An Artist of the Floating World

Review: An Artist of the Floating World, by Kazuo Ishiguro Memory and the heart. Such fragile things on which to build our notion of ourselves. The old prophet Jeremiah said, “The heart is deceitful above all things . . . Who can understand it?” Memory is surely at least as deceitful as the heart. Both memory and the heart seem to be at the mercy of the transient, ephemeral world of human life. And they are central to the fiction of Japanese writer Kazuo Ishiguro. An Artist of the Floating World is a beautiful emotional set piece. Following World War II, an aging Japanese artist struggles to integrate his experience of post-war Japan with the memories of his pre-war life and his role in the rise of the empire that ended in the destruction of the old world. Kazuo Ishiguro may be best known for his novel The Remains of the Day and its film adaptation, with Anthony Hopkins as the butler Stevens and Emma Thompson as Miss Kenton. There are significant similarities in tone and theme between the two novels. In both cases, the main character looks back on a career in which he devoted his life to a cause that was later shown to be horribly mistaken and in which he turned his back on a path that would have resulted in a different, and probably more fulfilling life. In The Remains of the Day, Mr. Stevens does not marry Miss Kenton, and in An Artist of the Floating World, the artist Masuji Ono turns his back on “fine art,” the art focused on the fleeting beauty of this world, in order to make his art serve the empire of the “New Japan.” Both novels are told from a perspective not long after the war, looking back on a time prior to and during the war, blended with the narrator’s current life. The tone of both is nostalgic, beautiful. In An Artist of the Floating World, Ishiguro’s use of an unreliable narrator, whose growth in the novel is toward self-realization, is masterful. Numerous times in the narrative, the artist Ono says it is entirely possible that his memory of an event or conversation is not accurate, that things might not have happened exactly as he presents them. These admissions become part of his growth in awareness of self, and are some of the elements that make him sympathetic and human, and very like all of us. A reader who identifies with Ono, and feels compassion for him, may experience in reading this novel what Aristotle called catharsis in his Poetics, a vicarious purging of guilt and fear, the impetus toward self-understanding. Ishiguro seems to be saying that as we grow older, we come to realize how much of our image of ourselves is dependent on feeling and memory, and we come to understand how fickle, how deceitful, those things can be. And if we are to live in peace with ourselves, we must see ourselves honestly and forgive ourselves for all the well-intentioned errors of the past. Only then can we live with integrity and dignity.

An Artist Of The Floating World is a wonderfully constructed reflection on post war Japan as experienced by a man who had been a promising artist focusing on images of the old order , Geishas and Nightlife of the pre-war period. (The Floating World) . He is wrestling with reconciliation following Japan's defeat as evidenced through his relationship to his two adult daughters and his reflections on the past which slowly illuminate his very personal relationship to the events that brought such dramatic change to Japan.This is a beautifully written novel that very gradually reveals how the past can haunt individuals and encroach on the present in very real terms. Wonderful reading and highly recommended.

i appreciated the writing. ishiguro spent most of the story understating who the main character was as a person but leaving enough crumbs to know some things were amiss. his role in japan’s war effort was essentially the culture police and though he might not have intended it, he ruined people’s lives. i expected at some point this fact would be revealed in some humiliating way but the crux of the story seemed to be that the country has moved on and he, like most old people is virtually persona non grata. perhaps this is why the ending was an unexpected letdown. it was a decent read and i will probably read other of the author’s works. just can’t imagine this one will be my favorite.

"An Artist of the Floating World" is a beautiful little novel, written in typical Ishiguro style, with the calm surface waters belaying the rapid current that flows beneath. It is an interesting style that attempts to ape classical Japanese literature, infusing it with Ishiguro's innate Brittishness, coming from being born of Japanese parents but raised in Britain.As with his other novels, and part of his style, a knowledge of historical events is taken for granted on the part of the reader. Allusions are made to once-famous or infamous events and people, and names are dropped with the understanding that everyone is intimately familiar with WWII and the cultures of Japan and England.The title is a bit misleading, as the "Floating World" is usually associated with the Edo period of Japan, and not with the Fascist era of Showa. Anyone expecting Geishas and Samurai will be disappointed.A very quick and quiet read, "An Artist of the Floating World" is something than can be read over a weekend with a cup of green tea. It contributes a viewpoint, and a necessary one, to WWII Japan and paints a human face onto a troubled period of history. Love and family and duty are on display here, along with good intentions leading down dark paths, and the righteousness of actions and re-actions.Like "Remains of the Day," "An Artist of the Floating World" is an intimate, beautiful character sketch. Very much worth the limited time needed to enjoy the book.

