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"I sometimes feel that if I had written a book like Kafka's
Trial, people would say to me, 'What a strange judicial system the
Japanese
have.'"
--Kazuo Ishiguro, qtd. in Bryson 44
In a discussion of the professional restrictions besetting
cosmopolitan
writers, the critic Timothy Brennan suggests that they are "unable to
enter the scene of letters as innovations in the way, for example,
that a
talented North American novelist without ethnic baggage might be
packaged as
the rude boy or girl of a new generation" (203). This is a simple fact
of life for some artists, and it has certainly been a constant in the
authorial reception of the Anglo-Japanese writer Kazuo Ishiguro, as
his
comment above suggests. Faced with the peremptory demand that he
explain a
birth-culture deemed ineluctably alien, Ishiguro has had to be nimble
in a
variety of ways. In his early works he fends off straitjacket
culturalist
assumptions even as he wrestles with compelling questions of
identity. He
writes from the exigencies of his location within and between two
cultures,
but he also refuses to make a fetish of difference, to pander to
demands for
exotica and titillation.
But what is interesting about Ishiguro's early fictions is also their
close
attention to form, the way they probe received wisdoms, and how they
lay the
groundwork for future development. For in his recent mature writing
Ishiguro
can justly be said to have expanded the possibilities of the novel as
an art
from. He has increased the range of the high-modernist European novel
associated with Kafka. His troublesome pen has mounted trenchant,
illuminating critique-cum-adaptations of certain popular genres--in
particular, the country-house novel and the detective novel--exposing
their
formal structures as agglomerations of certain readerly demands with
prohibitive aesthetic and social costs. And yet, because of that, he
also
extends their intellectual and emotional scope.
The outline above gives an idea of Ishiguro's range, and, for me, one
of the
most exciting thing about his work is just this refusal to stand
still as a
writer, this desire to push the envelope. This attribute can be seen
in the
shift from realist to fabulist writing in his recent fiction,
although that
assessment itself needs to be qualified, since even in his first novel
Ishiguro deploys psychological realism only to undermine it in the
denouement. Another key attribute is his scrutiny of the tropes we
use to
describe ourselves and others. To use a term popularized by critics
from the
reception-aesthetics school, Ishiguro confounds the horizon of
expectation
that readers bring to his fiction, and thus he also helps us to see
the world
in all its multihued complexity.
Ishiguro's characteristic stylistic and thematic concerns will be
discussed
in greater detail below, but we can get a sense of how he operates if
we turn
to his short story "A Family Supper." An elucidation of this story
allows us to appreciate the modus operandi underwriting his five
published
novels to date.
"A Family Supper" opens
with an account of the narrator's mother dying a painful death after
eating
Fugu fish--a dish that requires careful preparation to deactivate the
poison
inside--at the home of an old school friend. All through this period
the
narrator has been living in California estranged from his father. He
learns
the gruesome details surrounding his mother's death only when he
returns from
the States, in what is also an attempt to mend fences. Father and son
have
not talked in over two years; the narrator's sister, who has been
away at
university, has also returned for the occasion. Before the meal,
however,
several things suggest that a seemingly innocuous event is about to
go badly
wrong. The father declares that his wife's death "was no accident"
(439). He calls his former business partner, Watanabe, "a man of
principle and honour" while recounting his suicide following the
collapse of their firm (435). When the father goes to attend to the
cooking,
the sister reveals what he omitted to say, namely that Watanabe had
killed
his entire family before taking his own life. As the siblings talk, a
parallel is drawn between their deceased mother and a female ghost
said to be
haunting their garden, which then echoes the narrator's recollection
that his
father had once beaten him for "chattering like an old woman"
(435). And finally we are told that the main course is an unspecified
fish
dish. By the time the father mentions how he used to envy fighter
pilots during
his navy days because, unlike a stricken vessel, a plane could always
be used
as "the final weapon" (440), we therefore have a strong
presentiment of approaching disaster--it appears that a mass suicide
or
suicide cure homicide of some kind is about to take place.
My synopsis doesn't do justice to the skill with which the story
builds up
dramatic tension, but the implication is that the father blames his
son for
failing to take over the family business and also for the mother's
death. He
appears intent on emulating his former business partner, which
suggests that
the supper they have eaten is their last. Yet against the run of
expectations, he declares that Watanabe had made a "mistake"; his
"judgement" had been "weakened" by the collapse of their
firm, and, moreover, "there are other things besides work" (442).
