Dream Sequence

" have found myself continually bringing to mind that picture — of my daughter hanging in her room for days on end. The horror of that image has never diminished, but it has long ceased to be a morbid matter; as with a wound on ones own body, it is possible to develop and intimacy with the most disturbing of things" (54)

Also to support the idea that the girl on the swing in the dream is a repressed memory of Keiko hanging, is when Etsuko describes the events leading up to going to the tea house with Niki, where she says she saw the child on the swing. She says, “I had not been out of the house for several days and enjoyed the feel of air as we stepped into the winding lane outside” (47). This is an interesting connection to the story Etsuko tells about learning of Keiko’s suicide, especially given that Etsuko says her first thought upon hearing the news that her daughter committed suicide was wondering how long she had been hanging before she was found. Etsuko dreams about a little girl, overwhelming influenced by British culture through her clothing, swinging, and thinks about the haunting picture of her daughter, hanging. Etsuko “continually” thinks of her daughter’s suicide and continually has the winging dream, not coincidentally. The difference is, when she admits to thinking of Keiko, it is with “horror,” and the dream is never implied to be an unhappy one, because the underlying meaning behind it is so repressed. Even in her subconscious, Etsuko has built up so much pain that she can’t dream about the reality, only a figment that is connected to the reality. The word Etsuko uses describes it perfectly — “intimacy.” This recurring dream is a way Etsuko intimately, yet distantly, deals with her motherly anguish and regret. By somehow comparing a girl happily playing on a swing, to her daughter’s lifeless body swaying from a rope, demonstrates not only Etsuko’s inability to cope with reality, but her way of coping through familiar images in her head. She describes the girl “standing on the seat of the swing, was pulling hard on the chains, but somehow she could not make the swing go higher,” again showing Keiko’s resistance to move and despite any action or words, being ignored — even if there was verbal assurance (48). This also stems from Etsuko not knowing the details or events surrounding Keiko’s death, and her eerie need to imagine what happen to get some sort of conclusion. Aside from the metaphor of Keiko’s resistance in this line, it also depicts Keiko standing on a chair, and her body pulling hard against the rope as she fell.

Etsuko describes the girl as “a cheerful little girl, dressed in a green mackintosh and small Wellington boots” (48). This description is important because it supports the theory that the girl on the swings could be a suppressed picture of Etsuko thinking about Keiko’s body hanging after her suicide. Etsuko never saw her daughter hanging, even though she replays the imagined version of the scene in her mind on multiple occasions. Mackintosh raincoats were iconic in the United Kingdom, and were the innovation of water-proofing by spreading rubber over cotton. Keiko was forced to move to Britain with her mother after the bombings. She was forced into the English culture and despite her apprehensions about moving, as portrayed in the ending scene with Mariko’s reluctance to move to the United States, her feelings essentially didn’t matter — they rolled off Etsuko like the rain rolls off the coat. More coincidentally since this move happened after A Pale View of the Hills was published, Mackintosh was bought by a Tokyo firm in 2007. As for the boots the girl in the scene is wearing, Wellington was a symbol for British aristocracy, and during World War II 80 percent of production was from war materials. The boots were a product of the war, and Keiko was a second-generation victim and remnant of the war.

--Alexa