Then, of course, after WWII his actions weren’t looked upon so kindly by the broader Japanese community. He even became a police informer, playing a very active role in an ideological witch-hunt that saw other artists (his contemporaries and colleagues) sought out and shut down by the authorities. That said, it’s a lot more readable than Mrs D, and as such I got a lot more out of it.Īlright, I’ll stop being so vague, here’s the story: prior to WWII, Ono was a promising artist, but he shit all over the traditions of his master and took instead to creating propagandistic art for the far-right political groups that were gathering strength in Japan at the time. The action itself only takes place on four separate days (over the course of a year and a bit, 1948-50), but with all of his digressions and trains of thought, the reader gets a much richer story over a much longer time period. An Artist Of The Floating World reminded me of Mrs Dalloway, actually. The novel depicts Ono’s struggle to accept responsibility for his past. This refers to the narrator, Masuji Ono, an ageing painter who has lived through the seismic shifts of a world war (and we all know how that worked out in his neck of the woods). Its title is taken from a literal translation of the Japanese word Ukiyo-e, referring to the art of printmaking, “an artist living in a changing world”. And, once again, not so! It was very accessible, right from the beginning, even without having an intimate knowledge of the time period and setting.

Secondly, I assumed – with the Nobel Prize and everything else in Ishiguro’s trophy cabinet – that it would be a Very Smart(TM) book (i.e., dense to the point of unreadable). First off, I assumed (wrongly, as it turned out) that it was another fictionalised account of WWII in fact, it’s set in Japan after the surrender.

I’ll confess to some trepidation when I picked it up. Buy An Artist Of The Floating World here.Īn Artist Of The Floating World was first published in 1986.

An artist of the floating world book