Great Books

An Artist of the Floating World

By Katzuo Ishiguro


"Yesterday morning, after standing on the Bridge of Hesitation for some moments thinking about Matsuda, I walked on to where our pleasure district used to be. The area has now been rebuilt and has become quite unrecognisable. The narrow little street that once ran through the centre of the district, crowded with people and the cloth banners of the various establishments, has now been replaced by a wide concrete road along which heavy trucks come and go all day. Where Mrs Kawakami's stood, there is now a glass-fronted office building, four storeys high. Neighbouring it are more such large buildings, and during the day, one can see office workers, delivery men, messengers, all moving busily in and out of them. There are no bars now until one reaches Furukawa, but here and there, one may recognise a piece of fencing or else a tree, left over from the old days, looking oddly incongruous in its new setting."

Kazuo Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki, Japan, in 1954 and moved to Britain in 1960. An Artist of the Floating World is the story of a painter, Masuji Ono, whose retirement seems tranquil, but whose memories continually return to the past - to a life and a career deeply touched by the rise of Japanese militarism. The book was short-listed for the Booker Prize and won the 1986 Whitbread Book of the Year Award; it has been translated into fourteen languages. Ishiguro is the author of The Remains of the Day, and his most recent book, Never Let Me Go, is being made into a film from a screenplay written by Alex Garland, and starring Carey Mulligan, Keira Knightley, and Andrew Garfield.


The book is sad and brilliant. I hope you'll consider reading it, then writing to me and telling me you loved it to.

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