An Artist of the Floating World: Kazuo Ishiguro (Vintage International) - Softcover

Ishiguro, Kazuo

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0679722661 ISBN 13: 9780679722663

Publisher: Vintage, 2017

From the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature and author of the Booker Prize-winning novel The Remains of the Day

In the face of the misery in his homeland, the artist Masuji Ono was unwilling to devote his art solely to the celebration of physical beauty. Instead, he put his work in the service of the imperialist movement that led Japan into World War II.

Now, as the mature Ono struggles through the aftermath of that war, his memories of his youth and of the "floating world"--the nocturnal world of pleasure, entertainment, and drink--offer him both escape and redemption, even as they punish him for betraying his early promise. Indicted by society for its defeat and reviled for his past aesthetics, he relives the passage through his personal history that makes him both a hero and a coward but, above all, a human being.

Product Description:

[ { By Ishiguro, Kazuo ( Author ) AN ARTIST OF THE FLOATING WORLD Sep-19-1989 Paperback } ]

Review:

In An Artist of the Floating World, Kazuo Ishiguro offers readers of the English language an authentic look at post-war Japan, "a floating world" of changing cultural behaviours, shifting societal patterns and troubling questions. Ishiguro, who was born in Nagasaki in 1954 but moved to England in 1960, writes the story of Masuji Ono, a bohemian artist and purveyor of the nightlife who became a propagandist for Japanese imperialism during the war. But the war is over. Japan lost, Ono's wife and son have been killed, and many young people blame the imperialists for leading the country to disaster. What's left for Ono? Ishiguro's treatment of this story earned a 1986 Whitbread Prize.

• Publisher: Vintage
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 0679722661
• ISBN 13: 9780679722663
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 208