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.
