An Artist of the Floating World

An Artist of the Floating World, Kazuo Ishiguro’s second novel, was published in 1986 and shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. His following novel went on to win the prize in 1989. Like A Pale View of Hills, this book again portrays a Japanese protagonist living in the aftermath of the war.

Masuji Ono is a retired painter, and the story takes place around 1948 in postwar Japan. He gradually comes to realize that the failure of his younger daughter Noriko’s marriage negotiations stems from his own past. His elder daughter, Setsuko, hints at the same thing. As Ono reflects on his youth, his training, his teachers, colleagues, and pupils, the reader begins to sense that his recollections do not entirely match the memories of others.

What exactly is Ono’s past? It becomes clear that he had supported Japan’s wartime ideology as an artist involved in propaganda. Ishiguro, of course, never states this directly, but allows it to emerge subtly through implication.

During Noriko’s marriage meeting, Ono confesses his past and apologizes. The listeners are somewhat taken aback. Ishiguro highlights the absurdity of Ono’s self-conscious guilt by contrasting it with the indifference of those around him. Like Ogata‑san in A Pale View of Hills, Ono is a man struggling to find his place in a rapidly changing postwar society.

In Ishiguro’s fiction, the narrator’s voice and the conversations between characters are crucial, and these conversations are often uneasy or unsettling. An Artist of the Floating World is no exception—especially in the tense exchanges between Ono and Setsuko. Ishiguro’s later novel The Unconsoled (1995) is an even more extreme example of this style.

Ishiguro seems to suggest through his works that our memories—and our relationships with others—are far less reliable than we like to believe.

 

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