When We Were Orphans

By Kazuo Ishiguro, 2000

Ironically, this is a radically different approach to being an orphan from the last book I read, John Irving’s The Cider House Rules. In Cider House, an orphan protagonist follows his principles, compromises but eventually makes it through to an honourable ending. In When We Were Orphans, the orphaned protagonist stumbles around deceiving himself and pursuing ambiguous goals until he finds that his life and ideas are fictions. Also, while Cider House was enjoyable to read, this book feels a bit like a bad dream that goes from one misery to a worse one.

The book of course is written with Ishiguro’s usual skill, delicately exploring how the protagonist, Christopher, imagines himself in one deception after another. In this, it’s like other Ishiguro books, with characters who either deceive themselves or are deceived. I felt more empathy for his other characters, though, even Klara who is not actually human. For Christopher, I felt from the beginning that he was living in a child-like make-believe world, and continues to do so as an adult. His fantasy is his way of coping with the traumas of his childhood, but I always felt that he should get a grip (or get some therapy) and join the real world. His self-importance is unattractive, perhaps made even more so by his telling readers repeatedly that he is known as a great detective, but does not say anything about any of his cases or his methods. His claim to be a great detective grows particularly questionable when he seems to live in a fantasy.

Initially, his imaginary world seems harmless. As a child, he plays at being a superhero or detective rescuing his missing father. Later, he says he has solved important cases as a young detective, and perhaps he has. When he is drawn into the Japanese invasion of China in the 1930s, his stories become a nightmare about international diplomacy and urban warfare with improbable coincidence, extraordinary heroism and criminal corruption. (Here, he’s the opposite of a James Bond heroic spy. He’s portrayed as a weak figure overwhelmed by the reality of violence and corruption. Is Ishiguro deliberately undercutting the false heroism of the Bond myth?) It’s hard to separate the reality in the novel from Christopher’s story telling, but he seems to abandon both his purported clients and those he seems to love in order to pursue his dream of saving his parents. How can he be so irresponsible when he claims to be so principled?

Christopher’s memories of his childhood seem to have little connection to the reality he later attempts to revisit. The physical places he returns to are not as he remembers them, and the situation is far worse. This is probably true of all of us to a degree. The past we remember is not the same as other people experienced it, and sometimes it’s demonstrably wrong. But I think this usually means that we colour things a bit better or worse than they might have been. I hope that our memories are not so destructively mistaken as Ishiguro portrays them here. But perhaps, viewing things less personally, they are: as nations and peoples, we do tell ourselves false stories about our history and relationships, and we use those to justify exploitation and military attacks on other nations. In part, this seems to be what is happening in Ukraine, the Balkan states, the Middle East, Africa. So from this perspective, misleading stories that lead to more violence and abuse could be a very relevant one. I didn’t get that from the novel while I was reading it, but thinking back, there are parallels with the self-serving myths of the colonial powers in China (and elsewhere) that cover up reality and justify continuing exploitation.

Toward the end of the novel, a character says, “…our fate is to face the world as orphans, chasing through long years in the shadows of vanished parents. There’s nothing for it but to try and see through our missions to the end, as best we can, but until we do so, we will be permitted no calm.” But Christopher doesn’t see through it until he is forced into a very sordid reality.