It is in this vein then of a bathetic ending disrupting our customary
assumptions that Ishiguro calls the story "a big trick"; the
Japanese "love ... melodramatic stories where heroes commit suicide,"
he says, but they "don't go around killing themselves as easily as
people ... assume" (qtd. in Mason 343). While the concern in this case
was to enjoin a wider conception of Japanese sociality, and the
slightly
strident note needs to be contextualized perhaps against the
corporatist-state nostrums dominating the popular zeitgeist of the
eighties
when "A Family Supper" first appeared, the story nevertheless helps
us to appreciate what Ishiguro sets out to do in his writing.
The characteristic features are a spare, elliptical style where
everything
works by inference and insinuation, an extraordinary control of pace,
and a
focus on psychological minutiae rather than external action. Effects
are
achieved by understatement and the skillful deployment of material. As
mentioned earlier, Ishiguro confounds the horizon of expectation that
we
bring to his texts. He unsettles our familiar picture of the world,
always
posing the question of what is left out in any representation of
experience.
Up until the incorporation of fabulist elements in his recent
fiction, these
would also be the hallmarks of an essentially minimalist writing
style, with
Ishiguro content to work within self-imposed limits and where control
and
economy are the main watchwords.
Whatever the stylistic variation, however, the world of his novels is
always
suffused with a gut-wrenching melancholia. Ishiguro mentions in many
interviews that he took up fiction-writing in order to preserve
childhood
memories of Japan before they disappeared. In one of them he
confesses to
"very strong emotional relationships ... that were severed at a
formative age," especially the one with his grandfather, and how
perforce, "the creative process for me is never about anger or
violence,
but regret and melancholy." In the same interview Ishiguro adds that
he
had only recently become aware of that "other life" he "might
have had," that "whole person" he was "supposed to
become," all of which appears to have shaped his understanding of what
the writing life amounts to (qtd. in Jaggi 28). In his estimation,
writing is
"a kind of consolation"; writers "write out of some part of
themselves" that he wouldn't exactly say is "unbalanced," but
where there is "a kind of lack of equilibrium" (qtd. in Vorda and
Herzinger 30-31).
It is easy to see how these essentially exilic considerations find
their way
into Ishiguro's fiction. They appear to fuel the melancholic tenor of
his
novels, to explain his preference for first-person narrators gripped
by the
hermeneutics of memory. What often happens is that differences
residing in
geographical space are turned and turned so that they become
differences
residing in developmental historical time. Separated by half the
length of
England from the woman he had loved--and still loves--the narrator in
one of
Ishiguro's novels journeys to visit her. But everything he does
during the
trip prompts a flashback. Everyone he meets initiates a recollection
of that
period some two decades ago before they were separated, when things
might
have gone differently, when he might have had another life.
In such a situation it is perhaps not surprising that the uncertainty
and the
malleability of memory features so strongly in Ishiguro's books, for
the
truth is both concealed and revealed by it. At the same time his
novels are
full of individuals who are unconsoled, who look back on their lives
and
realize that they had spent the bulk of it mired in self-deception.
Coming to
terms with the past becomes for that reason a pressing concern. All
they can
do is to retrieve a measure of dignity from what is left, to face the
fact--honestly and bravely--that, indeed, the past is a foreign
country. The
results can be surprising--and deeply unsettling.
Born in 1954
in
Nagasaki, Ishiguro came to England in 1960 when his father, an
oceanographer,
joined a British government research project in the North Sea. His
family
settled in the affluent London suburb of Guildford where he grew up
receiving
what he later described as a "very typical middle-class southern
English
upbringing" (qtd. in Bryson 40). At home he was raised in the Japanese
style. The expatriation was originally intended to be short-term and
well
into his adolescence his family apparently had plans to return to
Japan. With
the passage of time, however, the sojourn became permanent.
