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According to writing and composition theorists, the Japanese style of communication tends to be more formal, oblique and vague than the direct, linear American/Western approach. In the Japanese method, conclusions are arrived at by an elliptical route whereby all necessary information is provided and the reader/listener left to assemble that information, in combination with the tacit knowledge of community and culture, in order to understand the points presented. Because of this style of communication, conclusions are more often left in doubt, but the appearance of harmony is maintained and overt conflict avoided. The structure of Ishiguro’s A Pale View of the Hills mirrors the different cultural approaches to communication by presenting different stories – one explicitly and one implicitly – and by proceeding to emphasize the power of both the indirect (Japanese) and the direct (Western) in the telling of a story.
In an immediate example of the power of direct storytelling, the novel begins with the startling revelation of Keiko’s death by suicide. Ishiguro writes: “The English are fond of their idea that our [Japanese] race has an instinct for suicide, as if further explanations are unnecessary; for that was all they reported, that she [Keiko] was Japanese and that she had hung herself in her room” (10). Included in this revelation is a commentary by the narrator, Etsuko, on the failure of the English (and westerners in general, by association) to appropriately understand the intricacies of Japanese culture. Ishiguro begins from the outset with a warning to the reader: don’t simplify people into cultural stereotypes. As stereotypes, they fail to capture the true nature of a person or a culture.
Ishiguro further delineates this confusion in cultural understanding by dividing the story between two times and locations. A Pale View of the Hills alternates between two settings: 1970s England and post-war Japan. The suspense of the novel comes from the eventual explanation of how Etsuko moved from one place and time to another, and adapted from one cultural attitude to existing in another. However, the period of transition between settings is only alluded to in the two timelines. Ishiguro never provides direct information on Etsuko’s decisions and travels from Japan to England. The reader is left to guess at what may have happened based off of Etsuko remembrances and ruminations on the distant past, with Sachiko and Mariko as clues as to the choices she made, and some vague comments on her life in England.
The primary means of piecing together the middle timeline between the summer Etsuko meets Sachiko and decades later in England, is presented indirectly, almost allegorically, through Sachiko and her daughter Mariko’s story. Sachiko and her daughter are leaving Japan with a Westerner, as we know Etsuko and Keiko will some years after the summer Etsuko and Sachiko meet. The allegory of Sachiko collides with the Etsuko’s story in the last section of Chapter Ten. The scene is set, appropriately enough, on a bridge, the meeting point between two places – two cultures and two stories. Etsuko is talking with Mariko about the impending move away from Japan. Ishiguro blurs the boundaries between stories when Etsuko says “…if you don’t like it over there, we’ll come straight back.” Etsuko’s “we” places her character, not Sachiko, as part of the traveling party. The implication is that the memory of Mariko’s despair in leaving Japan has merged with the sentiments of Etsuko’s own daughter, Keiko, at the prospect of moving away from Japan and having a new, foreign father.
When the reader arrives at this pivotal moment, having assembled clues along the way as to what happened in the intervening years of the two timelines, Etsuko’s character is suddenly seen in a new light. Up until this point, in the postwar Japan timeline, Etsuko has been largely portrayed as reflecting old Japanese ways. Her husband is seen as the ‘modern’ one, who breaks with tradition by refusing to move into his father’s home. While Etsuko has revealed (in the English when speaking with her second daughter, Niki) that she knew Keiko would not like England but that she went anyway, knowing this, it is not until this blurring of memory and characters that the reader is fully aware of how much Etsuko could be sanitizing her history. Etsuko could be much more like Sachiko than the reader has, up until this moment, been led to believe.
Sachiko’s apparently reckless and selfish course (given Frank’s unpredictability) becomes, at minimum, a harbinger of the choice Etsuko will make years later when she leaves Japan. Presumably, the Western ideals of individual wants and freedoms in some way came to supercede the needs of traditional Japanese community. As Niki, the Westernized daughter says to her mother, “So a many women get stuck with kids and lousy husbands and they’re just miserable. But they can’t pluck up the courage to do a thing about it…it’s pathetic when people just waste their lives” (pg. 90). But the reader is never clear why, or even how, Etsuko comes to leave Japan. Clearly, however, the decision is so difficult that Etsuko, as narrator, cannot even discuss it directly. She opts instead to preserve the illusion of harmony.
The violence of the decision to leave is in evidence as seen on Mariko’s fear of Etsuko in this same scene. Etsuko carries a rope with her, which brings to mind Keiko’s death by hanging. So while Etsuko says to Mariko she “isn’t going to hurt” her, there is the dreadful echo of the pain to be suffered by Keiko and her family when Keiko fails to prosper in her new country, culminating in her suicide. In the scene, Mariko has clearly made the connection between the drowned kittens and herself, that she is excess baggage more than a treasure, baggage that can be disposed if necessity calls for it. She sees Etsuko as a participant in the crime of the kittens, so her fear understandable. Ishiguro, by choosing to blend memories here, paints Etsuko as feeling herself a participant in Keiko’s death years later. The multi-layered approach that dances around the assignation of guilt, blame and leaves, in typical Japanese fashion, the judgment to the reader / listener.
Ishiguro presents Etsuko as a conflicted product of two, often contrary, cultures. Her largely unspoken Japanese side comes through the allegorical story of Sachiko and Mariko, while her Westernized side comes through more directly, in the present timeline with her own story with Niki. What she says, in conversation with Niki (her Western daughter), repeatedly emphasizes the need for the pursuit of individual life. When Nike leaves to return to London, she says, “You don’t have to apologize. It’s very important you lead your own life now” (177). These words could easily apply to the decisions made by Etsuko and Sachiko as they chose their own happiness over that of their children. And so Etsuko’s ability to speak the truth is called into question again. The reader cannot know if Etsuko speaks to make her daughter or herself feel better about her choices, if she speaks to maintain harmony, or if she truly believes what she says. For Etsuko is also still lost in an unspoken world of memory, haunted by the ghost of Keiko (her Eastern daughter) who she still hears in her old room and the summer she met Sachiko and was pregnant with Keiko. The blurred memory that takes place on the bridge has the two worlds and, allegorically, sides of herself, meeting and foretells of the ramifications of the shifting away from an exclusively Eastern viewpoint. On the bridge, Mariko/Keiko flees and Etsuko is left alone, part of neither world. Years later in England, one of her daughters is dead, and the other carries ideals so different from Etsuko, in particular on the topic of marriage, that Etsuko, as she does at the conclusion of the book, can only stand and watch her leave. Etsuko remains caught between the two banks of the river, influenced by Western individualism and Japanese duty to family and community, no matter what the personal cost.
The reader is left to question whether Etsuko and Sachiko are sides of the same person, if Keiko and Mariko are the same daughter. Etsuko tells her daughter of a happy memory with Keiko at the cable-cars, which harks back to the day Sachiko and Mariko saw that same view from the hills. Sachiko may be Etsuko, or possibly, Sachiko and Mariko merely foreshadow the path that Etsuko will take down the road. Ishiguro, in failing to provide absolute clarity, chooses an oblique, and so by extension, Japanese approach to constructing his novel. In fact, the choice of a novel in approaching any subject may lend itself to the oblique method more so than Western directness, as a story provides more powerful, layered view of any viewpoint. Ishiguro’s novel, as a novel, becomes a defense of the importance an indirect approach as a means of maintaining harmony and possibly, in Etsuko’s case, sanity. Etsuko approaches the decisions of her past through another character, and so can distance herself from the pain. By leaving the details open to interpretation, Ishiguro emphasizes the importance of the journey in arriving at any conclusion.
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