{"id":209,"date":"2014-01-28T08:20:06","date_gmt":"2014-01-28T13:20:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wordpress.clarku.edu\/mixlit\/?p=209"},"modified":"2015-12-14T07:20:21","modified_gmt":"2015-12-14T12:20:21","slug":"niki","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wordpress.clarku.edu\/mixlit\/niki\/","title":{"rendered":"Niki"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"paleview\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Character:\u00a0<\/strong>Niki<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Source Text:<\/strong> <\/span>\u00a0RIshiguro, Kazuo. A Pale View of Hills. London: Faber and Faber, 2005. Print.<\/p>\n

Entry Author: <\/strong><\/span>Victoria Patlajan<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u00a0\u201cFor paradoxically it was he who wanted to give her (Niki) a Japanese name, and I\u2014perhaps out of some selfish desire not to be reminded of the past\u2014insisted on an English one. He finally agreed to Niki, thinking it has some vague echo of the East about it.\u201d (9)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\n\u201cKeiko, unlike Niki, was pure Japanese\u2026\u201d (10)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Niki is the second daughter of the Japanese main character and narrator Etsuko, fathered by her English husband. Niki\u2019s mixed race, out-going personality, and her western influences serve as a foil to Keiko, Etsuko\u2019s first daughter, who is fully Japanese and is seen as reclusive and aloof. Keiko commits suicide before the start of the novel, and the story revolves around the interactions between Etsuko and Niki after Keiko\u2019s death, reflections on Keiko\u2019s life, as well as Etsuko\u2019s storytelling of Sachiko and Mariko\u2014a mother-daughter pair in Japan who lives serve as a parallel between Etsuko and Keiko.<\/p>\n

At the start of the novel, readers are given implicit references of Niki\u2019s mixed-race heritage through descriptions of family dynamics, yet her brusque personality aligns more with western traditions rather than her Japanese lineage. While many mixed-race characters struggle between the two worlds of their races, Niki seems to drop her Asian background for a more \u201cwhite-oriented\u201d life, though Etsuko attempts to demonstrate Japanese life through Sachiko and Mariko\u2019s story. Niki\u2019s character seems to have much more urban, western qualities that Etsuko criticizes, such as Niki\u2019s fast-paced walking, where Etsuko says \u2018Niki, one supposes, has yet to learn the pleasures of walking for its own sake\u201d (47) . Niki is also argued to be more selfish and \u201cYou mean you didn\u2019t come to her funeral because she didn\u2019t come to your father\u2019s? Don\u2019t be so childish, Niki\u201d (52), though Niki retorts with explaining that Keiko was never truly part of their family due to her lack of involvement. While her child-like reactions aren\u2019t necessarily \u201cwestern\u201d, Niki does not seem to have a grasp of her Japanese culture. While Etsuko attempts to show life in Japan through her storytelling to Niki, it is not clear if this truly changes Niki\u2019s perspective of her lineage.<\/p>\n

Interestingly, while the physical appearances of Niki and Keiko are not explicitly described in the story, they are shown as looking strikingly similar to one another, despite their different fathers and races. In an uncomfortable moment, Mrs. Waters, a family acquaintance, actually mistakes Niki for her late sister Keiko, saying \u201c\u2019Why hello, Keiko\u2019\u2014she touched Niki\u2019s sleeve\u2014\u2018I did not realize it was you\u2019\u201d (50). While Niki politely corrects Mrs. Water\u2019s mistake\u2014though without telling her of the suicide of her sister\u2014this one and only physical description is powerful in that readers can understand that, physically, Niki must still look clearly Japanese, and may be subject to any societal constructs and judgments that Asians must deal with, even if they aren\u2019t explicitly noted in the novel.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Character:\u00a0Niki Source Text: \u00a0RIshiguro, Kazuo. A Pale View of Hills. London: Faber and Faber, 2005. Print. Entry Author: Victoria Patlajan   \u00a0\u201cFor paradoxically it was he who wanted to give […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":211,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[20630],"tags":[20594,20631],"class_list":{"0":"post-209","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-a-pale-view-of-the-hills","8":"tag-female","9":"tag-japanese","10":"czr-hentry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.clarku.edu\/mixlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/209","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.clarku.edu\/mixlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.clarku.edu\/mixlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.clarku.edu\/mixlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.clarku.edu\/mixlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=209"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.clarku.edu\/mixlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/209\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.clarku.edu\/mixlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/211"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.clarku.edu\/mixlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=209"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.clarku.edu\/mixlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=209"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.clarku.edu\/mixlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=209"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}