Japanese author appears at Borders

By Johanna Hanink

For the Daily

Kazuo Ishiguro is quick to make sure that his latest novel, "When We Were Orphans," isn't confused with works of the post-war detective genre, which encompasses the work of Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers. "I don't think it's accurate to say I've been influenced by them ... (this novel) is more of a nod to them."

Ishiguro describes the style of the classic detective writers as reflecting an idealized view of British society in which "just one thing has gone wrong to spoil it all." It is only after the detective, a figure whom Ishiguro refers to as the "Superman," unmasks the evil that harmony returns to the sleepy English village of the story's setting. He also points out the irony inherent between the genre and its readership; the readers of these detective novels had just experienced the first era of modern warfare and knew that the nature of evil was not quite so simple as the stories implied. This generation enveloped themselves in a what Ishiguro calls a "knowing escapism," taking comfort in delusional hopes that a single disruption and an inevitable return to harmony was all the complexity that evil had to offer.

The novel's protaganist is Christopher Banks, who as a boy is sent to school in England after the vanishing of his parents in the early 1900s from their home in Shanghai. After graduating from Cambridge, Christopher becomes a detective whose ultimate goal is to solve the mystery of his parents' disappearance. Ishiguro said that his goal in crafting his novel was to take a character who had fallen out of the genre of the postwar British detective story and "dump him into the twentieth century." Christopher plays the part of the "deluded detective," trying desperately to cling to a vision of the world in which he is able to control and rationalize any situation. As the novel follows Christopher back to Shanghai, which in 1937 is wrought with the Sino-Japanese war, Ishiguro presents a man who is emotionally disconnected and unable to perceive the events happening outside of his immediate and personal world. Christopher seems to be oblivious to the war and suffering going on around him - the most important thing to him is that "he fulfill his agenda" of finding his parents. Ishiguro believes that there is this tendency of Christopher in everyone: "I think in a subtle, more shaded way a lot of us carry these missions."

Ishiguro uses the idea of the orphan to get at a more universal condition. "We all have to bear the legacy of being orphans," he said. "We all have to come to terms with coming out of a sheltered place." While none of the characters in either "When We Were Orphans" or any of Ishiguro's books are closely based upon people he knows, he says that he often begins with a particular impulse or tendency that he has felt within himself and develops characters around it. Acknowledging that many authors will work with the personality of their own alter ego or that of a friend or family member, Ishiguro said that "I've never had that kind of relationship to my characters," and calls them more of a "link in my emotional history."

Courtesy of Knopf

Kazuo Ishiguro wrote "The Remains of the Day."