Imperial Nostalgia and the Detective Genre: Kazuo Ishiguro's When We Were Orphans

Kazuo Ishiguro's fifth novel When We Were Orphans (2000) tells the story of Christopher Banks, a private detective, who embarks on the ultimate case of his career, the puzzle of his own life. The novel consists of two overall parts, one taking place in London, the other in Shanghai-a division which reveals one of the novel's major themes, the relation between home and abroad. Set in the 1930s, Ishiguro's novel on the one hand contains all the classic ingredients of the so called golden age detective genre-an archetypal English private detective, equipped with fierce deductive skills and a magnifying glass, as well as suspects, criminals, and victims-and yet on the other hand it also deviates in significant ways. In this article, I will attempt to make some links between When We Were Orphans and the genre paradigm of the golden age detective story, arguing that Ishiguro's novel offers an exploration of the genre's ideological connections to a larger historical discourse of imperial nostalgia and decline.