Ghost Map - Campbell Johns

When Henry James’s novella The Turn of the Screw was published, it was regarded as not much more than a ghost story. A good ghost story, but only a ghost story. It was only in the following years as critics reanalyzed the story that the novel became one of psychological horror along with gothic horror, adding a new complexity to the story. Out of this context, the novel became revered as a story of ghosts, but also the mind, tackling themes of trauma and innocence. Eighty-four years later, Kazuo Ishiguro’s A Pale View of Hills was published, a story tackling similar themes, but set in post-World War II Japan, tackling these themes of traumatic memory and lost innocence with characters taking on the impacts of modern war. One way in which Ishiguro uses his novel to connect to James’s is through creating children who are mirror images of those in The Turn of the Screw, the young girls, Mariko and Keiko, of his novel having great similarity to James’s Miles and Flora. By writing children who imitate the children of The Turn of the Screw, Ishiguro’s A Pale View of Hills proves its creation as an echo, or response, to The Turn of the Screw, an echo explored in my ghost map.

An Introduction