Looking Through Lenses: A Pale View of Hills

"Besides me, Mariko was looking out of the window, her knees up on the bench. From our side of the car, we could see the forecourt and the gathering of young spectators at the turnstiles. Mariko seemed to be testing the effectiveness of her binoculars, holding them to her eyes one moment, taking them away the next" (Ishiguro, 106).

This passage exemplifies the unreliability woven through Kazuo Ishiguro's A Pale View of Hills. Mariko is looking at the town of Nagasaki through a window and in addition with her binoculars, which can be compared to a camera obscura. This causes a disconnect from the reality of the ground-level devastation of the atomic bomb due to the act of looking being a form of separation. It is also interesting that Ishiguro decided to have Mariko looking through the window with her binoculars because she is an innocent child, looking at violence through two panes of glass. Perhaps this creates evidence of the phrase that "children are the future" and thus, must be blinded to the atrocities that were committed in acts of peace. In addition it can be concluded that the act of looking is one of innocence.
Delving further into the passage, the use of the word "young spectators" infers that there is an already established alienation of the history of violence, from the tourists' point of view; a young tourist. This act of spectating can be related to Peter Hale's theory of the Atomic Sublime, in which the image of the mushroom cloud is an act of separation from the viewer's perspective and the perspective of the people experiencing the mass destruction underneath the mushroom cloud. Hales describes the mushroom cloud as a horrific and magnificently beautiful image, that can be related to what Mariko is looking at through the different lenses of a window and her binoculars.