Summary
Our first-person narrator begins the story by giving us directions to his home, using a second-person address to explain how the reader might stumble upon his grand and well-positioned home. Though he doesn't identify himself, we find out later that the narrator is a man named Masuji Ono. Contrary to what we might believe based on the house's grandeur, Ono reports, he isn't wealthy. Rather, the man who owned the house before him and who built it was well-regarded in their city. This man's name was Akira Sugimura, and his family sold the house to Ono for a value far below the house's real worth. The narrator then launches into his own memories of that unusual sale fifteen years ago. He recalls that his wife pressured him to buy the family a new home in order to display the family's status. This show of status mattered because of the impending marriage negotiations for Ono's older daughter Setsuko, who was approaching an appropriate age for marriage. A pupil of Ono's raised the possibility of him purchasing Sugimura's house after Sugimura's death. Though Ono was sure he couldn't afford the house and believed the student to have an outsize amount of respect for him, he expressed his interest nonetheless. Later, Sugimura's two daughters visited Ono. They acted coldly, but gave Ono flattering news. Out of all the people who had inquired about buying the house, they had chosen four possible candidates based on character and status. They explained to Ono that they had set a minimal price for the house, but that they cared only about the prestige of the chosen new owner. The daughters explain that their father would have respected Ono because he respected art and artists, revealing to us that Ono himself is probably an artist. Though Ono's wife objected to the idea of being judged on the basis of prestige, Ono felt flattered to be considered and thinks, in retrospect, that the beautiful house was worth the inconvenience of getting it.
Ono reflects that the Sugimuras still act possessive of the house, and remembers seeing one of the Sugimura daughters after "the surrender." The daughter visited him at home and cared only about the state of the house, not displaying much concern about "my wife and about Kenji." Ono does not judge her, since she is clearly very emotional and since most of her family is now dead. The house, Ono says, did receive a fair amount of damage in the war, and though he pledged to Sugimura's daughter that he would repair it as soon as possible, it is hard to come by supplies for the repairs, and since only two people— "myself and Noriko"— live in the house now, fixing the damage doesn't feel so urgent. Though you might get a sense of the house's beauty walking through the ruined parts, Ono says, they are in a state of disrepair and look much as they did just after they were damaged. The beautiful Garden corridor is in disrepair, as well as the veranda, which was a favorite place of his daughters. "The blast" had caused such extreme damage that his daughter Setsuko, when she visited the house shortly after the surrender, was visibly saddened. But Ono was able to do repairs afterwards, so that when Setsuko visited a month ago she spent a lot of time on the veranda with Ono's younger daughter, Noriko.
Next, we enter a scene from that visit. Sitting on the veranda, Noriko gently pokes fun at her father. Setsuko is clearly uncomfortable with Noriko's teasing, though Ono tries to show that he finds it funny. Setsuko looks even more uncomfortable with Noriko brings up her inevitable marriage. The scene is disrupted by Setsuko's son, Ichiro. He asks his grandfather, while fidgeting and squirming, whether "the monster" is prehistoric, and Ono tries to answer, unsure what is being referenced. Setsuko is apologetic about her son's behavior, explaining that he is referring to a monster on a movie poster he saw yesterday, and seems upset that Ichiro is not being respectful enough of his grandfather, though Ono doesn't seem to mind at all. Noriko distracts her nephew by pretending to need his help cleaning up from breakfast. Setsuko, alone with her father, takes the opportunity to ask about the state of Noriko's marriage negotiations. She is surprised by her sister's implication that she will be married imminently, and Ono confesses that the negotiations are still at a very early stage. In fact, he says, Noriko has been acting as if her negotiations are much further along than they actually are, even talking to acquaintances as though plans for her marriage are completely settled, which puts Ono in an awkward position. While Setsuko considers this, Ono muses that she has gone from a plain child to a beautiful adult, just as her mother often predicted she would. Then Setsuko breaks the silence, pondering that Noriko must be upset about "what happened last year." The two of them wonder whether it was truly a love match, as Noriko claimed. Setsuko then wonders aloud why the Miyakes "pulled out," presumably of marriage negotiations. Setsuko claims that Suichi, her husband, is curious about this, believing that there is some kind of secret backstory that Setsuko has refused to tell him. Ono is irritated by this, since he knows that Setsuko herself thinks that he is keeping the full story from her. He coldly tells her that he has no more information than she does, and explains to the reader that Setsuko has interrogated him about this topic before. He shares his best guess with us: the Miyakes are simply a modest family who felt that Noriko was of too high a status for their son to wed. The new language of "love matches" breifly confused them, Ono imagines, but they eventually came down on the side of tradition. Ono himself, he tells us, cares little about status, did not disapprove of the match, and is often surprised by reminders of his own high status.
