Pale View of Hills

It’s that time of year again. Today marks my first finished RA Favorite book for 2017. It has been over ten years since I started this project and I continue to enjoy hearing about the new RAs and their journey to NYU. I continue to ask about their favorite books as well. This year there are 186 new RAs to meet, so I should receive about 75 new books to read this year. The first book is kazoo Ishiguro’s book Pale View of Hills. It is a curious read from my standpoint. The story is placed in Britain (at first), but focuses on the main character Etsuko, who has left Japan, the bombed town of Nagasaki, and reflects on her life there, especially her interactions with Sachiko, who is the epitome of a horrible mother. Etsuko and Sachiko become ‘friends’, rather they seem to be co-dependent on one another, though it’s hard to tell why. Sachiko is an absent mother for her daughter Mariko, who walks around the village at all hours of the night. As I re-read parts of the short novel, I realized maybe the Sachiko/Mariko relationship mirrors Etsuko’s own relationships with her daughters, one which commits suicide. Or maybe it is a bitter dream (the Sachiko/Mariko parts) to haunt Etsuko of how she too was an absent mother. As the novel ends, if is clear that there’s a certain depth of pain that is within Etsuko, of her own inability to mother the dead Keiko. There is also a shroud of mystery about her husband and her second daughter, feeling like more is missing from the story. There are very deeply disturbing moments where Etsuko stands by and witnesses her ‘friend’ Sachiko drown her daughters prized pet cat in the river and allowing her daughter to disappear in the muddy riverbanks at midnight alone and hungry. So the whole narrative strategy of the book was about how someone ends up talking about things they cannot face directly through other people's stories. I find within some people a dark side of regret and utter sadness about something they failed to do, or wished they had done better. Ishiguro presents these similar characters who long to better understand the journey they have lived, but never actually get there. In many ways it is a sad and incomplete story for me as I tend to like some level of conclusion. I’m afraid Etsuko will never get that, or learn the lesson that she was supposed to gain from the lives of those around her.