essay questions on the artist of the floating world

Essay Prompts

An artist of the floating world.

To what extent does An Artist of the Floating World  show that there is no pure form of art?

What makes Ono an unreliable narrator of his own story?

Characters in Ishiguro’s novel fail to take responsibility for their actions. Discuss.

Some of the changing values within the An Artist of the Floating World are seen as positive. Discuss.

‘Suichi believes it’s better he [Ichiro] likes cowboys than that he idolise people like Miyamoto Musashi. Suichi thinks the American heroes are the better models for children now.’ To what extent does An Artist of the Floating World demonstrate the extent to which Japan accepted American influence?

In what ways do Suichi’s and Ichiro’s generations differ from Ono’s?

‘…And if on reaching the foot of the hill which climbs up to my house, you pause at the Bridge of Hesitation and look back towards the remains of our old pleasure district, … you may see the line of old telegraph poles … and be able to make out the dark clusters of birds perched uncomfortably on the tops of the poles, as though awaiting the wires along which they once lined the sky…’ In what ways is the Bridge of Hesitation metaphoric of Ono’s life?

How does Setsuko’s character exemplify the changing role of women in An Artist of the Floating World ?

Ono has more reasons to feel proud than he does to feel guilty. Do you agree?

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Chapter and essay questions for Kazuo Ishiguro, An Artist of the Floating World

Subject: English

Age range: 16+

Resource type: Worksheet/Activity

Last updated

4 June 2023

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Thirty-five high-level reading questions and ten essay questions for students reading Kazuo Ishiguro’s masterly study of ambiguity and self-fictionalisation in post-war Japan. The questions are designed to draw students’ attention to Ishiguro’s mastery of language strategies and his handling of Masuji Ono’s deceptions, fictions, and shifting portraits.

Can be used together with the Talking Points and sample essay ( https://www.tes.com/teaching-resource/resource-12365546 ) available as a bundle. here

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An Artist of the Floating World

Kazuo ishiguro.

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The novel begins in an unnamed city in Japan in October 1948. The narrator is Masuji Ono , a retired artist who lost both his son and wife during the war which also caused serious damage to his beautiful house. Ono recalls the previous month’s visit of his older daughter Setsuko and her son Ichiro who live in a different town. The whole family is concerned about the marriage prospects of Ono’s younger daughter Noriko , because, a year before, Noriko had been in marriage talks with a man named Jiro Miyake when his family withdrew from negotiations under mysterious circumstances. Noriko is currently at the start of new marriage talks with a man named Taro Saito , but at nearly twenty-six, she is considered old to be unmarried. Ono is annoyed because he feels his daughters believe he knows the real reason why the marriage negotiations broke off and is hiding it from them.

Ichiro is fascinated by a poster for a monster movie that he saw at the train station. Ono decides to take Ichiro to the movie the next day, but his daughter Noriko says she has made plans. Setsuko says that she will stay with her father the next day, and Ono and Ichiro can go see the monster movie the following day. The next day, Setsuko says to her father that it may be wise to take precautions to prevent certain facts about his past from coming into the hands of the Saito family when they investigate the Ono family background. The day after that, Ichiro and Ono go to the monster movie. On the way there, they run into Taro Saito’s father, who tells Ono that he has discovered they have a mutual acquaintance: Mr. Kuroda .

