A Pale View of Hills

A Pale View of Hills (1982) is Kazuo Ishiguro's first novel. Its narrator, Etsuko, lives in England, and her second daughter, Niki, is visiting from London. We learn early on that Etsuko's first daughter, Keiko, was so unhappy in life she committed suicide. During Niki's visit, Etsuko remembers a time not long after the war, when she was a young woman, pregnant with Keiko and living in Nagasaki. There she met Sachiko, whose daughter, Mariko, was also very unhappy as a little girl.

There's something eerily evocative about this story. I wanted somebody to rescue Mariko, but from whom or what she could've been rescued, I wasn't sure. Through ostensibly banal conversations and accounts of everyday experiences, the tension swells slowly and moderately before gradually receding, again and again and again, which made me expect the absolute worst. Ishiguro is a master of subtlety, and it shows in this early work as it does in The Remains of the Day (1989), and likely in his other novels which I have yet to read. A Pale View of Hills has been described as macabre and mysterious. A review in The New York Review of Books calls it a ghost story, adding the narrator doesn't realize that it is. For me, the book itself feels haunted, and the writing is pure, with each word carefully chosen. It's a novel I'll remember and recommend.

The Sea and Poison

I sort of read this book by accident. I’ve heard about Shusaku Endo for years but never read his work, and I recently watched Martin Scorsese’s 2016 film, Silence, based on Endo’s 1966 novel of the same name. Then after reading a review in a friend’s blog about Endo’s 1986 novel, Scandal, I headed over to the Kinokuniya near Shinjuku Station’s east exit to see if they carried this title or any of his others. Half a dozen or so Endo novels were on the shelf but not Scandal, so at random I picked The Sea and Poison (1958).

Much of this story takes place at a hospital in Fukuoka at the end of the war. It’s told from the perspectives of ordinary people, all but one of whom become involved in an atrocity. The central character is Suguro, a medical intern whose colleagues are coercing him to participate in the vivisections of two captured American pilots. For a short novel, Endo covers a lot of ground, with a focus on guilt and culpability, ethics and morality. Reading it, I knew and dreaded that I'd eventually come to the vivisections. And although they weren’t so graphic, they were described in enough detail to be disturbing, as was the impassiveness of some characters in the lead-up to those grisly experiments. Endo’s prose in this book are smooth and easy to read, while the subject matter is rough terrain that’s hard to get through in places. I do look forward to reading more of his work but hope not all of it is so dark. I'm also interested in seeing how the story is told in the 1986 film The Sea and Poison, which was directed by Kei Kumai, with Eiji Okuda as Suguro and Ken Watanabe as Toda.

Shantaram

Weighing in at 944 pages (roughly 375,000 words), this is the longest novel I've read in a while. Shantaram (2003) details the fictionalized and meandering adventures of Australian-born writer Gregory David Roberts, the book’s author, under the alias Lindsay “Linbaba” Ford. Lindsay, a heroin addict and bank robber, locked away for his crimes in Australia, escapes from prison and with a fake passport ends up in Mumbai. There he meets a diverse group of foreigners, all running away from their previous lives, and befriends a local man, Prabaker, who helps him learn Marathi and Hindi while showing him the sites of the city and rural town of Sunder. On and on the story goes: the protagonist falls in love, acquires black-market medicine from a leper colony, bear hugs a bear, lives and heals in a slum where cholera, packs of dogs, and swarms of rats are rampant, works with the mafia, flies to and from Africa, is jailed and brutally beaten, does odd jobs for Bollywood, seeks revenge, and . . . just when you think there can’t be anything left to tell in the saga . . . joins a band of smugglers taking weapons to the Mujahideen in Afghanistan.

The book is violent, sometimes fantastically so, like when Lindsay gouges a man’s eye from its socket only to later pop it back in (“but it stared out at a strange angle”). I’d read that Shantaram was based on Roberts’ life, but the more you read it, the more you realize lots of it couldn’t have happened as described. But it's a great adventure tale, and I enjoyed Lindsay’s search for meaning and his philosophical pursuits, and how he draws life lessons from suffering. I think the first two lines of Shantaram capture its essence:

It took me a long time and most of the world to learn what I know about love and fate and the choices we make, but the heart of it came to me in an instant, while I was chained to a wall and being tortured. I realised, somehow, through the screaming in my mind, that even in that shackled, bloody helplessness, I was still free: free to hate the men who were torturing me, or to forgive them.