Following his secondary school graduation in 1973, Ishiguro served
for a
brief period as a grouse-beater for the Queen Mother at Balmoral
Castle,
Scotland. He also hitchhiked around the United States and Canada
during his
"gap year" before taking up study at the University of Kent in
Canterbury in 1974. During his studies he took a year out and also
worked as
a community worker at a housing estate in Scotland (1976). After
earning his
B.A. (Honors) in English and Philosophy in 1978, Ishiguro went back
to social
work, working with the homeless in London for an organization known
as the
Cyrenians. In late 1979 he enrolled in the creative writing Master's
program
at the University of East Anglia, where he was taught by Malcolm
Bradbury and
Angela Carter. He obtained his M.A. in 1980, having secured a
contract from
Faber and Faber for a novel in progress.
That work, A Pale View of Hills, was published in 1982. A
precocious first
novel, it tells the story of a woman who looks back on her days in
postwar
Japan before she came to England with her second husband, an
Englishman. The
novel won the Winifred Holtby Prize from the Royal Society of
Literature in
1983 and was translated into thirteen languages.
This was followed in 1986 by An Artist of the Floating World. Set in
postwar
Japan, the novel recounts the experiences of a painter who had
supported
militarism in the 1930s. It won the Whitbread book of the year award
and was
short-listed for the Booker prize. It subsequently appeared on best-
seller
lists in both Britain and America.
Ishiguro's most popular novel, The Remains of the Day, was published
in 1989.
It won the prestigious Booker prize that year and was made into a
successful
film in 1993 by Merchant-Ivory Productions starring Anthony Hopkins
and Emma
Thompson. The movie eventually garnered eight Oscar nominations.
Ishiguro's fourth novel, The Unconsoled, was published in 1995 to
mixed
reviews. Its formal experiments, lengthy dream sequences, and opaque
construction left many critics nonplussed. A reviewer from the
Guardian
declared that it "invents its own category of badness" (Wood 5). In
contrast, the philosopher Richard Rorty was convinced that Ishiguro
had
"expanded the frontiers of the novel," although he found the work
itself obscure, suggesting that "sometimes all a reviewer can do is
express appreciative puzzlement" (13). In the same year Ishiguro
received an OBE from the Queen for his services to literature.
When We Were Orphans, Ishiguro's most recent novel, was published in
2000.
Set in London and Shanghai, it relates the experiences of a celebrated
detective who tries to unravel the mystery of his parents'
disappearance in
Shanghai in the early years of the previous century.
In addition to several short stories, Ishiguro has also written two
original
screenplays for Britain's Channel Four television, A Profile of
Arthur J.
Mason (broadcast in 1984) and The Gourmet (broadcast in 1986). The
latter is
a black comedy about the plight of the homeless in London. More
recently,
Ishiguro was involved in a movie by the Canadian filmmaker Guy
Maddin, titled
The Saddest Music in the World. The movie, about an international
music
competition set in Depression-era Winnipeg, originated in a script
that he
wrote.
Ishiguro also wrote the screenplay for The White Countess, a Merchant-
Ivory
production slated for release in fall 2005. Set in Shanghai in the
late
1930s, the movie stars Ralph Fiennes as a disillusioned former
American
diplomat who has lost his sight but who creates a nightclub for the
title
character, an exiled Russian noblewoman played by Natasha Richardson.
Ishiguro lives in Golders Green, London, with his thirteen-year-old
daughter
Naomi and Lorna Anne MacDougal, his Glaswegian wife and partner
of over twenty years.
A Pale View of Hills
(1982)
A Pale View of Hills is a novel whose themes and concerns resonate
throughout
Ishiguro's oeuvre. Among them, it questions certain commonplace
assumptions
about Japanese sociality. More strikingly, it underscores the
interestedness
of memory and recall. Through the main protagonist, it points out
that these
processes are never neutral. It shows that they are always subjected
to the
exigencies of the present, which is to say of our need to fashion a
usable
past out of incongruent, often disparate material.
The novel opens with Etsuko, the narrator, receiving a visit by her
second
daughter at her home in an English village. Uppermost in Etsuko's
mind is the
compromise she had reached with her second husband, Sheringham, over
the
naming of their daughter:
Niki, the name we
finally gave my younger daughter, is not an
abbreviation; it was a compromise I
reached with her father. For paradoxically it was he who wanted
to give her a Japanese name, and I--perhaps out of some selfish
desire not to be reminded of the past--insisted on an English one. He
finally agreed to Niki, thinking it had some vague echo of
the East about it. (9)
Niki's visit operates in turn as the frame story for Etsuko as she
traces her
memories of postwar Nagasaki before she came to England some two
decades or
so earlier. It also emerges that the multiple flashbacks between her
days as
a young pregnant wife in the suburbs of Nagasaki and her widowed life
in the
English countryside are part of Etsuko's efforts to come to terms
with the
recent suicide of Keiko, her daughter from her first marriage: "Keiko,
unlike Niki, was pure Japanese, and more than one newspaper was quick
to pick
up on this fact. The English are fond of their idea that our race has
an
instinct for suicide, as if further explanations are unnecessary; for
that
was all they reported, that she was Japanese and that she had hung
herself in
her room" (10).
