The novel A Pale View of the Hills was written in 1982. This is the debut novel of Kazuo Ishiguro - a British writer with Japanese roots. It is difficult to answer unequivocally whether this is a British novel with Japanese coloring or vice versa. The author himself will not give an answer. In this book, there are elements of Britain and Japan in equal parts, on an equal footing.
The narrative is retold on behalf of Etsuko, who lost one of her daughters (Keiko had committed suicide). The space-time framework covers Nagasaki after the atomic bombing (August 9, 1945) and modern England, where the narrator lives.
The past and the present are described in a parallel way, and the problems that were once in the past remain relevant to the present: misunderstandings between different generations, the problem of fathers and children (Osaga-san and his son Jiro, Etsuko and her daughter Niki). And nobody is to blame for this, just the course of history makes what it wants to people, their consciousness and to the picture of the world. The content of problems is changing, but the character remains the same. This is the problem of historical memory: it is not said directly about the terrible catastrophe that brought with it hundreds of thousands of deaths, but it is remembered, the dialogues of the characters give us this to understand. Memory is a principal theme in this work, whether it is the tragedy of the whole country or the tragedy of one person.
The novel was well received and in the same year of publication (1982) won the Winifred Hiltby Memorial Prize.
