Home » Reading & Literature » British Literature » Magnifying Memories: Kazuo Ishiguro's When We Were Orphans

Magnifying Memories: Kazuo Ishiguro's When We Were Orphans

© Pamela St. Clair

I travel this month from Wilkie Collins’s nineteenth century headlong into the twenty-first, yet the journey finds two similarities uniting the columns, the ambiguous nature of memory and the mystery genre. In the enigmatic The Woman in White, narrators change as do, correspondingly, their perspectives on one event or character. Personalities and self-interests dictate how memory is interpreted. In Kazuo Ishiguro’s recently published When We Were Orphans, which was short listed in 2000 for the coveted Booker Prize, the narrator remains constant; however, his often distorted perception of events, of himself, and of how others perceive him reveals his skewed interpretations of the past. In other words, Ishiguro seems to hint, we see what we want to see. Hindsight does not always allow for perfect vision.

I had heard of the novel in passing but did not know much about it when I received it as a Christmas gift from my brother’s lovely girlfriend Monique, with whom I share, as evidenced by our mutual gifts to one another, similar passions for reading and for soaking in a bathtub. (May I add that Monique was so kind as to give me as well Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin, which nudged ahead of When We Were Orphans to win the Booker prize. You may not be able to judge a book by its cover, but you can judge, in my estimation, a person by her literary tastes. Monique's first rate.) I was pleasantly surprised to find myself immersed in another mystery, a genre quite suitable to bathtub reading and one I’ve enjoyed since stumbling upon teen detective Nancy Drew and later upon senior citizen Miss Marple and Belgian perfectionist Hercule Poirot. The detective in Ishiguro’s novel is Christopher Banks, an Englishman whose master case, as he sees it, will be the resolution to the mystery of his parents’ disappearance in Shanghai, where the family lived while Christopher was a boy.

Throughout the novel, we learn of Christopher’s mother’s campaign to stop the company for which Christopher’s father works from importing opium into Shanghai to the detriment of the native people. Christopher believes that his mother’s altruism is significantly connected to his parents’ disappearance. It is, of course, but in a rather unexpected manner.

When Christopher is orphaned at the age of nine, he is returned to London to live with his aunt. He is orphaned socially, as well, for he never quite assimilates with the “in crowd,” although he believes he does. He prides himself on keeping his emotions hidden and on how efficiently he adopts the mannerisms and verbal expressions of his classmates. As an adult, however, when he runs into his friends from his British school days, he is surprised and annoyed to learn that they view him as having been a bit of an outcast and a loner, despite his belief that he was just a regular guy. Osbourne, the first friend Christopher introduces, remarks, “My goodness, you were such an odd bird at school.” Christopher is shocked by the observation. On another occasion, Christopher accuses a classmate of confusing him with someone else when a similar pronouncement is made. As an adult, Christopher continues to feel outside of the social world he inhabits and continues falsely to believe that nobody but himself is aware of this distance. Hence, early on we’re warned that Christopher’s narration may not be fully reliable as a result of his own blindness and of the capricious nature of memory. Christopher admits, "Because what I am talking of here is so nebulous, it is not easy to recall instances to serve as clear illustrations.”

The copyright of the article Magnifying Memories: Kazuo Ishiguro's When We Were Orphans in British Literature is owned by Pamela St. Clair. Permission to republish Magnifying Memories: Kazuo Ishiguro's When We Were Orphans in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.