Etsuko

Etsuko, the narrator of A Pale View of Hills, looks back on her life through memories stirred by a five-day visit from her younger daughter, Niki. Her recollections of a brief friendship with Sachiko in postwar Nagasaki become inseparable from the more painful question of Keiko: whether Etsuko’s attempt to protect her daughter helped leave her isolated from the family. Etsuko’s account moves between past and present, and its deepest uncertainty lies in the distance between the explanations she once relied on and the knowledge she later claims to have had.

Family and the choice of a name

Etsuko describes Niki’s name as a compromise between her and Niki’s father. He wanted a Japanese name; Etsuko insisted on an English one, perhaps, she admits, from a selfish wish not to be reminded of the past. Her husband accepted Niki because he thought it carried a vague echo of the East. The name thus registers a small but consequential difference between the parents: Etsuko’s desire to place distance between herself and her former life, and her husband’s wish to preserve a connection to Japan.

That tension belongs to a family shaped by movement between countries. In the present of the novel, Niki is anxious to return to her life in London, while Etsuko lives in a quiet country house. The visit brings the daughters’ different relations to the past into the same room: Niki has taken an interest in aspects of Etsuko’s earlier life, but she does not share her mother’s grief in the same way. Etsuko’s memories emerge not as a settled family history but as an account offered to a daughter who is trying to interpret it for her.

Niki’s visit and the grief over Keiko

Niki arrives in April, when the days are cold and drizzly. Etsuko notices her restlessness in the country house: she listens impatiently to classical records, flips through magazines, and takes regular telephone calls behind a closed door. She leaves after five days. These ordinary details establish the distance between them without making the visit wholly unaffectionate. Etsuko considers Niki an affectionate daughter, and understands that she has come partly out of a sense of mission: to reassure her mother that she need not blame herself for Keiko’s death.

Niki does not mention Keiko until the second day. The conversation takes place on a grey, windy morning as mother and daughter move their armchairs closer to the windows to watch rain falling on the garden. Etsuko says she knew Keiko when she was living in Nagasaki, long before she met Niki’s father. She does not want to dwell on Keiko, whose memory brings little comfort; instead, she explains that the circumstances of Niki’s visit caused her to remember Sachiko again. The structure of the recollection is significant: Niki’s concern about Keiko opens the way to a story about another mother and daughter, without resolving the grief that prompted the conversation.

Etsuko’s account of Keiko is marked by regret over her own opposition to her daughter’s leaving home. She recognizes that, in England, it is not unusual for a young woman of Keiko’s age to leave. Yet Etsuko had feared that the world outside the home would overwhelm her unhappy daughter, and says she opposed her departure for her own protection. Keiko left nearly six years before the present visit, severing her ties with Etsuko. The protection Etsuko intended therefore stands beside the estrangement that followed, as an intention that could not prevent the outcome she feared.

Nagasaki and the remembered friendship

Etsuko’s recollection of Sachiko belongs to a brief period: she says they were friends for only several weeks one summer, many years earlier. She places that summer in a Nagasaki recovering from devastation. The worst days had passed; American soldiers remained numerous because of fighting in Korea, but the city experienced calm and relief. Etsuko and her husband lived east of the city centre, a short tram ride away. Near their home, rebuilding had replaced a bomb-destroyed riverside village with four concrete apartment blocks. Their block was the last built, marking the point where the rebuilding programme stopped; beyond it lay waste ground, ditches, craters of stagnant water, and summer mosquitoes.

The setting gives Etsuko’s remembered friendship a specific historical and physical frame: a city trying to resume ordinary life amid unfinished reconstruction. It is in this period that she knew Sachiko and encountered Mariko. One image returns to her with particular force. After Mariko proposes that they keep the kittens rather than find owners for them, Sachiko agrees and laughs. On the tram home, Mariko presses her forehead to the window and watches the changing city lights. Etsuko remembers her face as boyish and recalls that Mariko remains silent through the journey, while the adults speak little. The remembered image does not explain Mariko’s silence; its recurrence instead preserves the unease Etsuko associates with her.

Memory, responsibility, and the final image

Etsuko’s narration brings the remembered summer into conversation with her present-day account of Keiko, but it does not make the two stories identical. The friendship with Sachiko lasted only weeks, while Etsuko’s responsibility toward Keiko continues to shape her response to Niki. By returning to a scene with Mariko, she gives the past a vivid, particular face; by refusing to dwell on Keiko, she also shows where her account remains difficult to sustain. Memory here is neither a complete record nor a simple escape from grief: it is the route by which Etsuko approaches what she cannot comfortably discuss directly.

Near the close of Niki’s visit, Etsuko tells her that she had known all along that Keiko would not be happy in England, but brought her there anyway. Niki rejects the claim that her mother could have known and insists that Etsuko did everything she could. Etsuko remains silent. The exchange leaves two accounts side by side: Niki’s defense of her mother and Etsuko’s retrospective assertion of foreknowledge. Rather than settling responsibility, the difference exposes how the past changes shape as Etsuko tells it.

Their conversation ends with a calendar Etsuko has given Niki, showing the harbour in Nagasaki. Etsuko recalls a day trip there and the beauty of the hills above the harbour. Niki asks what was special about the outing, and Etsuko turns back toward the field as two ponies stand near the sycamores. The landscape offers a gentler final memory, but it does not cancel the unresolved conversation about Keiko. Etsuko’s significance as narrator lies partly in this double movement: she can offer a beautiful image of the place she left while remaining unable to make her account of leaving, motherhood, and loss feel complete.