A Pale View of Hills
Toi yama-nami no hikari
Kei Ishikawa (2025)
Kazuo Ishiguro’s most popular novels were soon adapted for cinema. Overrated as a book and as a film, The Remains of the Day was published in 1989 with the Merchant-Ivory movie released four years later. Never Let Me Go, published in 2005, sold equally well as a novel; Mark Romanek’s underrated film version, which came out in 2010, fared less well, commercially and critically. It has taken far longer for Ishiguro’s fine debut novel, A Pale View of Hills (1982), to reach the screen. When I re-read it recently, in anticipation of watching Kei Ishikawa’s film, the appeal and the difficulty of dramatising the book weren’t hard to see. The nature of the source material virtually guarantees that attempts to make a film of it will be intriguing, but Ishikawa’s version of A Pale View of Hills is almost entirely unsatisfying.
Until the late 1950s, Etsuko, the book’s first-person narrator, lived in Nagasaki with her first husband, Jiro; in 1952 she gave birth to a daughter, Keiko. By the time she emigrated to England, where her second daughter, Niki, was born, Etsuko was married to a British man. In the early 1980s, she’s a widow living alone in rural southern England. Keiko, who moved away from home to Manchester, recently committed suicide. Niki, who lives in London, visits her mother for a few days. During the visit, Etsuko recalls the summer when she was pregnant with her first child. Her recollections are prompted in part by Niki’s eagerness to know more from her mother about the family history, with a view to writing about it (Niki has vague literary ambitions), but Etsuko’s Nagasaki memories focus chiefly on her short-lived friendship with Sachiko, a woman of about her own age. Sachiko, a single parent with a ten-year-old daughter, Mariko, is in a relationship with Frank, an American serviceman. She intends that she and Mariko will soon travel with Frank to the US and make their home there. Mariko is vehemently opposed to the idea.
Etsuko proves an unreliable narrator – the means whereby Ishiguro fashions an impressively ambiguous story. There are striking resonances throughout A Pale View of Hills between the thirty-years-apart halves of the narrative. In conversation, polite, determinedly obliging Etsuko is often on the receiving end from a brusquely opinionated interlocutor – Jiro as well as Sachiko in the 1950s, Niki in the 1980s. If, in response, she qualifies or apologises for something she has said, Sachiko and Niki are liable to reproach Etsuko for her kneejerk acquiescence (as they see it). Sachiko’s plans to start a new life in a new country, with a non-Japanese man, clearly chime with what will happen to Etsuko herself. (It’s not explained how her marriage to chauvinist Jiro ended but one assumes it was in divorce.) The chief link emerging from the two time periods is an uncooperative and introverted daughter. The tensions between Sachiko and headstrong, friendless Mariko, expressed most strongly in the little girl’s opposition to Frank and the future that he threatens, are clear from an early stage. The reader learns more gradually how Keiko, growing up in England, became increasingly unhappy and reclusive.
By the novel’s end, the combination of these resonances has both clarified things and made them more uncertain. It’s clear that Etsuko feels deep remorse for bringing Keiko to England – that she is thereby to blame for her first daughter’s troubled life and suicide: at one point, Etsuko tells Niki that Niki’s father ‘really believed we could give [Keiko] a happy life over here … but … I knew all along she wouldn’t be happy’. It becomes clear enough too that Etsuko’s Nagasaki memories are shadowed by her present state of mind, but it’s hard to say quite how much these memories are reshaped by what became of Keiko. Etsuko remembers public alarm in Nagasaki about a series of unsolved child murders. When wilful Mariko goes missing one night, Etsuko, rather than Sachiko, voices fears for the child’s safety. This develops into a recurring pattern in the narrative. Etsuko is repeatedly scolded by Sachiko for worrying unnecessarily; the experienced mother keeps telling the expecting mother she’ll need to change her ways once she has a child of her own. Although one assumes the serial killings aren’t Etsuko’s invention, their main purpose in the story is to contrast Etsuko’s and Sachiko’s attitudes and create tension between them. This is just one example of Ishiguro’s use of Etsuko’s narration to blur the boundary between what really happened in 1952 and how she views her past in hindsight.
The book’s attractions as a potential film include Ishiguro’s expressive descriptions of locale, and the ease with which cinema can move between different times and places. A filmmaker’s chief challenge comes in whether to retain an unreliable narrator and, if not, how instead to tell the story. Kei Ishikawa, who wrote the screenplay for his film, deserves credit for not taking what might seem the easy option of Etsuko’s voiceover, but his choice of alternative is, in effect, muddled rather than mysterious. In the novel, Niki, although temporarily present in her mother’s life in 1982, isn’t a major character. She comes over as irritable and, despite professed interest in her mother’s past, somewhat disengaged; she returns to London well before the novel ends. Ishikawa makes Niki a more central character – it’s she who comes to seem to be writing her mother’s story. Even though she and Etsuko don’t have much conversation in the film about the past, Niki is several times shown tapping away on a typewriter. She also features in several sequences from which Etsuko is absent. Each of these sequences is, like the typewriter, a clumsy cliché.
