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The story of being left behind by modernity and driven by guilt, despite all our unreliable narrator thinks and says to the reader - Four Stars
It’s hard to appreciate the beauty of a world when one doubts its very validity

I reread Kazuo Ishiguro’s An Artist of the Floating World for my bookclub and the first chapter struck me as being really skillful, capturing all of the themes of the novel in just 28 pages. We follow a old man arranging the marriage of his daughter. His wife and son have died in the war and he himself is far from blameless we learn from side glances in his history while he goes about his day to day business in post-war Japan. The style is very chatty and conversational, quite plain on a sentence level.

We have some false modesty, sexism and the West being embedded on the grandson of our narrator, and reflections on old and new Japan, resembled in the demeanour of his daughters. In a way it feels constructed and a bit insincere, but at the same time completely realistic for Ono to think in such a manner to himself and the reader is pulled into his perspective. The trick of creating a layered and complex character who makes bad choices but for whom we can still cheer as readers is pulled in a perfect manner by the way Ishiguro shows Ono his family life.

Because despite the mirrors of events from his childhood, to experiences with his tutors to him doing the same, there are even worse things Ono is implied to have done to his pupil. The perspective of the losers of history, the people who turned out to be rooting for the wrong side, is balanced and in a fascinating way portrayed by Ishiguro.

The destruction and desolation of after war Japan with a lone cafe in a field of rubble as mental image is very powerful and remembered me of his debut novel. Compared to A Pale View of Hills the strange repeating of sentences when characters talk to each other is fortunately less prominent.

Finally what struck me was the poverty and misery (coupled to more than a bit of opportunism) that led to the narrator falling for the promise order of fascism.
The History of Japan podcast recently did a two parter (links included below) on the corruption and political instability of pre World War Two Japan, that make the fragility of democracy better understandable. Well recommended for anyone interesting in more on the fascinating period Ishiguro set this novel in!