이시구로의『우리가 고아였을 때 』: 역사라는 악몽

Abstract

Ishiguro's novels often deal with problematic historical periods before and after the Second World War or the period between the two World Wars, and imperialism seems to be one of his central topics. Yet Ishiguro is reluctant to admit outright that his novels are indeed about history. He claims that he is not interested in a particular historical period but in a situation that yields insight into general human conditions and experience. For all that, he keeps on coming back to the theme of the wrongs of imperialism in his novels such as The Remains of the Day, An Artist of the Floating World, and When We Were Orphans. I am trying to argue in this paper that When We Were Orphans is one such novel, deploying as it does the conventions of detective novel and at the same time undermining it. Detective novel is firmly grounded in scientism and rationalism and the belief in man's ability to right the wrongs of society manifested in crimes. However, in When We Were Orphans, the famous detective Christopher Banks finds after persistent investigation of his parents' disappearance in Shanghai that he is unknowingly implicated in opium trading and corruption through his anonymous benefactor Wang Ku, an warlord/bandit who had kidnapped his mother. His belief that rescuing his parents will at the same time set the crisis of the Second Sino-Japanese War aright turns out to be a futile illusion. And the nature of good and evil turns out to be a lot more involuted than he had imagined. However, his hunch about the link between his parents' kidnapping and the political crisis that would eventually lead up to the Second World War is not so misplaced in the sense that the deterioration of China, and Japan's ambition to conquer the weakened China is partly due to the Opium War and the subsequent imperialist invasion of China by European nations represented by the leasing of Shanghai by the Great Britain, France, and the United States. Leasing, according to Ishiguro, allows full license for exploitation “with none of the sense of responsibility that came with colonizing countries in the imperial sense”(Conversations 185). After all, the “violent climax of the age of Empire”(Machinal 87) seems to be an important concern in this novel.