Eighty years since its end, the Second World War is fading from living memory. Acclaimed Japanese film director Kei Ishikawa explores the aftermath of the conflict and the unreliability of recollections in his new Anglo-Japanese adaptation of A Pale View of Hills, the 1982 debut novel by Nobel Prize-winning writer Kazuo Ishiguro.

The book is set in two different eras: Nagasaki in 1952, seven years after an atomic bomb was dropped on the city, and England 30 years later. “I had always thought that this subject was for older generations who had experienced the war,” Ishikawa tells Monocle. “But that generation is disappearing and somehow we have to find our own way to tell the story.”

Ishikawa, 48, whose 2022 film Aru Otoko(AMan) was a critical and commercial success in Japan, had other reasons to be hesitant. “I was aware that Kazuo had written two books set in Japan but he is a big name so I wondered whether I was the right person to make the film.” But Ishikawa was more than up to the task. Engaging and laid-back, he is easy to converse with and curious about the world; he poses for a portrait in the hot sun without any complaints.

A Pale View of Hills focuses on Etsuko, who we meet as a young housewife in postwar Nagasaki and again in 1980s England, where she has settled. She has lost her husband and her eldest daughter, and lives alone with her memories. The logistical challenges of adapting the book are immediately evident: it required not only two period settings but also two locations on opposite sides of the world, not to mention two languages. It helps that A Pale View of Hills has a pair of powerhouse production teams behind it: Japan’s Bunbuku, which works with leading directors such as Hirokazu Koreeda, and the UK’s Number 9 Films, which has produced everything from Neil Jordan’s Interview with the Vampire to Oliver Hermanus’s Living.

Ishikawa was surprised to discover that Ishiguro’s first book had yet to be turned into a film – a sign of the challenge that the material presents. Few Japanese or international filmmakers have tackled the difficult subject of the Nagasaki bomb, which fell three days after the strike on Hiroshima and killed 74,000 people.

For Ishiguro – who was born in Nagasaki in 1954, before moving to England at the age of five – it was a deeply personal subject. The psychological impact of the bomb on a generation of people is the focus of his book, rather than the attack itself. Ishiguro has said that the novel was informed by conversations with his mother, Shizuko, who lived through the bombing. Her memories showed him that war is “not just about big violent conflict – it’s about small everyday lives”.

Ishikawa immediately knew that he would have to make that part of the story more explicit for contemporary viewers. “The bomb is a dark shadow that lurks underneath Kazuo’s story,” he says. “That was obvious to readers in the 1980s when this book was published; people still remembered the war. For audiences now, though, even the 1980s feels like a long time ago.”

The director brought in Ishiguro, who is credited as an executive producer, from the outset. “We had a video call,” says Ishikawa. “I thought that it would just be a matter of saying hello but he was very enthusiastic. He said, ‘Listen, it’s my first book so there are some problems but this is a good direction.’” As well as welcoming Ishikawa’s tweaks, Ishiguro even joked that the director had improved on his youthful novel.

Having swept the board at the Japan Academy Film Prize with Aru Otoko, Ishikawa is now a director who every actor wants to work with. For the leads in A Pale View of Hills, he cast Suzu Hirose as the young Etsuko and Fumi Nikaido as her mysterious friend, Sachiko. Both will be instantly familiar to Japanese audiences. “It’s the first time that they have been in the same film,” says Ishikawa. “There was a good tension between these two top actresses. I loved the chemistry between them.”

In this 80th-anniversary year, with fewer and fewer hibakusha (atomic-bomb survivors) remaining, relaying the horrors of nuclear weapons to the world has become more urgent. “This story is so important to the people of Nagasaki and they wanted us to shoot in the city,” says Ishikawa. “But it looks too different now.” As a result, much of the two-month Japan shoot took place in a studio, followed by a two-week shoot in England. The house that appears on screen is in Hertfordshire, carefully styled as the 1980s home of a woman who had emigrated from Japan.

The film shows us a fascinating montage of photos of 1950s Nagasaki, which might surprise viewers who are expecting to see only despair and devastation. “We wanted to make the movie very colourful because, in Japanese cinema, [representations of] postwar Nagasaki are always about the immediate aftermath of the bomb,” says Ishikawa. “Its people are always shown as poor, hungry and sad. But this film is set in 1952, seven years after the war. The city had been rebuilt a lot and people were wearing nicer clothes. It was quite close to the American base, so a lot of jazz bands had started to play there. A dark shadow is always present but this aspect is something fresh.”

A Pale View of Hills is out now in Japan and is released in France on 15 October, with wider releases next year. Ishikawa hopes that his film will resonate with a younger audience, however distant the events that it portrays might seem. “Our generation might not be able to experience that time,” he says. “But we can still tell the story.”
bunbukubun.com;number9films.co.uk