Distant Mountains, Pale Shadows Distant Mountains, Pale Shadows Last night I watched a movie, adapted from the early debut work of Kazuo Ishiguro. I originally thought it was a romance, but it turned out to be a mystery. The story unfolds through a mother's recollections shared with her daughter, following the Japanese heroine's struggle to leave her homeland after World War II. The main narrative is logically clear, until at the end, when the daughter matches her mother's recollections against her sister's keepsakes, she realizes her mother was lying. In her memories, she conjured an antithesis—a mother figure desperate to escape reality, cruel even to her eldest daughter—yet this person is the same as her biological mother, the two sides of yin and yang unified in one individual. The film also portrays the father-in-law, played by Yūsaku Matsuda. This elderly intellectual refuses to repent after the war, believing his right-wing agitation back then was all in service to the nation, until he is confronted directly by a young scholar. Ishiguro's narrative deftly reveals the dark pain points of human nature. Interpreted through Sartre's existentialism, everyone in modern society seeks freedom, and the pursuit of freedom inevitably means abandoning certain responsibilities. To bridge the gap between the two, people fantasize or fabricate an imagined antithesis, letting this fictional persona bear the responsibility, while they themselves comfortably evade the blame from others that freedom brings. The mother in the story, who lives actively yet treats her eldest daughter cruelly, and the father-in-law, who holds a strong sense of responsibility toward the nation yet led it into a sinful war, both essentially fall into the same trap: they fail to recognize the harm they cause others, rationalizing all their words and actions through fantasy—a vicious cycle. This morning, while strolling in the small garden, I kept recalling scenes from the film, either bathed in brilliant sunshine or shrouded in dim, unpredictable light, clearly the director's deliberate use of lighting to create a sense of illusion. Those deliberate lights lack authenticity, letting the audience sense a hint of falseness and unreality; the color contrasts, the transitions between golden and deep blue in the interplay of light and shadow, aptly substantiate the unsolvable answer within Ishiguro's work. http://duanjufenxiang.ongugu.com/
若林