One of Kazuo Ishiguro's themes … is the conflict between the traditional and the modern worlds. [In A Pale View of Hills] it is set against the background of the bombing of Nagasaki…. I first came across Mr Ishiguro's work in Faber's Introduction 7, where his story 'A Strange and Sometimes Sadness' impressed me as the work of a delicate and imaginative mind. A Pale View of Hills certainly fulfils the promise. The narrator is a middle-aged Japanese woman who, having lived through the bombing, is now resident in England. Her narrative switches in time between the present and the period just after the war, when the dust raised by the bomb is still very much in the air, and when she was in the role of a subservient wife. In the eyes of everyone, and in all senses, she appears to have survived. Nothing is necessarily as it seems, however; the terrible events prove to have had more than just a physically destructive effect, and Mr Ishiguro's double-barrelled narrative device enables him to show the past determining the present. In Etsuko's present life as much as in her past, she is encircled by a chain of death which has its beginning in the war. The Japanese sections centre around some mysterious killings and Etsuko's uneasy relationship with her friend's daughter; things begin to look sinister when, in the present, she starts dreaming about a little girl 'swinging'. What is most impressive about this novel is the way in which the author manages to blend the historical and psychological dimensions, so that his protagonist is a creation of her times. It is all done with subtlety, but if there is a fault it is that the incidental detail is not sufficiently filled in. Some characters are rather faceless, and the dialogue is vapid in places. Perhaps after this fine first novel, Kazuo Ishiguro will risk a little more in the realm of style.
James Campbell, "Kitchen Window," in New Statesman (© 1982 The Statesman & Nation Publishing Co. Ltd.), Vol. 103, No. 2657, February 19, 1982, p. 25.∗
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