An Artist of the Floating World

An Artist of the Floating World

            Twelve years ago the very first book read for the Subiaco Library Book Club was Kazuo Ishiguro’s then recent novel Never Let Me Go (2005). I recall that most of the attendees agreed that it is an excellent novel; a consensus that was similarly reached with this novel. An Artist of the Floating World is Ishiguro’s second novel and was inspired by Marcel Proust’s Modernist classic In Search of Lost Time (1913). Appropriately the novel features the unreliable recollections of artist Masuji Ono, who is struggling to come to terms with life in post war Japan. Ono’s memories and musings provide the basis for the novel’s thematic centre, which focuses on both the inherent subjectivity of perception and the pressures that society and culture bring to bear on the individual, particularly during times of great upheaval.

Throughout the novel we learn, through numerous flashbacks, that Masuji Ono enjoyed a career as a fairly prominent artist during the decades leading up to the Second World War. The beginning of novel, set in 1948, finds him retired and pondering both his life and the state of Japan as the country begins to recover from bitter defeat. The novel is beautifully written, with spare, almost poetic prose that is always hinting at Ono’s subconscious stirrings. Clues of a barely buried past come early in the novel when Ono’s grandchild, the precocious Ichiro, asks Ono where his paintings are and Ono swiftly indicates that they are stored away. Ono acts as a subtle personification of Japan itself, wavering between denial about the past and full awareness of the actions and decisions that ultimately led the country to ruin. Ishiguro establishes and then maintains a subtle tension throughout the narrative by not fully revealing Ono’s exact role in the country’s imperialist past until the last third of the novel.

An Artist of the Floating World is a compelling novel despite containing little in the way of drama. Instead the novel is deeply psychological and highly symbolic. Ono is, by his very nature, an unreliable narrator, and often his perception of both the past and the present is called into question. Ono’s plight is summed up beautifully during a scene in which he is sitting with his daughters on his back porch and one daughter comments that Ono should leave the garden alone, that he had pruned some trees too harshly and had ruined the symmetry of the garden. Ono can’t see her perspective at all and totally disagrees with his daughter. This brief interaction sums up the whole thematic thrust of the novel, but due to Ishiguro’s subtle style the point is never laboured. Even the repeated scenes of Ono sitting in his favourite pre-war bar, somehow still standing among the bombed-out ruins, are poignant rather than obvious.

Aside from Ishiguro’s brilliant writing style, An Artist of the Floating World works so well because Ono is such a sympathetic character.  At the end of the novel five years has passed since the end of the war and Japan has undergone significant changes. These changes are shown through Ono’s point of view, an old man pondering both the past and the future and wondering if the young people he sees around him as he sits on a bench that approximates a bar he once loved feel the same as he did when the will of the nation, and his world view, seemed so certain. It is a fittingly poignant conclusion to a novel of subtlety,  stylistic elegance and emotional complexity.

1. 'Lantern' appears 34 times in the novel. Even on the cover page, the image of lanterns is displayed. What is the significance of Lantern in the novel?

Lanterns in the novel are associated with Ono’s teacher Mori-san, who includes a lantern in each of his paintings and dedicates himself to trying to capture the look of lantern light. For Mori-san, the flickering, easily extinguished quality of lantern light symbolizes the transience of beauty and the importance of giving careful attention to small moments and details in the physical world. Lanterns, then, symbolize an outlook on life which prizes small details and everyday moments above the ideological concerns of nationalists or commercial concerns of business people. It is an old-fashioned, aesthetically focused, and more traditional way of viewing the world.

2. Write about 'Masuji Ono as an Unreliable Narrator'.

An aging artist who created propaganda for the Japanese during the Second World War and is now preoccupied after the war with assessing his legacy. Ono grew up with a father who did not support his becoming an artist, then moved to the city in which the novel takes place as a young man. He makes money by painting works for export to foreigners. His work catches the eye of an artist and patron of the arts named Mori-san, and he spends the next seven years living in Mori-san’s villa. Then, under the influence of the nationalist Matsuda, Ono decides to change his style of painting to promote Japanese imperialism. During the war and the years leading up to it, Ono’s propagandist paintings earn him prestige in the city, but after the war’s end, nationalist ideas are discredited and Ono is forced into retirement. In the post-war period, Ono feels that, even if his work pursued a mistaken ideology of nationalism, his good faith effort to do what he believes in and make an important contribution means that he can be proud of his life’s work. Ono lost his wife Michiko and son Kenji in the war, but he doesn’t discuss his grief. Ono also feels that the younger generation’s bitterness towards his generation and desire to sweep away all the old traditions is too extreme a response to the devastation of the war. Instead, he concerns himself with arranging the marriage of his youngest daughter Noriko, who resents her father because of what she sees as his sordid past and the shadow it casts on her marriage prospects. Ono also cultivates a close relationship with his grandson Ichiro. Near the end of the novel, doubt is cast on Ono’s account of his career’s importance and impact by his daughter Setsuko, who suggests he was “merely a painter” who had little impact on the fate of Japan or even, as he had thought, on his daughter’s failed first engagement.

3. Debate on the Uses of Art / Artist (Five perspectives: 1. Art for the sake of art - aesthetic delight, 2. Art for Earning Money / Business purpose, 3. Art for Nationalism / Imperialism - Art for the propaganda of Government Power, 4. Art for the Poor / Marxism, and 5. No need of art and artist (Masuji's father's approach)

4. What is the relevance of this novel to our times?