Monday, July 6, 2015

The 100 best novels / No 94 / An Artist of the Floating World by Kazuo Ishiguro (1986)

The 100 best novels

written in English

No 94

An Artist of the Floating World

by Kazuo Ishiguro (1986)

Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel about a retired artist in postwar Japan, reflecting on his career during the country’s dark years, is a tour de force of unreliable narration

Robert McCrum
Monday 6 July 2015 05.45 BST

azuo Ishiguro is best known for The Remains of the Day, his Booker prizewinner; The Unconsoled, a very long novel of hallucinatory strangeness; and Never Let Me Go, a contemporary favourite widely taught in schools. But the pitch-perfect novel that both expresses his Japanese inheritance and also captures the haunting beauty and delicacy of Ishiguro’s English prose is his second work of fiction, An Artist of the Floating World.

This, as its title suggests, is a tour de force of unreliable narration, set in post-second world war Japan, during the American occupation. Masuji Ono, a respected artist in the 30s and during the war but now retired, is garrulously recalling the past, from a highly subjective point of view.

Ono, who passes his time gardening and pottering, opens his narrative with a low-key sentence whose meaning will resonate throughout the story: “If on a sunny day you climb the steep path leading up from the little wooden bridge still referred to around here as ‘the Bridge of Hesitation’, you will not have to walk far before the roof of my house becomes visible between the tops of two ginkgo trees.”

This kind of hesitation and uncertainty runs through everything that follows. Everything, for Ono, is provisional and troubling: art, family, life, posterity. An Artist of the Floating World presents, with the menace of an almost dream-like calm, the reminiscences of a retired painter in the aftermath of a national disaster.

Outside his home, there’s the grim reckoning that has followed the horrors of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. The American occupation is crushing Japan’s national pride. A new generation of young veterans wants to forget the imperial past. At the same time, in the tranquil seclusion of house and garden, Masuji Ono has time for some increasingly troubled reflections. He has lost his wife and son in the war, but lives on with two daughters, one of whom is married. But for a puzzling anxiety about his second daughter Noriko’s marriage negotiations, Ono could slip into old age. Instead, he must take “certain precautionary steps” against the necessary inquiries of his prospective son-in-law.

It becomes clear that Ono’s past conceals some guilty secrets which “the artist” must reluctantly address, secrets that illuminate the larger themes of guilt, ageing, solitude, and the baffling incomprehension between young and old. Slowly, in a sequence of perfectly choreographed revelations, we discover that Ono was trained as a decadent artist, an illustrator of the night-time “floating world” of the prewar geishas. During the “China crisis” in the 30s, however, he broke away from that ukiyo-e tradition to develop a more patriotic form of art. Now, as he tries to marry off his daughter, Ono’s prestige as a former pro-government painter has come to haunt him.

While Ono grapples with the challenges of peacetime, and Noriko begins to negotiate her marriage, this crucial rite of passage forces Ono to reflect on his former role as a pro-government artist who advised the Committee on Unpatriotic Activities, and who (the reader discovers) once betrayed one of his proteges to the secret police for imprisonment and torture.

The tragedy implicit in the book is that Ono’s long digressions into the past revert, inexorably, to the troubles of the present. His reminiscences are teasingly equivocal, for instance: “Of course, that is all a matter of many years ago now and I cannot vouch that those were my exact words that morning.” However, the truth is ultimately laid bare. Ono is forced to revise his memories, with increasingly wretched personal recognition. “I am not one of those,” he says towards the heartbreaking finale, “who are afraid to admit to the shortcomings of past achievements.”

A Note on the Text

In an interview with the Paris Review, Ishiguro describes the genesis of his second novel by referring to his first: “There was a subplot in A Pale View of Hills about an old teacher who has to rethink the values on which he’s built his life. I said to myself, I would like to write a full-blown novel about a man in this situation – in this case, an artist whose career becomes contaminated because he happens to live at a certain time.”

Ishiguro’s fiction has certainly mined the complexities involved in the unreliable, first-person narrator. An Artist of the Floating World is perhaps the supreme example of his art. It is, at face value, deeply Japanese, but many of its themes – secrecy, regret, discretion, hypocrisy and loss – are also to be found in the 20th-century English novel. No surprise, perhaps, that his next work of fiction, The Remains of the Day, should be about a butler, inspired by P G Wodehouse’s Jeeves.Kazuo Ishiguro may have been born in Nagasaki, but the discreet and subtle complexity of English (and Japanese) life is his subject.