Etsuko adopts Sachiko's habit of using the name of the person she is talking to in absolutely every sentence. At the beginning of the flashback, Etsuko makes an abrupt shift from how she felt living in Nagasaki during the years immediately following WW2 to how Sachiko felt about it within the same paragraph.

In his highly acclaimed debut, A Pale View of Hills, Kazuo Ishiguro tells the story of Etsuko, a Japanese woman now living alone in England, dwelling on the recent suicide of her daughter. But I remember with some distinctiveness that eerie spell which seemed to bind the two of us [Etsuko and Sachiko] as we stood there in the coming darkness looking towards that shape further down bank” [Ishiguro, 2005: 41]. I wondered at times if Mariko was a yōkai, a spirit from Japanese folklore, and even whether Sachiko and her child were real or figments of Etsuko’s imagination.My feelings about The Remains of the Day are mixed up with my feelings about the film, which I saw before I read the book and have seen a couple of times since I read the book, making my memory of the novel unreliable! The pregnant Etsuko as described in her Japanese life seems destined to avoid some of the bad mothering described on the part of Sachiko. The dialogue between Etsuko and Sachiko is awkward and stilted and Sachiko, formally a wealthy woman, is patronising to Etsuko. Ogata-san has been offended by something an old school friend of Jiro’s has written about him and every time he visits, he asks Jiro to speak with his former friend.

Sir Kazuo Ishiguro (カズオ・イシグロ or 石黒 一雄), OBE, FRSA, FRSL is a British novelist of Japanese origin and Nobel Laureate in Literature (2017). The devastation of the war is not only instant but long-lasting, making deep marks in the generations to come. There is “an unmistakable air of transience” around the concrete block buildings, “as if all of us were waiting for the day we could move to something better. I'm sure if you haven't read the book, all this sounds a bit confusing, and you might be wondering what the deal is anyway, but from a narrative theory point of view, the ability of such a small thing - a few pronouns - to throw the entire preceeding narrative into doubt is pretty impressive.In this, his first novel, Ishiguro perhaps felt the need to exorcise some personal ghosts from his past. Certain telling details (easy to miss) suggest that Etsuko is lending Sachiko some of her own experiences and emotions, and by the end of the novel that seems obvious. Mariko was also unhappy at the thought of moving to America with her mother's American boyfriend yet we never find out if they actually make it to the States. To what extent she went with (the possibly imaginary) Sachiko and Mariko on that outing we do not know. I kept hoping it would develope into something, that I would learn more about the tragedies that befell each individual in the narrative, but I was left feeling somewhere between flat and bewildered by the end.