Source: The Conversation – UK – By Jennifer Coates, Professor of Japanese Studies, University of Sheffield
How much do any of us really know about who we are? This question haunts director Kei Ishikawa’s adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s first novel, A Pale View of Hills (1982).
The complex story follows “unreliable narrator” Etsuko from Japan to England. A Pale View of Hills starts in 1982, as Etsuko (Yoh Yoshida) packs up her English country house, preparing to move. Her daughter Niki (Camilla Aiko) arrives, taking advantage of the domestic upheaval to ask about their family history.
Both are struggling with the suicide of older daughter Keiko. Niki cannot enter Keiko’s old room, while Etsuko tells neighbours that Keiko is living in Manchester, England. Niki expresses surprise at how easily her mother tells this lie, but as the film progresses we learn that mother and daughter are keeping a number of secrets from one another.
The family secrets are hidden in omissions and untruths. Sometimes the secrets are obscured by mixing up truths to create confusion. When Niki asks Etsuko for the story of how she came to England, she blends truths supported by the evidence of photo albums and family belongings. Stories and pictures wend together into a confusing narrative that doesn’t add up, and is missing important details.
Etsuko’s memories take the film back to Nagasaki in 1952, seven years after the “Fat Man” atomic bomb was dropped on the port city on August 9 1945, killing as many as 70,000 people.
Ongoing hardship in Nagasaki can be inferred from neighbourhood gossip about a local woman rumoured to be entertaining American servicemen for money, and a spate of violent crimes against children. Nostalgic, warm images jar with dialogue about wartime suffering, violence and discrimination against the hibakusha (被爆者, “bomb-affected people”).
Ishikawa evokes postwar Japanese history in subtle references to the cinema of the era. The cinematography bathes Nagasaki in golden light, evoking the colours of Japanese films of the 1950s and 1960s. A poster for Yasujirō Ozu’s The Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice (1952), a drama about a postwar couple considering divorce, signposts the issues in Etsuko’s marriage.
Her relationship to her father-in-law, established during their shared work as schoolteachers, evokes the common trope in postwar atomic bomb film narratives of the young female teacher as heroine. Yet Etsuko emerges as a much more complicated character than the brave heroines of post-war films.
Played by Suzu Hirose, the younger Etsuko befriends her troubled neighbour Sachiko (Fumi Nikaido) and her daughter Mariko. Etsuko is in the early stages of pregnancy and the bullying suffered by Mariko prompts her to help the family. Mariko is ostracised because of the visible scarring on her arms from the atomic bombings, and Sachiko struggles to find work. Sachiko dreams of moving her small family to America, where discrimination against hibakusha will no longer hold them back.
As Etsuko’s story develops, however, the female characters seem to blend.
Sachiko’s hope that Mariko might become an actress in Hollywood echoes Etsuko’s fondness for film magazines, which she reads secretly. While the whole neighbourhood knows of Sachiko and Mariko’s hibakusha status, Etsuko is keeping secret that she was also exposed to radiation during the bombing and worries about its effects on her unborn child.
When Niki finds a family album featuring a photograph of Mariko with the caption “Keiko, 1952”, the audience questions whether Etsuko’s story contains a vital untruth: is Sachiko a version of herself? Ishikawa cites The Hours (Stephen Daldry, 2002) as inspiration for this structure, which shows “the different women at different times in the same story”.
A later photograph shows Niki’s birth in 1958, confirming that she cannot be the baby that the Etsuko in the story is carrying. This suggests that Etsuko will give birth to Keiko who will be a baby disfigured by radiation exposure. Like Sachiko, she will be abandoned by her husband and survive on the outskirts of the community until a move to the west and a new baby changes her fortunes in 1958.
Ishikawa’s desire to “update the story of Nagasaki” and connect contemporary audiences with it is achieved through the echoes that Etsuko’s omissions cast across the film. The subtle performances and beautiful cinematography of Ishikawa’s film creates an inviting and nostalgic atmosphere that allows the disturbing themes of this important book to be gently drawn out.
A rich history of the atomic bombings of Japan and the ongoing impact that continues in the silences, lies and omissions is exposed in A Pale View of Hills. What are people still carrying? For Ishikawa, “the unspoken words, the hidden gestures, the secrets passed on, the narratives that stem from objects” are all “traces of memories” that allow a generational transmission of history.
Jennifer Coates receives funding from UKRI and the Leverhulme Trust.
– ref. A Pale View of Hills: the legacy of atomic bombings in Japan is explored in this adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s first novel – https://theconversation.com/a-pale-view-of-hills-the-legacy-of-atomic-bombings-in-japan-is-explored-in-this-adaptation-of-kazuo-ishiguros-first-novel-273842