Ono intersperses reflections about the past and present into his account of Setsuko’s visit. He describes the time he spends at Mrs. Kawakami ’s place, the last bar standing in an area that had been a pleasure district with a number of bars and restaurants in the years before the war. There, he and his former pupil Shintaro reminisce with Mrs. Kawakami about the old days. Ono also recounts his role in bringing the pleasure district into existence. As a prominent artist, he had written to the authorities and gotten them to place their support behind a bar. The bar, called the Migi-Hidari, became a place where Ono and his students often drank and talked about the role of their art in building a great new future for Japan. Ono also recalls an incident from his own childhood when his father told him he would disgrace the family if he became an artist and then burned Ono’s paintings. Ono also recollects several run-ins with the younger generation. He remembers running into Jiro Miyake and hearing from him that he is glad that the president of his company committed suicide to atone for the company’s behavior during the war. He also recalls a conversation with Setsuko’s husband Suichi at the reception after his son Kenji’s funeral, where Suichi expresses anger over the many members of his generation that were killed during the war and the many leaders who have been too cowardly to take responsibility for their role during the war. Finally, Ono describes his first visit to an old colleague to make sure nothing from his past gets in the way of Noriko’s marriage. He visits his old colleague Matsuda , who has been ill, in the Arakawa district. Matsuda tells him that he will be sure to say only kind things about Ono, but advises that he seek out his former pupil Kuroda, if he is concerned about the investigation.

The second set of recollections are recorded in April 1949 and center around Noriko’s miai, a formal meeting between two families who are considering marrying their children. Ono first describes how he has a falling-out with Shintaro, who asks him to write to a potential employer and tell them that Shintaro disagreed with Ono about work they did together during the war. Ono says that it may seem that he was harsh with Shintaro, but explains that Shintaro’s visit occurred only a few days after the miai .

Ono describes Noriko’s bad mood and incivility to him in the weeks leading up to the miai , and says that Noriko does not know all that he is doing to make sure her wedding goes ahead. For instance, Ono goes to visit Kuroda. He is let into Kuroda’s apartment by Kuroda’s protégé, Enchi , who mistakes Ono for someone else. When Enchi realizes Ono’s true identity, he asks Ono to leave, saying that he is sure Kuroda would not want to see the man who is responsible for his having been beaten and injured in prison and labeled a traitor.

At the miai, Ono drinks quickly and is made uncomfortable by the stilted conversation. Eventually, he interrupts the flow of conversation to make a declaration that he can admit that he made mistakes with some of the work he did and may have been a bad influence in the country. He thinks that Taro’s father, an art expert named Dr. Saito, approves of his statement. After that, the conversation loosens up and it seems clear that Noriko and Taro like one another.

The third set of Ono’s recollections is recorded in November 1949 and centers around another visit Setsuko and Ichiro pay to the family some months after Noriko is married to Taro Saito. During a walk in Kawabe Park, Setsuko says to Ono that she was concerned to hear that he has compared himself to a composer who wrote highly influential nationalist songs during the war and recently committed suicide to atone for his role encouraging the bloodshed. Ono tries to reassure his daughter that he is not considering suicide, but she says other things that he finds upsetting. Setsuko says that he did beautiful work, but it was not at all responsible for influencing anything during the war. Ono points out that, the previous year, she had seemed to think his career a great liability in Noriko’s marriage negotiations. Setsuko says she does not remember any such conversation. Ono is shocked and points out that he made a statement during the miai as a result of her comment. Setsuko says that Noriko and the Saitos all found his declaration very puzzling. Ono defends his statement as appropriate, explaining that Dr. Saito was familiar with his wartime work and seemed to appreciate hearing that his position had changed. Setsuko says that she believes that Dr. Saito was not even aware that Ono was an artist.

Later that day, Ono takes his grandson Ichiro on an outing and promises that he will get Ichiro a taste of sake that night at dinner. That night at the home of newlyweds Noriko and Taro, Ono tries to convince Setsuko to allow Ichiro to taste some sake, but Setsuko refuses. During the dinner, the younger generation discusses how happy they are with the new American-style leadership at the corporations where they work. After Ichiro goes to bed, Ono says to Taro that it is a shame that Dr. Saito and he were not better acquainted sooner, since they both worked in the art world and knew one another’s reputations. Taro agrees with this and Ono looks to see how Setsuko is responding, but she does not seem to register this at all.

Ono intersperses a variety of reflections about his past in his account of this conversation with Setsuko and his reactions to it. He recalls the moment sixteen years before when he moved into his home and, he says, Dr. Saito approached him and said how glad he was to have an artist of his stature in the neighborhood.

