An Artist of the Floating World
Encyclopedia
An Artist of the Floating World (1986) is a novel
by British
-Japan
ese author Kazuo Ishiguro
. It is set in post-World War II
Japan and is narrated
by Masuji Ono, an aging 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. The novel attempts to ask and answer the question: what is man's role in a rapidly changing environment?
The book is written in the first person and hinges on the exclusive use of a single, unreliable narrative voice, expressing a viewpoint which the reader identifies as limited and fallible, without any other voice or point of view acting as a test. Ono often makes it clear that he is not sure of the accuracy of his narrative, but this may either make the reader cautious or, on the contrary, suggest that Ono is very honest and therefore trustworthy.
The self-image Ono expresses in his narrative is vastly different from the image of him the reader builds from reading the same narrative. Ono often quotes others as expressing admiration and indebtedness to him. Ono's narrative is characterized by denial, so that his interests and his hierarchy of values are at odds with the reader's. The reader therefore finds what they are interested in is not in the focus of Ono's narrative but at its fringes, presented in an oblique rather than frontal way. For example, Ono's descriptions of his pictures focus on pictorial technique, mentioning the subjects as if they were unimportant, although they reveal the propagandistic nature of his work. It is not necessarily clear if this focus on style rather than substance should be ascribed to Ono as narrator (showing his retrospective, unconscious embarrassment) or if it was already present in him at the time he was making the pictures (showing that totalitarianism exploits people's "ability" to restrain their consciousness to limited aspects of their actions). Similarly, when Ono narrates an episode when he was confronted with the results of his activity as a police informer, it is debatable whether his attempt to mitigate the police's brutality is a retrospective fabrication devised to avoid his responsibility, or whether he did disapprove of the treatment of the person he had denounced, dissociating himself from his actions and refusing to recognize this treatment as a direct and foreseeable consequence of his own action.
, 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.
Novel
A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....
by British
British people
The British are citizens of the United Kingdom, of the Isle of Man, any of the Channel Islands, or of any of the British overseas territories, and their descendants...
-Japan
Japan
Japan is an island nation in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of the Sea of Japan, China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south...
ese author Kazuo Ishiguro
Kazuo Ishiguro
Kazuo Ishiguro OBE or ; born 8 November 1954) is a Japanese–English novelist. He was born in Nagasaki, Japan, and his family moved to England in 1960. Ishiguro obtained his Bachelor's degree from University of Kent in 1978 and his Master's from the University of East Anglia's creative writing...
. It is set in post-World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
Japan and is narrated
Narrator
A narrator is, within any story , the fictional or non-fictional, personal or impersonal entity who tells the story to the audience. When the narrator is also a character within the story, he or she is sometimes known as the viewpoint character. The narrator is one of three entities responsible for...
by Masuji Ono, an aging 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. The novel attempts to ask and answer the question: what is man's role in a rapidly changing environment?
Narrative structure
In the buildup to World War II, Ono, a promising artist, broke away from the teaching of his master, whose artistic aim is to reach an aesthetic ideal, and became involved in far-right politics, making propagandistic art. As a member of the Cultural Committee of the Interior Department and official adviser to the Committee of Unpatriotic Activities, Ono became a police informer, taking an active part in an ideological witch hunt. After the 1945 defeat and the collapse of jingoistic, early twentieth-century Japan, Ono became a discredited figure, one of the "traitors" who "led the country astray", while the victims of state repression, including people Ono himself had denounced, are reinstated and allowed to lead a normal life. Over the course of the first three sections, spanning October 1948-November 1949, Ono seems to show a growing acknowledgement of his past "errors", although this acknowledgement is never explicitly stated. However, in the short fourth and last section (June 1950), Ono appears to have returned to his earlier inability to change his viewpoint.The book is written in the first person and hinges on the exclusive use of a single, unreliable narrative voice, expressing a viewpoint which the reader identifies as limited and fallible, without any other voice or point of view acting as a test. Ono often makes it clear that he is not sure of the accuracy of his narrative, but this may either make the reader cautious or, on the contrary, suggest that Ono is very honest and therefore trustworthy.
The self-image Ono expresses in his narrative is vastly different from the image of him the reader builds from reading the same narrative. Ono often quotes others as expressing admiration and indebtedness to him. Ono's narrative is characterized by denial, so that his interests and his hierarchy of values are at odds with the reader's. The reader therefore finds what they are interested in is not in the focus of Ono's narrative but at its fringes, presented in an oblique rather than frontal way. For example, Ono's descriptions of his pictures focus on pictorial technique, mentioning the subjects as if they were unimportant, although they reveal the propagandistic nature of his work. It is not necessarily clear if this focus on style rather than substance should be ascribed to Ono as narrator (showing his retrospective, unconscious embarrassment) or if it was already present in him at the time he was making the pictures (showing that totalitarianism exploits people's "ability" to restrain their consciousness to limited aspects of their actions). Similarly, when Ono narrates an episode when he was confronted with the results of his activity as a police informer, it is debatable whether his attempt to mitigate the police's brutality is a retrospective fabrication devised to avoid his responsibility, or whether he did disapprove of the treatment of the person he had denounced, dissociating himself from his actions and refusing to recognize this treatment as a direct and foreseeable consequence of his own action.
Themes
Amongst the themes explored in this novel are arranged marriage, the changing roles of women, and the lessening status of "elders" in Japanese society since World War II. The novel is narrated through the eyes of one man who, besides being an artist, is also a father, grandfather, and widower. It tells, with a strong voice, much about the "pleasure" era of Japanese society, elaborating on the life of a successful and devoted young artist in a decadent era. We learn how attitudes toward Japanese art and society became less tolerant of such extravagance, and what it was like to live with the guilt of such pleasure. The pace is slow and luscious and the language delightful, all reflecting the central theme.Awards
The novel was shortlisted for the 1986 Booker Prize and won the Whitbread Book of the Year Award for the same year.Title
The novel's title is based on the literal translation of Ukiyo-eUkiyo-e
' is a genre of Japanese woodblock prints and paintings produced between the 17th and the 20th centuries, featuring motifs of landscapes, tales from history, the theatre, and pleasure quarters...
, a word referring to the Japanese art of prints
Woodblock printing in Japan
Woodblock printing in Japan is a technique best known for its use in the ukiyo-e artistic genre; however, it was also used very widely for printing books in the same period. Woodblock printing had been used in China for centuries to print books, long before the advent of movable type, but was only...
. 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.