An Aging Painter Draws His Portrait of the ‘New Japan’

An Artist of the Floating World by Kazuo Ishiguro (Putnam’s: $15.95)

Written in English by a Japanese born 10 years after the end of World War II, “An Artist of the Floating World” nevertheless belongs entirely to the culture Kazuo Ishiguro left at the age of 3. To read it is to be transported to a civilization built on indirection and innuendo, in which the spoken word offers only clues to the speaker’s meaning. The true import of what is said must be deduced from hints, the message decoded as if heard in cipher. Though the “floating world” of the title refers explicitly to the pleasure district of the city in which the elderly narrator lives, to the bars, restaurants and geisha houses he enjoyed in his youth, the phrase applies to the book as a whole.

Masuji Ono is a retired artist, old enough to have been an activist during Japan’s imperialist phase in the 1930s, to have survived the war--and now, set in traditional ways, he must accommodate to the changes brought about by the American occupation of his country. The novel begins in 1948, the old order all but dismantled, the new not yet in place. Japan is adrift between one set of values and another--parents and children at odds, the recent past intruding upon the present, the future still uncertain.

A Previous Engagement

Ono is a widower whose elder daughter, Setsuko, is married and the mother of an 8-year-old child, a boy who prefers the Lone Ranger to Tales of the Ninja, who confounds his adoring grandfather at every turn. Setsuko is home for one of her rare visits, timing the trip so she can be on hand for her sister Norike’s marriage negotiations. Norike is 26, the veteran of a previous engagement canceled by the bridegroom-to-be for mysterious reasons.

This time the tension in Ono’s household is palpable--the sisters whispering to each other, endlessly speculating about the broken engagement, always breaking off their conversations when their father enters the room. Though the young women address Ono formally in the third person, their respect is exaggerated to the point of contempt, their tone distant and chilly. Ono, at a time in his life when he had expected to enjoy the deference due a famous artist and teacher, finds himself snubbed by acquaintances, former pupils and neighbors.

As he examines his life in an effort to understand why everyone he knows seems to have turned against him, a pattern begins to emerge, the design as spare and calligraphic as a brush painting. Born into a family conservative even by old Japanese standards, Ono had defied his father by studying art. Employed at first in a kind of art factory, churning out typically “Japanese” paintings for the export trade, his unusual ability soon brought him to the attention of the finest masters. Unlike the hacks content to reproduce tiny bridges and flowering plum trees, Ono’s work was strong and innovative, its social and political content plain. Though he was honored and celebrated during Japan’s short-lived imperialist period, now his work is disdained, disparaged by erstwhile admirers.

Ono himself finds nothing to be ashamed of in his past; he was no more nor less than a man of his time, often in the avant-garde, sometimes lagging behind. As an artist, surely he cannot be considered a war criminal, yet that is how he is treated, not only by the younger generation but by his own contemporaries, who are as desperately eager to repudiate the past as his Westernized daughters and sons-in-law.

The author’s style is courtly and precise, the narrator so schooled in oblique methods of expression that he obscures facts even in his own thoughts. As Ono’s story unfolds in a pattern as complex as origami, the reader becomes increasingly involved in that vanishing world, learning to admire its elaborate structure and intricate precision.