ishiguro an artist of the floating world

When he hears that his fierce, beautiful twin sister Savannah, a well-known New York poet, has once again attempted suicide, he escapes his present emasculation by flying north to meet Savannah's comely psychiatrist, Susan Lowenstein. Tom Wingo is an unemployed South Carolinian football coach whose internist wife is having an affair with a pompous cardiac man. Ono and his dilemma are rigidly contoured from the first-but we seem to be more reading about it than simultaneously suffering, feeling with it.Ī flabby, fervid melodrama of a high-strung Southern family from Conroy ( The Great Santini, The Lords of Discipline), whose penchant for overwriting once again obscures a genuine talent. One scene-of a miai: a prenuptial family dinner-borrows heavily from Tanazaki's The Makioka Sisters, without Tanazaki's sense of an unfolding center. Ishiguro (A Pale View of Hills) handles Ono's dilemma better as something in the past, as memory, than he does when showing Ono in the here and now those sections tend to be static, too oblique.

And partly it had to do with Ono's psychology, finding itself crushed by the riding tide of antihumane values rolling through prewar imperial Japan.

Partly it was moral: the fear of art being turned into propaganda (as he saw happen with some of his fellow artists who became poster-makers for the war machine). Partly the reason was political: an apprehension-abstracted from the way his fellow art students treated their teacher, their sensei-that blind submission to authority was too easily achieved. But why Ono stopped painting, stopped the trajectory of his obviously very great talent, remains the central question. Thereafter, he lives a semi-tranquil life with his family-a wife, grown daughters, even a grandson-and seems to have made peace with his renunciation (although occasionally his ego still finds itself craving artistic recognition). Set in the years immediately after WW II in Japan, Ishiguro's novel bears down upon a Japanese painter, Ono, now middle-aged, who has totally renounced his art, who decided (some years before) to make no more.

Ishiguro an artist of the floating world