‘A pale view of self’: the limits of knowing and mourning in Kazuo Ishiguro’s A Pale View of Hills

Kazuo Ishiguro's first-person narrators are known for their self-deception, and more generally for their lack of self-knowledge. As narrators who are ‘supposed to know’, they complicate the category of narrative unreliability. Taking A Pale View of Hills as a case study, the essay explores narratorial ignorance concerning Etsuko's hindered process of mourning and its ethical and socio-political implications. Knowledge is largely obscured by Etsuko's repressed grief over her dead daughter, Keiko, and by her ambiguous account of herself that serves to secure her motherhood. Etsuko's disavowal of grief bears on societal prohibition on mourning in postwar Japan and social expectations for ‘good immigrants’ in the 1980s UK. As a mother, her recollection of personal history falls short of confronting the ‘differend’ between her status as a war survivor and her decision to emigrate, which is sequentially linked to Keiko's suicide rather than being its direct cause. Etsuko’s compromised ability to know and to mourn reveals the tension in Ishiguro's oeuvre (and in novelistic discourse more broadly) between individual agency and the structural constraints within complex social backdrops.