Kazuo Ishiguro's An Artist of the Floating World

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This blog is my response to the task assigned to us by our Prof. Dr. DilipSir in the MA Sem2 assignment. So read, understand and enjoy. Happy Learning!

An Artist of the Floating World

By 

Kazuo Ishiguro

An Interesting Introduction 

• An Artist of the Floating World (1986) is a novel by Nobel Prize-winning British author Kazuo Ishiguro. 

It is set in post-World War II Japan and is narrated by Masuji Ono, an ageing painter, who looks back on his life and how he has lived it. He notices how his once great reputation has faltered since the war and how attitudes towards him and his paintings have changed.

• The chief conflict deals with Ono's need to accept responsibility for his past actions, rendered politically suspect in the context of post-War Japan. 

• The novel ends with the narrator expressing good will for the young white-collar workers on the streets at lunchbreak. 

• The novel also deals with the role of people in a rapidly changing political environment and with the assumption and denial of guilt.

• The novel is considered as both historical fiction and global literature (Weltliteratur). 

• It is considered historical fiction on account of its basis in a past that predates the author's own experiences, and it draws from historical facts. 

• It is also considered global literature on account of its broad international market and its thematicisation of how the world today is interconnected.

☆ TITLE ☆

The novel's title is based on the literal translation of Ukiyo-e, a word referring to the Japanese art of prints. Therefore, it can be read as "a printmaker" or "an artist living in a changing world," given both Ono's limited understanding and the dramatic changes his world, Japan in the first half of the twentieth century, has undergone in his lifetime.

The title also refers to an artistic genre. Ono's master is especially interested in depicting scenes from the pleasure district adjacent to the villa in which he and his students live. Ono mentions the ephemeral nature of the floating world that could be experienced during each night. His master experiments with innovative softer Western-style painting techniques, rejecting the hard black outlining that was considered more traditional. Under the influence of right-wing political ideas about tradition, Ono becomes estranged from his master and forges his own career. He feels gleeful when his master's paintings fell into disfavour during a return to the use of more traditional bold lines in the paintings used for nationalistic posters.

☆ STRUCTURE ☆

• An Artist of the Floating World, is structured through the interwoven memories of the protagonist Masuji Ono. 

• The novel is set in three distinctly different years, although Ono's memories go back to his own childhood, when his father opposed his wish to become an artist.

• The four different years and title sections of the novel are: October 1948, April 1949, November 1949, and June 1950.

Key Facts about An Artist of the Floating World

• Full Title: An Artist of the Floating World
• When Written: 1980s
• Where Written: England
• When Published: 1986
• Literary Period: Post-Postmodern Literature; Realism; New Sincerity. An Artist of the Floating World employs the clear, dispassionate descriptions of middle-class life that characterize realist texts, but depicts a world in which any idea of truth is undermined by the shifting nature of memory and popular understandings of history. In this way it combines the language of realism with the fractured picture of reality typical of postmodern texts. The novel does not have the cynicism often associated with Postmodern novels and for this reason, can be seen to combine elements of Postmodernism with an earnest desire to depict life as it really is, which is characteristic of realism. Texts that combine these characteristics have sometimes been grouped together under the rubric the “New Sincerity.”
• Genre: Realist Fiction
• Setting: An unnamed city in Japan in the years following the end of the Second World War.
• Climax: At Noriko’s miai, Ono tells the Saitos that he admits making mistakes in his career.
• Antagonist: Pride; Nationalism
• Point of View: First-person

Extra Credit for An Artist of the Floating World

Reluctant Representative. Because Ishiguro left Japan at the age of five and did not live through the events he describes, he has expressed discomfort with the use of his novels as source texts for understanding post-war Japanese experience. Instead, he sees works like An Artist of the Floating World as works set in post-war Japan that tackle universal themes.

Kazuo Ishiguro, in full Sir Kazuo Ishiguro, (born November 8, 1954, Nagasaki, Japan), Japanese-born British novelist known for his lyrical tales of regret fused with subtle optimism. In 2017 he won the Nobel Prize for Literature for his works that “uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world.”

