Kazuo Ishiguro’s first novel is an attempt to grapple with this concept. In A Pale View of Hills, an old woman must reconcile her daughter’s death with a dark past and an old man, a former state school teacher, is indicted for his role in Japan’s imperial war. Different characters in this book find their pasts exposed to the sentiments of people in a present world much different from the old. A Pale View of Hills is set mostly in a Japanese city following the Second World War. It describes men who achieved greatness early in life who are incriminated in their old age by facts about their past that come to be seen as evils. Ogata’s story is that of the future’s vengeance on the past. Etsuko’s story is different. While in many ways it more poignant—as the story of a mother losing her daughter to suicide must be—there is an element of redemption in Etsuko’s story; Etsuko is able to lose the guilt she feels for her daughter’s death by recognizing that forces from the past had in some ways determine the death. Here, the future is relieved from blame because of the past.
In a 2008 Paris Review interview Kazuo Ishiguro discussed how the theme of personal history transformed by time was easily translated from book to book and nation to nation. “The essence of what I wanted to write,” he says, “was moveable.”[1] After An Artist of the Floating World, Ishiguro published The Remains of the Day, which won the Man Booker Prize for fiction. This novel, unlike his first two, is set in post-War England. It still retains the essence of the first two books, “an old teacher has to rethink the values on which he’s built his life.”[2] What distinguishes the first two novels, though, given their context, is the ability to read them easily as parallel stories to the lifespan of the short lived “modern” Japanese nation. How this plays out in A Pale View of Hills is the subject of this paper.
Japan’s distinct history of modernization makes it especially important to provide a deeper historical context for A Pale View of Hills; within this context this novel can function as an allegory of the Japanese nation. The history of modern Japan—from the Meiji Restoration in the 1870s to the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki—is a story of a uniquely and newly developed Japanese nationalism. Ogata, the old man in A Pale View of Hills, held an esteemed position that made him responsible for the development of the political consciousness of his country. He was, more or less, an employee of state; a schoolteacher whose teaching assisted in the imperial war effort. The gravity of his responsibilities was thus great. This is especially true when considering his treatment following the war. Ogata’s failure was both personal and national, having lost his personal esteem and the war itself.
A Pale View of Hills takes place precisely at the end of the imperial moment in Japan. It was a time of ideological dissonance; the lingering spirit of nationalism and the generation that most arduously waved its banner had begun to run up against the new ideas of a youthful Japan occupied by the United States military. The pre-war values that had privileged national greatness over human life were eroding. Nationalism remained—experienced as humiliation and sadness over the lost war and defeated emperor—but that movement had been dealt a crushing blow. There was no longer room for the representation of such ideas in political life; government was being restructured under U.S. watch. Ministries were stripped of formerly powerful nationalists and pro-militarization leaders were ousted. The Japanese government was rebuilt with younger people, more open to U.S. influence. It was a time of demilitarization, reconstruction and reconciliation.
