The Long Shadows of Nagasaki

A Pale View of Hills (1982) by Kazuo Ishiguro

I have found myself continually bringing to mind that picture—of my daughter hanging in her room for days on end. The horror of that image has never diminished, but it has long ceased to be a morbid matter; as with a wound on one’s own body, it is possible to develop an intimacy with the most disturbing of things. (p54)

I have always lived in memory and thought more than the real world. I’m a daydreamer, a second-thinker, a memory-replayer. In the various seasons of my life this has sometimes been a positive feature that makes me a more compassionate and thoughtful person, at other times a dark and self-destructive tendency that leads to a miserable spiral of self-absorption. 

I’ve come to understand that behind the reflection or the rumination is a fundamentally creative impulse. Memory is a creative act; every time a memory is called up from long-term memory into our working memory, it must be re-created when it returns to long-term memory. The memory that is filed away is not the same memory that was recalled. The memory that is recalled is destroyed, and then re-imprinted on newly created synapses. Noise is inexorably introduced into the data. Memory is a living, dynamic phenomenon.

This means that, the more you return to a given memory, the less reliable it becomes. Eventually, that often-revisited memory may bear little resemblance to what “actually” happened. We are, in a literal sense, the unreliable narrators of our own lives. That’s either a profoundly destabilizing or a profoundly liberating idea, depending on how you approach it. If time only flows in one direction and the past can only be accessed through memory, then you can change your own past and alter your future responses to that past event by shaping your memory. You can change who you “are” just by remembering differently. 

This is a truth that Nobel laureate Kazuo Ishiguro understands on a cellular level. I’ve never read anyone who writes about memory better than Ishiguro. (Nabokov may be lovelier, but Ishiguro feels even truer to me. Proust is still on my to-read list.) He is able to inhabit a first-person perspective so thoroughly and intimately that it makes me half believe in reincarnation. How else could he so delicately excavate such diverse minds? I find his narrators utterly and completely convincing. As an American, I’m sure it’s offensive for me to say this, but The Remains of the Day (1989), about an aging butler reflecting on his years of service, gave me more insight into the British psyche than a lifetime of Anglophile media consumption. Never Let Me Go (2005), a speculative novel about children who are raised for a special purpose, struck me as so perfectly encapsulating the experience of girlhood, female friendship, and coming of age as a young woman, that it’s folly to even try to write another book on the subject. Ishiguro even managed to pull off an AI android narrator in Klara and The Sun (2022), god damn him. 

(I have strong and conflicted feelings about the way that Ishiguro apparently approaches genre, particularly my beloved genre of science fiction, but that’s a story for another time. He makes it work, the talented bastard, even though he seems to have little regard for the history or conventions of the genre.)

And now I see where it all began. I read A Pale View of Hills, Ishiguro’s debut novel, while I was in Canada last month. Many of the elements that he explores more thoroughly in his later books are present in primordial form here: the unreliability of memory; deeply felt yet misunderstood emotion; slow, controlled unspooling of narrative; the gradual dawning of realization and recognition. The authorial touch is lighter, here, than in the later books, but just as deft. It feels like the masterful sketch of a novel, with the negative space between strokes evoking the story, rather than a novel itself. It’s a beautiful and maddeningly unsatisfying piece of art.

Ishiguro’s narrator is Etsuko, a Japanese woman originally from Nagasaki who lived through the war and now lives in England. Her half-British adult daughter, Niki, comes to visit her and she reflects on her other, full-Japanese daughter’s recent suicide and the events of one summer in Nagasaki during the Korean War. World War II and the atomic bomb are addressed obliquely, glancingly, like the half-remembered nightmare Etsuko can’t quite shake off.

The year would have been 1951 or 1952. Etsuko is uneasily pregnant with her first husband’s child, trying to convince herself and everyone around her that she’s delighted to start a family. Presumably, this pregnancy is Keiko, the suicide we learn about on the second page. (Presumptions, we soon learn, are risky in the world of Etsuko’s memory.) They live in a newly-constructed apartment building east of the city when a single woman, Sachiko, and her young daughter, Mariko, move into a pre-war cottage visible from their apartment.

Sachiko is deemed aloof by the gossiping women of the apartment complex, and Etsuko, still traumatized by the war, feels an immediate affinity for her. Sachiko is proud, improper, an uninvolved mother—she often leaves 8 or 9-year-old Mariko alone for hours when she goes out drinking with her American boyfriend, Frank. In contrast, Etsuko is demure, thoughtful, and quiet, seemingly on her way to becoming the ideal Japanese mother and wife. But we know, from the vantage of 1980s Etsuko, that her marriage fell apart, that she left Japan for England, that she failed her troubled daughter in some way that led eventually to her suicide. The two women strike up a strange friendship and Etsuko has a series of unsettling encounters with young Mariko.

I called this book deeply unsatisfying, but that’s not a critique—that’s the point. The first thing I said when I finished the book was: “Wait, so what actually happened?” Then I flipped back through and tried to triangulate something like reality from the reminisces scattered throughout the book. As designed, this yielded a deepening of the mysteries rather than any answers.

At many points in the story, Etsuko asymptotically approaches and yet never quite achieves the introspection and self-realization that hangs tantalizingly close to the reader. Instead, she seems lost in the comforting distortions of her memory, failing to unravel the false conflations that protect her from the most damning realities of her past. But it’s difficult to know, as the reader, what was ‘real’ and what was ‘false.’ Etsuko has spent the last thirty years remembering, forgetting, and reshaping the events of that faraway summer. They are as indistinct and confused as the titular distant hills overlooking Nagasaki harbor. She has altered her memory and thus changed herself—just as we all do.

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A Pale View of Hills: 8.1/10