An Artist of the Floating World

The Nobel-prize winning laureate has written many more famous books dealing with the human condition, most notably The Remains of the Day and Never Let me Go, but this is, to my mind, his best rumination on humanity's familiar ache. Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day is a flawless book and similarly themed, but there is something about the post-war regrets, delusions, and self-justifications of the aging Japanese artist Masuji Ono that just slay me and make me want to weep. Ishiguro is of course the king of unreliable narrators, so I don't want to give away the big… show more.

It is a few years after the war and an elderly painter, who is also the novel’s narrator, recalls his role as an artist before and during the war. His memory slowly unfolds, with shadows and twists, and hints that some things are better left unsaid. The artist’s mind plays tricks to cover up the past, distorting recollections, and refashioning events to conform to a more acceptable version of reality. The novel is a powerful meditation on responsibility and what it means to be an ordinary man in extraordinary circumstances. As such, it talks to us all.  

The Nobel Prize-winning novelist’s second book centers on the life and ‘crimes’ of an elderly artist whose graphic talents in the service of Japanese Fascism, creating powerful works of militaristic propaganda, helped send tens of thousands of young Japanese to their death in war. Yet such a description belies the measured, gentle, apparently inconsequential narrative style which carries the reader along like a sleepwalker until the cruel moral dimensions of the story quietly reveal themselves. A sustained attempt to drill down into the way a profoundly different culture experiences defeat and humiliation.