He also looks back further into his past, recalling his relationship with a fellow artist nicknamed the Tortoise , who worked with him at Master Takeda ’s firm in 1913 or 1914, producing Japanese paintings for export to foreigners. When Ono gets an offer to go to live and study at the villa of the prestigious artist Mori-san , the Tortoise comes with him. Over the next seven years, Ono adopts Mori-san’s style of painting and becomes Mori-san’s prize pupil. But in the early 1920s, Ono gets to know Matsuda, a nationalist art appreciator, who convinces him to take a different direction in his art. The Tortoise is horrified at Ono’s disloyalty to Mori-san’s methods, and Mori-san tells Ono that he must leave the villa. Ono reflects how gratifying it was that, in later years, his own career took off, and Mori-san’s declined.

The final set of recollections is set in June 1950. Ono reveals that he has learned of Matsuda’s death and recounts the visit he paid to Matsuda the month before. On this visit, he tells Matsuda that both Noriko and Setsuko are now pregnant and that it will soon be five years since his wife Michiko ’s death. Matsuda says that they were two ordinary men who made a marginal contribution, but Ono says that he believes Matsuda actually feels proud of his life’s work. Ono compares himself and Matsuda to the Tortoise to Shintaro, saying that he and Matsuda can be proud to have boldly tried to do something ambitious that they believed in, while the Tortoise and Shintaro have never tried to rise above mediocrity.

Ono also describes how the area that used to be the pleasure district is now full of office buildings. He sits in a bench outside one of these buildings and looks at the enthusiastic young office workers, whom he wishes well.

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An Artist of the Floating World

By kazuo ishiguro, an artist of the floating world literary elements.

Historical Fiction

Setting and Context

Japan, 1948-50, after World War II

Narrator and Point of View

Matsuji Ono is the novel's narrator and protagonist. He is an unreliable narrator, to a certain extent by his own admission, since he often confesses to memory lapses or uncertainty about the events he narrates.

Tone and Mood

The novel's tone is mostly matter-of-fact and quietly straightforward. It achieves emotional resonance mostly through subtle means and by occasionally contrasting its controlled tone with moments in which the tone very briefly becomes more dramatic. Its mood is similarly calm, pedestrian, and even professional, but when describing the past it often shifts abruptly. For instance, "the floating world" has a surreal, ethereal mood.

Protagonist and Antagonist

Ono presents himself as the protagonist, but, while he has various competitors, he ultimately feels that he is the antagonist of his own story.

Major Conflict

The major conflict lies between Ono and others who look back on Japanese imperialism and sovereignty with nostalgia, and younger people who have embraced the American occupation and resent the Japanese role in the war. However, other conflicts arise, taking shape around this generational conflict. For instance, different movements in art are portrayed feuding with one another, and these movements can to an extent be linked to one side or another of the post-war generation gap, ideologically if not literally.

The climax of the novel is Ono's conversation with his daughter Setsuko, in which Setsuko casually announces that Ono is not guilty of any important wrongdoing, and in which she simultaneously absolves him of guilt and robs him of the illusion that his work has been relevant, even in a negative way. This scene causes the reader to reevaluate the content of the book until that point, and, in spite of its understated tone, represents the fullest and most direct confrontation between Ono and his daughter.

Foreshadowing

Ono's allusions to his own parting from his favorite student, Kuroda, foreshadow the violent and upsetting nature of their parting. Even when not speaking about Kuroda directly, Ono often speaks theoretically about students and teachers, and about the difficulty teachers find in letting their students mature. This foreshadows that Kuroda and Ono will part ways over an artistic disagreement.

Understatement

Ono tends to speak at length about a topic on his mind, and then dismiss it as irrelevant, in an understatement both of how important the topic is to him and of how surprised he is to find himself talking about it. For instance, after the emotionally intense scene in which Ono watches the police burn Kuroda's paintings, he says to the reader "But this is all of limited relevance here." This is an enormous understatement, though it is also, strangely, a lie—the scene is deeply relevant to the reader, and it is absolute anathema to Ono. In this case, as in other similar ones, the understatement is strong enough to be subtly funny.