Together with the intricately nuanced opening paragraph, which
registers in
the valences of the word "thinking" Etsuko's opposition to the
"vague" echo perceived by Sheringham, the direct address to the
implied reader's stock beliefs here suggests that Pale View sets out
to be
contrarian. I described above how "A Family Supper" tackles the
suicide-instinct canard, and in this respect the offer to provide
"further explanations" continues, we might say, that strand in
Ishiguro's writing that is concerned with the critique of essentialist
assumptions. Although Etsuko spends the rest of the novel circling
around the
incident, Keiko's death is never satisfactorily explained. Textual
gaps
abound over this issue. At the end, the novel suggests that she had
found her
new home alienating, and thus her death cannot be attributed to
anything
ethnically distinctive. Like "A Family Supper," that is, Ishiguro
lures readers by offering to affirm essentialist verities, but he
never
delivers. Instead, the textual gaps over this issue enjoin an
examination of
the stock beliefs elicited by the opening.
Such, at least, is one layer of the novel's multiple levels of
meaning. It
sets out to confound expectations, to make available alternatives to
the
seamless quality of culturalist descriptions. Despite the many
reviewers
engrossed with the "Japaneseness" of Ishiguro's early fiction,
therefore, his main concern is in some ways preliminary to that,
meaning that
he firsts clears space for a genuine cultural encounter, one worthy
of the
name. It is through this, I feel, that Ishiguro attends to the
exigencies of
his location within and between two cultures. For with the critique
of those
descriptions, he also fashions a usable past out of that double
patrimony.
For most readers the most intriguing part of Pale View, however, is
likely to
be the shocking disclosure in the denouement. The enigma involves
Etsuko's
friend and alter ego, Sachiko. While Etsuko's father-in-law (Ogata-
San) and
first husband (Jiro) feature prominently in her flashbacks, their
main focus
is the progress of her friendship with Sachiko over the key summer
months
haunting her recollections. We first meet Sachiko after the death of
her
husband and with her having a hard time looking after her troubled
young
daughter, Mariko. Sachiko has an American boyfriend named Frank and
has set
her heart on going to America with him. When she goes off to be with
Frank,
Mariko is often left in the care of Etsuko. By the close of the
novel, it
appears that Sachiko will not get to fulfill her dreams, and thus
symbolically it is Etsuko who accomplishes the overseas move, but to
England
rather than America, which she now balances against the decision to
take
Keiko with her when she left. From other parallels between the two
women
their relationship begins to take on doppelganger inflections, and
this is
then confirmed in a haunting climax when Etsuko lets slip her use of
Sachiko
to stage her misgivings over the past.
The revelation follows Sachiko's drowning of Mariko's pet kittens, an
incident that prefigures Keiko's death. Mariko runs away in distress
into the
waste-ground near their riverside cottage, and it is in this
psychically
suggestive setting, therefore, that Etsuko finds Mariko and urges her
to be
sensible. Before coming to Nagasaki, Mariko had witnessed a young,
apparently
deranged woman drown a baby in the war ruins of Tokyo. She appears to
be
traumatized by the incident because she sometimes talks about a
woman--probably imaginary--whom she meets near the riverbank. Her
fears about
abandonment and resentment against Frank for displacing her in her
mother's
affections are projected onto her kittens, over which she is
especially
protective. And, additionally, our sense of foreboding is heightened
by
newspaper revelations that there is a child killer loose in the
neighborhood.
But what is most shocking for us is that, without anything in the way
of
obvious signposting, Etsuko suddenly shifts into her own familial
reveries.
