A Pale View of Hills
1982 novel by Kazuo Ishiguro
A Pale View of Hills is the first novel by Nobel Prize–winning author Kazuo Ishiguro, published in February 1982. It won the 1982 Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize. A Pale View of Hills is the story of Etsuko, a middle-aged Japanese woman living alone in England. It opens with discussion between Etsuko and her younger daughter, Niki, about the recent suicide of Etsuko's older daughter, Keiko. The novel was adapted into the 2025 film of the same name.
Plot summary
During a visit from her daughter, Niki, Etsuko reflects on her own life as a young woman in postwar Nagasaki, Japan, and how she left that country to live in England. As she describes it, she and her Japanese husband, Jiro, had a daughter together, and a few years later Etsuko met a British man and moved with him to England. She took her elder daughter, Keiko, to England to live with her and the new husband. When Etsuko and her new husband have a daughter, Etsuko wants to call her something "modern" and her husband wants an Eastern-sounding name, so they compromise with the name "Niki", which seems to Etsuko to be perfectly British, but sounds to her husband at least slightly Japanese.
In England, Keiko becomes increasingly solitary and antisocial.
“A Pale View of Hills” enters the record as 1982 novel by Kazuo Ishiguro. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Pale, View and Hills can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Reception evidence should be dated and situated: later canonical status may differ sharply from the work’s initial circulation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 19, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4658705. VIAF identifies the subject as 9714163513744411230000. 1 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1982 and 2025.
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This entry incorporates text from “A Pale View of Hills” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.