Lord Yoshitsune, who Ono encourages Ichiro to admire, is a celebrated historical Japanese warrior from the twelfth century. The Lone Ranger is an iconic fictional Texas Ranger and a symbol of the American West. Karl Marx was a German intellectual famous for his critique of capitalism and his advocacy of communism. Vladimir Lenin was the leader of the Russian Revolution in the early twentieth century and the first leader of the Soviet Union. Popeye the Sailor is a popular American cartoon character from the mid-twentieth century. Kitagawa Utamaro was a Japanese artist working primarily at the end of the eighteenth century and known for his woodblock prints.

For the most part, the imagery in this novel is fact-based and visual. Ono describes images in great detail, but avoids using figurative language or employing non-visual senses, so that the reader learns a great deal of information without feeling completely immersed in an imagistic atmosphere. When describing places or times that were particularly important to him, though, Ono uses non-visual images, creating more vivid and immersive sensory engagement. In particular, important moments are marked with smell images. An impoverished neighborhood stinks of sewage, for instance, while the fire in Kuroda's backyard creates the scent of smoke. Sound images also pervade these important scenes. For instance, the old pleasure district is associated with the sound of wooden sandals on the sidewalk. As an artist, Ono can describe the visual faithfully and accurately, with a professional mindset. When he is emotional, though, he resorts to his other senses.

The major paradox in this book is the relationship between teachers and students. As our narrator notes, teachers want their students to remain loyal and obedient while still growing independent and mature. This is impossible, since the most mature artist will always develop distinct styles and opinions that differ from their teachers'. The paradoxical relationship leads to impossible situations in which teachers and their former students both resent and long for each other.

Parallelism

Ono's father burns Ono's earliest paintings because he disagrees with Ono's desire to create art. When Moriyama refuses to accept Ono's new work, the scene includes several explicit parallels to the one between Ono and his father: in both instances nearly-identical lines are exchanged, and both scenes include fire. The parallel becomes a pattern when Ono, too, burns his student's art, if only indirectly. By creating scenes that are so explicitly parallel to one another, Ishiguro implies that this conflict is a cyclical one.

Metonymy and Synecdoche

Personification.

Ono personifies the banners that used to hang in the pleasure district, describing the way that they leaned and pushed like people. He also describes the scrabbling of rats' feet as a kind of language, in the scene where Sasaki leaves Moriyama's villa, and therefore lightly personifies the animals.

An Artist of the Floating World Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for An Artist of the Floating World is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

Please help me with a plot for each page characters, theme and stylistic devices.

GradeSaver has a complete study guide for this unit readily available for your use. Simply navigate to the study using the title link at the top of the page.

Describe the character traits of major characters.

Ono is the novel’s protagonist and narrator. He is, at the time of the narration, an aging retired artist in post-war Japan. He has a somewhat mysterious past, which he reveals in small pieces, and it seems that his role in the art world once...

How did Master Takeda and Masjid Ono relate?

Ono worked for Master Takeda. During his time with Master Takeda, Ono learned that art is a process that belongs to the artist.... something that should not be created under factory-like conditions and deadlines. When Kuroda and the other pupils...

Study Guide for An Artist of the Floating World

An Artist of the Floating World study guide contains a biography of Kazuo Ishiguro, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

• About An Artist of the Floating World
• An Artist of the Floating World Summary
• Character List

Essays for An Artist of the Floating World

An Artist of the Floating World essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of An Artist of the Floating World by Kazuo Ishiguro.

• The Use of Generational Differences in Order to Establish the Importance of the Floating World

Lesson Plan for An Artist of the Floating World

• About the Author
• Study Objectives
• Common Core Standards
• Introduction to An Artist of the Floating World
• Relationship to Other Books
• Bringing in Technology
• Notes to the Teacher
• Related Links
• An Artist of the Floating World Bibliography

Wikipedia Entries for An Artist of the Floating World

• Introduction