An Artist of the Floating World: Plot Analysis and Characters: A Guide to Kazuo Ishiguro's An Artist of the Floating World, #1

READING KAZUO ISHIGURO’S AN ARTIST OF THE FLOATING WORLD

The character (*) will be used to designate important End Notes. Check the End Notes for better understanding whenever you encounter this character.

Introduction

On 16th January 2014, Hiroo Inoda, a Japanese Second World War veteran, died – but that wasn’t the news. The news was that this particular Imperial Japanese Army intelligence officer kept fighting on until 1974 – nearly thirty years after the formal Japanese surrender and the declaration of the end of the Second World War. Inoda, a Japanese holdout, continued hiding in the jungles in the Philippines until his commanding officer, under express orders from Emperor Hirohito, went to formally relieve him of duty.

This short anecdote probably best demonstrates the feelings of ultra-nationalism which, originating with the Meiji imperial restoration of 1868 and lasting until the end of the American occupation, nearly a century later, in1851, shaped the politics of Japan for nearly a hundred years. The restoration, coupled with military reform, led to the defeat of the Chinese in the Sino-Japanese War and later the Russians in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05. With this, many Japanese began viewing themselves as an international power or empire the way Napoleon had between 1803 and his Waterloo in 1815, the way Hitler had between 1920 and 1945. These feelings were exacerbated by the Japanese defeat of the Germans in the pacific theatre of the First World War and the acceptance of Japan into the League of Nations after the war. To compound this, the great depression of the 1920s led the Japanese to seek resources outside their country, thereby increasing the need to expand the empire, while the attempted assassination of the emperor in the Sakuradamon incident of 1932 increased nationalistic feelings to protect the emperor and expand the empire; the fact that the incident had been perpetrated by a Korean made matters worse by perpetuating ultra-nationalism even further. This was the situation in which Japan approached the Second World War. It also explains the Japanese fervor of nationalism during the war, best demonstrated not only by the likes of Hiroo Inoda, but also by the famous suicidal Kamikaze pilots.

It is against this background that Kazuo Ishiguro sets his award-winning novel, An Artist of the Floating World. In the novel, Masuji Ono, a Japanese painter who takes part in the propaganda war that encourages Japan’s aggression into Manchuria – and its participation in the Second World War - later finds himself at odds with a generation critical of the war, its causes and results as well as those who propagate it, when the war comes to an end. (Manchuria is a Chinese territory to the farthest north-east which today includes the districts of Heilongjiang, Jilin and Liaoning which are separated from the Japanese islands by strips of land forming parts of Korea and Russia, and the Sea of Japan). This conflict is demonstrated by Ono’s daughters’ mutual feeling that Masuji Ono needs to do something in order not to spoil the chances of his second daughter’s marriage the second time round; though not openly said, the common understanding between the daughters is that their father’s background had something to do with the withdrawal of the first marriage party – the Miyakes. The fact that that arranged marriage failed last year has cast doubt on whether their father’s background – specifically his propagandist activities through art during the Second World War and his chairmanship of the committee of art that advises the Japanese government on war, might have led the prospective son-in-law and his family to withdraw.

However, Ishiguro is not only interested in war and its aftermath; he weaves a narrative that discusses other crucial thematic issues including positive and negative nationalism and its validity, memory and its role in the recording of the so-called history, the role of guilt in the creation of self-consciousness/self-image and the conflict that results from generational gap, change and the clash it generates in general progression of world affairs among others. Ishiguro is also pointedly interested in the role of art in a commercial world – visiting the age-old question of art for art’s sake.

The Novelist

Kazuo Ishiguro is a British novelist of Japanese descent, screen writer, musician and short story writer. He was born in Nagasaki, Japan, in November 1954, but moved to Britain with his parents in 1960 when his father, an oceanographer, was invited for research at the then National Institute of Oceanography. Ishiguro was educated in Britain, graduating first with a Bachelor of Arts in English and Philosophy from the University of Kent and later with a Master of Arts in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia; his Masters thesis later turned out to be his first novel, A Pale View of Hills. It won the Memorial Prize in 1982. Ishiguro became a British citizen in 1983. 

Many of Ishiguro’s works have a Japanese ‘feel’ which he says he got from his upbringing (his Japanese parents having been born and brought up within the Japanese culture and ensuring he grew up strictly aware of Japan and Japanese mannerisms), from reading Japanese writers, notably Junichiro Tanizaki, and from Japanese films such as those of Yasujiro Oju and Mikio Naruse. Apart from The Burned Giant, his novels feature a first person narration telling stories from the past. Never