A Pale View of Hills

A Pale View of Hills (1982) is Kazuo Ishiguro’s first novel. Born in Nagasaki in 1954, Ishiguro immigrated with his family to the United Kingdom when he was five years old. Despite his family’s Japanese origins, the author frequently states in interviews that his experience with Japanese culture is very limited, as he spent all his adult life in England. Simultaneously, however, growing up in a Japanese family developed in Ishiguro a different perspective compared to his English peers. The result is a unique writing style that relies on conspiratorial narrators and character dialogue to speak to the human condition and memory.

In 1980, Ishiguro received an MA in creative writing from the University of East Anglia. He has published eight novels, including The Remains of the Day (1989), awarded the Booker Prize, and Never Let Me Go (2005), named by Time magazine as one of the 100 best English-language novels since 1923. Ishiguro received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2017 and was knighted for services in literature in 2018.

Plot Summary

A Pale View of Hills follows two specific temporal points, one in modern-day (1980s) England and one in post-World War II Japan, connected through the first-person recollections of the narrator,

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