Introduction
Sir Kazuo Ishiguro OBE FRSA FRSL is a British novelist, screenwriter, musician, and short-story writer. He was born in Nagasaki, Japan, and moved to Britain in 1960 when he was five. Ishiguro is one of the most celebrated contemporary fiction authors in English.
An Artist of the Floating World (1986)[1] is a novel by Nobel Prize-winning British author Kazuo Ishiguro. It is set in post-World War II Japan and is narrated by Masuji Ono, an ageing painter, who looks back on his life and how he has lived it. He notices how his once great reputation has faltered since the war and how attitudes towards him and his paintings have changed. The chief conflict deals with Ono's need to accept responsibility for his past actions, rendered politically suspect in the context of post-War Japan. The novel ends with the narrator expressing good will for the young white-collar workers on the streets at lunchbreak. The novel also deals with the role of people in a rapidly changing political environment and with the assumption and denial of guilt.
Lanterns are the symbol of the floating world. They represent the fleeting beauty and warmth of nightlife as well as the transience of the traditional way of life in Japan, which vanishes after the war. Lanterns are the old-fashioned, welcoming source of soft light at Mrs. Kawakami's. Within their spheres of light Masuji Ono is embraced. As a symbol of the floating world, lanterns often appear in Mori-san's work, either within the picture or as the implied light source for the subject in the painting. With the end of the war, the occupation, and the rapid modernization of Japan, traditional light sources like lanterns vanish just as the pleasure district and the floating world disappear when the sleek office buildings arise.
2. Write about 'Masuji Ono as an Unreliable Narrator'.
An Artist of the Floating World is a masterpiece that glides in out and of many dimensions. On the one hand, it is a story of generations separated by a massive ideological gulf. On the other, it is about an older man attempting to come to terms with his mistaken philosophies. It is also a historical fiction set in the Japan of limbos; Japan, which has suffered because of its misplaced imperialism, been shattered by bombings and is now critical of the past and every person representing it. At the heart of it is an unreliable narrator, Masuji Ono. Once an acclaimed painter, Ono is our guide through post-World War II Japan and its sociopolitical and emotional trauma; felt in extremities like the once-vibrant pleasure districts destroyed by bombings and kids who loved Popeye and Godzilla.
The book is a contemplative journey, spread across four time frames: October 1948, April 1949, November 1949 and June 1950. We are introduced to a retired artist of great acclaim, Masuji Ono. Ono lives with his youngest daughter Noriko, and his attempts to secure a good match for her is a central theme. In the past, Noriko’s engagement had been called off. While Ono likes to believe that his family was more powerful than the boy’s, Noriko’s often belligerent behaviour suggests the unsuccessful engagement has more to do with Ono’s past. His older daughter Setsuko asks Ono to meet his acquaintances and rectify his errors should Noriko’s prospects inquire about the family’s history. This simple task is the starting point of his recollections, opening twisted alleys of memory.
3. Debate on the Uses of Art / Artist (Five perspectives: 1. Art for the sake of art - aesthetic delight, 2. Art for Earning Money / Business purpose, 3. Art for Nationalism / Imperialism - Art for the propaganda of
Government Power, 4. Art for the Poor / Marxism, and 5. No need of art and artist (Masuji's father's approach)
1. Art for the sake of art - aesthetic delight
When summarized in this way, the novel sounds misleadingly like the depiction of a straightforward decline: as if Ono’s artistic ambition leads him first to aloof and implicitly elitist aestheticism, and then from aestheticism to overtly elitist fascism, as Walter Benjamin might have predicted:
“Fiat ars – pereat mundus”, says Fascism, and, as Marinetti admits, expects war to supply the artistic gratification of a sense perception that has been changed by technology. This is evidently the consummation of “l’art pour l’art.” Mankind, which in Homer’s time was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, now is one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. This is the situation of politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic. Communism responds by politicizing art.
But Ishiguro’s novel tells a very different story, one consonant not with a Marxist critique like Benjamin’s but instead with the aestheticist philosophy of Wilde and his fin-de-siècle cohort. In this story, the aesthete becomes a totalitarian precisely because he abandons his apolitical outlook.
4. What is the relevance of this novel is our times?
Also, This Novel is relevance in our time because we are already believe that The idea of Imperialism is depict by the writer through we can connect with current time. Also, According to countries people what's Nationalism? what do you believe if I know that there are so many soldiers, who will die for country. we can say that this is the true Nationalism but In my opinion like you can invent any new things from your own mind and gives for country so that's also Nationalism.
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