A pale view of hills

A PALE VIEW OF HILLS

This novel is like an open window to a japanese woman´s life. When you read this novel it seems as if you know this woman because, as in real life, you don´t exactly know what she´s feeling or thinking all the time.When the book is finished,the reader
readers have many unanswered questions about this enigmatic woman.

Etsuko is a japanese lady of about fifty who lives in England and when her daughter Niki comes back to visit her, she looks back on some moments of her life.

Just after getting married, she lived in Nagasaki during the years after the war. Aparently, she loved Jiro, her husband, an untraditional worker.

The area where her family lived was to the side of a useless extension because of an atomic bomb. All the characters have lost many of their loved ones; for example, almost all the Miss Fujiwara´s family, who had a restaurant, had died because the bomb It also sems that Etsuko had lost all her family and was rescued by Jiro´s parents

At the other side lived Mariko,a very strange girl, due to an unhappy childhood and her mother Sachiko.This woman has a north american lover who makes her promises that he won´t ever keep, but she hopes that some day hewill take her to live with him in the United States. However,she a strange woman, very reserved, who talks very little about herself.

We know that the main character gets married again and comes to live to England; but this point is not very clear in the book.
In certain moments, we must use our imagination to formulate questions and answers. However, the plot doesn´t seem uncomplete.

The author shows us how polite and discreat the Japanese are towards other people and what life is like for a middle class in a Japanese family