Thinking Activity

Thinking Activity: An Artist of the floating world 

This blog is reaponse of Thinking Activity given by Professor Dr dilip Barad sir here I discuss about the questions of this novel.

About the novel: 

     

An Artist of the Floating World (1986)is a novel by British author Kazuo Ishiguro. 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. He notices how his once great reputation has faltered since the war and how attitudes towards him and his paintings have changed. The chief conflict deals with Ono's need to accept responsibility for his past actions, rendered politically suspect in the context of post-War Japan. The novel ends with the narrator expressing good will for the young white-collar workers on the streets at lunchbreak. The novel also deals with the role of people in a rapidly changing political environment and with the assumption and denial of guilt.

About the writer

  

Kazuo Ishiguro is best known for The Remains of the Day, his Booker prizewinner; The Unconsoled, a very long novel of hallucinatory strangeness; and Never Let Me Go, a contemporary favourite, widely taught in schools. But the pitch-perfect novel that both expresses his Japanese inheritance and captures the haunting beauty and delicacy of Ishiguro’s English prose is his second work of fiction, An Artist of the Floating World.

This, as its title suggests, is a tour de force of unreliable narration, set in post-second world war Japan, during the American occupation. Masuji Ono, a respected artist in the 1930s and during the war, but now retired, is garrulously recalling the past, from a highly subjective point of view.

1, 'Lantern' appears 34 times in the novel. Even on the cover page, the image of lanterns is displayed. What is the significance of Lantern in the novel?

    

Ans, Lanterns in the novel are associated with Ono’s teacher Mori-san, who includes a lantern in each of his paintings and dedicates himself to trying to capture the look of lantern light. For Mori-san, the flickering, easily extinguished quality of lantern light symbolizes the transience of beauty and the importance of giving careful attention to small moments and details in the physical world. Lanterns, then, symbolize an outlook on life which prizes small details and everyday moments above the ideological concerns of nationalists or commercial concerns of businesspeople. It is an old-fashioned, aesthetically focused, and more traditional way of viewing the world.

2, Write in brief a review of the film based on the novel. 

Ans, Set in post-World War II Japan, “An Artist of the Floating World” is Japanese pubcaster NHK’s adaptation of the Kazuo Ishiguro novel of the same title. It stars Ken Watanabe in the lead role of Masuji Ono, a renowned artist looking back on, and coming to terms with, his life against the backdrop of a country being rebuilt after the war.

Ahead of traveling to Cannes for the international launch of the one-off drama at Mipcom, Watanabe told Variety that he did not initially think the book could come to the small screen. “When I first read the novel, I wasn’t convinced it was even possible,” he said. “But the screenwriter, Yuki Fujimoto, created a script that’s extremely simple and very profound.” 

The drama tackles some deep existential questions as Ono ponders the impact his actions have had on others and his role in the war; his memories shift in focus and detail. The subject matter gave Watanabe, (“The Last Samurai,” “Inception”) pause for thought about his own life. “I’ve been reminded that life for everyone is profoundly mysterious,” he said. “The absence of perfect answers makes human culture richer. This is all reflected in the drama, so I’m sure that different viewers will come away with different impressions.

What was challenging was bringing Nobel Prize-winning writer Ishiguro’s work to TV in a meaningful way. The author, who lived in Japan until he was 5 years old and moved to England, wrote the book in English; it was then translated into old-fashioned Japanese. “I wasn’t sure how to deliver that style of language to viewers in a way that was meaningful,” Watanabe said. “Fujimoto turned it into a script in a very clear way. Still, the sentences are very difficult to understand. They include lots of exaggeration and modifiers.” 

3, Debate on the use of Art / Artist (five Perspectives: 1) Art for the sake of art

aesthetic delight, 2) Art for erning Money - Buisness Purpose, 3) Art for nationalism/ imperialism - Art for the propaganda of Government Power, 4) Art for the poor Marxism and 5) No Need of art and artist (Masuji's father's approach)

Ans, The role of art has differing conceptualisations in the novel, in turn having implications for the artist. Artistic vision that seeks to create purely for aesthetics sake, focusing on visual beauty without illuminating any deeper meaning, is represented in Moriyama’s partiality for capturing the fleeting and temporary ‘floating world’, but which consequently leads the artist into the guilty pleasures of a decadent lifestyle. Ono’s ambition caused him first to leave the commercial and auto-exoticizing “art for export” firm of Takeda for the art-for-art’s-sake milieu of Moriyama, which focuses on the ephemerally sensual “floating world” of the traditional Japanese pleasure district.Ishiguro here implies an analysis that directly opposes Benjamin’s: in this novel, the turn toward the politicization of art leads toward fascism. Or, to put it another way, the aestheticization of politics and the politicization of art amount equally to totalitarianism, and Ono would have been better off remaining in his studio, indifferent to the affairs of his country. This is the situation of politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic. Communism responds by politicizing art. 

Ishiguro warns the reader, then, that the politicized artist will not only commit evil deeds—such as Ono’s informing on Kuroda—but will also be as ineffectual as he would have been had he remained apolitical. The totalitarian artist is therefore denied by the novel even the glamor of infamy; Ono’s actions are both vile and bathetic, which, Ishiguro suggests, are all that the politicized artist’s actions could ever. This all are important thing in the novel.

5, What is the relevance of this novel in our times? 

Ans, The Floating World (ukiyo) was an expression of the new economy and social ambitions of the common townspeople of the Edo period (1615-1868). It was, specifically, a world of play and entertainment in Japan's three main cities (Edo [now called Tokyo], Osaka, and Kyoto). It could also be argued that this "world" was also a state of mind or an ethos, a characteristic spirit of the chônin ("persons of the town"). Although the activities and occupations varied, the participants focused particularly upon the pleasure quarters and entertainment districts. These areas of play were ritualized milieu offering escape from the constraints that the samurai estate forced upon the growing and increasingly more economically powerful merchant class. 

this novel represent our time also because we can easily connect masuji character with all the father who has humiliated by her children and specially for daughter. And also connected that time artist and present time artist also. so this all things are represented our life trew the novel.