Although Mr Ishiguro has spent most of his life in England and has even acquired an MA in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia, [A Pale View of Hills] is typically Japanese in its compression, its reticence and in its exclusion of all details not absolutely essential to its theme. It might, one feels, be some apprentice work by Kawabata or Endo, its dialogue rendered slightly stilted by translation. It is a memorable and moving work, its elements of past and present, of Japan and England held together by a shimmering, all but invisible net of images linked to each other by filaments at once tenuous and immensely strong. (pp. 24-5)

Francis King, "Shimmering," in The Spectator (© 1982 by The Spectator; reprinted by permission of The Spectator), Vol. 248, No. 8016, February 27, 1982, pp. 24-5.