Being the most enigmatic and powerful chapter, this episode of the Ishiguro text offers the reader the clues to decipher the whole novel. The cottage is depicted as a prison-like cell along with a disturbing personification of Death. Ishiguro’s mastery in describing the drowning scene is nerve-wrecking. The writer meticulously records every move of Sachiko’s character and her brutal determination for destruction is juxtaposed by the narrator’s filtered and restrained report. I advance the idea that when Sachiko disappears from the narration Etsuko puts on her character. I interpret Sachiko as Etsuko’s conscience, her double. Shifting from a dissonant to a consonant narrative mode, Sachiko fades and the narrating self, Etsuko enters, which is suggested by the famous and crafty blur of pronouns. The noun “pig” will ring a bell for the implied reader as it was used in connection with Frank. In previous scenes Sachiko and Mariko were arguing about the man. The girl called him “pig” and claimed that he drank his own piss, an accusation her mother was not able to respond to. One would venture how is it that Mariko addresses this offence to Etsuko while they are talking about the girl’s new life? Playing with the fortitude and resilience of the implied reader, the narrator reports that she has just entered the cottage in which a prison-like atmosphere strengthens the apprehension of the situation, light coming through “narrow gaps” (PVH 158).
An encounter with Death gives the narration special tension. In the cottage an old woman is with Mariko. Her characterization brings us to the allusion that she might be Death itself. Her face is very thin and has a “chalky paleness” (PVH 158) about her that unnerves Etsuko. The kimono she is wearing is dark, “the kind normally worn in mourning” (PVH 158). Her eyes are “slightly hooded and watched me with no apparent emotion” (PVH 158). The spooky poltergeist seems to be Sachiko’s cousin, Yasuko-San, a very rational figure who came to persuade Sachiko to return to her uncle’s house. After these surreal opening lines the discourse returns to a realistic one. Nagasaki has changed, it is reported, and as Yasuko-San puts it, Mariko needs a proper shelter. Mariko is very optimistic about this return to safe-life but Sachiko has different plans. The vegetable box 74
Mariko won at the kujibiki stand is converted into a dwelling for the kittens. A “wave of irritation” (PVH 164) crosses Sachiko’s face and a heated dialogue portrays how much the girl is desperate to keep the animals, she insists that her mother once agreed on the issue.
She repeats this accusation four times in a few lines (PVH 163–165). Sachiko answers with growing anger and claims that Mariko is “deliberately awkward, as you always are. What does it matter about the dirty little creatures” (PVH 165)? As the tension reaches a peak Sachiko puts all the kittens into the box, except for the one Mariko is holding firmly, but she has to give in: “Mariko stared up at her mother. Then slowly, she lowered the kitten and let it drop to the tatami in front of her” (PVH 166). The narrator is witnessing the situation with growing panic. Sachiko is making preparation to drown the kittens without hesitation. Etsuko – as it is reported – tries to convince her to let them go. Sachiko mercilessly answers with the same alternating lines: “It’s just an animal” (PVH 167).
Ishiguro’s mastery in describing the drowning scene is very disturbing. The writer meticulously records every move of Sachiko’s character, her brutal determination for destruction is juxtaposed by the narrator’s filtered and restrained report:
Sachiko adjusted her position then pushed the vegetable box over the edge of the bank; the box rolled and landed in the water. To prevent it floating, Sachiko leaned forward and held it down. The water came almost halfway up the wire-grid. She continued to hold down the box, then finally pushed it with both hands. The box floated a little way into the river, bobbed and sank further. Sachiko got to her feet, and we both of us watched the box. It continued to float, then caught in the current and began moving more swiftly downstream (PVH 167–168).
Mariko is watching the scene and her face is “expressionless” (PVH 168). The shock she has suffered is even more severe as she was mortified to death by the war-trauma of witnessing a woman drowning her baby (PVH 74). The trauma behind Mariko’s state is revealed by hearing the story of “the other woman”, who killed her baby (PVH 74) by drowning it in the canal and then cutting her throat. Mariko follows the box down the river, which is, as it is repeated in the text for a second time, “dirty” (PVH 168). This “filthy”
water is metaphorical in my understanding since in it babies and animals are brutally killed. This is consonant with which Brian Shaffer declares that Sachiko’s drowning of the
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kittens is a “figurative murder of her daughter,”217 Shaffer calls this a symbolic murder.
Etsuko pursues Sachiko into the cottage and they converse about the reasons for leaving Japan. The mother is not concerned how her daughter will cope with the new life. She indifferently repeats that Mariko will manage well enough, as she has to (PVH 171). She also insists that “Japan is no place for a girl” (PVH 169). As it is very vividly described;
the cottage filled with the metaphorical “pale light” and “Behind her the sky had become pale and faded” (PVH 169). In my interpretation this “pale” light connotes to the meaning of “uncertainty,” as it is “misty” and “blurred.” And indeed, Sachiko is fading away, her silhouette dissolves into the darkening sky. At this point in the narration, I put forward the idea that when Sachiko disappears from the narration Etsuko puts on her real character. In other words, I interpret Sachiko as Etsuko’s conscience, her double. As soon as Sachiko fades, the real Etsuko enters, which is shown by the famous and crafty change of pronouns.
The key is hidden in a grammatical trick, the second person plural “you” meaning Sachiko, Mariko is altered to the first person plural “we” referring to Mariko and Etsuko:
“In any case,” I went on, “if you don’t like it over there, we can always come back.”
This time she looked up at me questioningly.
“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” (PVH 173).
The insects are intolerable and there is a threatening tranquillity pending over the place.
Etsuko’s tone changes from the, so far, craven and intimidated to an authoritative, even angry manner as she keeps asking Mariko (PVH 172). It is not farfetched to say that, probably, Etsuko is Sachiko and she is the one who plans to move to America/England with Frank/Sheringham and Mariko/Keiko. Personas are blurred into new characters, giving the Ishiguro-text a brand new angle: Sachiko’s past is Etsuko’s present and future.
To make the situation more complex, the image of “rope” returns with equally terrifying effect for Mariko. Now Etsuko is holding a rope which the girl is very afraid of, echoing a previous episode. As Wai-chew Sim rightly observes, not only “this situation mirrors an earlier scene when Etsuko had also found Mariko after she ran off”218 but also, the
217Matthew Beedham, The Novels of Kazuo Ishiguro, 21.
218 Wai-chew Sim, Kazuo Ishiguro (New York, Routledge, 2010), 30.
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“unexplained repetition adds an element of the macabre.”219 To restate once more: the
“rope” metaphor is introduced while searching for Mariko on the night of babysitting. The pregnant Etsuko is walking through “muddy” and damp grounds. She finds the girl under a willow tree and a serpent-like rope is twisted around her ankle “with a rustling noise as if a snake were sliding in the grass behind me” (PVH 83). Mariko is paralyzed by seeing the rope – echoing the one Keiko strangled herself with – this fright is emphasized by alarming repetitions in the narrative. The same narrative technique is exercised here. Mariko asks Etsuko about the rope twice and she gives her “suspicious” (PVH 173) looks. Etsuko plainly answers that it was caught around her sandal. Keiko’s rope is associated with Etsuko’s and the similarity gap between the two makes the tension almost unbearable. It seems as if Etsuko wanted to strangle Mariko, as the baby and the kittens were.