At the same time, in the tranquil seclusion of house and garden, Ono has time for some increasingly troubled reflections. A new generation of young veterans wants to forget the imperial past. The American occupation is crushing Japan’s national pride. Outside his home, there’s the grim reckoning that has followed the horrors of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. An Artist of the Floating World presents, with the menace of an almost dream-like calm, the reminiscences of a retired painter in the aftermath of a national disaster. Everything, for Ono, is provisional and troubling: art, family, life and posterity. This kind of hesitation and uncertainty runs through everything that follows. They’re anything but quiet to me.Ono, who passes his time gardening and pottering, opens his narrative with a low-key sentence whose meaning will resonate throughout the story: “If on a sunny day you climb the steep path leading up from the little wooden bridge still referred to around here as ‘the Bridge of Hesitation’, you will not have to walk far before the roof of my house becomes visible between the tops of two gingko trees.” But for me they’re not quiet books, because they’re books that deal with the things that disturb me the most and the questions that worry me the most. There’s a surface quietness to my books-there aren’t a lot of people getting murdered or anything like that.
That’s really a question of technique more than anything else. Oe discusses Ishiguro’s reception in Japan, where he is thought of as a “quiet” and stylistically Japanese writer. The two discuss Japan, England, and the cultural clichés surrounding both Japanese literature in the West and Western literature in Japan.
Two interviews with Ishiguro delve into his themes, and a conversation with the Japanese novelist Kenzaburo Oe is particularly interesting.
His novels deal with national identity, memory, trauma, and the various ways humans repress and avoid their painful histories. Ishiguro’s work itself is often about things hidden in plain sight. His last book was 2015’s The Buried Giant, a stylistic departure that took cues from the fantasy literature of Tolkien, as well as the myths and legends of the British Isles.Īlmost all of his work has been praised critically, but he was not often mentioned among the likely winners in the run-up to this year’s announcement. It’s fitting that Ishiguro should be chosen for the prize this year. Ishiguro has been writing since the early 1980s, and his books like The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go have been adapted to Hollywood films. Kazuo Ishiguro, an English novelist, won the 2017 Nobel Prize for Literature.
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