In the following essay, Wong employs literary theorist Maurice Blanchot's theories on first person narration to analyze Ishiguro's A Pale View of Hills.

["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 troub...

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 t...

Kazuo Ishiguro has written a first novel of uncommon delicacy. A Pale View of Hills is an extremely quiet study of extreme emotional turbulence, which summons up the various nightmares of a survivor of Nagasaki in a manner that will probably perplex those readers who like to swallow their horrors whole or enjoy being told the worst, at length. It is not Ishiguro's intention to "do" Nagasaki, as other novelists have recently "done" Buchenwald and Babi Yar. Far from it; his ...

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, ...

A Pale View of Hills has caught the loss and uncertainty of modern Japan…. (p. 266) [It] is a beautiful and dense novel, gliding from level to level of consciousness as it slips between the narrator Etsuko Sheringham's widowed life in the English countryside and her days as a young pregnant wife in the suburbs of Nagasaki, where she managed to find one important friend. The atomic bomb had fallen not long before, but, as the author drily observes, "Memory, I realise, can be an unreliabl...

[A Pale View of Hills depicts the] present-day troubles and dark memories of Etsuko, a Nagasaki woman now living alone in England—in a strongly moody but ineffectually structured first novel. Etsuko is now alone, divorced; one daughter, Keiko, has committed suicide; the other, Niki, English-born, lives unmarried with a man in London. And these very un-Japanese social circumstances direct Etsuko's musings back to the time in Nagasaki, a year or so after the Bomb, when things started to unravel&...

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 t...