A Novelist of the Floating World

It’s unusual to find an enjoyable book in which nothing much really happens, but Kazuo Ishiguro has managed to write one. The book in question is called An Artist of the Floating World, and although it’s not one of Ishiguro’s more popular works, it certainly lives up to his reputation.

The intriguingly-named floating world is a pleasure district in post-war Nagasaki, once a thriving warren of bars and brothels, reduced to rubble by allied bombing. It doesn’t literally float – this isn’t Howl’s Moving Castle or anything - but it is an ephemeral world that comes alive at dusk and is a favourite subject for many of the city’s artists. Only one bar remains intact amid the destruction of the district, frequented by our narrator, the ageing artist Masuji Ono. Ono’s attempts to secure a husband for his daughter make him reconsider his past and all the things that he might need to hide from a prospective son-in-law.

Ishiguro’s narrator tells his story with an incredible economy of words which for me seems to accentuate the highly ritualistic society of 1940s Japan. There is little emotion on display even between family members, the city under reconstruction is orderly, and Ono’s house is tasteful and formal. The language evokes the scene, and is appropriate for such an understated novel. The refined atmosphere which Ishiguro creates also reminds us that the protagonist’s main concern is with what people think of him and his family. In this society reputation is everything and the respectable artist is keen that none of his youthful indiscretions should surface and compromise his daughter’s prospects.

Occasionally, Ono’s veneer seems to crack. He reveals to us his intimate doubts; about his unashamedly nationalistic early works and how he ‘betrayed’ his master when he was an apprentice painter by adopting a different style. The narrator is emotionally flawed - like all the best narrators – and troubled by self-doubt, and this uncertainty shows itself in the narrative as Ono is sometimes forgetful when it comes to precise details.

I think this is really a novel about constraints, and it is a credit to Ishiguro that his style of writing at once shows these constraints and rises above them. The reader is struck by the constraints which a ritualised, respectable society places on an individual, like the expectation of conformity that troubles Ono. It is also about specifically artistic constraints, about the problems inherent in creating a work of art which portrays the painter and his society at the time when it was painted, and does not change as they do. Ishiguro shows that an artist’s most celebrated work can easily become a millstone around his neck or a dirty secret to be hushed up, particularly in a fast-paced, modernising society like that of post-war Japan.

Given its content, it is surprising to learn that this is one of Ishiguro’s earlier novels. It is a meditation on the nature of art in a changing society, and sounds very much like a mature writer looking back on his career. I don’t know whether Ishiguro’s writing is always so elegant and minimalist, as this is the first of his novels I have read. There is a copy of The Remains of the Day floating around somewhere downstairs, waiting to be read, and I don’t think it will have to wait too much longer.