He gives an example of one such occasion, a few nights ago, when he was having a drink at Mrs. Kawakami's place with someone named Shintaro. Shintaro, Ono, and the proprietor, Mrs. Kawakami, were chatting, and Shintaro mentioned that Ono could write a letter of recommendation for Mrs. Kawakami's unemployed relative. Ono protests that he is retired and doesn't have any influence now, but realizes that Shintaro is remembering an event that happened in the mid-1930's, when Ono wrote a letter of recommendation for Shintaro's younger brother, Yoshio. He remembers that the boys arrived at his house and stood outside giggling, refusing to enter out of fear of imposing on Ono, even though Ono invited them inside. Shintaro urged Yoshio to speak quickly before they could impose any longer, and Yoshio delivered a short speech, thanking Ono sincerely and dramatically for his letter of recommendation. Ono felt bewildered, but also satisfied, having realized that he was in a position to kickstart someone else's career without having to put in much effort at all. Again, Ono claims that he's not often aware of his own status, and that perhaps he really is as influential as Shintaro claims. In any case, he likes drinking with Shintaro, since he seems not to be damaged. The same cannot be said of Mrs. Kawakami, who seems somehow broken, or of the old "pleasure district" where Mrs. Kawakami's is located. Ono launches into a poetic monologue about the district in its livelier days, when it offered an alternative to the rowdier city center. He used to spend his spare time at an establishment called the "Migi-Hidari," drinking with his best pupils, Kuroda, Murasaki, and Tanaka. These young men, especially the ringleader Kuroda, tended to speak flatteringly of Ono and to listen raptly to him. Shintaro, though a pupil of Ono's, was not welcome at these nights of drinking and conversation. Ono himself did not object to Shintaro's presence, but his students arranged themselves by hierarchy, and those closest to him looked down on Shintaro. In fact, Ono first visited Mrs. Kawakami's because he was specifically searching for Shintaro. Back in those days, the place was full of life and sat harmoniously beside the neighboring businesses. Now, though he still enjoys spending time there, the surrounding neighborhood is completely ruined, including the Migi-Hidari. It is, he notes, something like a graveyard now.
