Non-Japanese Characters

In A Pale View of Hills, there are a few non-Japanese characters mentioned. These include Etsuko’s new English husband, who is only mentioned a few times, an American woman, who they meet at a picnic place, and the American man Frank who is Sachiko’s boyfriend.

Frank is only talked about by Sachiko and Etsuko never meets him, which is the reason there is not much information about him in the novel. He seems to have promised Sachiko that he would take her and Mariko to America, but he appears mainly to use her. This can be seen when Sachiko speaks of why their first attempt at going to America failed: “a few more weeks and we could have got a ship to America. But then he drank it all. All those

weeks I spent scrubbing floors on my knees and he drank it all up in three days” (A Pale View of Hills 87). From this it is possible to gather that he did not truly want to take them to America and more likely took advantage of Sachiko. This was possible because of Sachiko’s need to change her life back to how it used to be before the war, when she was wealthy.

Etsuko’s English husband is mentioned only on a couple of occasions. Etsuko does not say how she met him or how she came to England however from her telling that he was fine with Niki as their daughter’s name because “it had some vague echo of the east about it” (A Pale View of Hills 9) and also how he “despite all the impressive articles he wrote about Japan, my husband never understood the ways of our culture” (A Pale View of Hills 90) that he was not truly interested in Japanese culture, only on the surface. Such behaviour was common during the late 19^th and early 20^th century when people in the West became crazy about Oriental because of the cultural difference. This resulted in “French and English women entertained at home in ‘tea-gowns’. The Japanese tea ceremony spawned tea shops throughout Europe, and Japanese gardens influenced garden design”

(Moore 275). While there was an interest towards Japan, it was only towards the stereotypes of Japanese culture.

Westerners thought that there are many different elements that are considered as Japanese “such as simplicity, functionality and minimalism have been talked about in such a way that Westerners now understand Japanese design as a distinctive mix of all these elements” (Graig 3). They also noticed the “notions of harmony and a special Japanese affinity with the natural world, each of which has become part of a general rhetoric in the West for describing things Japanese” (Graig 3). In the West, after Japan “opened” to the Western world,

Japonisme […] exploded on the European art scene in the nineteenth century after new technologies opened the eyes of the Western world to previously unexplored Eastern lands. Japan had been closed to the outside world for more than two hundred years, a fact that increased the excitement in 1860 when Japan began to allow easier access to foreigners. (Eversole 20).

People in the West began to collect Japanese items and at some point, it became a craze to have a Japanese wife.

This was because of the stereotype about Japanese women that they were docile and did everything for their husbands. While in the novel it is not clear whether Etsuko and her husband loved each other and whether that brought her to England or whether there was another reason for it, at least he brought her. This is positive compared to other stories like Puccini’s Madame Butterfly which is an opera set in Japan. In the opera a Japanese woman has a child and the American man leaves her to Japan as he himself returns to America. For the Western men “by the end of the nineteenth century, Nagasaki had become a ’rest and relaxation’ port for American sailors, who would often use Nagasaki geishas as prostitutes” (Eversole 26). This shows the lack of appreciation for Japanese culture as the men thought of geishas as prostitutes. Western men thought Japanese women as something to be used for when there but not as something permanent in their lives. For the man in Madame Butterfly, the Japanese woman “She, too, is simply part of a collection; her wings pinned and unable to fly” (Eversole 30). This relates to the idea that the West is above other cultures and also how collecting Japanese culture during the Japonisme period was highly sought for.

As the West has this idea of being above other cultures, it is not limited to Western men. The novel includes a short appearance of an American woman, Suzie, who can be

seen as showing similar views as Western men. According to Guo, “The conversation between Sachiko and Suzie-San, the American woman, reveals that the latter tries to exhibit her privileged status before the native Sachiko” (Guo 34). During her dialogue with the Japanese characters in the novel according to Guo it can be seen how

The American woman, Suzie-San, however, is not merely culturally insensitive to Mariko’s butterfly drawing when she uses the Japanese word “delicious” to mean “beautiful.” She holds herself high above the Japanese women, as Etsuko notices for three times that she speaks and laughs “loudly”, a manner Japanese women regard as being offensive. And Sachiko’s eagerness to talk with her in English reinforces the American woman’s cultural superiority. The American woman’s sense of self-importance reflects Western women’s racial discrimination against non-Western women. (Guo 35)

This shows the superior attitude Westerners had towards other cultures. It also shows the influence the West has had on Japan as it has become important to know English even while in Japan. The influences Western culture has had on Japan are shown in many parts of the novels and these interactions will be discussed in the next chapter.