An Artist of the Floating World

Kazuo Ishiguro
1986
Rating: 6.5

Overall this book felt very polished, well executed, and had no blemishes. The novel evinces a powerful sense of even-keeled control and restraint, mostly to its benefit.

I found the subject matter to be very interesting, and for me it was a novelty. i’ve not read many novels set in Japan. The protagonist is an artist who is renowned throughout his city and even the nation for his pro-military art and propaganda prior to and during World War II. He’s celebrated during the war, but in the years immediately following Japan’s surrender, his hawkish views, his activities, and his propaganda present him and his family with a number of difficulties. The story offers a vivid picture of what life was like for its characters.

In addition to the fascinating historical milieu, I enjoyed the way that Ishiguro wove together the narrative. There was an elegant seamlessness in the way that the story unfolded, from plot point to plot point. The novel, his second, also captured the sadness that can accompany the changes brought about by the passage of time, and this was reflected not only in the characters but also in the way that neighborhoods evolved due to the war and its aftermath.

Maybe the novel owes a significant part of its achievement to Ishiguro’s choices around perspective. The protagonist, Ono, is clearly complicit in fueling the ugly fires of Japanese militarism, but the portrait of him, while not making excuses for or justifying his views, offers a rich portrait of him, and of his attempts to process his decisions after the fact.

Ono, who narrates the book, is unreliable, and the use of the unreliable narrator was shrewd and effective.

As for the book’s shortcomings, there were a few minor ones. The language is not particularly vivid or visual, and I think much of that is by design. The restraint was, I believe, intentional, and it seems to me that Ishiguro did not want the language to call attention to itself. The language was not at all bad, it served its purpose, but it’s not a book full of beautiful sentences, nor of vivid visual details.

I also felt that, for a book that revolves so much around art and artists, that it didn’t really talk about art that much in an interesting or novel way. It felt to me like it was written by a man who didn’t know a great deal about visual art and hadn’t bothered to do the type of research that might have brought those passages to life more. Surprisingly few of the books passages concern the act of painting, considering that painting and paintings anchor the story.

I would also say that the characterization is completely adequate, but somewhat perfunctory. Ono the protagonist is rendered as a fully developed, three-dimensional character, but the book’s other characters are adequately developed, but not much more than adequately. They were generally not very vivid on the page.

Lastly, Ono’s views of his actions before and during the war evolve; that is in fact what the book is primarily about, but at the end of the book I was wondering if the character in fact vacillated in a way that was not satisfying, or in a way that weakened the story somewhat. I guess it’s fair for Ishiguro to have created him in a way that he had conflicting views of his own actions and beliefs. Where Ono actually stands in relation to his past is a bit ambiguous, but maybe that was intentional.

This was also true of a shift with his family that I found to be somewhat confusing, although the confusion too may have been intentional on Ishiguro’s part.

Overall I would definitely recommend it if you have any interest in what life was like after the war in Japan. It was pretty satisfying to work through it.