First novel by the 2017 Nobel Prize in Literature winner
Already in his debut novel, Faded Landscape with Hills, 2017 Nobel Prize winner Kazuo Ishiguro opens with a theme in which he eventually became a master of quiet horror arranged in a neat ikebana. Fine, unobtrusively, and yet he relentlessly compares the "shameful manifestations of the Great Sphinx" - as my colleague John Fowles once called the problem - and finds, that seemingly beneficial, but the dignified artificiality is a detriment to the typical Japanese and British character, because it actually crushes the machined man and his surroundings.
A brief visit from her only surviving daughter causes the aging Etsuko, a widowed Japanese woman now living in the English countryside, to flash back to a hot summer in her native Nagasaki. At the end of the Second World War, however, the souls of its citizens changed beyond recognition. Nothing is the same as during the pre-war militant regime, the streets are crawling with mobs of former acquaintances and few people find the strength to move on. In a landscape of fading memories, the helpful Ecuko recalls especially the months before the birth of her first child, when she was forced to cozy up to her only living relatives: to the overbearing First Mate and his equally manipulative father. It seems that the submissive wife may have been strengthened by her acquaintance with the erratic neighbour Sachiko and her naughty daughter, who want to get out of the city of burnt shadows at any cost.
However, the escalating inaudible protest and the omnipresent Nagasaki trauma bring the drama of the pregnant Ecuko to its climax, whose Kafkaesque features are enhanced by the author's favourite ich-form. After all, it is thanks to this trick of Ishiguro's that we have learned that human memory selects and deceives with the passing of years, as shown by the excellent novels Twilight of the Day and The Painter of the Ephemeral World.
Awarded the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize for Best Debut of 1982, the story opened the door for an aspiring British writer of Japanese descent to enter Granta magazine, whose recommendation is the best reference for entry into the island's literary elite. In a treacherously soft minor key and with the help of an almost minimalist expression, Kazuo Ishiguro depicts the psychological block of the narrator, who, despite her smallness, longs to escape the noose of "big" history. Won't her memory knock her back into the bomb pit?
