Flipping the Colonialist Paradigm: Grigorii Chkhartishvili’s Akunin

Abstract

This essay examines how the Erast Fandorin series by Boris Akunin (Grigorii Chkhartishvili) employs,revises, and deconstructs the Orientalist paradigm through the portrayal of Masa, the detective’sJapanese sidekick. At first glance, Masa appears to embody Orientalist clichés through allusions toa familiar ethnic stereotype. But the Fandorin series does more than activate the preconceived roleof a Russian hero’s Asian valet: in reformulating the detective story narrative, Akunin introducesboth Orientalist and Occidentalist perspectives and ultimately reconfigures the master-servant struc-ture as something similar to a Confucian, father-son relationship. Despite the stereotypical ethnicimage reproduced in the series, Masa’s representation is divorced from the colonizing agenda that isfundamental to Orientalist discourse. After appearing at first as a Colonialist sign, Masa’s depictionturns out to be a pastiche without the implied referent whose trajectory in the cycle traces choicesmade by Akunin (and ultimately Chkhartishvili). While the author first and foremost pursues enter-tainment, as the series progresses, he exhibits signs of postcolonial political awareness by flippingand deconstructing the quasi-Orientalist mode. As a result, the initial division between the implicitperspectives of the fictional and nonfictional authors turns into an alignment of the two