Silvia Tellini. Identity and Nation in Kazuo Ishiguro’s An Artist of the Floating World. Transnational Literature Vol. 10 no. 2, May 2018. http://fhrc.flinders.edu.au/transnational/home.html Identity and Nation in Kazuo Ishiguro’s An Artist of the Floating World Silvia Tellini Abstract An Artist of the Floating World (1986) looks back to Ishiguro’s first novel, A Pale View of Hills (1982) and anticipates his third, The Remains of the Day (1989). The painter Ono worries about a possible interference in his daughter marriage negotiations as a consequence of his support to the nationalist government, which compels him to undertake a self-evaluation of his career. By focusing on the Americanisation of the Japanese culture and the generational gap created during the postwar period in Japan, the present article discusses universal conflicts that emerge from verticalised familial and social relationships through the lens of Ono who is having trouble dealing with his sense of guilt and internal conflict regarding his active participation as a nationalist propagandist artist of the empire during the war. His reminiscing reveals mechanisms of self-deception and repression to bury intolerable and unwelcome memories insofar as they are discussed against the backdrop of a unique fluid historical moment of intense upheaval and cultural change in Japan. Keywords: Kazuo Ishiguro; An Artist of the Floating World; memory; identity; World War II * * * * * Introduction Kazuo Ishiguro was born in Japan and moved to England at the age of five. In his early years of school, he experienced what might be called culture shock, finding himself ‘a curiosity in the playground’ and adjusting to a new reality. 1 The novelist has declared on a number of interviews that he considers himself an international author, which means that he is able to move in different linguistic universes since he is actually creating from a cultural cross-road. One of the recurrent themes explored in Ishiguro’s narratives is wartime, especially moments of intense political and social upheaval. Memory and identity are elements that the novelist uses strategically in his narratives, contextualising them in a world where old values are crumbling, hence generating conflicts that stem from reminiscing unreliable narratives in the context of social and historical shifting values. In An Artist of the Floating World (1986) narrator Masuji Ono dwells on his personal history: his early endeavours as an artist around 1913, when he studies as an apprentice; his subsequent fame, reaching its pinnacle around 1938; and finally his post-war decline. The main narrative is set between October 1948 and June 1950. As the story opens we learn his wife and son have died in the war, leaving him with two daughters. Setsuko is the older married daughter and Noriko is the younger. Noriko lives with her father and is still single. We learn Ono is indirectly 1 Brian W. Shaffer, Understanding Kazuo Ishiguro (South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press, 2008) 1-2. brought to you by CORE View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk provided by Flinders Academic Commons