When We Were Orphans

After reading Kazuo Ishiguro's latest, The Buried Giant (2015), and his earlier effort, Never Let Me Go (2005), I was entranced by the dreamlike quality of his stories and decided to keep working my way through his backlist. I just finished When We Were Orphans (2000), another of Ishiguro's first-person narratives, this one set largely in the International Settlement in Shanghai before and during the Second Sino-Japanese War.

The narrator, an English detective named Christopher Banks, spends his childhood in Shanghai but grows to adulthood in England after his parents' mysterious disappearance. The novel centers on his internal conflict between finding out what really happened to his parents and his desire to recreate himself in only occasionally-troubled ignorance.

As in The Buried Giant, Ishiguro lays bare the ridiculous within his characters without sacrificing empathy. However, his narrator's lack of introspection can sometimes be grating. Bank's self-involvement precludes any real insight into the other characters, rendering them as one-dimensional as they appear from his perspective. On the other hand, this very tendency encourages the reader to imagine how Banks must appear to others and to reflect on the inconsistencies between his interpersonal encounters and his interior world.