Ono cuts himself off from this tangent and picks up again with Setsuko's visit, on a day when his daughters sat talking on the veranda. Ono hears Ichiro making a racket in the dining room. Walking in, Ono finds his grandson galloping, as if to imitate a person on horseback. Ono asks if he can stay and watch, and Ichiro reluctantly consents on the condition that his grandfather not interrupt. Ono decides not to applaud the energetic game of pretend, in which Ichiro appears to be fighting invisible combatants and speaking incomprehensibly. When Ichiro pauses, Ono asks who he has been pretending to be, naming a few famous Japanese heroes or types, such as a samurai. But Ichiro impatiently says that he has been pretending to be the Lone Ranger. Ono argues that cowboys are less interesting than the Japanese heroes he has named, and he becomes unintentionally harsh and passionate. He apologizes, and then, as Ichiro begins to play again, catches sight of a sketchpad. The first pages are full of childish drawings, and Ono tries to teach his grandson some techniques to improve his drawing. Ichiro asks Ono whether he was once a famous artist, since his father has told him that Ono was famous, but had to stop when Japan lost the war. Ono avoids answering, saying only that he has chosen to retire, and is evasive when Ichiro asks where his old paintings are. Ono steers the conversation back towards Ichiro's drawing, and coaxes him to draw the movie poster with the monster on it. Ichiro draws the poster, and Ono asks him whether he would like to see the actual movie tomorrow. He jokes that Setsuko and Noriko will be too afraid to watch it, which Ichiro finds hilarious. Eventually, he gets bored of drawing and runs out to look for his Aunt Noriko. For a moment, Ono sits and stares blankly. He explains that he cannot recall exactly what he was thinking about, since, increasingly, he finds himself thinking about nothing at all. Eventually, though, he gathers himself and goes to the veranda. Setsuko explains that her son loves to play cowboys, and that his incomprehensible muttering is an imitation of English. Ono cannot help noting that a child several years before would not have been permitted to watch a cowboy film, and Setsuko responds that her husband Suichi finds American film heroes to be better influences than Japanese ones. Ono then explains that he and Ichiro are planning on going to the cinema the next day, and that he would like Noriko and Setsuko to join. Setsuko replies that her sister has plans, and in fact would like for the family to go together to the deer park. Ono is displeased, but waits until dinner to bring the topic up again.
At dinner, he reminds Ichiro of their plans to go to the cinema before informing Noriko that the whole family will be attending. Noriko says that she can't go, and reminds Ichiro that they are going to the deer park instead. She tells her father that she is planning to visit a certain Mrs. Watanabe after, and that her plans cannot be changed. Setsuko tries to act as a peacemaker, but both Ono and Noriko argue that Ichiro will prefer their own chosen plan. Ono tries to get Ichiro to agree by banding together against the women in the family, but Ichiro simply walks off. Ono finds his grandson in the other room, not speaking, and tries to cheer him up by telling him that they will have to see the movie later. When Ono emerges, Noriko and Setsuko ask whether he will still join them at the deer park, but Ono insists that he has too much to do, though his daughters know that this isn't true. Setsuko decides that she'll stay home with her father, leaving Noriko and Ichiro to have a day together. Ono is happy to have time to talk with Setsuko, but reveals that she has her own reasons for wanting to spend time with him.
The next day, Setsuko finds him standing absentmindedly in the house's reception room. He notes that he is clearly becoming more absent-minded, since he was taught by his own father to behave reverentially towards the reception room and use it only for important occasions or to make use of its Buddhist altar. In fact, Ono thinks that the mysterious reception room at the center of his childhood home ignited his visual imagination and made him a better artist as a result. Once he turned twelve, Ono entered the reception room weekly, since his father required him to attend "business meetings" there. These meetings consisted of Ono's father explaining obscure elements of his work to his son while Ono pretended to understand. Ono dreaded the meetings and feared his father's discovery that he did not fully understand their content, though in retrospect he knows that the meetings were more about instilling an expectation that he would take over the family business than they were about conveying particular facts. He also remembers an occasion in the reception room when he was fifteen. His father had a large ash pot and candle on the table, and asked Ono to bring all of his paintings to the room. After his father presses him, Ono admits that he has not brought two of his paintings, and that they are in fact the two he takes the most pride in. His father praises the paintings for their accuracy and evocativeness, then mentions that Ono's mother believes that he wants to be a professional artist. His tone makes clear that he will not allow his son to take such a path. He then sends him to fetch his mother. Ono's father recounts a wandering priest, who assessed his son as a baby. He recalls this priest declaring that Ono had a weak and lazy tendency which would have to be counteracted by his parents. Ono's mother concurs, though she seems uncomfortable. Ono's father then speaks about the world of artists, which he believes is marked by laziness, debauchery, and amorality. Given his son's weakness, he explains, he cannot be expected to withstand that environment without falling victim to its depravity. Ono's father then sends his family out of the room, and Ono, out in the hall, tells his mother that he will never follow his father's footsteps. He has no respect, he explains, for the straitlaced path he is being pressured to follow, and refuses to cave to that pressure.
