An Artist of the Floating World by Kazuo Ishiguro
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

An Auction of Prestige

Harold Bloom in his 1975 book A Map of Misreading recast literary history as a record of the struggle between the “son” and his literary “father” (it has frequently been pointed out that Bloom is more than a bit sexist in his expression). Through a Kabbalah-like misinterpretation of one’s literary forebears, Bloom believed, a writer both builds on and destroys the work he admires most. This provokes a sort of anxiety in the writer, a struggle of wit and language with one’s mentors which results in both creative new work, and a re-creation of the old.

Ishiguro’s book is an example of the process, extended to fine art and from the perspective of the mentor being misinterpreted. The fact that the book is set in the very restricted cultural location and time of Japan in the immediate post-war years seems, paradoxically, to generalise Bloom’s idea - not just to painting but also to the broader culture in which artistic effort is embedded.

Masuji Ono is an artist of his time, a man of tradition and set ways, a man of polite formalities, and devoted to the importance of history; but also to hard drinking and male loyalties. He has a patriarchal view of society which, although more liberal than his parents’, nonetheless borders on the misogynistic. Like almost all Japanese of the period, he was a nationalist who responded to the war and its aims enthusiastically.

The physical losses resulting from the war are of course traumatic. Masuji’s son and wife have been killed; his house damaged and his neighbourhood destroyed. But the spiritual trauma proves just as distressing. From being a pillar of the artistic community, he is now not simply old but old hat. Western mores are undermining traditions and family relationships as well as artistic fashions. His pre-war loyalties are now suspect.

The central event of the story, as in Masuji Ibuse’s Black Rain, is the betrothal of his daughter. Marriage is still a highly formalised and ‘negotiated’ affair. Yet these negotiations take place in a world that has changed radically and it is unclear if either his parental skills or his art are adequate to their respective tasks. In Black Rain the issue is the physical purity of a woman after exposure to radiation from an atomic blast. In Ishiguro’s narrative the issue is also one of purity, but of a much more subtle familial purity involving Masuji’s war-time activities. In both cases the opinions of others must be investigated minutely in order to reach a settlement.

According to Bloom, in a very Freudian manner the artistic son, by working through his own anxiety, gives birth to his father, or more accurately a re-birth in a new cultural oeuvre. This involves the son overcoming both the history of respect and the resentment (they go together) for the father. But for Ishiguro this process also demands an awareness by the father of his past dominance and faults inflicted upon the son and a recognition of a need for forgiveness. For Ishiguro, the son and father give birth to one another simultaneously through a sort of inverted auction of prestige - only by subverting one's reputation and personal pride to those of the other is creative reconciliation possible.

This dynamic applies as much to generations as to individuals. As a by-product, it removes art entirely from the domain of economics, that is, of self-interest. Ishiguro suggests that this process of inter-generational reconciliation is what makes true art. It is a process that unites not just artists but an entire culture, creating not just solidarity but also an openness to the new and foreign. This is the way in which art transcends the eponymous floating world of transient appearance, fashion, and reputation.

I have no idea whether Ishiguro is familiar with Bloom’s theory of literary development. But, if so, he certainly has re-invented that theory by appropriately misreading it in this captivating book.

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