The story of being left behind by modernity and driven by guilt, despite all our unreliable narrator thinks and says to the reader - Four StarsIt’s hard to appreciate the beauty of a world when one doubts its very validityI reread Kazuo Ishiguro’s An Artist of the Floating World for my bookclub and the first chapter struck me as being really skillful, capturing all of the themes of the novel in just 28 pages. We follow a old man arranging the marriage of his daughter. His wife and son have died

"Our Emperor is our rightful leader. Power has been grasped from him by these businessmen and their politicians. Japan is no longer a backward country. We are a mighty nation capable of matching any of the western nations. It's time for us to forge an empire as powerful and wealthy as the British and French. We must use our strength to expand abroad.""It is my belief in such troubled times artists must learn to value something more tangible than pleasurable things that disappear with the morning...

I thought Kazuo Ishiguro was not one of the authors who do not rewrite themselves. This book proved me wrong. He is like many other authors who write at least two novels with similar plot, themes and even characters. They just change some aspects of the novel like settings, climax or maybe the names of the places and people. I was disappointed but the disappointment was not enough for me to give this 1 star because the book still has all those Ishiguro's trademarks that made me fall in love with...

After reading Never Let Me Go, I swore that I would read more of Ishiguro's work. It was fate that I ran across An Artist of the Floating World at my Library. The novel isn't a particularly long one - coming in at a mere 206 pages. It was a breeze to get through.I'm noticing that with Ishiguro's narrators so far, the tone is very conversational. Throughout this book, the protagonist Masuji Ono, a retired artist, speaks intimately to the readerThroughout the book, Masuji Ono, the protagonist, spe...

Did you ever wonder what it was like in Japan after its defeat in WW II? So here we are in Japan in 1947. Our main character, an older man and an artist, lost his wife in a stray bomb that also destroyed much of his home, and he also lost his only son in the war. But he still has two daughters; one married with a son, and one trying to get married, but she’s getting a bit old for that time and culture; she’s past her mid-20’s.Japan was occupied by the United States, of course, and we imposed our...

Rereading this novel I felt that the award of the 2017 Nobel prize for Literature to Ishiguro was a very safe choice.In one way Ishiguro's books are not very interesting, the narrator might be unreliable or limited, there is a concern for memory and the role of a creative intelligence in understanding and reinterpreting the past, there are issues of guilt and responsibility, and love. And one can find these elements in book after book. But he is deft and clever, a safe choice for the nobel prize...

Second reading. The gist of this novel is the narrator's culpability for his patriotic actions during the war with the U.S. Set in a suburb of Tokyo during the American occupation, the narrator, Masuji Ono, is now surrounded by those who blame him for Japan's disastrous gamble on war and those like himself. Ono's generation was that of the old men cheerleading for war. And there can be no question about his complicity. In his youth he trained as an artist of the demimonde or "floating world," bu...

An Auction of PrestigeHarold Bloom in his 1975 book A Map of Misreading recast literary history as a record of the struggle between the “son” and his literary “father” (it has frequently been pointed out that Bloom is more than a bit sexist in his expression). Through a Kabbalah-like misinterpretation of one’s literary forebears, Bloom believed, a writer both builds on and destroys the work he admires most. This provokes a sort of anxiety in the writer, a struggle of wit and language with one’s

It's hard to be humble when you're so great used to be the words on a spoon rest in my mother's kitchen, but they are oddly appropriate in relation to the narrator as well.Now the question is, is Stevens from The Remains of the Day the Ono 2.0 (new and improved), or is it a case of the original always being better, this one having been published first? Both narrators are very prim, and proud, precise with their words--this may just be Ishiguro--and yearning for the past while defending what took...

Ishiguro is at his absolute best when he is exploring pain. He takes mundane characters, ordinary people, and demonstrates how the present is perpetually pervaded by the past.Memories shape us and, in some ways, define who we are. There is no moving away from them, no matter how hard we might try. And that’s what makes most of his stories so compelling, the human struggle is something he evokes in all its bitterness; yet, here he failed. Normally when I pick up one of his novels I am drawn strai...

An Artist of the Floating World, Kazuo IshiguroAn 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 pa...

If you've already read The Remains of the Day, chances are your enjoyment of An Artist of the Floating World will be greatly curtailed. And that is the sheer tragedy of this book.Replace Stevens with Masuji Ono. Replace a tottering England with a war-ravaged, financially unstable Japan and insert Ishiguro's penchant for allegory. And TADA you have An Artist of the Floating World.This book had potential to be a very emotionally charged commentary on a nation rebuilding itself from its charred (at...

There's such much drama in nothing at all! That's the genius of Ishiguro: here and in his masterpiece Remains of the Day, the actual plot is that nothing happens, and it's fuckin' gripping.Masuji Ono is an artist. During World War II he ended up on the wrong team; he arted up some propaganda, and now that Japan's lost the war he is embarrassing. His reputation has crashed. Maybe his daughter's impending marriage will be called off, if the family discovers some of his disgraceful former attitudes...

An Artist of the Floating World is a nice pleasant read. Although Ishiguro had not lived through this period and lives in England, he evokes the languid rhythms of life in post-war Japan with panache. His protagonist addresses the reader in the second person over the entire book, telling us of his career as a propagandistic artist of pre-war Imperial Japan and his retirement. There is a marked similarity between Oji and the protagonist of The Remains of the Day, in that each had acted in morally...

The recipe for this novel isTen large bags of BLANDNESS14 kg of EVASION27 litres of VAGUENESSA bucket or two of INSINUATIONSA generous grating of DARK HINTSMix well with five enormous slabs of CRUSHING CLASS CONSCIOUSNESSSprinkle with DISCONCERTINGLY INCOMPLETE SELF-DECEPTIONServe ice cold***Everyone talks in stilted formal plum-in-mouth style :It was the greatest impertinence to come here like this and disturb your afternoon.Excuse me for mentioning this to you, Father. No doubt, it would have

These are the recollections of Masuji Ono, an ageing painter taking stock of his past and the decisions informing it, especially during the Pacific War. Surprise Attack of Naval Paratroops at Manado, MIYAMOTO Saburo, 1943 STYLE :Throughout, you are following Ono's loose thoughts about himself, his family, his pupils, the past. In a sense, the title 'An Artist of the Floating World' is somewhat self-explanatory, as Ono is constantly drifting from one memory to another and back to the present (c...

"And if on reaching the foot of the hill which climbs up to my house, you pause at the Bridge of Hesitation and look back towards the remains of our old pleasure district, if the sun has not yet set completely, you may see the line of old telegraph poles – still without wires to connect them – disappearing into the gloom down the route you have just come, And you may be able to make out the dark clusters of birds perched uncomfortably on the tops of the poles, as though awaiting the wires alo