Once again, Ono catches himself off on a tangent and returns to the reception room with Setsuko, who is now arranging flowers on the room's altar. She tells her father, with some hesitation, that he must be careful as he continues with Noriko's marriage negotiations, and make sure that investigations into the family's past do not yield unflattering information about their past. Ono does not quite understand what his daughter is saying, or at least acts as if he does not understand.
Analysis
An Artist of the Floating World begins in a way that gets us, as readers, firmly grounded—in spite of the "floating" in the title. Kazuo Ishiguro has chosen to divide the book into sections, marked with a month and year. This first one is October 1948, a few years after Japan's surrender to the Allied powers in World War II in the fall of 1945. By orienting us in such a specific moment before the narrative has even begun, Ishiguro offers the reader a helping hand. Combined with a fairly no-frills prose style, the reader gets the immediate impression that this is going to be a pretty straightforward narrative. The content of the first paragraph contributes to this impression. Our narrator guides us to his home, as if helpfully offering directions or explanation while he walks beside us. It all feels as though we're going to be guided through time and space by a helpful, friendly narrator, without having to do much navigation or questioning on our own. But even at the book's outset, certain troubling bits of language occur, hinting that all is not as simple as it seems. The very first word of the book, after all, is "if." "If on a sunny day you climb the steep path..." the novel starts, so that from the first word, the reader and narrator together are inhabiting an uncomfortable space, somewhere between hypothetical, imperative, and simple present-tense narration. Furthermore, from the very first sentence, Ishiguro introduces a relationship between the narrator and the "you" whom the narrator addresses. This is no simple second-person narration, either: the "you" is evoked as a specific person with a past and a certain number of preconceptions. Referencing Akira Sugimura's local fame, the narrator tells the "you" that "you may be new to this city, in which case the name of Akira Sugimura may not be familiar to you." The narrator is still mysterious at this point, and his name, personality, and biography come to us in pieces rather than as part of a standard exposition. But equally mysterious, if not more so, is this "you." It lurks in the background if the novel, never taking center stage but acting as an audience against which the narrator measures his own feelings and defends his subjective evaluations.
Furthermore, as much as the date that divides this section from the rest of the book seems to anchor the narrative, time quickly becomes detached from the laws of a traditional linear narrative. In fact, though the narration seems to be occurring in the fall of 1948, most of the action described takes place during Setsuko's visit of several months before. And, during Setsuko's visit, much of the conversation between Setsuko and Ono revolves around Noriko's failed marriage negotiation from the previous year. In the meantime, Ono references the war, skirting around the enormity of the event but referring to it often enough to impress that enormity upon us. Simply put, time in this novel is anything but linear. Often, Ono, narrating from October of 1948, will recall a scene from after the war, such as the moment in which he drinks with Shintaro at Mrs. Kawakami's. He then leaps to a memory within a memory. In this case, his conversation with Shintaro prompts him to recall the letter of recommendation he once wrote for Shintaro's brother, and then to muse about the pupils he used to drink with, excluding Shintaro. After getting increasingly tangled in related memories, Ono apologetically takes note of his distraction and remembers to get back on track. These moments remind us that, in the world of this book, there is a "you," a person being addressed. But such moments also bear an interesting resemblance to an occurrence taking place within the action of the novel itself. Often, Ono remembers sitting blankly, thinking about nothing, as if half his brain is turned off. He recalls emerging from these trances, but they are essentially blank spots in his memory, the same way the reception room was once a blank, mysterious spot in his childhood home.
