An Artist of the Floating World

…Japan following World War II, An Artist of the Floating World (1986) chronicles the life of elderly Masuji Ono, who reviews his past career as a political artist of imperialist propaganda. Ishiguro’s Booker Prize-winning The Remains of the Day (1989; film 1993) is a first-person narrative, the reminiscences of Stevens,…

Kazuo Ishiguro’s spare, refined novel An Artist of the Floating World (1986) records how a painter’s life and work became insidiously coarsened by the imperialistic ethos of 1930s Japan. Novelists such as Buchi Emecheta and Ben Okri wrote of postcolonial Africa, as did V.S. Naipaul in his most ambitious novel,…