An Artist of the Floating World by Kazuo Ishiguro

While young Ono refuses to accept the floating world, old Ono seeks to make peace with the transitory nature of existence, which is equivalent to accepting the entropy of the Universe. The Japanese understanding of the ‘pathos of things’ is reflected in the second law of thermodynamics, which stipulates that universal disorder will always increase. The last subchapter explains the concept of ‘mono no aware’ from a scientific perspective. 20 likes, 2 comments - Alice M (aliceandthegiantbookshelf) on Instagram: ' Mini Charity Shop Haul I acquired these two beauties yesterday in charity shops. 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. Since Ono’s recollections often clash with what his family can remember about certain events, the painter may be suffering from the false memory effect as a form of healing old trauma. An Artist of the Floating World (1986) is a novel by British author Kazuo Ishiguro. The third part focuses on Ono’s narrative unreliability as a form of confabulation. Instead, he put his work in the service of the imperialist movement that led Japan into World War II. The second part discusses the relativity of choices and decisions based on transgenerational ethics as presented in Strauss and Howe’s Fourth Turning Theory. Kazuo Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki, Japan, on 8 November 1954. In the first part, Henry James' interpretation of literature applies to Masuji Ono’s totalitarian views to link fiction to real life. The current study proposes a theoretical approach to Ishiguro’s second novel (1989) from an interdisciplinary perspective on the main character’s narrative. An Artist of the Floating World presents, with the menace of an almost dream-like calm, the reminiscences of a retired painter in the aftermath of a national disaster. Kazuo Ishiguro acknowledges the fallibility of the human condition, and herein lies the therapeutic core of his novels.

An Artist of the Floating World by Kazuo Ishiguro