Confessional Modes in A Pale View of Hills and A Temporary Matter

In A Pale View of Hills by Kazuo Ishiguro, the character-narrator Etsuko confess

through recalling her life in Japan in the first-person point of view, in which creditability is

questioned due to the intention of hiding details of her memories and the significant similarity

between herself and Sachiko. She is believed to be utilising Sachiko as the mode of

confession to cover up her misconduct that leads to the death of her elder daughter, Keiko,

and the guilt accompanying it. In A Temporary Matter, Lahiri uses a third-person narrative to

illustrate the recollection of a couple, Shukumar and Shoba. The confessional game they

played during the blackout serves as their confessional mode. Confession is significant to

Etsuko and Shukumar, whose character development will also be explored in this paper.

The first-person narrative in A Pale View of Hills makes Etsuko’s confession

unreliable. Etsuko’s confessional narrative of her life is told with a frame story of her

daughter Niki’s visit, triggering Etsuko’s fragmented memories of her desolate life in Japan

but interrupted by the unwelcome recalling of Keiko, the daughter of her first marriage in

Japan, who committed suicide. The disjointed narrative structure may have damaged the story

discourse’s continuity; such discontinuity and chronology shifting has weakened the

confession’s credibility and delayed the audience’s realisation of the truth. The supposed

foregrounding, the story’s focus — Etsuko’s confession and other guilty feelings regarding

Keiko’s death — has been shunted to the background. “I feel only regret now for those

attitudes I expressed toward Keiko” (Ishiguro, 65), Etsuko admits. Nonetheless, when Etsuko

is revealing and guiding her audience to revisit her memory and past in most episodes of the

confession, the focus of the confession is always shifted away from Etsuko’s personal life,

especially that in Japan, which appears to comprise the mystery of Keiko’s death. While the

plot has gone back to post-war Japan in chapter 5, where Etsuko was pregnant with her first

child — readers expect a closer look into her personal life as the novel progresses — the
focus abruptly turns to the observation of Sachiko’s life. As a result, Etsuko’s story is

reduced to a minor subplot.

Moreover, Etsuko makes up the character Sachiko as the mode of confession. The

seemingly unimportant story of Etsuko’s friend Sachiko and her love-hate relationships with

her daughter Mariko and American boyfriend Frank seep in and become the main focus of

the narrative as the initial aim of the confession is pushed to the background. It is not difficult

for readers to see the parallelism between the two characters. For instance, “‘Yes I promise,’ I

said. ‘If you don’t like it over there, we’ll come straight back. But we have to try it and see if

we like it there. I’m sure we will’” (Ishiguro, 130). Here, Etsuko keeps mentioning the first-

person “I” and “we” when persuading “the child” who is supposed to be Mariko to leave

Japan. But the name is deliberately concealed; the identities of Sachiko-and-Mariko and

Etsuko-and-Keiko is therefore believed to be overlapped. The fact that Sachiko, rather than

being a friend of Etsuko, is actually Etsuko’s alter ego established to distance herself from,

meanwhile indirectly confessing her misdeed and the remorse and guilt that comes with it.

Sachiko’s emphasis on looking forward represents Etsuko’s self-rescue. It indicates her guilty

for the death of Keiko, so she wants to find a way to escape from being destroyed by self-

blame.

Unlike The Pale View of Hills, a third-person narrative is used in A Temporary Matter

which reveals the confessional process of the couple, Shukumar and Shoba, more directly and

credibly. At the very beginning of the story, through “when he returned to Boston it was over.

The baby had been born dead” (Lahiri 2), the readers have already learned the root of the

couple’s anguish and frustration — their child was stillborn, and Shukumar was away from

Shoba at the moment. The recollection also foreshadows the guilt that plays a significant role

in Shukumar’s grieving process since he believes that his absence deprives him of the right to

grieve. Nevertheless, the true confession is not displayed until the couple plays the game
during the blackout. The conversation in the “confessional game” is gradually developed

from shallowness like Shoba revealing her decision of not telling Shukumar about the dab of

pate on his chin when he is speaking to the chair of the department to hurtfulness like Shoba

describing Shukumar’s poem as “sentimental”, and eventually vulnerability when the sex of

the baby is disclosed by Shukumar. It is a complete process of confession which arouses the

audience’s curiosity in whether the couple would open up and reconcile with each other at

last. On the other hand, “darkness” serves as an alternate reality that allows the couple to be

candid with each other in a manner that they could not be if the lights were turned on. The

blackout marks the couple’s entrance into this safe, cosy zone. Shukumar thinks about their

stillborn infant after hearing Shoba’s account, but he does not voice out. Shukumar’s silence

emphasises his shame as well as the couple’s incapacity to confess openly with one another.

Confession is essential in order to achieve reconciliation. The two stories show that

people are unable to directly face their traumatic experiences. Therefore, the characters have

to reveal the truth through some devices, Sachiko and the game, respectively, and find

excuses for self-consolation. For example, Shoba trivialises the rules of the confessional

game into telling “a little poem. A joke. A fact about the world” (Lahiri 5) in order to entice

Shukumar to play. Shoba reduces the stakes and puts Shukuma at ease to confess by

downplaying the seriousness of the morsels of information they will trade back and forth. Not

to mention Etsuko in The Pale View of Hills creates a projection and does not disclose the

mindblowing truth until the end of the novel. She keeps recalling and telling about her past

through Sachiko’s story because she has been unable to let go of the guilt of bringing Mariko

to immigrate to a foreign country at that time, let alone the shame brought about by Mariko’s

death. Her confession is an ease to her painful past that has been trapped here for a long time.

On the other hand, Shukumar eventually puts down his guard and shows his vulnerability

when he discloses the sex of the baby.

 To conclude, although A Pale View of Hills and A Temporary Matter deal with the

mode of confession differently, the two characters, Etsuko and Shukumar, reflect the process

and importance of confession in literature. They both tend to hide, deny, rationalise, or justify

their sin. But when they finally come to confession, it is time for them to accept their flaws

and move on. Different modes of confession come into the same purpose — to reconcile to

certain circumstances like Keiko’s and the baby’s death; with someone else, like Keiko and

Shoba, and most importantly, with their inner selves.

Reference

Ishiguro, Kazuo. A Pale View of Hills. FABER & FABER LTD. 2010

Lahiri, Jhumpa. A Temporary Matter. 1998