The War Complex and Us: The Representation of the Sino-Japanese War and Cosmopolitanism in Empire of the Sun, When We Were Orphans, and My Shanghai, 1942–1946

This chapter focuses its analysis on the representation of the Sino-Japanese war in J. G. Ballard’s Empire of the Sun, Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans, and Keiko Itoh’s My Shanghai, 1942–1946. While there are different strands of cosmopolitanism (Virginia Woolf’s desire for peace and Kwame Anthony Appiah’s respect for difference, for instance), Erica Aso argues, a common desire for a peaceful world runs through all these novels. She shows that British literature used to fail to treat British people’s ‘war complex’ because of their victory in WWII, but that Ballard, Ishiguro, and Itoh changed the trend by incorporating foreign civilians’ perspectives into their novels, thereby confronting the British war complex. Finally, she demonstrates that their confrontations co-occurred with the protagonists’ cosmopolitan sympathy for and their emotional solidarity with their ‘enemies’.