His work has been translated into over fifty languages, and The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go, both made into acclaimed films, have each sold more than 2 million copies. Roughly, there are two main connected themes in the novel: (i) the unreliability of memory and the incapability to distance oneself from past traumatic events; and the subsequent usage of (ii) the psychological dissociation and imaginary/mistaken association as mechanisms to make peace with the past and to overcome self-blame and grief. One interpretation of the story is that this is exactly what is happening to Etsuko as she narrates this story of her friendship with mysterious woman Sachiko in Nagasaki. As far as I could make out, and not having read other people's reviews/interpretations, it deals with the cultural changes before and after The Bomb in Nagasaki, but it was addressed in such a tangential way, the message was rather obscure, and there were so many unanswered questions, so many issues just hinted at and left hanging in the air, that ultimately I was no better informed by the end of the book than before I started.

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