When we were orphans
When We Were Orphans is a novel by the British writer Kazuo Ishiguro . The novel was published in 2000 under the title When We Were Orphans by Faber and Faber in London and was translated into German by Sabine Herting in the same year.
The novel was nominated for the UK's highest literary prize, the Booker Prize .
The book is about the first-person narrator's arduous process of dealing with a traumatic childhood experience. When he was 10 years old, both of his parents in Shanghai disappeared in an unexplained manner within a short period of time. As an orphan he was sent to England to live with a relative, later sent to boarding school and returned to Shanghai as an adult with the determination to solve the crime committed against his parents.
background
The novel was first set in Shanghai in the early years of the 20th century, when a mixed society of foreign diplomats and business people lived luxuriously in a ghetto-like foreigners' quarter, strictly separated from a local population vegetating in economic misery. The second setting is London in the 1930s, in which a pleasure-seeking society ignores the signs of impending armed conflict in Europe and Asia. The setting for the last part is Shanghai in 1937, which lies under the cannon fire of Japanese warships, where Chiang Kai-shek and the communists fight for the liberation of China from foreign rule and the ideal world of the international quarter collapses in the atrocities of war .
content
Christopher Banks, the narrator, grows up as the only child of an English couple in a villa in Shanghai's foreign quarter. The father works for an English company that is involved in a flourishing opium import to China. Christopher's mother, a young, beautiful and very sincere woman, is involved with a group of like-minded English women in a campaign against the opium trade, in which she sees a cause of the misery of the Chinese people. She is supported by "Uncle Philipp", a friend of the family. Christopher's playmate is Akira, a Japanese of the same age, with whom he performs dramatic fantasy games.
When Christopher was 10 years old, his father left the house one morning in order not to return. It is widely believed that he was kidnapped. Chinese detectives are searching in vain for the kidnappers. A little later, when he goes on a trip with Uncle Philip, his mother disappears too.
Christopher is sent to England to see an aunt, accompanied by an old colonel. He is considered an orphan, but will not accept this fact for himself. He decides to become a detective, to return to Shanghai, solve the crime and find his parents again. After attending boarding school and graduating from Cambridge, he becomes a private detective and solves several spectacular crimes in England. He is making an inheritance so that he becomes financially independent.
In 1937 he returned to a changed Shanghai. The city is a demilitarized zone. In China, threatened by an expansionist Japan, communist troops and the Kuomintang are fighting for supremacy, and warlords are establishing local domains. Japanese gunboats fire on Shanghai, and the residents of the foreign quarter are extremely concerned. One of the topics of conversation in the colony of foreigners is the yellow snake , which is believed to be one of the evils of their current situation.
Christopher goes in search of his parents and, with the help of a Chinese detective, whom he admired in his childhood and is now a seedy drunk, finds a clue to a house in which the parents are allegedly being held. The house is between the enemy lines, but he goes on a search anyway. He finds himself in a real nightmare: smoking debris everywhere, corpses of Chinese women and children, mutilated Japanese soldiers. He meets a Japanese soldier and thinks he recognizes Akira in him. The Japanese can help him find the house - successfully - but is arrested by Japanese soldiers as a traitor. There is no trace of the parents in the house.
Only in a conversation with "Uncle Philipp" mediated by the Chinese secret police does he finally find out how his parents disappeared. The father left the family with his lover and is now dead. The mother insulted a Chinese warlord who took revenge through the kidnapping. To protect her son, the mother endured years of imprisonment and humiliation.
expenditure
- When We Were Orphans . London: Faber & Faber 2000. ISBN 0-571-20516-X
- When we were orphans . Novel. Translation by Sabine Herting. Munich 2000. ISBN 3-442-72981-5