Kei Ishikawa interview: On adapting Kazuo Ishiguro’s ‘A Pale View of the Hills’ for a modern audience

Japanese filmmaker Kei Ishikawa’s films return, again and again, to people trying to live with versions of themselves that no longer quite fit. His 2022 feature A Man followed a widower who discovers that the husband she loved was never who he claimed to be, forcing the film to ask how much of a life survives once its foundation collapses. In A Pale View of Hills, Ishikawa adapts Kazuo Ishiguro’s 1982 debut novel and turns to a quieter, more intimate rupture of a mother revisiting her past in fragments, and a daughter listening closely enough to hear what doesn’t add up.

A Pale View of Hills was written by Ishiguro when he was just 25, shortly after he had moved to Britain from Japan and before he became widely known for novels like The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go. Published in 1982, it was his first attempt to work through questions of memory, migration, and cultural dislocation, drawing loosely on Nagasaki, where he was born, and England, where he came of age.

Ishiguro has often described the book as flawed, even calling it “a very bad book,” but it establishes the narrative method he would refine over decades: a composed, courteous voice, circling around grief, and allowing contradictions to carry as much weight as facts. The novel oscillates between Nagasaki in the early 1950s and England in the early 1980s, following Etsuko, a Japanese woman living abroad who revisits her past after the suicide of her daughter, recalling friendships and decisions that never quite settle into a single, reliable version of events.

Ishikawa approached Ishiguro directly about adapting it. He did so fresh off A Man, a film that critics quickly linked to his new project, sometimes dismissively. Ishikawa shrugs at the comparison, though the connective tissue is obvious to him. “I’m always interested in this kind of identity,” he says. “Especially since Kazuo Ishiguro is kind of in between Japanese culture and English culture.” He talks about his own biography in the same breath — studying filmmaking in Poland before returning to Japan, and being told his films felt Polish in Tokyo and Japanese in Łódź. “I always felt I’m kind of in between too,” he says. “I feel great sympathy for the kind of people who are standing in between something.”

A still from ‘A Pale View of the Hills’
| Photo Credit:
Bunbuku

The sense of being suspended between places and languages shapes the film at every level. A Pale View of Hills premiered in Cannes’ Un Certain Regard section in 2025, with Ishiguro serving as executive producer and something like a benevolent script doctor. The cast bridges continents too, with Suzu Hirose playing the younger Etsuko in Nagasaki; Yō Yoshida embodying her decades later in England; Fumi Nikaido appearing as Sachiko, the volatile friend who may or may not be a projection; and Camilla Aiko playing Niki, Etsuko’s British-born daughter and, in Ishikawa’s adaptation, the film’s primary point of view.

That last shift is one of Ishikawa’s boldest departures from the book. In the novel, Etsuko narrates everything, but in the film, Niki becomes the listener, the investigator and the audience surrogate. Ishikawa frames this change as structural rather than philosophical. “If I talk about the core spirit, I never felt I had to change something,” he says. “It’s more about how to tell the story. It’s written in letters and then we have to tell the story by pictures.”

Time complicates that translation. Ishiguro wrote the novel in the early 1980s, looking back to the 1950s. Ishikawa is adapting it in the 2020s, for viewers for whom the atomic bombing of Nagasaki has slipped beyond living memory. “Now we have another layer,” he says. “We have three layers with the ‘50s, ‘80s and then the 2020s.” Rather than treating the film as either a memory piece or a historical drama, Ishikawa searched for what persisted across those decades. Gender, for one. Nuclear anxiety, for another. “We improved something,” he says, “but somehow the very essence of the problem really still stays.”

That continuity guided one of the adaptation’s most debated choices of addressing the atomic bomb more directly than Ishiguro does on the page. In the novel, the bombing is an atmospheric presence which is rarely named, but in the film, survivors speak openly about stigma, injury, and psychological fallout. Ishikawa explains how this clarity did not feel like betrayal. “This is post-war Nagasaki,” he says, emphasising that the film is set seven years after the blast. What surprised him in his research was not devastation but colour. “Everything is very vivid and colourful and the people are more positive than we imagined,” he says. “But at the same time, it was only seven years ago that they actually experienced hell.”

A still from ‘A Pale View of the Hills’
| Photo Credit:
Bunbuku

Rather than staging explicit horrors, Ishikawa leans into absence and displacement. He makes use of trauma as something felt obliquely, like a recurring nightmare whose origin remains just out of frame. “It seems like a metaphor,” he says, “but I think people can really feel sympathy with those people [survivors] because it’s not very clear.” He draws a subtle line between Nagasaki’s survivors and contemporary audiences shaped by more recent global crises. “Nowadays, there are many, many people who have lived thorugh the nightmare,” he says. “In this sense, it’s about atomic bomb trauma but it’s not really about that.”

The production itself also mirrored the film’s bifurcated structure. The Japanese and British sections were shot separately, with different crews, languages, and climates. Ishikawa expected friction, but it never came. “In the end, the actors are basically the same,” he says. The real shock was economic rather than artistic. “In England, the schedule was very strict and very expensive there,” he laughs. Rehearsals and staging also remained consistent, but the weather, less so.

Ishikawa was not entirely alone in navigating the adaptation’s fault lines. Veteran Japanese auteur Hirokazu Kore-eda, under whose Bunbuku banner Ishikawa works, read an early draft and later watched the edit. Ishikawa downplays the intervention. “He tried not to influence the film much,” he says, describing notes that were practical rather than prescriptive.

If A Pale View of Hills has traveled widely since Cannes, Ishikawa seems almost startled by the intensity of its reception outside Japan. At the International Film Festival of India in Goa last year, he encountered an audience he did not expect. “Many young people came to watch the film,” he says. “They really watched it very seriously and then they discussed a lot.” He contrasts this with screenings back home. “It doesn’t really happen in Japan,” he says. “I just thought, ‘wow, cinema still has power’.”

A Pale View of the Hills premiered in India at the International Film Festival of India (IFFI 2025) in Goa. It will next screen at the Red Lorry Film Festival 2026 in Mumbai from 13-15 March, 2026.

Published – February 05, 2026 05:29 pm IST