In those moments, we get the impression that Ono is dwelling on something too painful to be expressed, perhaps his past and the losses he suffered during the war, one of which seems to be his own wife's death. When Ono goes off on a tangent, getting lost in memories within memories, he is entering a trancelike state similar to the one he sometimes enters while walking around his house. Basically, he's operating at two levels. One is the level of the present and the everyday, in which he engages with the living people around him. The other is the level of memory, which he can access only by disengaging with reality. The past is the mysterious "reception room" in the middle of his consciousness. And though he dips into it, there's still a mysterious center he won't give us access to. For instance, it's hard not to wonder whether he knows something he's not sharing about Noriko's failed marriage negotiations, and when Setsuko urges him to be careful about investigations into his past, we understand that he has some secrets. But Ono isn't giving those secrets away just yet. Whenever we start to get close to a memory that might be revealing, he apologetically pulls us back to the "main" narrative. In this regard, it seems as if the reassuring "October 1948" heading might be obscuring more than it reveals. By anchoring himself in a specific temporal perspective, Ono is able to yank us back from the looming past, pulling the narrative back to a safe present, so that it's hard for the reader to get all the information we might want.
This novel's sentences are marked by a certain spareness. At times they tend to wind a bit, falling into dependent clause after dependent clause, but this expresses an analytical mindset rather than a poetic one: we follow the logic of the developing sentence like a set of directions, and are eventually ushered to a final syntactical destination. Ishiguro uses formal but simple diction, and he avoids figurative language, with only rare exceptions. Even sensory detail is kept to a minimum. Though Ishiguro conveys atmosphere skillfully, he tends to focus on a few choice details, and the atmospheres he does describe are clean, domestic ones. Overall, the prose gives the sense that our narrator is a realistic and practical person, who is, if anything, a bit dry. This changes suddenly when Ono recalls his beloved pleasure district at its peak, before the war. In these moments, descriptive language proliferates, and metaphors, similes, and personification suddenly sneak into the text. When he remembers the first days of Mrs. Kawakami's establishment, for instance, he describes the "numerous cloth banners pressing at you from all sides, leaning out from their shop fronts, each declaring the attractions of their establishment in boisterous lettering." Here, the artistic spirit of our narrator emerges in full force. It is as if he once saw the world infused with sensation and life, though he no longer does. And these changing attitudes are linked to these two main settings. His house, site of his post-war life and family life, is described in lovely but prosaic language. His lost pleasure district, site of his pre-war artistic and social life, gets treated with linguistic lushness.
Ono, it seems, has a kind of double life. One life takes place in the domestic setting, in the present, with prosaic language. The other takes place in memories, at bars with his artistic colleagues and pupils. He seems to be a deeply nostalgic person, in fact. This isn't just true of his own autobiographical details. When he finds Ichiro pretending to be a cowboy, Ono is dismayed. He believes that his grandson should think more about Japanese heroes, and bitterly points out that a Japanese child of several years before might not have been allowed to see American cowboy movies. This displays a certain anxiety about Japan's status internationally, which makes sense, given the book's post-war setting. That anxiety about status bleeds back into Ono's personal concerns. He claims not to care about status, prestige, or influence, but he spends quite a bit of time explaining how little he cares and then reassuring us that, nevertheless, he is of a high status. That being said, he doesn't necessarily seem vain. Rather, Ono comes across as uncertain about how to navigate his new world. As a child, he rejected his father's demand that he abandon art for a more respectable field; as an adult artist, he found himself enjoying praise, respectability, and status. Now, having lost at least some of that status in the war—though it's not clear why, exactly—Ono must readjust once again, situating his own social standing within a rapidly shifting personal, national, and international status quo. He tries to jokingly bond with his grandson over their shared maleness, as if he might find an ally in this way. But Ichiro seems generally uninterested in maleness as a shared characteristic. As a result, Ono is unsure who his allies are, and his uncomfortable discussions of wealth and status reveal this.
