An Artist of the Floating World

3.5 stars that I’m rounding up to a 4. I’ve had a few of those in a row, which is so fun…

This feels very much like The Remains of the Day version 1. It doesn’t feel as subtle as Remains, but it covers very similar thematic ground. It’s just set in Japan, from a Japanese man’s perspective. Still covers post WWII complicity via a narrator who is traditional and somewhat repressed.

I loved that we came full circle on the art burning. That was just perfect to me.

I read another review that explained the ending - I definitely had the wrong impression. Or maybe what I thought is an alternative. My sense of his daughter’s comments on his career at the end were that he had misinterpreted where he had gone wrong. Instead of the art he produced being the major problem, it was the cooperation with the government to target artists. That he had mistaken the power of his art. I do like that interpretation, but I think others make sense, too.

Ishiguro does a really excellent job creating moments that feel so awkward even though they’re minor. He creates conversations where you feel the subtext so strongly. But I felt stretches of boredom here I didn’t feel in Remains, which made the experience less moving.

I listened to this as an audiobook, and the narrator left a lot to be desired. He voiced the protagonist so straightforwardly. I was hoping for some hints of insecurity or strain, but didn’t get any of that. Might’ve been a better one to read as a print book!

[b:An Artist of the Floating World|18144266|An Artist of the Floating World|Kazuo Ishiguro|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1372714599l/18144266.SY75.jpg|2464610] is one of [a:Kazuo Ishiguro|4280|Kazuo Ishiguro|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1424906625p2/4280.jpg]'s earlier works and it shows the sensitivity he has to manners he later shows in his later [b:The Remains of the Day|28921|The Remains of the Day|Kazuo Ishiguro|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1327128714l/28921.SY75.jpg|3333111], his most well-known novel due to the successful 1993 movie adaptation.
The story, which takes place from 1948 to 1950, is part family drama part musings of an irrelevant man and has the same elegiac quality of Remains. It captures specific aspects of post-war Japan that now get little attention if they're not forgotten, as the population living in that era has dwindled in number.

Yesterday, as I took the tram down to Arakawa, the carriage was filled with bright autumn sunshine. I had not made the journey dto Arakawa for a little while—in fact, not since the end of the war—and as I gazed out of my window, I noticed many changes in what had once been familiar scenery. Passing through Tozaka-cho and Sakaemachi, I could see brick apartment blocks looming over the small wooden houses I remembered from before. Then, as we passed the backs of the factories in Minamimachi, I saw how abandoned many of them had become; one factory yard went by after another, untidily stacked with broken timber, old sheets of corrugated metal, and often what looked to be plain rubble.

An Artist of the Floating World evokes a lost world of artists' lives in the pre-War Japanese demi-monde against the rise of strident propaganda leading up to the catastrophe of the War. At one point, the narrator, Mr. Ono, a painter, describes his masters' geisha paintings as updating a classic 'Utamoro tradition' in order to "evoke a certain melancholy around his women, and throughout the years I studied with him, he experimented extensively with colours in an attempt to capture the feel of lantern light." Even as Ono turns his back on this "floating world" to create a "new Japan," the war consumes his old pleasure district, leaving only ashes, fertile ground for Japan's new Americanized business culture.

Against this backdrop, an Artist of the Floating World is a novel of guilt and remembrance, perception of self and perception of others, a brief journey in which Mr. Ono must confront the legacy of destruction he helped create and the passing away of the fragile aesthetic he once cherished.