Ostensibly, she is trying to persuade Mariko to be sensible, to go
home. Yet
she suddenly says that, "If you don't like it over there [overseas],
we'll come straight back" (173). Speaking to Niki right at the novel's
end, Etsuko also refers to Keiko once going on a day trip to Inasa,
the
hill-park overlooking Nagasaki bay, and of how she had been "happy"
there (182). However, the only Inasa day trip recounted in the novel
is
undertaken by Etsuko, Sachiko, and Mariko. Keiko thus surfaces in
place of
Mariko, and what lends the narrative its compelling poignancy,
therefore, is
our realization that Etsuko has all along been thinking about her
eldest
daughter--and on her recent suicide in Manchester.
We understand as such that Etsuko's narrative combines pain and self-
reproach
over her decision to begin a new life overseas, as well as an
unvoiced plea
asking what else she could possibly have done. The implication is that
Etsuko's recollections were designed all along to converge on her
exchanges
with Keiko prior to their departure for England, to that promise to
bring her
back if she wasn't happy. The novel does not say how Etsuko's first
marriage
ended or how she met Sheringham, only that he had once worked as a
journalist
in Japan. However, it suggests that Etsuko had lost her entire family
during
the nuclear destruction wrought on Nagasaki. She had lost her lover
as well and
had been mourning him when Ogata-San took her in. In her own words,
she was
like a "mad person" during the immediate postwar (postbomb) period,
all of which adds to the plangency of the narrative moment (58). The
loss of
Keiko appears to be layered over memories of earlier, even more
unspeakable
losses and of the survivor guilt they induced. Significantly, the
novel's
title refers to "a pale outline of hills visible against the
clouds" that had given Etsuko "a rare sense of relief from the
emptiness" of' long summer afternoons spent in her apartment (99). It
transpires that the view is of the hills of Inasa, and thus Etsuko's
psychic
investment in misremembering Keiko's happiness is linked to the
succor they
had once provided. As a vista from an apartment window--perhaps as a
symbol
of durability amid shattering change--that "pale view" had helped
her find the courage to rebuild her life. In the frame story she
returns to
it again, but this time to collapse Mariko and Keiko into, as it
were, a
single blurred outline.
Just as poignantly, Etsuko also sees herself writ-large in all the
disturbing
figures mentioned above. She appears to see herself reflected not
just in
Sachiko's treatment of the kittens but also in the child-killer and
the
deranged woman and also in an American woman they meet during the
Inasa trip.
Like the other delineations above, the encounter is imbued with
menacing
overtones. It acquires this aspect because of the uncanny way they
keep
running into each other during their passage through the hill-park.
But,
additionally, the American woman also sees Mariko drawing a
"butterfly" in her sketchbook; she describes the butterfly--using
broken Japanese--as "delicious" (114), and this then brings to mind
an earlier disconcerting episode when Mariko had pretended to swallow
a
spider.
Through the associative logic linking these images, we infer that
Etsuko sees
them as "premonition[s]" of Keiko's eventual demise (156). Her
entire narration appears to be colored by that unspoken rebuke, by
the idea
that she should have heeded the warning they gave, and also by a
paradoxical
need to find or even to fabricate such warnings. What adds to the
ominous
mood of the climax is also the curious presence of a piece of rope
that
Mariko (cum Keiko) spies in Etsuko's hands when they meet up on the
waste-ground. Etsuko protests that she had picked up the rope because
it got
caught around her ankles. It just happened to be there, she says. But
we are
also not sure how to respond because the incident repeats an eerily
similar
episode when Etsuko had gone looking for Mariko after she ran away
from home.
The reappearance of the rope in the climax could be a genuine
repetition or a
memory that Etsuko obsessively recalls in the narrative present.
At the level of the individual psyche, then, Pale View underscores the
interestedness of memory and recall. It shows how memory reworks the
past in
response to current needs. Just as we often talk about ourselves
through an
imaginary friend, Etsuko approaches her deepest fears through
Sachiko. A
strategy of seeing herself in Sachiko appears to form part of a
necessary
accommodation to Keiko's death, but the process is also tinged with
ambiguity. Up till the merger of the two girls, Pale View appears to
follow
the conventions of narrative verisimilitude. The plot is constructed
according to a plausible Cartesian logic of cause and effect. There is
consistent narrative point of view, lifelike characters,
circumstantial
detail, and convincing dialogue. All of the novel's technical ability
to
provide a particular sort of bourgeois credibility has been deployed.
