Nagasaki’s Scar: The Formation, Reference, and Transformation of Nuclear Explosion Memory in A Pale View of Hills

Kazuo Ishiguro’s exploration of memory in A Pale View of Hills opens a window for us to understand his literary creation. Although the academic community fully acknowledges Ishiguro’s reliance on memory and recognizes the connection between the writer’s own memories of his native Japan and this work, it has not yet analyzed the mechanism of memory’s occurrence and development as a central topic. As a result, the role of memory elements in the theme of this novel remains obscure. Utilizing the philosophical theory of memory, this article conducts an in-depth examination of the writer’s memory and the characters’ memories and finds that the protagonist’s memory of the atomic bombing is constructed through Ishiguro’s transferential framing of his own memories of his native Japan. Ishiguro uses the mutual referencing of Etsuko’s narration – Etsuko’s narration to Sachiko, and Sachiko’s narration to the unnamed woman – to allude to the widespread sense of collective loss among people in post-war Japan. He deliberately designs a spiral literary rhetorical structure of overlapping references to war memories, ultimately achieving a transformation of the re-encoding of war trauma.