群山淡景 (1982)

《远山淡影》（英语：A Pale View of Hills，又译群山淡影）是石黑一雄于1982年出版的作品，获英国皇家学会颁发温尼弗雷德．霍尔比奖（Winifred Holtby Prize）。

内容

来自日本的英国寡妇悦子，因不善交际而又沉默反叛的长女自杀，开始回想战后在长崎生活的往事。当时，悦子身怀六甲，遇到一对从东京来的母女。母亲一直为出走日本到美国而奔波，而女孩则经常孤立自己，母女间的口角弄得双方都很不愉快。一日，悦子陪同两人到山上游览，雾下的群山十分美丽。两人当晚更赢了大奖：一个盛菜的木箱，女孩亦因此感到十分快乐。不过，离开前的一晚，母亲违背承诺，不肯带女孩心爱的小猫一同出国，更将它们一一扔入河中。女孩一气之下上吊，却摔了下来受了伤。

悦子最后对次女说，那天她们到山上游览时，长女十分高兴；母女的故事其实是悦子为了减轻自己的罪感而编出来的。

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. Etsuko recalls how, as Keiko grew older, she would lock herself in her room and emerge only to pick up the dinner-plate that her mother would leave for her in the kitchen. This disturbing behavior ends, as the reader already has learned, in Keiko's suicide. "Your father," Etsuko tells Niki, "was rather idealistic at times...[H]e really believed we could give her a happy life over here... But you see, Niki, I knew all along. I knew all along she wouldn't be happy over here."

Etsuko tells her daughter, Niki, that she had a friend in Japan named Sachiko. Sachiko had a daughter named Mariko, a girl whom Etsuko's memory paints as exceptionally solitary and antisocial. Sachiko, Etsuko recalls, had planned to take Mariko to America with an American soldier identified only as "Frank". Clearly, Sachiko's story bears striking similarities to Etsuko's.

Characters

Etsuko – main protagonist; middle-aged Japanese woman

Keiko – Etsuko's elder daughter who commits suicide

Niki – Etsuko's second daughter, by her English husband

Sachiko – woman known to Etsuko, and, possibly, a third person on whom Etsuko projects bad memories, thoughts, and events

Mariko – Sachiko's daughter, and, possibly, a representation of Etsuko's daughter, Keiko

Jiro – Etsuko's first husband

Ogata-san – Jiro's father

Frank – man that Sachiko was going to America with

Mrs. Fujiwara – the owner of noodle shop who gave Sachiko a job

Hanada – Jiro's friend who threatened his wife with a golf club

Shigeo Matsuda – a student in Ogata-san's class

Origin and publication

Ishiguro received a £1000 advance from publishers Faber and Faber for the novel after a meeting with Robert McCrum, the fiction editor.

Reception

The novel was generally well received by critics, many praising the novel's mysterious tone. The New York Review of Books called it "eery and tenebrous. It is a ghost story but the narrator does not realise that." The New York Times said the novel was "infinitely ... mysterious", and the inconsistent tone of the narrator, with the graphic imagery in the book combined to create "the absolute emblem of our genius of destruction".