But
with the emergence of Keiko at the waste-ground everything changes. A
great
mystery ensues. The design of the novel does not suggest that Sachiko
is
merely a mental projection. However, our realization that Sachiko and
Mariko
are in some sense doubles suggests that Etsuko has great psychic
investment
in her version of events. Her need to see in the past a pattern of
ill-omened
incidents obviously drives her recollections. And this means that her
narration is radically unreliable.
Among other things, what engages our interest about Pale View is the
craftsmanship attendant on such a configuration: the great skill
through
which readers are drawn in via the conventions of realist fiction; the
instant deflation of those conventions following the emergence of
Keiko; the
frisson of the uncanny evoked by this development; the mystery
surrounding
the nature of the psychogenic relationship between Etsuko and
Sachiko. These
all stem from that design. We are blindsided by the switch in
persona. But as
my account above shows, it is also a fitting one, given that already
in the
opening paragraph Etsuko confesses to a "selfish desire not to be
reminded of the past," meaning that she can only approach it
tangentially (9). As a result, the novel also reveals in an
interesting way
the gap between appearance and reality, which is to say that it
underlines
the human need to distort or to conceal the latter. This is, I feel,
its
primary concern, for at its deepest level Pale View bears out
something
universal. It reveals the pathos and the sorrow of the stories we tell
ourselves to cope with reality, including those we tell ourselves to
keep
other stories at bay, stories concerning, for instance, the
unspeakable
destruction unleashed at Nagasaki. Our ability to tell the difference
between
truth and falsehood within the imagined world of a novel is
fundamentally
compromised here, but it is done for a purpose.
What is worth mentioning, finally, is the way Ishiguro rewrites the
Madama
Butterfly (1904) story in Pale View. He does this through Sachiko,
whose
plight mirrors Cho Cho San, the woman abandoned by her American lover
in the
opera. In this regard Frank calls to mind Puccini's protagonist,
Benjamin
Franklin Pinkerton. Befitting the story's marine associations--
Pinkerton is a
naval officer--Frank is offered a job aboard a cargo ship. Like
Pinkerton, he
goes home promising to return later to bring his lover over. Pale
View in set
in Nagasaki, where the opera is set as well, and even the Inasa
locality is
suggestive, for the Encyclopedia Britannica tells us that a mansion
located
there was the home of a nineteenth-century British merchant reputed
to be the
inspiration for Puccini's fictional Pinkerton. What Ishiguro does as
such is
to modify the opera's desertion plot for his own writerly concerns.
In the
opera Cho Cho San kills herself because Pinkerton returns, not as
promised to
bring her over, but to claim their child for himself and his new
American
bride. For Pale View, in contrast, the focus is on the child, on
Keiko, and
on Etsuko's attempt to come to terms with her suicide years after the
accomplishment of that dream of an overseas move. Through such a
modification
Ishiguro attends, it would seem, to the "melancholy" from which he
self-professedly draws creative inspiration. We might say that he
modifies
the desertion plot to voice exilic and diasporic concerns, to explore
the
hermeneutics of memory in tandem with the aesthetic possibilities
opened up
by unreliable narration, as outlined above. And this would also be
typical of
what Ishiguro does in his writing, something to watch out for. For in
his
subsequent work the same pattern persists, meaning that the raw
material and
the tropes available in the general culture will be taken up, and
something
unique will be fashioned out of it.
An Artist of the Floating
World
(1986)
An Artist of the Floating World picks up and develops the Ogata-San
subplot
in Pale View. Ogata-San's revanchist views about the war are
suggested by the
language he uses when he plays chess with his son. While Jiro plays
half-heartedly and is indifferent when he loses, Ogata-San is quick
to rebuke
him for "defeatism"; Jiro should be "planning" his "defence"
so that he can "survive and fight" again, he says (129).
Nevertheless, Ogata-San's recidivist proclivities are censured in no
uncertain terms, for Pale View takes pains to establish his
culpability in
the sacking and imprisonment of five teachers who had opposed the
war. His
role in the incident is revealed by an ex-pupil who rebukes him at
one point
in the novel, and in the end Ogata-San's acceptance of that rebuke is
suggested by his decision to end his summer visit with Jiro and
Etsuko, the
telling point being his acknowledgment that he shouldn't "sit here [in
their apartment] thinking about chess all day" (155).
