When We Were Orphans by Kazuo Ishiguro

I've had this book for about a year now but it was only last weekend when I've had the inspiration to read it. Yes, rummaging through my bookshelves, now occupying one-fourth of my ex-bedroom (cause it's now more like a very untidy storeroom), is one of my productive alternatives to procrastination. And so, instead of getting started with what I was supposed to do, I plucked the quite heavy hard bound book from the shelf and began reading.

It took me just one day to read the quite sizeable book. Hmnn... basically, it's about an Englishman whose parents mysteriosly disappear in Shanghai where the family was based since the father was employed with a British company who imports opium into China. Set in the early 1900s, the Shanghai depicted in the novel was the cosmopolitan Shanghai, the Europe in the East. In the fringes of the International Settlement were the Shanghainese villages, a wall dividing two worlds far apart. I wish I had read the book without being able to perceive that Ishiguro is Japanese. My personal biases persisted, having a cognitive resistance to a Japanese writer writing about a British in Shanghai in the first person. Christopher or Poppin, the main protagonist in When We Were Orphans had only one friend in his lifelime who he considers to be closest to him, Akira, a Japanese boy who lives next door.

Several years after the boy Poppin was brought back to England after he became an orphan, he returns to Shanghai, at the brink of World War II, now as an acclaimed detective, determined to unravel the mystery behind his parents' disappearance, which eventually, he did.
Being Japanese, I thought Ishiguro painted them in a positive light in this book. There was a scene in the novel where Poppin, who strayed in that portion of Shanghai already occupied by the Japanese and was actually turned over to the British Embassy unharmed. I began to doubt the historical accuracy of the novel, having read Iris Chang's "Rape of Nanking" which is a memoir, until I was reminded that this is fiction and Ishiguro has the artistic license to write his story. Afterall, his novel does not attempt to advocate for or against a race or any political decisions made during the war. Instead, he succeeds at depicting and chronicling how a certain kind of love can make a person go at great lengths to protect another from hurt, from pain, from despair. As a child, Poppin and Akira shared this kind of love, each striving to protect each other's feelings when it matters. Impelled by her desperate desire to change her son's impeding fate, Poppin's mother chose a miserable half-life existence just to allow him to remain whole, alive, albeit, an orphan. Ironically, these acts of people who love us and we mutually love gives rise to feelings of misery and guilt. It is difficult, but the choices made by people who love us can only be returned by feelings of gratitude, and a resolve to not to waste and put such act of love in vain, as Poppin did.

(Also posted at http://www.isabellemoon.blogspot.com)