A phone call Niki makes to London, early in the film, presents her as a more established writer than in the novel. She has been researching the anti-nuclear protests currently taking place at Greenham Common but the male voice on the other end of the phone line, either her publisher or her agent, suggests she use her family background to write about surviving a nuclear attack, though he stupidly confuses Nagasaki with Hiroshima. It’s also clear from this phone conversation that he’s having an affair with Niki, and that he’s married; a bit later, Niki is in the bathroom doing a pregnancy test. Her mother has put the house on the market; Etsuko is out when an estate agent calls and Niki shows him round. The main point of this exchange is presumably to point up that, when he first visited the house, Etsuko wouldn’t let the estate agent see what was Keiko’s old bedroom – a point rather lost by the agent’s giving the impression, in what he says to Niki, that he’s not familiar with the house at all. The action isn’t cliché-free even with Etsuko in the picture. An exchange of cross words between her and Niki culminates in mother slapping daughter’s face – which seems entirely out of character for Etsuko.
The legacies of Japanese defeat and of the atomic bomb attack on Nagasaki in 1945 come through strongly but never over-emphatically in Ishiguro’s story. The post-war American occupation of Japan is represented by Frank, but he’s never seen by Etsuko and is talked about only by Sachiko and Mariko. The latter often mentions to Etsuko a woman ‘across the river’; this mysterious figure, according to Sachiko, derives from an incident in Tokyo during the war, when she and Mariko saw a woman who had drowned her own baby then killed herself. Jiro’s widowed father, Ogata, a retired schoolmaster, who visits Jiro and Etsuko, is much offended by a recent educational journal article by one of his former pupils, Shigeo Matsuda, deploring Ogata’s teaching and naming him as typical of the imperialist mindset that prevailed in 1930s Japan and led the country into a war that proved a national catastrophe. Jiro, who fought in the war, is annoyed having his father as a house guest when he’s so busy at work. As his son becomes more offhand and impatient, so Ogata’s obsession with Matsuda grows, and Etsuko eventually accompanies her father-in-law to Matsuda’s place of work.
Although Ishikawa retains these elements, his treatment of them tends to be relatively crude. Frank is briefly glimpsed in the film, to the accompaniment of local women reviling Sachiko for consorting with the enemy. In the book, Ogata’s face-to-face meeting with Shigeo Matsuda leads the old man to climb down and reproach himself; in the film (in another scene sans Etsuko), Ogata is angrily confrontational. It therefore makes less sense that he then immediately decides to end his visit and return, defeated, to his lonely life in Fukuoka. Ishikawa distorts or abbreviates other strands or episodes to an extent that makes it hard to see why he retained them at all: Sachiko’s part-time employment at a noodle joint; Jiro’s arriving home late with two drunken work colleagues; a day out for Etsuko, Sachiko and Mariko in Nagasaki. The several stages of this excursion are a cumulatively important part of Etsuko’s apparently real memories in Ishiguro’s narrative. Mariko’s memorable encounter with an obnoxious young boy during the day trip becomes almost perfunctory in the film.
Some visual facets work well. A rope motif in the Nagasaki scenes anticipates Keiko’s suicide by hanging. Suzi Hirose (as the younger Etsuko) and Fumi Nikaido (Sachiko) don’t closely resemble each other, but Ishikawa and his cinematographer, Piotr Niemyjski, sometimes shoot their faces at angles that call to mind the face of the older Etsuko (Yoh Yoshida), conveying a sense of her being a combination of the two younger women. Late on, Niki (Camilla Aiko) looks through a family album and pauses at a photo of Keiko in the 1950s. It’s a photo of the same little girl (Mio Suzuki) we’ve been watching as Mariko – hardly subtle but effective as a clear message to the audience. Ishikawa’s shallow faithfulness to the original novel is always in conflict, though, with Niki’s prominence in the story (Camilla Aiko’s unnuanced acting doesn’t help) – and never more so than in the film’s closing stages.
After the photograph album revelation, Ishikawa briefly and unfortunately returns to Nagasaki in 1952, where Etsuko, now wearing a dress recognisable as one worn previously by Sachiko, addresses the girl who was Mariko as Keiko. Is the idea that we’re now seeing the reality of the past, and that Sachiko and Mariko were figments of Etsuko’s remorseful imagination? Surely not: for a start, it would reduce Frank to a proxy for Etsuko’s future ‘foreign’ husband (and the whole US occupation dimension of the story to very little). More likely, this moment is meant to show that Niki now understands, as she didn’t before, her mother’s feelings about bringing Keiko to England and painfully guilty conscience. This may be implied too in Niki’s insisting to Etsuko, before returning to London, that what happened to her sister ‘wasn’t your fault’. But those words ring hollow – especially since Niki, irritated that her mother wants her to start a family, also takes this opportunity to remind Etsuko that there’s more to life than having children, which prompts Etsuko to ask out loud what more. These exchanges serve chiefly as a reminder that unsympathetic Niki is part of her mother’s present loneliness. Kei Ishikawa’s decision to work Niki into the storytelling – and compete with Etsuko as the central consciousness of A Pale View of Hills – was the wrong decision. He has turned Kazuo Ishiguro’s deft, elusive writing into heavy-handed cinema.
13 March 2026