I loved Never Let Me Go and this had a similar vibe. It’s a beautiful told story and I burned through it in 2 days. I was sad when it ended as I was fully invested in the Klara character. Wonderful novel!

In 1948, when we first meet him, Masuji Ono is an elderly man. He is a widower, his wife killed when their house was bombed during the war, while he also lost his only son, killed serving in the army. He has two adult daughters: the elder, Setsuko, is married with a young son; the younger, Noriko is 26 and negotiations are currently underway for her marriage. Similar negotiations for her to marry a different man had fallen through the previous year, and while neither Ono nor Noriko can be sure why, Setsuko hints to Ono that it may relate to his past actions before and during the war. So Ono sets out to visit the people he knew in the pre-war days to ensure they will say nothing to damage Noriko’s chances. As he reminisces about the past, we gradually learn about life before the war and the part that Ono played, and we see the new Japan, struggling to reinvent herself after her humiliating defeat, now under the control of the US and the spread of American hegemony.Beautifully written, this is a brilliant character portrait of a rather unlikeable character for whom I nevertheless grew to feel a great deal of empathy. In pursuit of his daughter’s happiness, Ono is prepared to show a humble, almost apologetic face to the world, but the reader, privy to his private thoughts, knows that inside he feels he was right to support the militaristic regime that younger Japanese people blame for the slaughter of the war. But it’s more complex than that, because gradually we realise that there are odd inconsistencies in Ono’s memories, or at least in his narration of them. In his mind, he played an important role, but is that the view of others, or is he allowing a sense of self-importance to give us an inflated picture of his past relevance?As a young man, Ono trained as an artist under his sensei, Mori-san, who taught his pupils to reach for an ideal aesthetic through representations of the “floating world” – the pleasure district of the city where men congregated for night-time entertainment. This in itself is fascinating, giving a real insight into how artistic schools operated in Japan at the time, with the close, almost familial relationship between sensei and pupils, and the resulting strict adherence to artistic traditions. Later, Ono breaks away from his sensei and begins to develop his own school and reputation, eventually painting propaganda posters in the fascist style, promoting the idea of empire through war. It is for this that Ono tells us he was once lauded, but is now expected to feel shame. We hear of the suicides of other men who promoted the culture that led to the disastrous war, and we know, or think we do because Ono tells us, that Ono’s daughters fear he too may decide that is the honourable thing to do.You’ll be able to tell from my qualifiers that Ono is very definitely an unreliable narrator. However, while the details of his past importance may be exaggerated (or may not), through him we get a very clear picture of the psyche of a defeated and subjugated nation, and of the resentment of the young who fought and saw so many comrades die, and who hold their elders responsible – those elders who upheld the now discredited regime, and sat at home while they sent their sons as sacrifices to their own desire for glory.The contrast between pre- and post-war Japan is stark – much more so than in any of the winning Allied nations whose cultural trajectories remained largely unchanged. For the younger Japanese people the new world has much to offer, and they are ready to embrace the values brought to them by the Americans, but the old remember the culture and values they have lost. Ono is open enough to see the benefits of some of the changes and to wish the young people well in the recreation of their society and their pursuit of a new kind of national pride, but he is also nostalgic for the past – for the personal prominence he once felt was his due, and for the culture and art embodied, for him, in the now defunct floating world of bars and geishas. The pleasure district has now been replaced by offices where the young Japanese people throw themselves into the pursuit of capitalism with the same dedication as Ono’s generation pursued empire, offering their unquestioning loyalty to their superiors at work with as much enthusiasm as their parents offered to the military leaders of the old regime. There is an underlying feeling that although the aims differ, the fundamentals of the Japanese psyche are less altered than they might seem at a superficial glance.A great novel, that reminds us that perceptions of war and glory and heroes depend entirely on whether one is victorious or defeated, and does so through the very human story of one man.

The copy I bought seems pirated. so many grammatical mistakes and words missing.

Leí otro libro de éste autor que me encantó. Sin embargo, hasta la fecha, éste se quedó a medias.

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