A Pale View of Hills - Kazuo Ishiguro

By Kazuo Ishiguro

His first book. It unfolds in Nagasaki, right after the war, where so many people are still living, or trying to live looking forward while deeply in the shadows of the past. Everyone has suffered in the war, inhumane sufferings which put a question on the forward in life too, yet life persists, and though the war has changed life, its meanings, its constituents, people's hopes and dreams, yet people pick up the pieces and move forward. 

Although the book doesn't talk about all this, the war and its effects, explicitly but you feel it in the shadows in people's lives. Perhaps that's what a good book does, by recreating the world for you, make you feel the things that are given in that world, and people would not go about talking too much about the given, but it is in the very fabric of their being. Perhaps why we read, and hope to read good books, to get a glimpse of different times and spaces, where the 'given' things in life are very different from the reader's world.

It is not a very long book. Still reading through. 

**

Later. Finished the book.

A few quotes from here and there:

"So many women get brainwashed. They think all there is to life is getting married and having a load of kids."

I continued to watch her. Then I said: "But in the end, Niki, there isn't very much else."

--

"The Americans, they never understood the way things were in Japan. Not for one moment have they understood. Their ways may be fine for Americans, but in Japan things are different, very different." Ogata-San sighed again. "Discipline, loyalty, such things held Japan together once. That may sound fanciful, but it's true. People were bound by a sense of duty. Towards one's family, towards superiors, towards the country. But now instea there's all this talk of democracy. You hear it whenever people want to be selfish, whenever they want to forget obligations."

--

"But it's so good to come out here. Today I've decided I'm going to be optimistic. I'm determined to have a happy future. Mrs Fujiwara always tells me how important it is to keep looking forward.

[...]

Whenever I see her, I think of myself I have to be like her, I should keep looking forward. Because in many ways, she lost more than I did...."