Now, as he tries to marry off his daughter, Ono’s prestige as a former pro-government painter has come to haunt him. During the “China crisis” in the 1930s, however, he broke away from that ukiyo-e tradition to develop a more patriotic form of art. Slowly, in a sequence of perfectly choreographed revelations, we discover that Ono was trained as a decadent artist, an illustrator of the night-time “floating world” of the prewar geishas.
It becomes clear that Ono’s past conceals some guilty secrets that “the artist” must reluctantly address, secrets that illuminate the larger themes of guilt, ageing, solitude and the baffling incomprehension between young and old. Instead, he must take “certain precautionary steps” against the necessary inquiries of his prospective son-in-law.
But for a puzzling anxiety about his second daughter’s marriage negotiations, Ono could slip into old age. He has lost his wife and son in the war, but lives on with two daughters, one of whom is married. 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. 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.”
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