BORN

November 8, 1954 (age 66)
Nagasaki, Japan

NOTABLE WORKS

• “Never Let Me Go”
• “An Artist of the Floating World”
• “The White Countess”
• “The Unconsoled”
• “The Remains of the Day”
• “When We Were Orphans”
• “A Pale View of Hills”

AWARDS AND HONORS

• Nobel Prize (2017)
• Booker Prize (1989)
• Costa Book Awards (1986)

☆MAIN CHARACTERS ☆

1. Masuji Ono

2. Setsuko 

3. Noriko

4. Ichiro

5. Chishi Matsuda

5. Seiji Moriyama

6. Yasunari Nakahara

7. Shintaro

8. Suichi

9. Kuroda

10. Dr. Saito

11. Jiro Miyake 

12. Mrs. Kawakami

13. Akira Sugimura

14. Miss Sugimora

15. President of Kimura Company

☆ THEMES ☆

Politicisation of art

Art is a central theme of the novel, with Ono's role as a propaganda artist being the chief story line. The novel questions the ability of art to influence and inspire political action within a community. There is a large conflict between whether art should be politicised or whether it should be simply a source of pleasure and gratification. The novel highlights the way politicised art was retrospectively seen as detrimental to society through the impact of the war, but also presents views within which art is conversely seen as ineffectual and unable to influence events, by implying that the war and its subsequent effects would have occurred with or without Ono's propaganda.

Unreliable narrator

The novel is structured as a series of interwoven memories described by Masuji Ono. Ishiguro uses a variety of techniques to convey the fallibility of Ono's recollections to the audience, gradually revealing that Ono is an unreliable narrator and undermining the audience's faith in his story. For example, Ono makes frequent digressions into unrelated topics and events during his narration, downplaying and concealing his cruel actions and misleading the reader as to the significance of important topics. When Ono recounts interactions with family members, events are often referred to indirectly, or with incomplete information, disguising the truth of what has occurred. Because they are given incomplete and confusing information, it becomes more difficult for the reader to determine the extent of Ono's actions and the responsibility he bears for them.

Masuji Ono repeatedly reassesses events from his past throughout the novel, which suggests that he is constantly reconsidering his guilt about his actions and ultimately rethinking both the role of propaganda and the construction of memories. This process of reassessment highlights his status as an unreliable narrator, emphasising his fickle nature. The narration reflects the concept that memory is processed through an individual's consciousness, making it subjective to that particular person.

Responsibility

Similar to the theme of the politicisation of art, the novel explores the role of responsibility through the narration of Masuji Ono. There is a conflict between actions and culpability created through Ono's inability to take responsibility for the political aspects of his past work. Ono's deflections of responsibility are evident through his attempt at masking his actions and their subsequent consequences. An Artist of the Floating World makes reference to the liability of leaders after the war and how many of them were not held responsible, a group from which the narrator implicitly disassociates himself.

Alternatively, the concept of responsibility can be considered abstractly. This is done by placing emphasis on the reader to take responsibility in the determining the ending of the novel; is Ono guilty of his actions or is he simply exaggerating his importance and role in the war?

Changing values

Post-World War II Japan was a time of great change and upheaval of traditional values. Japan's defeat in the war created a large divide between individuals and generations. In the novel, this clash of values is represented in the relationship between Masuji Ono and his grandson Ichiro. Ono represents the traditional values of pre-war Japan, while Ichiro represents post-war Japan and the new generation. Major changes explored include the changing attitudes towards the war, family hierarchy, geography of Japan and the increasing prevalence of Western culture.

Cultural tension is presented through various scenes between Ichiro and Ono, such as their watching of the Godzilla movie, Ichiro's obsession with cowboys and Popeye and his lack of interest in Japanese heroes.

Women are portrayed throughout this novel from the perspective of Ono and well from the perspective of the changing Japanese society around him. The concept of Japanese masculinity altered after Japan's defeat in the war, and while changes were made to the role of women, women's stereotypes were not changed drastically. Gender relations are explored throughout the novel in the plot strand that treats Noriko's quest for a husband.

Marriage negotiations are a central feature of this novel. The marriage negotiations on behalf of his daughter cause Ono to reflect on his past, facilitating the creation of the story. They further facilitate Ono taking responsibility for his past actions, as well as allowing him to reconsider the changing values of Japan as perhaps being positive. They allow Ono to admit his mistakes, progressing the narrative and acting as a literary device.

Literary significance

Iain Maloney listed An Artist of the Floating World as an essential novel for Japanophiles. Robert McCrum ranked it the 94th greatest novel ever written.

The novel was shortlisted for the 1986 Booker Prize and won the Whitbread Book of the Year Award for the same year. It was a nominee for ALA best books for young adults.

The Nobel Foundation, which awarded Ishiguro the 2017 Nobel Prize in Literature, noted in its biography of the author that An Artist of the Floating World was the work that made him "a highly visible young writer".

