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Cultural displacement and the mother-daughter relationship in Kazuo Ishiguro's A Pale View of Hills.

Article Excerpt
When Kazuo Ishiguro's most recent novel Never Let Me Go was published in 2005, the work received immediate attention and accolades. In the twenty years since the publication in 1982 of his first novel A Pale View of Hills, followed by five novels (An Artist of the Floating World [1986], The Remains of the Day [1989], The Unconsoled [1995], When We Were Orphans [2000], and Never Let Me Go), television scripts (A Profile of Arthur J. Mason [1984] and The Gourmet [1986]) and a film screenplay (The Saddest Music in the World), Ishiguro's stature as a major writer has been established, as critical and popular interest in his work has steadily increased and he has won major literary prizes including the Whitbread Book of the Year Award and the Booker Prize for Fiction (Lewis xi-xiii). Much of the academic interest in Ishiguro's work has centered on his imaginative and skillful narrative technique, a technique first experimented with in A Pale View of Hills.

Summarizing A Pale View of Hills is complicated by the way in which the story is told, a story which weaves between present and past, reality and memories, major historical and private family events. Etsuko, the narrator of the story, is a middle-aged mother who has transplanted her daughter Keiko from Japan to England in order that Etsuko can marry an English journalist with whom she eventually has a second daughter Niki. The narrative focuses on Etsuko's review of her troubling past, including the loss of her entire family during the bombing of Nagasaki, her unhappy first marriage, the strange relationship with a neighbor she met in Nagasaki during her first pregnancy, and the recent suicide of her daughter Keiko after their move to England. What critics all note about A Pale View of Hills is the striking quality of ambiguity, an ambiguity in the storytelling technique, the motivations of the narrator and other characters, and the elusive truths sought by the narrator. However, critics have examined the source of the ambiguity from a variety of perspectives. Hermione Lee identifies a linguistic source, focusing on the way in which Ishiguro employs a language of paradox. Pico Iyer claims the stylistic penchant for ambiguity in all of Ishiguro's works derives from his roots in Japanese culture; he concludes that "all three of his novels have that same ink-wash elusiveness, an ellipticism almost violent in its reticence" (181). Focusing on setting and historical context, Barry Lewis, who employs postcolonial and deconstructionist principles of cultural displacement, concludes that the novel "is a study of the unhomeliness and displacements created by a family suicide and a nuclear genocide" (44). On the other hand, Cynthia F. Wong draws from reader-response theory and argues that the ambiguity in the story stems from the nature of memory and Etsuko's divided narrative, concluding that "she [Etsuko] is a reader of her own life who is interpreting its significance from the distance of time and space" (Kazuo Ishiguro 35). Taking a psychological approach, Brian Shaffer sees A Pale View of Hills as shaped by mythmaking, as it examines the complex psychological impact of the trauma Etsuko has experienced.

This study of A Pale View of Hills builds on these various interpretations but adds to it an exploration of how the central mother-daughter relationship compounds the various levels of ambiguity. Central to this examination is the nature of the role of mother--a role which demands that one make choices and take responsibility for children, but which does not allow control over the ultimate happiness or well-being of those children. Because of the pressures that Etsuko experiences in fulfilling this role as mother, she strives to fix in her imagination a portrait of herself as a good mother; however, she is plagued, instead, by a blurring blend of images of motherhood that produces both anguish and solace, revealing the very nature of the mother role. Thus, unlike other studies of A Pale View of Hills, this study focuses on the mother-daughter relationship between Etsuko and Niki, influenced by their other relationships, but defined by their struggle to understand and fulfill their roles and achieve an identity beyond those roles, and on how Ishiguro employs mental images as a means to tell their story. It is this relationship and its narrative implications that have been neglected by other critics; it is this relationship that augments the ambiguity but also produces the tenuous hopefulness achieved in the narrative.

To begin the examination of the mother-daughter relationship, it is helpful to identify Etsuko's assessment of it. The pivotal event that frames the novel is Niki's five-day visit to see her mother after Keiko's recent suicide by hanging and the earlier death of Niki's father. The second paragraph of the novel provides Etsuko's summary of the visit:

She came to see me earlier this year, in April, when the days were still cold and drizzly. Perhaps she had intended to stay longer. I do not know. But my country house and the quiet that surrounds it made her restless,...

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