Unlike Pale View, however, Artist is set entirely in Japan. Composed
in four
narrative sections stretching between October 1948 and June 1950, it
tells
the story of a retired artist named Masuji Ono who had supported the
rise of
militarism during the 1930s with propaganda art pieces. At one point
he
denounces one of his pupils, turned dissident, who as a result spends
the war
in prison. When the novel opens, Ono's wife and only son are dead,
the former
from an allied bombing raid, the other from fighting in Japan's
expansionist
ventures on the Chinese mainland. Over a number of months Ono is
visited by
his eldest daughter, tries to arrange a respectable marriage for his
second
daughter, revisits an ex-colleague, drinks at a bar with a former
pupil, and
attends a monster movie with his grandson.
Behind these quotidian events, however, the scale of postwar changes,
the
ideological desertion of his ex-pupils, and, more immediately, the
desire to
secure his younger daughter's marriage causes Ono to examine his
past. Afraid
that any disclosure of his misdeeds will derail the nuptial
arrangements, he
tries without success to initiate reconciliation with Kuroda, the
pupil he
had betrayed. He also confesses his misdeeds before the family of the
prospective groom, but his behavior strikes us as self-serving: his
so-called
confession seems to be aimed merely at forestalling possible qualms
on the
part of the groom's family about the marriage. It is only after
further
self-scrutiny, coupled with the unremitting impact of disturbing
social
change, that Ono gains a limited insight into the contours of his
life. He
understands eventually that he had spent the bulk of it mired in
self-deception, and thus the novel ends on a note of resignation as
he gazes
at the pleasure district he knew as a youth, now converted into a
business
quarter. Ono consoles himself with the thought that a younger
generation will
"make a better go of things" (206). If his generation made ruinous
mistakes, the hope is that others will learn from them, and from that
he
tries to retrieve a measure of dignity for himself as well.
As suggested by the foregoing, the focus of Artist is the meaning of
Ono's artistic
career. More obviously than with Ogata-San, Artist draws compelling
parallels
between Ono's private experiences and conduct and the direction of
public
events. His acknowledgment of blameworthiness acquires, that is,
emblematic
significance, for with him, more general questions about
responsibility and
guilt during this contested period of Japanese history are also
raised. It is
in Artist, moreover, that Ishiguro develops his favorite theme,
namely the
limits and the difficulties of self-knowledge. Through Ono's
flashbacks and
meandering first-person narration, the details of his training and
working
conditions before the war are revealed. In the process he moves ever
closer
to understanding the magnitude of his errors. The idea that we can
spend huge
parts of our lives pursuing goals that matter little in the greater
scheme of
things is forcefully brought across, and with that the attendant
question
arises of how we come to terms with such a past.
More specifically, Ono realizes that his betrayal of Kuroda was
analogous to
his own expulsion from an artists colony prior to his enrollment in
the
ultranationalist body that commissioned his artworks. As the
influence from
that organization grew, Ono had strayed from the aestheticist nostrums
championed by the head of the colony, a man named Moriyama or Mori-
san. As a
result he had been kicked out. As Ono plumps the depths of his
memories, he
realizes that his betrayal of Kuroda was compensatory behavior for
his own
hurtful treatment at the hands of Mori-san. He realizes in addition
that an
earlier banishment of another pupil by Mori-san for pursuing
unsanctioned
artistic experiments had foreshadowed the two subsequent events. From
this
attainment of a capacity to see the self in others, Ono gains insight
into
his own behavior. Self-reflexivity is made coeval with his attainment
of that
capacity, and thus the link between the two is emphasized.
At the heart of the novel, then, is Ono's deliberation over the
pivotal
moments of his career. In chronological terms it goes through three
stages.
Ono starts as an artist-illustrator at a commercial studio run by a
man named
Takeda. He joins Mori-san's outfit after that and is subsequently
recruited
by the previously mentioned ultranationalist organization (known as
the
Okada-Shingen or "new life" society); sometime later he also sets
up his own artists' colony espousing promilitarist views. As Ono
deliberates
over the past, the unstated but obvious implication is that he should
not
have left Mori-san's establishment. Narrative wisdom appears to lie
in an
amplification of this idea, and hence, for many readers, the colony
also
takes on the mantle of a sanctuary. It appears to represent the
halcyon times
of proverbial allusion. Descriptions of its communal life suggest
purposeful,
unalienated labor, and in fact the whole place seems to be a refuge
from the
world of practical affairs and unrewarding toil.
