I’m 140 pages in and I still don’t know exactly how to describe what A Pale View of Hills is about. It’s set in postwar Japan just outside Nagasaki and goes between an undisclosed more modern day and the a few years or so after WWII has ended. The protagonist is a woman named Etsuko. It mostly spends time describing the lonely days she spent during the period just after the war. She lives with her husband, who is often too busy for her, in isolated but new apartment blocks which has a wasteland surrounding it (to the irritation of her and her neighbours). The author writes in a beautifully simple way and has mastered the ability of communicating dialogue without any adverbs or exclamation. Each piece of dialogue communicates the emotion of what is said through the choice of words - which creates an amazing flow that allows the reader to fill in through intuitive contextual understanding.
As the narrator switches between past and “present”, it becomes clear that Japan has had drastic culture changes in a fast period - or perhaps faster than it previously had. Etsuko’s father-in-law, Orgota, comes to stay at their place for a brief period. Through the dialogues between Etsuko and Ortoga, and Etsuko and her youngest daughter, we read through their dialogue that between each generation history has molded them. They expect certain things of society and the people around them but often times those
Ultimately, I’m hoping that there will be some redemption for the story and message of this book at the end. The author has made this book inscrutably subtle - apparently this is not an uncommon reaction either.
I finished. The book was one of those one’s you can look back on and say: “that was good”, but its message was subtle. The overarching motif was of cultural change - especially cultural change in post war Japan. Japan quickly became Westernized after the second world war and its older generations had difficulties in adapting.