The impact of A Pale View of Hills … is out of all proportion to both its length and its slight plot. The narrator, Etsuko, resident in England, recalls her relationship with another woman in Nagasaki many years before, and the odd and slightly sinister events surrounding it; her recollections take place during a visit from her daughter by her English husband, her elder, Japanese, daughter having recently committed suicide. The daughter leaves; the recollection ends without any actual completion of the brief tale of the mother and child with whom it is concerned. And the novel finishes on a dying fall that is both unsettling and a little baffling—which indeed has been its effect throughout. For its strength is a remarkable quality of style in which dialogue and narration are unemphasised and yet oddly powerful. It is the kind of writing in which one searches in frustration for the source of its effects; sparse, precise and plain, the language has a stealth that leaves you with images that are suggested rather than stated. Trying to pin this down, I turned back through the pages looking for the description of a certain room: it was not there, was a product of my own imagination. And this is a subtle power for a writer to have—the ability to prompt a creative response in the reader, to arouse reactions which must be quite individual, so that the book takes as many forms as it has readers. It can only be done by means of this stylistic negativism, and the danger of course is that it overreaches itself and lapses into blandness. Once or twice A Pale View of Hills threatens to do this, but on the whole the effect is one of extraordinary tension, of implied griefs and evils.
The setting of Etsuko's recollection of her Japanese past is not arbitrary. It is Nagasaki, and the shadow of the bomb lies over the place and the people. The sad, wild, neglected child—Mariko—of Etsuko's friend Sachiko has seen "terrible things." A new Japan is emerging from the ashes of the old, and the conflict between the two generations is neatly and economically presented in the frustrated confrontation between Etsuko's father-in-law, a retired teacher, and the young colleague who has attacked his old-fashioned teaching methods….