The 100 best novels: No 94 – An Artist of the Floating World by Kazuo Ishiguro (1986)

Kazuo Ishiguro’s study of guilt, ageing and solitude in postwar, post-imperial Japan is a tour de force of unreliable narration

Robert McCrum

Kazuo Ishiguro is best known for The Remains of the Day, his Booker prizewinner; The Unconsoled, a very long novel of hallucinatory strangeness; and Never Let Me Go, a contemporary favourite, widely taught in schools. But the pitch-perfect novel that both expresses his Japanese inheritance and captures the haunting beauty and delicacy of Ishiguro’s English prose is his second work of fiction, An Artist of the Floating World.

This, as its title suggests, is a tour de force of unreliable narration, set in post-second world war Japan, during the American occupation. Masuji Ono, a respected artist in the 1930s and during the war, but now retired, is garrulously recalling the past, from a highly subjective point of view.

Ono, who passes his time gardening and pottering, opens his narrative with a low-key sentence whose meaning will resonate throughout the story: “If on a sunny day you climb the steep path leading up from the little wooden bridge still referred to around here as ‘the Bridge of Hesitation’, you will not have to walk far before the roof of my house becomes visible between the tops of two gingko trees.”

This kind of hesitation and uncertainty runs through everything that follows. Everything, for Ono, is provisional and troubling: art, family, life and posterity. An Artist of the Floating World presents, with the menace of an almost dream-like calm, the reminiscences of a retired painter in the aftermath of a national disaster.

Outside his home, there’s the grim reckoning that has followed the horrors of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. The American occupation is crushing Japan’s national pride. A new generation of young veterans wants to forget the imperial past. At the same time, in the tranquil seclusion of house and garden, Ono has time for some increasingly troubled reflections. He has lost his wife and son in the war, but lives on with two daughters, one of whom is married. But for a puzzling anxiety about his second daughter’s marriage negotiations, Ono could slip into old age. Instead, he must take “certain precautionary steps” against the necessary inquiries of his prospective son-in-law.

It becomes clear that Ono’s past conceals some guilty secrets that “the artist” must reluctantly address, secrets that illuminate the larger themes of guilt, ageing, solitude and the baffling incomprehension between young and old. Slowly, in a sequence of perfectly choreographed revelations, we discover that Ono was trained as a decadent artist, an illustrator of the night-time “floating world” of the prewar geishas. During the “China crisis” in the 1930s, however, he broke away from that ukiyo-e tradition to develop a more patriotic form of art. Now, as he tries to marry off his daughter, Ono’s prestige as a former pro-government painter has come to haunt him.

While Ono grapples with the challenges of peacetime, and Noriko begins to negotiate her marriage, this crucial rite of passage forces Ono to reflect on his former role as a pro-government artist who advised the Committee of Unpatriotic Activities, and who (the reader discovers) once betrayed one of his proteges to the secret police for imprisonment and torture.

The tragedy implicit in the book is that Ono’s long digressions into the past revert, inexorably, to the troubles of the present. His reminiscences are teasingly equivocal, for instance: “Of course, that is all a matter of many years ago now and I cannot vouch that those were my exact words that morning.” However, the truth is ultimately laid bare. Ono is forced to revise his memories, with increasingly wretched personal recognition. “I am not one of those,” he says towards the heartbreaking finale, “who are afraid to admit to the shortcomings of past achievements.”

A note on the text

In his interview with the Paris Review, Ishiguro describes the genesis of his second novel by referring to his first: “There was a subplot in A Pale View of Hills about an old teacher who has to rethink the values on which he’s built his life. I said to myself, I would like to write a full-blown novel about a man in this situation – in this case, an artist whose career becomes contaminated because he happens to live at a certain time.”

Ishiguro’s fiction has certainly mined the complexities involved in the unreliable, first-person narrator. An Artist of the Floating World is perhaps the supreme example of his art. It is, at face value, deeply Japanese, but many of its themes – secrecy, regret, discretion, hypocrisy and loss – are also to be found in the 20th-century English novel. No surprise, perhaps, that his next work of fiction, The Remains of the Day, should be about a butler, inspired by PG Wodehouse’s Jeeves. Kazuo Ishiguro may have been born in Nagasaki, but the discreet and subtle complexity of English (and Japanese) life is his subject.

2,512 Words.

Works Cited

1. Ishiguro, Kazuo. An Artist of the Floating World. PDF file, Faber & Faber, 2009.

2. "The 100 Best Novels: No 94 – An Artist of the Floating World by Kazuo Ishiguro (1986)." The Guardian, 22 Mar. 2018, www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jul/06/100-best-novels-no-94-an-artist-of-the-floating-world-kazuo-ishiguro-mazuji-ono-noriko.