The reading outlined here is reinforced by the title of the book. The
floating world appellation refers to a tradition of Japanese art named
ukiyo-e (literally, floating world pictures). Popularized by the
famous
Tokugawa painter and printmaker Kitagawa Utamaro (17531806), the genre
emphasizes the depiction of sad, transitory events, oftentimes the
stylized
world of the Japanese pleasure quarter and its demi-monde denizens.
But
significantly, Mori-san is also labeled "the modern Utamaro"
because he seeks to "'modernize' the Utamaro tradition" in his work
(140). When Ono gazes at the pleasure quarter he had known and
painted as a
youth, the poignancy that arises from his acknowledgment of waste is
therefore linked to a consideration of what he lost when he broke
away from
Mori-san. And this is also to say that the closure of Artist invites a
consideration of the differences between the bohemian lifestyle
promoted by
Mori-san and Ono's subsequent pursuit of militarist objectives
through his
art.
Such, at least, has been the focus of much of the commentary on
Artist. The
common strand in most responses has been a tendency to cast Ono's
departure
in prelapsarian terms. In a review of Artist, Anne Chisholm states,
for
example, that, "One would like to think ... that it is always the
Floating World, the world of love, beauty and art, that endures, and
that the
'real' world of action, of politics and war, turns out to be
treacherous and
temporary. But the Floating World, in Japan as elsewhere, is always
under
threat; the old man's longings for his past become a universal lament
for
lost worlds" (162). Separately, Brian Shaffer describes the Mori-san
outfit as the "stereotypically bohemian world of the postromantic
artist
cut off from an inhospitable, materialistic, aesthetically shallow,
mainstream society" (52). When he breaks from the school, "it is
precisely the 'real world' in general, and Japanese economic and
military
aspirations in particular, that Ono hopes to shape and reflect" (53).
In
similar terms Wendy Brandmark argues that the "central irony" of
the book is Ono's rejection of "the art of the floating world"; he
breaks away from the colony because he finds their work too
"ephemeral"; but what he discovers after the war is that the
political ideals through which he sought intransigence "were indeed
transitory" (1).
In order to appreciate the rhetorical setup of Artist, however, we
need to
highlight what these readings leave out. For what a close reading of
the
pertinent sections shows is actually the opposite. Instead of being a
variant
on the fall-from-paradise trope, Ono's artistic development is from
the
beginning coeval with national developments. The novel maintains an
isomorphic fit between the two realms, and this makes problematic any
attempt
to cast the Mori-san outfit as some embodiment of the authentic, or
some
autochthonous, proto-Edenic locale threatened by change and
corruption.
At no stage of Ono's career is he, in fact, free from foreign or
worldly
influence. Already at the Takeda outfit we are told that Ono and his
colleagues sometimes have to paint "around the clock" (66) to
complete commissions for "geishas, cherry trees, swimming carps"
and the like, the "essential point" being that these pictures must
"look 'Japanese' to the foreigners to whom they were shipped out"
(69). In the sections devoted to the Mori-san sojourn, what is even
more
revealing is that he seeks to modernize his art form according to
declared
"European" precepts. Although Mori-san uses "traditional
device Is]," his work is "full of European influences"; he
abandons the use of the "traditional dark outline to define his
shapes,
preferring instead the Western use of blocks of colour, with light
and shade
to create a three-dimensional appearance"; and just to press the point
home the novel reiterates that Mori-san "had taken his cue from the
Europeans in what was his most central concern: the use of subdued
colours" (141).
What Ono crucially retains when he leaves Mori-san is, in fact, this
European-initiated use of color. The propaganda piece for which he
retains a
recidivist affection in the narrative present is titled "Eyes to the
Horizon"; Ono tellingly addresses an implied interlocutor--us the
reader--as being possibly "acquainted" with it because "as a
print in the thirties, [it had] achieved a certain fame and influence
throughout this city" (168). And this piece, we are told, had received
fulsome praise precisely because of its "powerful use of colour"
(169).
It seems, then, that Artist highlights
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