Empire of the Sun was based on Ballard's own childhood years in Japanese-occupied Shanghai. The author's fictionalized account of his youthful experiences in the Lunghua internment camp – where he was interned for nearly three years shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor – is one of the most original avatars of the so-called ‘death of affect’, here exemplified by the boy's candidly amoral and semi-fantastic understanding of the war, including the daily routine of death and starvation at the Lunghua camp. Yet, despite Jim's overall insensibility to his own suffering and that of others, the result is somehow as emotionally unsettling as it is forcefully unsentimental. As the reader follows Jim's attempts to assign meaning to a meaningless environment and cope with each day of malnutrition and disease, Empire of the Sun also signals a further interiorization of some of Ballard's favourite themes. His treatment of the isolated, fragmented self, for example, is here directly inscribed in the very fabric of Jim's consciousness and, thereby, dispenses with the author's more habitual ‘literalized’ psychological landscapes. Similarly, the forceful honesty and the extraordinary sobriety of tone of Jim's narrative endows him with a psychological credibility quite unlike the abstract or allegorical phantoms which people some of Ballard's earlier works.

The impact of modern media on private and public consciousness, as well as the ideological misrepresentations according to which reality can be perceived, interpreted and fictionalized, are once again central to Ballard's novel, as, for instance, when Jim's mind attempts to ‘separate the real war from the make-believe conflicts invented by Pathé and Movie-tone’ (ES 14). In contrast with the patriotic, glamorizing war of the newsreels, Jim observes that ‘real war was the thousands of Chinese refugees dying of cholera in the sealed stockades at Pootung, and the bloody heads of communist soldiers mounted on pikes along the Bund. In a real war no one knew which side he was on, and there were no flags or commentators or winners. In a real war there were no enemies’ (ES 14). In addition to its systematic dismantling of consoling and positive clichés about World War II, Empire of the Sun also contains many direct or indirect critical assessments of life in the International Settlement.