Title: When We Were Orphans

Series: N/A

Author: Kazuo Ishiguro

Genres: Literary, Historical, Mystery

Publishing Date: 24 November 2000

Original Language: English

Pages: ~313

CW: War, Violence, Gun violence, Rape, Sexual assault, Xenophobia, Trafficking, Infidelity, Death of parent

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Read if you’re looking for: 

• Historical fiction set in 1920’s & 1930’s London & Shanghai
• A look at the colonialism in China at the time & the opium trade
• An unreliable narrator
• A gorgeous & lyrical writing style
• A mystery about what happened to the main character’s parents, & whether they are still alive

“Perhaps there are those who are able to go about their lives unfettered by such concerns. But for those like us, our fate is to face the world as orphans, chasing through long years the shadows of vanished parents. There is nothing for it but to try and see through our missions to the end, as best we can, for until we do so, we will be permitted no calm.”

Kazuo Ishiguro is one of my favorite authors, but this was my first time reading When We Were Orphans. Every one of Ishiguro’s books are written gorgeously, with beautiful characterization and dramatic and beautiful prose. Ishiguro can really evoke emotion from the reader. That being said, I would probably place this lower down on a ranking of Ishiguro’s books.

Our narrator, Christopher Banks, is English but spent his young childhood in the early 1900’s in Shanghai, playing with his neighbor, a Japanese boy named Akira. Christopher’s father is somehow involved in some shady business involving opium, and both his parents go missing when he is ten years old. The adult Christopher has become a detective, and has been obsessed with the idea of finding his parents, believing that they have been kidnapped and are still alive. When he returns to a war-torn Shanghai to look for them, he starts to uncover the unsettling truths of his childhood.

Ishiguro is considered one of the master’s of the unreliable narrator. In this book, you do get more and more information about what really happened as the book goes on, but it doesn’t seem that Christopher is purposely hiding information from the reader. I found the story to be sad, but I wasn’t as attached to these characters as I have been in some of Ishiguro’s other novels, like Klara and the Sun and Never Let Me Go. Overall, it’s delectable prose but the story is less engaging, but still worth a read if you enjoy Ishiguro or other works of sweeping and emotional historical fiction.

“All I know is that I’ve wasted all these years looking for something, a sort of trophy I’d get only if I really, really did enough to deserve it. But I don’t want it anymore, I want something else now, something warm and sheltering, something I can turn to, regardless of what I do, regardless of who I become. Something that will just be there, always, like tomorrow’s sky.”