Library Director’s NotebookSeptember, 2013 As someone who has been passionate about reading since...

Thu, 08/29/2013 - 10:21am -- KChin

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Library Director’s Notebook
September, 2013

As someone who has been passionate about reading since she was a little girl, I do quite a bit of reading every day; yet it seems no matter how much I read, I still miss some important books along the way.  The pleasure of finally “catching up” with those  excellent books is similar to the enjoyment of finding money in your coat pocket that you hadn’t realized was there—in other words, the  startled excitement of finding a small treasure!

This feeling of pleasurable discovery is what I experienced from the very first sentences of this 1986 novel An Artist of the Floating World by Kazuo Ishiguro.  The narrator of this slender novel, is Masujo Ono a once famous and honored artist who seems to have lost his position in the world of post-World War II Japan. Little by little, in a series of wandering memories and  imperfect recollections, we follow Ono’s early  artistic struggles, his courageous decisions, his wartime honors, and his post-war fall from grace. Through all these reminiscences the reader has the sense that Ono has only a very imperfect understanding of the seismic social changes his own country is undergoing.  He also does not seem to fully grasp why his own countrymen have turned against him and his fellow artists, who dedicated their careers to propagandist, chauvinist-inspired art.  Indeed some of Ono’s colleagues in the arts and in politics have made the supreme decision to kill themselves for their part in stoking the Japanese war machine, as a way of offering appeasement to the survivors of catastrophes like Nagasaki.

Yet Ono is not in any way a militaristic or insensitive man.  In nearly every sentence his compassion, his  artistic sensitivity, and  his love of the natural world shine through.  It seems he can do nothing, whether sitting on a bench, or crossing a bridge, or walking in a park that leaves him unmoved in  a quiet yet intense appreciation of the moment.  His conversations with his daughters, his memories of his son and wife, both killed during the war, his encounters with old colleagues show him to be not bitter but bemused by the changes in his country.

Ono’s surviving daughters are more aware then he of his fall from grace.  One daughter gently and the other impatiently tries to make her father understand that Japan has changed and that his place in the new Japan is no longer a place of honor. Barely heeding the words of his daughters, Ono instead lets his mind drift back to his youth and his encounters in “the floating world”, that world of bars, nightclubs, geishas,  and merriment that served as a backdrop to his artistic youth and an inspiration for his early work.

By the end of the novel, Ono seems to have come some distance in his understanding of the war, his country’s shame and defeat, and his part in it.  Yet, he does not feel guilty about his actions, believing that he at least took an authentic stand  in what he believed.  Nonetheless, despite his fall from grace, he has the innate generosity to look with a kind of tolerance and appreciation upon the younger generation who no longer venerate him, including his own grandson.  The floating world, his dreams, and his achievements, like so much of Japan has drifted past  Ono; but the elusive ,delicate memories still linger like a sweet, but faded perfume.

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