Flipping the Colonialist Paradigm: Grigorii Chkhartishvili’s Akunin

AbstractThis 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’s Japanese sidekick. At first glance, Masa appears to embody Orientalist clichés through allusions to a familiar ethnic stereotype. But the Fandorin series does more than activate the preconceived role of a Russian hero’s Asian valet: in reformulating the detective story narrative, Akunin introduces both Orientalist and Occidentalist perspectives and ultimately reconfigures the master‐servant structure as something similar to a Confucian, father‐son relationship. Despite the stereotypical ethnic image reproduced in the series, Masa’s representation is divorced from the colonizing agenda that is fundamental to Orientalist discourse. After appearing at first as a Colonialist sign, Masa’s depiction turns out to be a pastiche without the implied referent whose trajectory in the cycle traces choices made by Akunin (and ultimately Chkhartishvili). While the author first and foremost pursues entertainment, as the series progresses, he exhibits signs of postcolonial political awareness by flipping and deconstructing the quasi‐Orientalist mode. As a result, the initial division between the implicit perspectives of the fictional and nonfictional authors turns into an alignment of the two.