![]() Whatever the case, her smile does paradoxically signify one thing to the child: danger. For what is that smile disguising but moral vacancy, a murderous derangement that wishes to disguise itself as placid, even welcoming? Or is it the mother’s superficial self-denial of her own atrocious deed, as though the most natural thing in the world is to kill our own children? Perhaps, like Niobe, she is petrified by affliction, her capacity for expression surpassed by her grief. Something in the woman’s smile, in her unseeing eyes, simultaneously concealed and revealed a profound threat-in this case, the gravest threat imaginable to a five-year-old girl: death by maternity. One of the details Sachiko recalls is that Mariko stopped short before becoming aware that she was witnessing the killing of an infant. Whatever emotions this scene could foreseeably provoke in a reader, one overwhelming aesthetic effect is the uncanniness of the woman’s smile. Well, she brought her arms out of the canal and showed us what she’d been holding under the water. At first I thought the woman was blind, she had that kind of look, her eyes didn’t seem to actually see anything. I knew something was wrong and Mariko must have done too because she stopped running. You see … she turned around and smiled at Mariko. I knew something was wrong as soon as I saw her. There was a canal at the end and this woman was kneeling there, up to her elbows in water. After the Allied firebombing campaign that reduced almost all of Tokyo to rubble and left most survivors inhabiting derelict buildings and tunnels, Mariko took off through the wreckage: Mariko ran down an alleyway, and I followed after her. In a crucial scene from Kazuo Ishiguro’s first novel, A Pale View of Hills, a woman named Sachiko attempts to account for her daughter’s odd behavior by telling the story of a drowning the young girl witnessed as a toddler during the Second World War.
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