["A Pale View of Hills"] is narrated by a Japanese woman, Etsuko, who, like the author, was born in Nagasaki and lives in England. Widowed by the death of her second, English, husband, and mourning the suicide of her first, Japanese, daughter, Etsuko finds herself recalling random moments of a summer in Nagasaki during the 1950's. It was the summer of her brief, enigmatic friendship with Sachiko, the woman next door, and the time of her meeting with Sachiko's disturbing and troubled child, Mariko….

Etsuko's memories, though they focus on her neighbor's sorrows and follies, clearly refer to herself as well. The lives of the two women run parallel, and Etsuko, like Sachiko, has raised a deeply disturbed daughter; like her, she has turned away from the strangling role of traditional Japanese housewife toward the West, where she has discovered freedom of a sort, but also an odd...