I could see far beyond the trees on the opposite bank of the river, a pale outline of hills visible against the clouds.

But such a confession, such reluctance to appear certain, such a recognition of the false nature of memory, does the opposite of what the words should do. There are lots of hints that Etsuko’s telling of the tale of Sachiko and Mariko is her way of narrating the story of herself and Keiko. The two women are very different, and you sense Etsuko isn’t quite as nonchalant about Sachiko’s lifestyle, and her dating an American, as she appears.Even thought A Pale View of Hills is Ishiguro's debut novel, it shows the masterfulness of his craft in full display. Quite possibly, some of the episodes describing the girl Mariko really relate to the girl or young woman Etsuko. Ishiguro’s novels are heavily populated by reticent people, who suppress their feelings, hold in their emotions, and lie to themselves. She apparently is never happy in her life with Jiro, and there are indications that this cold young man never shows any affection for her.

The hills around me are unseeable, which makes the timing of reading Kazuo Ishiguro's slim debut novel quite poignant. In fact, there is a line in the novel which refers to both: “It is possible that my memory of…events will have grown hazy with time, that things did not happen in quite the way they come back to me today. I didn’t really catch on to the narrative trick of this, Ishiguro’s first published novel, until near the end.I missed a few words and misunderstood a key part the first time I read it, but the re-reeading was so much better.

Ogata-San must live out his life as an old man, suspecting that Matsuda may be right—that he is responsible for some unconscionable things.She also says toward the end of the book that “Memory can be unreliable…heavily coloured by circumstances…no doubt this applies…here. His novels An Artist of the Floating World (1986), When We Were Orphans (2000), and Never Let Me Go (2005) were all shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Ogata-San believes that the honor of the family has been besmirched by Shigeo Matsuda, a young man who was once a friend of his son. This is because Etsuko admits to us at one point that, when she first heard that her daughter was found hanged in her room in Manchester, her first thought was to wonder how long Keiko hanged there – hardly the first thought response of a loving and caring mother. The story is narrated by Etsuko, a Japanese woman who came to England with her second husband, and it begins with an unexpected visit from her younger daughter, Niki.