Author:Kazuo Ishiguro
Published: 1986
Pages: 248
Project: Orpheus | fleeting nature of happiness
Project: War | World War II
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Masuji Ono, once an artist for Japan’s imperialist cause, faces postwar judgment and guilt. Rejecting mere beauty, he embraced nationalism leading to war. Haunted by the “floating world,” he seeks escape and redemption. Condemned by society, Ono confronts his past, revealing both heroism and cowardice.
Complexity
CEFR: B2
Plot Complexity: moderate
Language Complexity: moderate
Ideas Complexity: moderate
Blurb
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.
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